WGTC: What was motivation/idea behind taking this sequel to crowdfunding?
Schenkman: The funny thing is I actually got the idea to take this sequel to crowdfunding when Kickstarter first came out. I remember sending Eric an e-mail saying, “Look at this thing. This is exactly the way to make a Man From Earth sequel.” And I felt the reason it was the way to make a Man From Earth sequel was because of the way Man From Earth‘s popularity was so very much an internet phenomenon. I’m sure you’re familiar with the story of how the film was ripped from a screener DVD and posted online and very quickly spread among the peer-to-peer community who just loved the movie and told their friends about it. Within a number of months, millions of people had seen it. It became this internet phenomenon, but at the same time we weren’t really finding ourselves all that successful in terms of selling the international rights to distributors. We sold to the UK and to Australia and a few other markets, but that was it. There were countries, for example Brazil, we must have played 5 different film festivals and yet we never sold the rights in Brazil. People all over the world, if they wanted to see the movie, honestly the only thing they could really do was to buy a region-1 DVD from Amazon or to illegally download it. If they bought it, it would only be in English, but if they downloaded it there were going to be subtitles in their language. It’s been translated into over 30 languages. I absolutely understand why people did it.
So what we did was we went out to the peer-to-peer community and we said, “We understand that you have downloaded the movie. We appreciate you watching it, telling your friends about it, getting on IMDB and giving us an 8 or 9 or 10 like you’ve done. We really appreciate it. But at the same time, we still haven’t broken even on this movie. So if you liked it, maybe you could send us some money. Send us what you would’ve paid for a rental, what you would’ve paid for a DVD, you can send us whatever you like.”
We set up a Paypal page and over the years well over 1,000 people, maybe closer to 2,000 people, have made donations. That’s why originally I wanted to do that on Kickstarter but we never did. I didn’t know how realistic it was to raise the kind of money we needed to raise on Kickstarter, and Eric always thought we’d be able to fund it in a more traditional way. We thought, for example, that the distributor of the first film would give us the money to make a sequel. We tried that a few times and they were never interested even though they made quite a bit of money on the first film. Oddly enough, despite the success of the film, maybe because it had been downloaded so many times instead of purchased, everybody passed on the project. We finally had a deal in place to get the movie funded, but then that company got bought and our deal went away, and so finally that’s when I said, “Goddamn it I’m going to Kickstarter!” Honestly though, not to quote Spike Lee, but we were Kickstarter before there was Kickstarter. All over the world people were giving us money on Paypal after watching our movie. If that’s not crowdfunding I don’t know what is.
WGTC: Was the sequel something you guys always had in mind? When did the idea first come about?
Schenkman: The idea for the sequel first came about when a producer actually approached me to create a pitch for a Man From Earth TV series. I was thinking about what a Man From Earth TV series would be like, and I had a bunch of ideas. But then I got to thinking about how you need an antagonist, not necessarily a bad guy per se, but you need conflict. My basic idea for the show was that on the one hand there’d be this incident of the week where John would be traveling around and getting into people’s lives and helping them or at least trying to help them. But on the other hand, there would also be over-arching issues, over-arching conflicts. The show wouldn’t necessarily be a serial, but it would have serialized elements. Which I think is the format of a lot of one-hour dramas these days. There’s the crime of the week, but then there are season-long issues for these characters. In thinking about who the antagonists would be, I came up with an idea that I was very excited about. For one reason and another the TV series didn’t get pursued, but it was in that process of developing this TV proposed series that the basic story and these antagonists were created.
Eric was the one who had really wanted to do a sequel and for a long time I said, “No, no, no.” But then once I had this breakthrough with the TV series, and I saw that we could also use this for a sequel, that’s when the story really came together.
Head to the next page for what to expect from Man From Earth Millennium…
