It turns out that there are a lot more fans of Super Troopers than Citizen Kane. That’s a fact that the producers who dreamed of finally releasing Orson Welles’ final film in coherent form learned the hard way.
To mark the Citizen Kane director’s 100th birthday, Filip Jan Rymsza and a team of producers were hoping to finally release The Other Side of the Wind, a film Welles worked tirelessly before his death in 1985.
However, they couldn’t get the last $2 million they needed from outside distributors because they wanted to see an edited sequence. That was a chicken-and-egg situation, because they needed that money first in order to provide the distributors with something coherent. Just the dream of seeing Welles’ final film finished wasn’t enough for the distributors.
So in May, they went public with their plight and launched an Indiegogo campaign, hoping to raise $2 million by June 14. When it was clear that this wasn’t going to happen, they cut the goal in half, hoping to raise $1 million by July 5.
But even that didn’t happen. The campaign closed with just $406,405. For comparison, a Super Troopers sequel raised $4.4 million in 30 days earlier this year.
Ryzma told The New York Times today that they did raise enough to keep the project alive, although they will need another private investor, who is ready to stay in.
“We’re enormously grateful for the contributors, because we now have enough to at least start the next phase,” Rymsza told the Times. “From that standpoint, we feel the Indiegogo campaign was a big success.”