The ever-expanding Crowdsource Era has a new milestone: Charlie Kaufman needs $200,000 to help make a 40-minute stop-motion animated film called Anomalisa, and he’s inviting exiled Community creator Dan Harmon — and you — along to help.
The project, which has already raised $80,000 on Kickstarter, brings Kaufman, Harmon, and the animators at Starburns Industries (Moral Orel, the stop-motion Community Christmas episode) together to tell the story of a motivational speaker who is “crippled by the mundanity of life” until “suddenly one day, a girl’s voice pierces through the veil of nothingness. She fills him with such a rush of ‘aliveness,’ he’s willing to abandon everything and everyone, including his own family, and escape with her to a better life.”
Duke Johnson will direct, and apparently you will pay for it — though you can’t really argue with the incentives: A 20-page screenplay about you, written by Dan Harmon? Hand-crafted puppets and/or sets? Executive producer credit? Skype chats with the filmmakers? Pretty amazing, and not cheap: The really good stuff will run you $1,000 and up, with some of the top prizes already spoken for. Maybe there is an aftermarket eBay kind of thing to auction off Kickstarter rewards? Someone should get on that. Anyway, good luck to all!
[Kickstarter via Gawker]
Bad news, Charlie Kaufman fans: While some cast members had been hopeful in recent months that Frank or Francis would move ahead, Elizabeth Banks (doing the press rounds for People Like Us) spilled news to the contrary.
“I honestly don’t know where that film is at,” she told AICN. “We were supposed to make it sooner, but it’s been pushed. I think they’re waiting for everybody’s lives to come back together…I don’t really know anything about it.”
Speaking with Moviefone, she elaborated that things “fell apart” before the Hollywood satire/musical could move forward into production: “We didn’t get to shoot that movie. It was ready to go, and, as many movies do, it fell apart at the last minute.”
UPDATE: Over at The Playlist, the filmmaker’s reps say that the project’s not completely dead — it has just been “postponed.”
Today in news that doesn’t relate to Comic-Con: Deadline reports that Steve Carell, Jack Black and Nicolas Cage are in various stages of negotiations to star in Frank Or Francis for director and writer Charlie Kaufman. Details on the film are slim, but when it was first announced back in March, Frank Or Francis reportedly dealt with a filmmaker and the blogger “who takes delight in berating his cinematic talent.” (It sorta sounds like that movie Pitchfork that Jonah Hill was rumored for; bloggers, they’re not just for blogs anymore!) Assuming Carell, Black and Cage sign on for Frank Or Francis — and assuming at least two of them are in talks for the lead roles — this news raises a fairly legitimate question: who among them is believable as a blogger?
The obvious answer is probably Jack Black — he’s got the ability to grow a pretty legitimate blogger beard, has a bit of a paunch to him, and just seems to have the look you’d expect a film blogger to possess. Yet, I can’t help but draw back to Nicolas Cage — and not just because he played a writer so adeptly in Kaufman’s Adaptation. Cage has that necessary bit of crazy-cum-cowardice that a filmmaker-antagonizing blogger would need in this scenario — you can just imagine him having a wicked case of Keyboard Muscles.
Or maybe it’s Carell, doing that smug Michael Scott know-it-all thing he does so well? Who knows! Rank these three on their blogger believability in the comments section below.
· Charlie Kaufman Attaches Steve Carell, Jack Black and Nicolas Cage to ‘Frank Or Francis’ [Deadline]
[Photos: Getty Images]
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