'Wish I Was Here' - Zach Braff Kickstarter

Well, you knew it was just a matter of time that someone remotely famous would come out and use the “Veronica Mars” method of crowdsourcing a movie.  There’s been some talks of Kevin Smith exploring these methods in the past and possibly even again with “Clerks 3”, but it turns out that Scrubs’ actor and the writer/director of one of my favorite movies “Garden State”, Zach Braff is the first to jump on this movement as tries to make his new movie “Wish I Was Here.”
This movie is in a lot of ways the spiritual successor to 2004’s “Garden State,” where that was a movie about being in your 20’s this is his take of being in your 30’s.  Ironically enough, that was the same concept Kevin Smith used for Clerks and Clerks 2 respectively, although “Wish I Was Here” is a completely different cast and idea from “Garden State.” 



While Braff had the ability to get this funded by a studio, he chose to let the fans of his work fund it, so he would have complete creative control of the movie and not lose that to a studio.  In his Kickstater video, he tells a very interesting story about getting funding for “Garden State” not from Hollywood, but from a fan of Scrubs who had faith in Zach Braff.  This also allows Braff to have “final cut” of the movie and also cast who he wants in the movie, and if the cameos in the Kickstarter video are any indication it seems plausible that Jim Parsons and Donald Faison could be appearing in one way or another.

Needless to say, I was super excited when I found out about this as I’ve been clamoring for Zach Braff to do another movie as I find him to be a very talented individual and Garden State was just mind-blowingly good. He deserves all the support he can get on this and it is nice to see that he is definitely on pace for making his goal of $2,000,000. Much like the Veronica Mars project, any additional funds will help make the movie better as there are fantasy sequences in this film that will only look cooler with the more money they can raise. Much like all Kickstarter campaigns this has some great perks including a speaking role in the film which went rather quickly. It starts off with the old Production Diary and PDF of the script, then works up to getting streaming access to the film’s soundtrack as well as exclusive playlists that Braff will make during production, which will be cool since Zach’s “Garden State” soundtrack is easily one of the greatest musical compilations in history. At the $30 tier is the ability to watch a live stream of the movie online and Q&A with Braff after it’s done. For $40 you can get an exclusive “soft as kitten taint” t-shirt. From there the perks only get bigger and better as framable artwork, advance film screenings, autographed DVDs and posters, voice and video greetings, a set visit, and your name in the credits are just a few of the many available perks for contributing. So far in just over 8 hours, the movie has done well earning close to $700,000 from over 9,000 backers. Very cool to see and I hope it reaches it’s goal plus more soon as I am eagerly anticipating this. I have included the Kickstarter video here for you to watch and please consider donating here.