Latest in Kickstarter

EXCLUSIVE: BlackStar Projects, and Xfinity, announced the participants of the inaugural class of their new Philadelphia Filmmaker Lab. The year-long fellowship supports Black, Brown and Indigenous emerging and mid-career artists and filmmakers in the Greater Philadelphia area by providing access to equipment, funding…

Omar Miller (HBO’s Ballers) is set to join Jack Huston and Emilia Clarke in Phillip Noyce's Above Suspicion, a thriller that has been adapted from the book by New York Times columnist Joe Sharkey. Miller will portray Denver Rhodes, a hard-working criminal who tips off the FBI over a sour deal. Chris Gerolmo adapted…

Here’s a first look at a documentary on “arguably the greatest American screenwriter,” as Rob Reiner calls William Goldman. He’s the guy Aaron Sorkin says “is responsible for inventing the modern screenplay as we know it.” Also a novelist and nonfiction writer, he’s the pen behind such Hollywood classics as Butch Cassi…

UPDATED, 1:13 PM: Who The F*@% Is Frank Zappa, which has become the highest-funded documentary film in Kickstarter’s history, has a final tally: $1,126,036 from 8,688 backers. Outside of Kickstarter, Alex Winter collected another $91K to push the final to $1.2M. The funds will be used to mount a documentary film about…

Is this guy serious? German director Uwe Boll is failing in his attempt to raise funds for his film Rampage 3, and he delivers such a bile-filled and animated diatribe about Hollywood stars and film financiers, that it ought to go down as a classic. He’s so over the top that all that’s missing is the Hans and Franz…

Abel Ferrara, who launched his controversial Gerard Depardieu-starrer Welcome To New York at Cannes last year, will return to announce his plans for his next film. He’ll unveil at a 4 PM Monday press conference Siberia, a film he wrote with Chris Zois that will star Willem Dafoe. Ferrara will announce he’s taking to Ki…

Bill Plympton, a two-time Oscar nominee for his slightly deranged hand-drawn animated films, returns to Kickstarter on Tuesday, seeking to raise $100,000 to finance his eighth feature-length film, Revengeance, co-produced with Jim Lujan, another animator who wrote the screenplay. He cited films such as The Big Lebowski…

Day three at our first-ever Deadline Studios @ Sundance '15 got underway with Being Evel producer Johnny Knoxville arriving with a Land Rover camera crew in tow (the carmaker is a sponsor of the documentary). Photographer Mark Mann was busy as ever in the photo studio, using the Leica S-System and Rotolight lighting…

Kickstarter’s CEO Yancey Strickler sat down with me at the DeadlineNow studios at the Sundance Film Festival this week to talk on video about the booming business of crowdfunding, “exchange of value” and the millions of dollars that have been raised through his company to finance thousands of movies, including 10% of…

A trailer has dropped for Spike Lee’s latest, Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus – aka “the newest, hottest Spike Lee joint,” a no-star, semi-experimental affair made possible with the help of $1.4 million in Kickstarted donations. Gravitas Ventures picked up the re-envisioning of Bill Gunn’s 1973 cult horror film Ganja & Hess…

Dreams come cheap, right? $1 for a lottery ticket and now, $1 for a producing credit? For a movie that could conceivably have more producers than there are zombies in The Walking Dead, Barrie Osborne (one of the producers on The Lord Of The Rings and The Matrix) is looking to Kickstarter to help fund his next film…

EXCLUSIVE: Actor Matt Letscher (Scandal, Boardwalk Empire, Her) along with his brothers Brian Letscher (Tom, the secret service agent on Scandal) and Aaron Letscher are collaborating on One and Done, a comedy basketball web series about four fortysomething friends who decide to reform their high school basketball…