Kickstarterage.

When the ‘Kickstarter’ website / concept began to take off a few years back, I’ll admit I treated the whole thing with a certain amount of derision. (You want £10,000 to make a rock album? Fuck off - £150 of Maplins vouchers probably buys you more recording capacity than Sam Philips saw in his lifetime, and if that’s not good enough for you, get a bloody job like the rest of us etc etc.).

Filmmaking though is something that actually does take a certain amount of investment, and that generally involves a massive financial risk for all who venture into it. With the good / bad ratio horribly skewed toward the latter in what passes for the low budget film ‘industry’, and very few people willing to take a chance on the former, I find myself feeling a lot more charitable towards folks struggling to get worthwhile projects on screen, and as such, I’m interrupting our regular programming to inform you of a few such endeavours that have come to my attention recently.

First off, official Breakfast In The Ruins Hero Alex Cox is currently hunkered down in Boulder, Colorado, working on an adaptation of the late Harry Harrison’s ‘Bill The Galactic Hero’. Never less than ambitious, Cox is asking the world for $100,000 with which to realise this retro-fitted sci-fi epic, and, speaking as someone who actually really liked 2011’s Repo Chick, I have confidence in his ability to deliver entertaining, informative and generally ass-kicking satirical product for extremely low overheads. $88,000 in the bank with five days to go.

And secondly, those of you who keep an eye on the more interesting corners of weird-world-cinema type blogging might already be aware of Filipino b-movie super-fan Andrew Leavold’s long struggle to realise his self-explanatory documentary feature ‘The Search For Weng-Weng’. Without rehashing the details here, let’s just say that he’s obviously put a vast amount of time, research and obsessive dedication into the project over the years and has pretty much been taken to the cleaners for his trouble. For anyone half as interested as I am in the odd world of regional b-movie industries and suchlike, it looks to be an absolutely fascinating film and I’d really like to see it, so for heaven’s sake, drop him a few bucks.

Right, that’s the commercial break over with. You can turn the sound up again. Hope you enjoyed your trip to the kitchen.