Zach Braff Takes Advantage of Kickstarter

This Kickstarter website is starting to become a very useful tool in the world of Hollywood. The crowd funding site has been around for a few years now and has successfully launched a bunch of new products, new games, books, business ideas and now movies! Thanks to the extremely successful “Veronica Mars” movie campaign, Hollywood has now found out they could use their fans to help create their dreams. Which means, that the stars themselves have direct control over what goes in their film. They don’t have to get approval from any executives, all they need is the approval of their fans.

Zach Braff is the latest celebrity to take advantage of the website. The former star of the hit TV show, “Scrubs” announced his campaign just 24 hours ago and has already raised almost $1.5 million, just $500,000 short of his $2 million goal. Braff is wanting the money to fund his movie, “Wish I Was Here” which is his follow-up to the very successful, “Garden State.”

On the Kickstarter page, he explains specifically why he wanted to fund his movie through a crowd funding website,

 “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 of 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.”

He then goes onto explain how he was inspired by the success of the Veronica Mars movie campaign and that it showed him that sites like Kickstarter could be a great new tool for independent filmmakers.

So, what is this movie going to be about?  Braff provides details on the campaign page,

 “’Wish I Was Here’ is the story of Aidan Boom (played by me), a struggling actor, father and husband, who at 35 is still trying to find his identity; a purpose for his life. He and his wife are barely getting by finically and Aidan passes his time by fantasizing about being the great futuristic Space-Knight he’d always dreamed he’d be as a little kid. When his ailing father can no longer afford to pay for private school for his two kids (ages 5 and 12) and the only available public school is on its last legs, Aidan reluctantly agrees to attempt to home-school them.”

It sounds interesting…I guess? I mean, I am not going to fund the project, mostly because I don’t have any money. However, I’ll probably end up watching it once it does getreleased. You can view the campaign here.