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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Just to recap: Zach Braff put his proposed film, Wish I Was Here, up on Kickstarter. People freaked out, because Zach Braff is supposedly worth $22 million and maybe shouldn’t need Kickstarter (what does anyone “need?”). But his movie got funded anyway, and Kickstarter shot back that Braff’s movie, far from taking money away from other projects, was actually funded 63 percent by people who’d never used Kickstarter before, who went on to contribute $400,000 to other projects. So, a dick perhaps, but a net good in the end. End of story, right? Well, not exactly.

The brouhaha is poised to become even more kerfufflerous today with the news that Wish I Was Here has found a financier. Wait, what?

Zach Braff’s successful Kickstarter campaign for Wish I Was Here has helped the actor-director land a leading film financier: Worldview Entertainment.
Wish I Was Here has been generating headlines since April 24 when it became the latest film project to turn to the popular crowd-funding site for help. To date, the project has raised more than $2.6 million from more than 38,000 people, exceeding the $2 million goal.
Worldview will provide most of the financing for the drama, which will star Braff as a young man who, upon learning that his father is dying, must take a second look at his life and reconnect with his family. The budget is less than $10 million. With Worldview on board, a small percentage of the money raised will be returned in the form of a fee to Kickstarter, according to insiders.

Now, that might’ve been a little difficult to parse, but basically, Braff’s $2 million goal wasn’t the entire cost of the movie. The entire cost of the movie was closer to $10 million (even though the LA Times said $5 million a few weeks ago). Worldview Entertainment is stepping in to pay for the difference between the $2.6 million raised on Kickstarter and the final, near-$10 million cost of the movie. (The part going back to Kickstarter is just Kickstarter’s standard fee – they get paid when a project gets funded, that’s how it always works).

The question is, was Braff being disingenuous when he explained why he needed your Kickstarter money? Here’s his original pitch:

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Early this morning, Jeff Sneider at TheWrap filed a story that Michael B. Jordan (best known as Wallace in The Wire) was “in contention” to play The Human Torch in Fox’s Fantastic Four Reboot. It’s hard to know what “in contention” or “being considered” even really mean as it relates to casting, but Fantastic Four is being directed by Josh Trank of Chronicle, which also starred Michael B. Jordan, whose star is sure to be on the rise after starring in the critically acclaimed festival darling Fruitvale (now Fruitvale Station), so I guess it would make sense. Sure, why not, he’s a good actor. Either way, in and of itself, this news item is still a few facts away from me giving a shit.

But of course, this wouldn’t make Kerfuffle Watch without a kerfuffle, or at least a fracas with a whiff of hubbubelry. OH MY GOD, A BLACK GUY MIGHT PLAY A WHITE CHARACTER! Just search “human torch black” on Twitter if you want to see some pissed off people. But I wouldn’t recommend it, because let’s be honest, if you go snooping around pond bottoms, you’re going to find scum. It’s not a surprise. The age old argument in play here is, “Wouldn’t black guys be pissed if a white guy was cast as a black character?!” Probably, but I don’t feel like playing make believe in order to predict whether people might be offended by something. They probably will. Someone, somewhere, will be. All things being equal, yeah, a white guy could play a black guy from a comic book and vice versa, and everyone would be fine with it. But all things aren’t quite equal yet, there’s still the memory of minstrel shows and black people being underrepresented and blah blah blah. Maybe some day it will be just as okay for a white dude to play a black dude as vice versa, but we’re not quite there yet. So in the meantime, maybe just shut up about it because who really cares anyway.

Let’s not forget, we’re talking about The Human Torch here, a character named “Johnny Storm,” who is literally flaming. The people worried that the character might be black don’t seem at all troubled by the fact that he’s super duper gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Some of my best friends are gay superheros. Look, all I’m saying is, if a black guy playing The Human Torch is something that legitimately troubles you, I’m going to wedgie you with your own Klan robes, you tumbling, tumbling dickweed.

Photo Credit: Phil Stafford / Shutterstock.com / Marvel.com

Whenever someone who’s not an unknown individual tries to crowd-fund a project, it’s always a recipe for a kefufflerous brouhaha. First it was Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas raising $5.7 million for a Veronica Mars movie, and so it is again with Zach Braff, who’s currently using Kickstarter to fund a project called Wish I Was Here. Braff hasn’t made a movie since 2004′s Garden State, and Wish I Was Here would reunite him with his Garden State cinematographer, production designers, and producers. No word on whether it will also pimp The Shins super hard again.

I was about to sign a typical financing deal in order to get the money to make “Wish I Was Here,” my follow up to “Garden State.” It would have involved making a lot of sacrifices I think would have ultimately hurt the film. I’ve been a backer for several projects on Kickstarter and thought the concept was fascinating and revolutionary for artists and innovators of all kinds. But I didn’t imagine it could work on larger-scale projects. I was wrong.

After I saw the incredible way “Veronica Mars” fans rallied around Kristen Bell and her show’s creator Rob Thomas, I couldn’t help but think (like I’m sure so many other independent filmmakers did) maybe there is a new way to finance smaller, personal films that didn’t involve signing away all your artistic control.

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Just look at this fratboy rapist

Ugh. I really didn’t want to write about this, but I guess I have to. So James Gunn, known to a cult handful as a kitschy-clever Troma-trained director of films like Super and Slither, back in 2011 wrote a kitschy-campy, tongue-in-cheek blog post called “The 50 Superheroes You Most Want to Have Sex With.” A post which, for some reason the “guide to geek girl culture” site The Mary Sue only picked up on this week, calling it a “slut-shaming, misogynist, homophobic post” (thanks to the internet, I can now spell “misogynist” without a dictionary!). From which followed the requisite online petition to get James Gunn removed from his job directing the much higher-profile Guardians of the Galaxy, which Marvel hired him to do back in August. The petition garnered a relatively paltry 3,100 signatures.

Naturally, James Gunn had to monkey dance for the self-appointed morality police in an apology posted by GLAAD:

“A couple of years ago I wrote a blog that was meant to be satirical and funny. In rereading it over the past day I don’t think it’s funny. The attempted humor in the blog does not represent my actual feelings. However, I can see where statements were poorly worded and offensive to many. I’m sorry and regret making them at all,” Gunn writes.

“People who are familiar with me as evidenced by my Facebook page and other mediums know that I’m an outspoken proponent for the rights of the gay and lesbian community, women and anyone who feels disenfranchised, and it kills me that some other outsider like myself, despite his or her gender or sexuality, might feel hurt or attacked by something I said. We’re all in the same camp, and I want to do my best to make this world a better place for all of us. I’m learning all the time.” [THR]

If you knew anything about James Gunn or had ever seen a Troma film, you’d know the “offending” post was par for course – kitschy, gleefully vulgar, and written in tongue-in-cheek vernacular. The worst you could say about it was that it was un-PC, and duh, that’s Troma’s entire mission statement. That stuff wouldn’t even exist without  humorless, content-deaf outrage merchants to clutch their pearls over it. As far as I can tell, this was the language Susana Polo of the Mary Sue had such a problem with:

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