If you’d like to support him, the kickstarter page is here.
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Documentary on Riffing Running Kickstarter CampaignA filmmaker in Utah named Dave Chadwick is trying to pull together the funds he needs to make a documentary about riffing. He hopes to talk to some or many or all of the cast members, but he’s also planning to go beyond that and look at how movie riffing has grown into a phenomenon.
7 Replies to “Documentary on Riffing Running Kickstarter Campaign”Commenting at Satellite News
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I live not too far from this guy apparently. This documentary he’s planning sounds really interesting so I decided to help back it, sure hope it gets made!
I’ve got some projects around the house I’d like to get done if anyone would like to give me some money for them.
“…but he’s also planning to go beyond that and look at how movie riffing has grown into a phenomenon.”
It has?
Shout Factory has already done wonderous documentaries on MST and the films they riffed. They also released Mel Brooks’ The Critic on his DVD set. There’s that Peanut Gallery book out already. The CT and Rifftrax crews were offshoots of MST. There’s the episode guide and books from Mike, Kevin, and Mary Jo that talk about it. Josh Way and ICWXP and other fan groups should definitely get more love because so many of them are quite talented.
SO: what exactly is the point of this again? What audience is being gone for? What new earthshattering info could possibly be gathered? Outside of leaning heavily if not completely on MST, which has had a wealth of documentary info already released in the past 5+ years, why should I care? This just sounds like a “please fund my efforts to meet Joel/Mike/Trace/Frank/anyone from the show” type of plea.
And even if your heart is in the right place, just ask for donations to send towards ICWXP or other fan based projects that are creating something funny and new rather than rehashing things that have been hashed already.
I’d have to agree with #4. It’s great to see the enthusiasm of the fans, but I think that enthusiasm should be channeled into productive directions, directions which do not cover old ground or rehash other projects. With all the documentary material that Shout Factory has already put together for the 20th and 25th anniversaries of MST3K, Joel Hodgson’s own “Riffing Myself”, books like “In the Peanut Gallery with Mystery Science Theater 3000”, and the numerous interviews that Joel and the others have already given through various media, I’m not sure there’s enough new ground to cover to justify this particular project. The Kickstarter page says that he plans to talk about the fans if he can’t get the MST3K alumi on board for the project … but we are the fans, we’re already sharing our enthusiasm about the show all the time through websites like this one, and I can’t imagine that such a documentary would be of interest except to other fans, which amounts to preaching to the choir. I haven’t watched the pitch video, but going only by what I read, I can’t help but notice that, beyond some very rudimentary artwork, there are very little details provided in the pitch: nothing about the author’s qualifications or experience or why he thinks he can successfully execute this project, very little about the proposed structure of the documentary, etc. Again, I like the idea of an outside project about MST3K, but it has to be a well-developed project which brings something new to the table before I’d be comfortable contributing to it.
A few more thoughts:
I just did some quick research, and it turns out that there are even more books about MST3K and related subjects than I realized. In addition to “In the Peanut Gallery”, there is also “Reading Mystery Science Theater 3000: Critical Approaches”, published just last year, and of course there is also “The Amazing Colossal Episode Guide” and Kevin Murphy’s own thoughts about movies and the movie-watching experience in “A Year At The Movies”. (I own the last two of these books, but not the first two, both of which were written or edited by accomplished academics.)
One of the ways that I judge whether the authors of Kickstarter projects have done their due diligence, especially for projects like documentary films, is whether they have taken the effort to research other work that has already been done in their chosen subject area, to decide whether there is a place for another project in the same area, and if so, to plan out ahead of time what unique approach their project should take, whether it’s uncovering new material or revisiting previously-discussed material in a novel way.
In the case of this project, I see no evidence that the author has done anything more than decide out of the blue that it’d be cool to do a documentary. If he is serious enough about the idea to have done his homework, he will have already surveyed the field and considered the preceding questions, and would thus be able to lay out all the specifics for the edification of potential backers fairly easily. The fact that there are almost no specifics, and no evidence that the author is aware that this is already fairly well-covered ground, makes me believe that none of this has been done. If so, it’s way too early to ask for $50K. (Why $50K, anyway? No details about that, either.)
I’m not trying to be harsh. I’m just sharing my views in the hope that they’ll be helpful for the further development of the project.
Just in case anyone is still tracking this, the project just ended at about 6% of its fundraising goal, at $3,053:
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/695277314/rifflife-an-exploration-of-the-movie-riffing-pheno/