A 30-day campaign generated by two Nashville men to save the making of the feature adaption of “Blue Like Jazz,” based on the New York Times Bestseller of the same name, has now become the largest crowd-sourced creative project in American history. The “Save Blue Like Jazz” project raised $345,992 from 4,495 supporters, topping Kickstarter.com’s previous record of $200,641. Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Kickstarter.com is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects.
Filming is set to begin this week on Wed. Oct. 27 in Nashville, Tenn. and Portland, Ore. Marshall Allman (“True Blood,“ Prison Break”) is set to play the lead role of Donald Miller. Tania Raymonde (“Lost,” “Crash”), Justin Welborn (“Final Destination,” “The Crazies”) and Claire Holt have also been cast. The movie, directed by Steve Taylor, will be produced by Clarke Gallivan (Ruckus Film) and filmed by cinematographer Ben Pearson.
“The crew in Nashville that didn’t have work until you helped us thanks you, the writers who really wanted to see their story on the screen thank you, our mothers thank you, the actors who live to bring other characters to life thank you, the musicians who will make the soundtrack thank you, the real life characters whose lives will be reflected in the story thank you, the people who were turning toward cynicism thank you, everybody who was about to give up before they heard this story thanks you, and I thank you,” said Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz in a blog post on www.donmilleris.com on the last morning of the campaign, Mon., Oct. 25.
After seeing the news on the author’s blog that the movie was being put on indefinite hold due to a lack of funding, two fans of Miller’s famous
Blue Like Jazz, Zach Prichard and Jonathan Frazier, created a grassroots style effort to save the film with the launch of
www.savebluelikejazz.com. One of the movie’s investors committed to matching the amount raised if their campaign reached $125,000. To see the original video post from Prichard and Frazier, visit
www.savebluelikejazz.com. The website encouraged viewers to download and pass along “Save Blue Like Jazz” posters, place Twitter hash marks of #savebluelikejazz, “like” on Facebook and, most importantly, donate on www.kickstarter.com. Pledge incentives included recorded voicemails from Miller, “Associate Producer” credits in the film’s end titles, t-shirts, screening tickets, copies of Miller’s script, digital downloads, personal “thank you” calls from the film’s director and more.
Miller’s Blue Like Jazz has sold 1.3 million copies to date, and the writing of the movie’s screenplay was highlighted in his latest New York Times Bestseller A Million Miles In A Thousands Years.
More information on Donald Miller:
Donald Miller grew up in Houston, Texas, in the shadow of the Astrodome. He left Houston at 21 in a Volkswagen van, and later wrote a book about his trip called
Through Painted Deserts. In his travels, he ran out of money in Portland, Oregon where he audited classes at Reed College, then selected as the most godless campus in the country. He wrote a book about that experience called
Blue Like Jazz that eventually became a New York Times Bestseller and is now being made into a movie. Don then followed up with the best-selling
Searching for God Knows What. After thirty-years of no interaction with his father, Don found his biological dad and wrote about it in a book called
Father Fiction. About that time, he started
The Mentoring Project, an organization that seeks to respond to the American crisis of fatherlessness by inspiring and equipping faith communities to mentor fatherless boys. Don’s work with The Mentoring Project led the Obama administration to invite him onto the
Presidential Task Force on Fatherhood and Healthy Families. Last year, along with the Ride: Well Team, Don rode his bicycle across America in an effort to raise money to drill wells in Sub-Saharan Africa. This experience, along with the writing of the screenplay for
Blue Like Jazz, provided material for his newest book,
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (also a New York Times Bestseller). He has appeared at such diverse events as The Democratic National Convention and the Vertias Forum at Harvard. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his dog Lucy. More information can be found at
http://donmilleris.com/ and
http://twitter.com/donmilleris.
More information on Steve Taylor:
Filmmaker Steve Taylor earned his “Renaissance Man” stripes (Prism Magazine) from a uniquely diverse body of work. As a recording artist he’s sold over one million albums worldwide, earned two Grammy nominations for Meltdown (1984) and Squint (1993), and made history as the only artist to twice win Billboard Music Video Awards for self-directed music videos. Steve was also lead singer/co-writer in the MCA-signed modern rock band Chagall Guevara. His producer resume includes the Platinum-certified Sixpence None The Richer (featuring the hits “Kiss Me” and “There She Goes”), three Gold-certified albums for Newsboys, and tracks for Relient K and Third Day. In 1997 Steve launched Squint Entertainment, whose worldwide success in the pop music arena was a first for a Nashville-based label. In addition to Sixpence, Squint’s roster included Chevelle, Burlap To Cashmere, and hip-hop collective L. A. Symphony. Steve’s parallel career as a filmmaker began in college and includes his video for Sixpence’s “Kiss Me,” the long-form Newsboys comedy Down Under The Big Top, and the award-winning Squint: Movies From The Soundtrack. 2006 marked the release of Steve’s debut as a feature film director/writer/producer with The Second Chance, an award-winning drama that was distributed theatrically by Sony Pictures Releasing. He’s currently in pre-production on his next movie, an adaptation of Donald Miller’s million-selling memoir Blue Like Jazz. Steve lives in Nashville with his wife, the artist D.L. Taylor, and their daughter.
