
This Zach Braff story is still in the news today, and I’m going to keep using this screencap to accompany it as long as it is. So yesterday, The Hollywood Reporter reported exclusively that Braff had found “financing” for his Kickstarted movie, Wish I Was Here, at Cannes. A lot of people were angry, thinking Braff had been misleading in asking fans to fund his movie to keep from having to take industry money with creative strings attached, and then seeming to turn around and take industry money anyway. It would’ve been easy, and more lucrative, for me to try to stoke outrage in that regard when I reported on it, but I didn’t, because it didn’t seem to me that Braff had specifically broken any promises, and because I’m terrible at making money.
Today Braff tried to clarify what kind of funding he’s getting from Worldview Entertainment. Basically, it all goes back to something called Gap Financing, which I imagine your mom knows all about. (*looks over at joke writers, gives confused shrug*)
— The story out there about the movie being fully funded by some financier is wrong.
I have said on here and in every interview I’ve done on this project that the film would be fully financed from 3 sources:
- My Kickstarter Backers
- My own money
- Pre-Selling foreign theatrical distribution.
Those three amounts will bring us to a budget of around 5 to 6 million dollars.
— Nothing about the making of this movie has changed. This movie is happening because backers funded it.
This film would not be happening without my backers. The traditional way is to have a financier put up the money and then sell the foreign rights. What I did, was to say to my fans, “If you and I provide the capital, we don’t need some rich dude dictating how we make the movie; we can then go sell foreign distibution [sic] and we’ll be all the way to our goal. Are you interested in that? So far 38,455 people have said yes.
— What happened today is that a financial company agreed to fill in the gap between what Kickstarter backers have funded and what I have put in, and what the movie will actually cost. Shooting could not happen without this.
When you pre-sell foreign distribution, you don’t get that money for some time. So you need to go to a company to provide something called “Gap Financing”. They are essentially a bank. Loaning us the “gap” between what we’ve raised together and what we need to actually make the movie. I have no idea where a 10 million dollar number came from but it is wrong and a lie.
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