We knew that right now was the best time to launch our feature film documentary about Ayn Rand’s life and ideas, and a grassroots campaign on the web is getting our film, Inside the Mind of Ayn Rand off to a quick start.
Interest in Rand has been escalating over the last couple of years, and of course the main reason is that she nailed it with her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. Rand foresaw, more than fifty years ago, what is happening today in our country — the free market being destroyed, government taking over private industry, bureaucratic bungling and deception, always with disastrous results — and she understood the underlying causes, too.
Sales of her books are setting records. She is quoted constantly–not only in newspapers, newsmagazines, television and radio talk shows, but also in mass media favorites like The Simpsons, South Park, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and The Colbert Report. And then there is her popularity with so many in the Tea Party and pro-liberty community. Odd bedfellows maybe, but there’s no denying her ability to get people talking!
Her visibility climbed even higher this month with the long awaited release of the film, Atlas Shrugged, Part One.
So it was time to launch Inside the Mind of Ayn Rand, a project we have been prepping since early 2010. Slated for release in theaters in early 2012, the 90-minute feature film explores the relevance of Ayn Rand’s views on the fundamental issues facing society today. And while it also weaves in the epic story of her life, it’s not focused on biographical details. Most importantly, this will be the first major film to examine, in some depth, the full range of her ideas–i.e., reason, limited government, self-interest, and free markets–and the impact those ideas have on the state of our world today.
After spending our own money on the initial development stages, it became apparent that the best way to get this movie into theaters quickly, was to reach out to the worldwide base of Rand fans.
While most of our budget will be met through the usual methods–private investment, institutional support, and pre-sales to distributors–we discovered an exciting way to reach-out to the thousands Ayn Rand fans around the world who want to see Rand’s ideas popularized. For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been running a funding campaign over at an ingenious website called Kickstarter.com.
As the name implies, Kickstarter.com helps get projects–mostly of a creative nature– off to a fast start. For us, this was the perfect opportunity to harness the grassroots liberty community in a pro-active way.
What we like is that donations, large or small can be made right at the Kickstarter page. It makes it easy for people to play a role in making the film possible — even with the smallest donation. Most of us don’t have the means to be serious movie investors However, a lot of small contributions add up quickly, as we have seen with the growing support of our project.
Kickstarter allowed us to offer donor incentives too. They range from a free DVD of the finished film to an exclusive private screening anywhere in the world, and even to receiving producing credits on the film.
Kickstarter encourages projects like ours to present short “pitch” videos, and we’ve found that to be an important component of our success. Anyone planning to launch a project there should put a lot of thought and creativity into the video they create. We’ve also found that publicizing the site, mainly through e-mail blasts and calls to key individuals was no small job, but it pays off. And Kickstarter itself has an enormous community of people who routinely peruse the site, looking for projects to donate to.
This kind of grassroots support ensures that we will keep moving quickly towards production while the other, more time consuming fundraising continues. But perhaps most importantly, it accelerates the pace at which independent projects like ours get to the screen.
I think Inside the Mind of Ayn Rand will be a real eye-opener, not only about her ideas, but also about the fascinating and complex woman behind those ideas. But we need to get the film out there as fast as possible, and we’re happy to be using Kickstarter to help do that!
Check out our project, which expires on May 10th, see how it works, and consider making a donation too.
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