There're only a few hours left to contribute to Charlie's "Anomalisa" Kickstarter. Please do chip in, if you can spare the dough and want to help make this project something truly nifty. YOU CAN HELP MAKE A KAUFMAN THING HAPPEN. (All contributors receive cool gifts, too.) As I type this, $383,245 has been pledged. The highest grossing film in Kickstarter history raised $406 000. I don't know what the film was, and I'm a little pressed for time at the mo', otherwise I'd Google it up. I'm sure it wasn't as good as a Kaufman project.
Dino Stamatopoulos just did an AMA on Reddit. I was late to the party on this. I do apologise. I suck. Anyway, the subject of Anomalisa came up, as did other subjects, and you can read it all here.
Edit: Actually, wait. Maybe it's happening right now, as I type this. Time zones are messing with my head.
There's now an auto-generated Charlie Kaufman YouTube channel, where you can peruse a bunch of interviews, awards speeches, and other stuff related to his films - 369 videos, as I type this. There's at least one video related to a completely different Charles Kaufman: the brother of Lloyd. Lloyd Kaufman co-founded Troma Studios. Troma are behind such films as The Toxic Avenger, Tromeo & Juliet, and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. So. Yeah.
I've mentioned Kirby Ferguson before. His Everything is a Remix video series points out that there's no such thing as complete originality - everything draws something from stuff that's come before. If you're an artist and you get hung up on thoughts like "I am unoriginal. I suck. Hey, I wonder if I have any email," you should check him out. He'll make you feel better. Anyway. He gave a TED Talk recently. It's very good.
Film School Rejects have (has? I think it's "has") a series of articles called 6 Filmmaking Tips From..., and last week it was Charlie's turn. The 6 tips are drawn from various interviews Charlie has given over the years, and there're links to those interviews within the Film School article.
Being eccentric won’t make you as strong a writer or director as Kaufman, but the two truly obvious things about his work ethic might help.
One, he takes his time. His scripts take years to develop, meaning he doesn’t steamroll through them on a tear. He’s calculated and calculating, taking great care in handling difficult concepts and experimental structures. This may not be universal, but chances are if you’ve got something that laughs at convention while exploring huge ideas and you haven’t spent more than a year on it, you’re probably still selling your story short.
Two, he knows an unbelievable amount. Just reading through interviews and speeches, it becomes clear that he’s insanely well-read, swirling a large amount of facts and ideas and perspectives around in his brain. That probably helps when attempting to plumb the depths of the human experience, but being able to channel those thoughts into a clear purpose (even if the film you’re making is ultimately open to interpretation) is vital. (Source)
Flix have a great interview with Dino Stamatopoulos, in which he tells us pretty much everything I think we'd want to know about the upcoming Anomalisa animated flick, written by Charlie and funded by Kickstarter. Even though they reached their minimum funding goal of $200 000, they'd like to raise tons more money -- more money means a better quality film, and more money means they won't have to scratch their heads quite so much as to exactly how the money should be allocated.
Why bypass the system? You’ve have done so many weird things within Hollywood. (“Synecdoche New York” for Kaufman, “Community” for Harmon, “Moral Orel” for Stamatopoulos). Yes, but you still have to go through networks. Even now, I’m not sure Charlie could have made that movie - things have changed drastically over the past few years. The money people will always want to change this, add that so they can make more money and we’re simply not willing to do that. Charlie wants to create the perfect Charlie Kaufman film, and for it to be something that he hasn’t done before - to be animated!
[...]
What’s the schedule right now? Charlie’s pace, you know? I mean, we would like to start immediately but I don’t know how much time he’s gonna have, we’ve certainly started to talk about things, even though we don’t have the money yet. [The interview was conducted before the $200000 mark was reached.] Some preliminary ideas. I don’t think he’s gonna come full force till we know we have the money for sure. But he’s a very particular producer and writer – hopefully we’ll get started before the end of the year. (Source)
When last we heard from Paul Proch (Charlie's friend and some-time partner in crime -- see his art in Eternal Sunshine, and his scripts and other fiction written with Charlie), he'd co-written a film for Michel Gondry, The We and the I. One other thing you guys should be interested in is his work on CHUM -- a literary magazine published by Paul's good friend Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, Ernest's great-granddaughter. Paul regularly contributes art and writing to the mag, so it's well worth checking out if you've enjoyed his stuff in the past, and/or if you're into literary mags. He has a story and some drawings in the next issue, in fact.
Says the website:
the Summer issue (out August 11th) will be chum's first since moving to Brooklyn! and will feature four New York writers, including three from Brooklyn; featuring cover art by Karin Bolstad, poetry by Jeff Grimshaw, Wolf Shuttleworth, and Ben Prez; short fiction by Adam Stanley, Mark Iliasayev, and John Hemingway; and humor by Paul Proch.
It's the outdoors issue! and will be available in both hard copy and kindle. For this issue, chum will also be featured for the first time in the Ingram International Catalog. (Source)
Jeff Grimshaw, by the way, was Paul's co-writer on The We.
I mentioned this at the end of the last update, but it should prolly get an update by itself. BCK's annual bills are on their way -- hosting, domain name, the plugins that keep the site lookin' nifty and functioning with minimal glitches -- and if you'd like to help out by tossing us a few bucks, that'd be awesome! I've set up a donation thermometer thingy in the sidebar, so that you can see how we're going.
