Once again, I’m thinking you movie fans out there will be interested in a documentary about filmmaking. It doesn’t have the all-star cast of something like Side by Side or the classic film clips of These Amazing Shadows, but Click Here should still be on your radar if you care about not just cinema but all visual storytelling in the digital age. Its full title is Click Here: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Making Movies, and it’s a project led by Pete Chatmon, who directed the early Zoe Saldana movie Premium and who teaches production at NYU. He also won the Tribeca Film Institute’s Creative Promise Narrative Award in 2008 for a script that, five years later, has yet to be produced. That frustrating experience is what inspired him and co-writer Candice Sanchez McFarlane to embark on this other endeavor.
Their scope appears to be very wide, as they’re looking at all kinds of media-makers and the numerous problems and benefits had by those storytellers in an era when the business is hard to navigate but the tools to get things done on your own are easier and cheaper than ever. Some of the characters and interviewees we see in the film’s crowdfunding campaign video or Facebook page include writer-director/actor Kentucker Audley (V/H/S; Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), producer Ron Simons (Blue Caprice), producer Craig Shilowich (Frozen River), cinematographer Reed Morano (Frozen River; Shut Up and Play the Hits – she’s also in Side by Side), actor Dorian Missick (TV’s Southland), producer James Belfer (Prince Avalanche), writer-director Daniel Schechter (Life of Crime), producer and Tugg founder Nick Gonda (Tree of Life), former New Line exec turned writer-director Janet Grillo (Fly Away) and Oscar-nominated editor-producer Sam Pollard (4 Little Girls; Clockers). Others are names you probably won’t know because they’re just doing stuff, maybe not concerned with the big time.
And hopefully they’ll get some other notable and less-notable-yet-very-noteworthy people for their doc over the next seven months as they continue production on Click Here. Of course, as I alluded, Chatmon and McFarlane are crowdfunding in order to finish the film. They’re on Seed & Spark, which is one of the lesser known services but also one of my favorites because of the way donations are made. You get to decide exactly what you’re paying for, whether it be hard drives or the film’s editor or composer or flights or hotels for the travel to L.A. and San Francisco for the rest of the interviews. It’s like a wedding registry but this is a union of talent and means. Their goal is $50k and as of this posting they’ve got a little more than a tenth. But they do have nearly a month left to make up the difference.
As usual, I’m not necessarily trying to get you to give money to this project. I have nothing to gain from that anyway. But I will say that one of the things that’s great about Seed & Spark is that you can follow a project and get updates without making a contribution to that project financially. There are already some helpful and fascinating clips online, either at Seed & Spark or Facebook (all via Vimeo, including this one with Belfer). And whether you can or can’t or don’t want to give, Click Here seems like something that will be made either way and its progress should be interesting to watch through its expected end time of May 2014 and beyond.
I’ll let Chatmon and McFarlane take it from here. Watch their video:
Do you want to see this film? Enough to help fund it?
Related Topics: Fund This Film
