Kickstarter

Hey everyone,

If you follow me on Twitter (or, really anyone for that matter), you've probably heard of the campaign running right now for Jack Marchetti's 4 OF A KIND.

I won't bore you with the details, because time is of the essence, but he's in a pretty big hole with a deadline of Friday (like, today) at midnight.

Here's the hook:

Jack has a rare degenerative eye disease. He's going blind. There's no cure. He's trying to make this script of his before his vision completely fails him. I've read the script. It's pretty good. But you can check it out for yourself. Yesterday there was a seated reading of some of the script by actors around the world.

http://youtu.be/dBgiosnc8gg

Jack's got hours left. Literally hours. The film community is rallying to his cause. The campaign is already 600 backers strong. Any help you can give would be fantastic.

Help a filmmaker realize his vision before he loses his sight.

Thanks so much,

Lucas

Hey everyone,

Been a long time since my last update, as I kind of turned my brain off to all things AYWR for a little bit there.

First, apparently there's people who still haven't gotten their AYWR shirts. I'm not really sure why. Adam Woods (the t-shirt guy) and I have probably sent hundreds of emails back and forth about this. He's handling all the shipping (to save the cost of shipping them to me) and the subsequent detective work of figuring out what happened when they didn't show up. There's about a thousand places in the chain where something could go wrong. We think the vast majority of the shirts got there safely, but it's hard to know for sure. I think we sent one person 4 different shirts before one actually made it, so...I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine. Last week (Thursday? We held off on this email so it wouldn't get lost in the weekend shuffle.), we decided to just break down and print more. So...if you didn't get a shirt, let me know. Also, if you could verify your address for us, that'd be great. I know there were at least a couple where we had the wrong address. Some of them, I'm just going to assume went into a black hole.

As for the other perks, I'm working on it. I swear. Probably 60% of the postcards have been sent. 

AYWR became a thing where I bit off more than I could chew (or should chew), which will probably shock no one. But I'm chipping away at it, bit by bit. 

Also last week I did an interview with Filmcourage, which you can see here.

All the footage is in the hands of producer John W. Yost, who's turning it into some sort of a documentary. I know I said there wasn't a documentary, but no one was listening, so now there's going to be one. I have very, very little input into that (by design. we don't want it to be just this thing where I try and tell people I'm wonderful). There's a good chance you know more about that than I do.

I'm starting to compile all the blog posts and stuff into an ebook, along with some extra stuff that'll probably only be in there.

And, I'm working on putting my life back together, which has been harder than I expected. But, like everything else, I'm chipping away at it. There's a little bit about that in the Film Courage interview. It hit a point where I was just hanging on and it became all about survival. Not literal, on-the-edge-of-death survival, but project survival. And stuff slipped through the cracks, both project stuff and personal stuff. I went off my medication (which was dumb), I lost a lot of weight, then I gained it all back and more. I'm back on the meds. I'm starting to work out a little. Marty Lang saw me near the end and then again 2 weeks ago and was kind of shocked at how much better and more rested I looked. This is probably the best I've felt in over a year. But, I guess on some level that's part of the project. 

Let's call this the AYWR post-production period, shall we? I'll keep working on it, and eventually it'll all get sorted out. Hopefully.

lucas

This is the update where I'm supposed to get all teary-eyed and profound. Or, where I wow you with "One More Thing...". But I don't have any of that right now. There's no big, epic, raging party at the finish line, no balloons falling from the ceiling, no confetti, nothing grand at all. At least, not that I know of. 

And that's totally fine.

I'm not even on a set today. I'm going to go down to Santa Monica and hang out with Dustin Pearlman and his couch will be the final AYWR couch. Simple as that.

The updates will keep coming as I catch up on everything, but the road trip is over. I guess you could say now that we're heading into post-production. So it's not like this is just going away.

But I think what gets lost a lot in talking about AYWR is how important the community has been in quite literally keeping this thing afloat. Ultimately, this is your project and a document of how you collectively operate. I'm just the guy going from place to place to see it first-hand. 

Without you, AYWR doesn't work. Without you, it's nothing. 

Over on the blog, there's a version of this same post where I asked people to post their reactions to AYWR's final day under the hashtag #AYWRfeb18, and I'm compiling a bunch of those there. I'd love to see yours.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. It's been a hell of a year.

- Lucas

Last month, I was in Purchase, NY on the set of Shane Sheehy's AW, NUTS!, which if you remember was actually the town of the first project, Mattson Tomlin's DREAM LOVER. Actually, we were on the same sound stage.

Somewhere around day 3, I'm getting coffee at the craft services table. I tend to put the sugar in my cup first, so the pouring action does the stirring for me. Mattson walked up to the table at that moment and asked if I was eating pure sugar. 

"Because I don't know. Maybe that's what you've turned in to," he said. "No one's ever done this before."

Not quite.

As I type this, there are 6 days and 4 hours left in AYWR (there's a counter on the webpage). I'm in LA on the set of Anne Lower's webseries THEY LIVE AMONG US, running the second camera. I'm exhausted. But you probably knew that already.

I'll be in LA until the end of AYWR. And then?

In my mind, I always figured I'd know what to do next, kind of like how when you're a kid you figure you'll have everything figured out when you grow. But you never do. You're always working with imperfect information, like a long poker game. Instead, I've got about 6 projects in the fire that may or may not come to fruition--a feature I'm shooting this summer, a web-based quasi festival that applies the ethos of AYWR to distribution, some consulting gigs, and a couple of others--but nothing concrete. Nothing even as concrete as knowing where I want to live.

In a lot of ways I feel like the kid in the "The Jungle Book" as they're about to take him into polite society. 

There's really 2 strong impulses I have right now in terms of location: 1) I really, really, really want to have a place to put all my shit. Living out of a car is a pain in the ass. There's dozens of Kickstarter perks buried in my car...somewhere. The trunk is full of half-drank bottles of alcohol. And I've been wearing a small rotation of clothes because the other ones are just too hard to get to. 2) There's really something great about being located everywhere. DIY Days in NYC? I can do that. SXSW in Austin? I can do that too. There's a great amount of freedom inherent in traveling where you know that all you need to do is jump on a plane. It's pretty liberating.

I don't want to live in Seattle or LA or NY or Austin or wherever. I want to exist in all of them. That's not really possible, of course, without doing AYWR 2, and I think that would maybe kill me.

Also, there's the question of having a job of some sorts. So if you're hiring a bohemian filmmaker who's really good at traveling, let me know. I think I'm ending AYWR with like $200 to my name, minus the bottle of scotch I'll be drinking when I'm done. I couldn't pay rent right now if I wanted to.

Pretty soon after AYWR I'll be handing all of the photos and video to Filmmaker Magazine columnist and producer John W. Yost, who's going to be working with an unaffiliated documentary filmmaker to turn this all into a documentary because, well, even though I said dozens of times there was no documentary film, apparently no one was listening. So...stay tuned for that. And for the perks I find in my car. And for me to catch up on all the blog posts and articles I owe.

Part of me can't believe the year is nearly over, and part of me feels like it was 5 years and not 1. I've lost track of the number of people I've met and the number of films I've worked on. My Tripline.net map tells me I've traveled over 41,000 miles. One of our films (FAT KID RULES THE WORLD) will be premiering at SXSW this year. It's been a hell of a year.

This year wouldn't have been possible without the amazing support of David & Karen at Filmcourage, and on March 4th I'll be on their radio show to rehash the whole experience. So be sure to check that out. 

More importantly, it wouldn't have been possible without the 243 people who said during that crazy campaign over a year ago, "sure, I'll help this filmmaker I've maybe never heard do some crazy thing I only partially understand that involves a lot of driving and no rent." I can't believe 1 person got behind this, let alone 243. Or the dozens of people who said, "sure, I'll let this guy I've never met sleep on my couch". Or the filmmakers who let me come on their set, knowing they had no control over what I would write. Or anyone who RT'ed something on Twitter, liked something on Facebook, or just generally helped spread the word. I'm overwhelmed by all of you. Honest.

Like most things in life, a Tweet says it best:

Now...when do I get a vacation?

Thank you all, so very very very much.

(a very tired) Lucas McNelly

Depending on how much of your time to spend on ye olde internet, you may have gotten wind of some Thankgiving AYWR campaign floating around Kickstarter. It's a real thing, and before I get 243 confused emails from backers, I thought I should explain what the hell it is.

As I understand it, the original plan was to keep this a secret from me, to somehow do it while I wasn't paying attention, but I think they figured out that would be pretty much impossible. Over/under on how long it would take before I heard about it would be 10 minutes. I know too many people.

Plus, they kind of needed my digital rolodex to contact everyone. 

So here's my involvement in the whole thing: 

1. Victoria Westcott, who came up with the idea, ran it by me to make sure it had my blessing. It does, of course. Otherwise you wouldn't be reading about it. 

The fact that AYWR faces long odds of survival has been well-documented. Anyone with half a brain knows that $12,000 isn't a lot of money to travel the country world. I'm grateful for all the help I can get.

2. I then gave her contact information and made some introductions with filmmakers she doesn't know.

3. I answered a couple of questions about AYWR, stuff like number of projects, miles travelled. Things like that. Also, I provided that graphic on the front, because I guess it's easier to just get it from me than re-create it.

Which is to say that if you have questions about the campaign, I probably don't know the answer. In fact, I probably know just as much as you do. That doesn't mean I'm not insanely thankful that people have taken up this initiative. The idea that people would do this pretty much blows my mind. I'll be obsessively refreshing the Kickstarter page, as I know there's almost no chance that I'll be able to resist. 

It's kind of bizarre, to be sweating a campaign that's effectively yours, but at the same time isn't. There's this detached feeling to it.

More importantly, I don't want anyone to feel like there's any obligation to pony up $$ again. Your support in getting us this far has been nothing short of Herculean. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't any confusion about what this new thing was. I didn't want to go back to you, the backers, because I didn't feel right about double-dipping, but I also don't want this thing to happen without you hearing about it from me. You deserve that, at minimum. All this will do is make it easier for me to finish what I set out to do. 

But, if nothing else, you should go check out the video. It's pretty sweet. I'm not going to say I didn't get a tiny bit choked up when I saw it. 

The whole idea of this blows my mind.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/victoriawestcott/a-year-without-rent-thanksgiving