And prob­a­bly a lot of refunds to hand out at least.

It was Scrubs star Zach Braff who announced that his new com­edy – the follow-up to 2004’s well-received Gar­den State – could not get made with­out the help of fans’ finan­cial sup­port on crowd­fund­ing site Kick­starter. But a month on from launch­ing a high-profile cam­paign to raise fund­ing for inde­pen­dent film Wish I Was Here, Braff has not only hit his $2m Kick­starter tar­get but secured mil­lions of dol­lars in extra sup­port from a tra­di­tional film financier.

The Hol­ly­wood Reporter revealed on Wednes­day that World­view Enter­tain­ment is step­ping in with extra funds that will take the film’s total bud­get to about $10m. “Zach has proven again that he is a cre­ative force in inde­pen­dent film, and we were imme­di­ately drawn to his pow­er­ful and unique story,” World­view CEO Christo­pher Woodrow told the site at the Cannes film fes­ti­val.

Kick­starter is increas­ingly used by film-makers to raise finance for movies. Last month, pro­duc­ers of the Veron­ica Mars TV show secured a stag­ger­ing $5.702m (£3.70m) to revive the detec­tive series as a fea­ture film. In Sep­tem­ber, the Char­lie Kauf­man–scripted stop-motion film Anom­al­isa raised a then-record $406,237 (£250,600).

Wish I Was Here is writ­ten by Braff and his brother Adam. Braff will direct and play the lead role of a father, actor and hus­band strug­gling to find his iden­tity. Braff admit­ted in a video directed at fans as part of his Kick­starter cam­paign that he was close to a tra­di­tional financ­ing deal to shoot the film, but didn’t want to give up the final cut and the right to pick the cast. In response, fans donated $2.6m.

But Twit­ter users and blog­gers sub­se­quently ques­tioned why the actor, for­mer star of the hugely suc­cess­ful, long-running sit­com Scrubs, did not sim­ply use his own cash to make Wish I Was Here. Oth­ers won­dered if it was rea­son­able to ask fans to con­tribute when they would not ben­e­fit if the movie became a sur­prise box office hit. News that tra­di­tional fund­ing has been secured from a financier that will pre­sum­ably want a return on its invest­ment may fur­ther cloud the question.

In an inter­view with the LA Times about his Kick­starter cam­paign last month, Braff denied sug­ges­tions he had “Oprah Win­frey money”. He said: “I’ve done well in my career, but I am not sit­ting on $22m. I’m doing this so that one neg­a­tive audi­ence com­ment in a test screen­ing won’t force me to change the end of my movie.”

He also said he felt fans were being well-rewarded for their con­tri­bu­tions, with spe­cial early screen­ings and after-parties avail­able to many.

Kick­starter is hit or miss for many inde­pen­dent film­mak­ers.  Kevin Smith has said he’s going to bypass “Clerks III” on Kick­starter par­tially because he wants to avoid the headaches Braff is now get­ting, he wanted to ‘return to his roots’ and fund it him­self, like he did the first “Clerks”  and he believe Kick­starter should be there to “help the kind of up-and-coming film­mak­ers and entrepreneurs.”

Over­all, I’m intrigued by what Kick­starter is allow­ing folks to do.  It’s giv­ing a fund­ing option for entre­pre­neurs, artists and bands they never would have got­ten before.  Let’s be hon­est with our­selves, many banks aren’t hand­ing out the small busi­ness loans like they were thanks in part to Dodd-Frank and Kick­starter is fill­ing a void.

It also has been so suc­cess­ful, that it is legit­i­mately mak­ing many won­der if the National Endow­ment of the Arts (NEA) is even nec­es­sary since in 2012 it was reported that Kick­starter pro­vided more money for more projects than the NEA did in all of 2011.  Kickstarter’s co-founder felt he had to apol­o­gize on Talk­ing Points Memo for that — why, I have no idea?

Hav­ing helped fund a project or two on Kick­starter, I mostly do it not for a return on invest­ment (Like $5 to $50 is really an invest­ment for a $20,000 project?), but to get the idea off the draw­ing board and into the pro­duc­tion phase.  If the guy with the idea ends up mak­ing a mil­lion dol­lars some­time down the road, so be it.  My goal is get­ting a prod­uct in hand at the end of the day dur­ing the early adapter phase.

In the past it was wait­ing for a comic book, now it’s wait­ing for a “Set­tlers of Catan” game board.

As for the Braff / Smith debate, I believe Smith is on to some­thing when he says that Kick­starter should be reserved for the up and com­ers.  Guys like them have access to money and can get it with typ­i­cally a call or two to a Wein­stein.  You and me, who have hopes, dreams, a draw­ing board, a cam­era and dreams need some­thing like Kick­starter.  The big guys don’t.

My favorite line, the guy who com­ments that the S.H.I.E.L.D acronym is another one of those clas­sic works of gov­ern­ment think­ing.  You know the kind, where they think of the acronym first and what the let­ters stand for later.

In the orig­i­nal Lee / Kirby days at Mar­vel circa 1965, S.H.I.E.L.D stood for “Supreme Head­quar­ters, Inter­na­tional Espi­onage, Law-Enforcement Divi­sion,” it’s been changed a few times since then.

In fact, the comics today don’t give S.H.I.E.L.D the same acronym def­i­n­i­tion as the movies.  In the movies, the “H” stands for Home­land, the “E” for Enforce­ment and the “D” is for Divi­sion, while in the comics the “H” is for Haz­ard, the “E” is for Espi­onage” and the “D” is for Directorate.

Got all that?  Yeah, I barely under­stood it myself.

Enjoy two and a half min­utes to blow your mind though.

 

The Son of Coul has returned!

Don’t expect to see much of the movie cast in this series. Only Clark Gregg is a reg­u­lar — who’s done TV in the past and is said to pre­fer it — and pos­si­bly Samuel L. Jack­son might make a cameo as the show gets underway.

“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D” will also help intro­duce other Mar­vel char­ac­ters into the movie uni­verse.  This teaser already gives you a clear hint that for­mer “Angel” star and Joss Whe­don reg­u­lar, J. August Richards will be por­tray­ing the street-level hero “Luke Cage” (that’s him jump­ing out of the burn­ing build­ing and throw­ing a guy around like a rag doll) with all his inde­struc­tible skin and pow­er­house strength.

Some­thing tells me this will be the Bendis era ver­sion of Luke Cake from the past decade, not the disco shirt wear­ing, “Sweet Christ­mas” say­ing one from the ‘70s.  This one’s a badass and one well-earning of the reputation.

Thanks Lance.  I could have lived my life in bliss­ful igno­rance to this thing’s very exis­tence, but “Noooo!” you had to tempt me to Google it didn’t you?

Bas­tard.

 

(H/T Fel­low con­ser­v­a­tive comic book geek Jonathan Last, the other senior writer at the Weekly Standard)

“I’ve been a cop for 23 years, I’ve never heard of a Ghost­buster and a Stormtrooper get­ting assaulted,” — Port­land, ME Police Lt. Gary Hutcheson.

And now, the rest of the story…

A West­brook man was Tasered by police on Sat­ur­day for allegedly assault­ing a man dressed as a Stormtrooper and another man dressed as a Ghost­buster, accord­ing to police.

Adam Barnes, 31, was arrested on State Street after assault­ing two peo­ple in cos­tume and threat­en­ing police, said Port­land police Lt. Gary Hutch­e­son. He was charged with two counts of assault, dis­or­derly con­duct and five counts of crim­i­nal threat­en­ing because he threat­ened all five offi­cers at the scene.

After refus­ing to sub­mit to arrest, he was Tasered, said Hutcheson.

Coast City Comics at the cor­ner of Con­gress St. and Park St. was host­ing an event asso­ci­ated with Free Comic Book Day, a national event, on Sat­ur­day, accord­ing to Jar­rett Melen­dez, event coor­di­na­tor. About a dozen peo­ple were dressed in cos­tume. Peo­ple were dressed as Ghost­busters, Stormtroop­ers from Star Wars, the Green Lantern and Won­der Woman.

Bobby Daggett of Port­land was dressed as Green Lantern when he said he wit­nessed the first assault.

“There were a bunch of peo­ple stand­ing out­side try­ing to drum up busi­ness and one guy was dressed as a Stormtrooper,” said Daggett. “Out of nowhere this guy tried to put [the guy in the Stormtrooper cos­tume] in a choke­hold from behind and then throws him to the ground. He was try­ing to be intim­i­dat­ing above him and screamed obscen­i­ties to everybody.”

Hutch­e­son said Barnes is 6 feet, 4 inches tall and weighs 300 pounds. He was intox­i­cated at 2:30 p.m., when Barnes was arrested, he said.

“Free Comic Book Day” is not sup­posed to go down like this.  Unless of course, there’s some lightsabers involved and other nutty kinds of LARP­ing going on.

Just an epic improv per­for­mance here by Pat­ton Oswalt for eight min­utes on a so-called “Citizen’s Fil­i­buster” for a scene in the NBC sit­com “Parks and Recreation.”

For the unini­ti­ated, Moon Knight (men­tioned around the 3:45 mark) is a Mar­vel super­hero who’s the iden­tity of ex-mercenary Marc Spencer, who was given mys­tic Egypt­ian pow­ers when vis­ited by the god “Khon­shu” after being bru­tally attacked while on mis­sion in Egypt.  While a gifted fighter from his merc days, he doesn’t really have many actual super pow­ers, but is granted increased strength depend­ing on the phase of the moon.

He can carry the most at full moon, at his least dur­ing a new moon.

In actu­al­ity, Moon Knight is a clever take­off of Bat­man.  He is also insane and suf­fers from mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ties.  It’s unknown if Khon­shu is real or just a fig­ment of Spencer’s mind or if Spencer died in the orig­i­nal attack and Khon­shu cre­ated the other per­son­al­i­ties to compensate.

That being said, he’s a fun char­ac­ter to read, but hardly what would be called a “pow­er­house” in the Mar­vel Uni­verse.  He bat­tles mostly street-level crim­i­nals and is known to help guys like Spider-Man and Dare­devil.  He’s not going to be able to go toe-to-toe with Thanos any­time soon.

Cod­ing errors.  Not fun.

And here’s how it was saved…

Ear­lier, we men­tioned Super­vis­ing Tech­ni­cal Direc­tor Galyn Sus­man. A few months ear­lier, Sus­man had given birth to a son. As she was a new mother, she needed to be able to do some work from home, so Pixar had set up a com­puter for her that had the com­plete film. In addi­tion to the full film at that point, she would receive incre­men­tal updates with changes made over that time. No one knew when the last update had been, but obvi­ously what­ever she had was bet­ter than what they pos­sessed at the moment. So they headed to her house and drove her com­puter back to the Pixar offices (Sus­man and Jacob later recalled the amus­ing pro­ces­sion, with her com­puter wrapped in blan­kets and strapped into a seat belt in the back seat with Jacob ner­vously watch­ing it as Sus­man drove). The com­puter was plugged in and booted up. It had been updated two weeks ago. So they had the orig­i­nal back-up from a few months ago, her cur­rent updated ver­sion plus what­ever other files they could cob­ble together from the var­i­ous worker’s indi­vid­ual work sta­tions. That gave them roughly 70 per­cent of the film’s files (as of the update two weeks ear­lier) as being ver­i­fied as work­ing fine. They had to then hand-check all of the direc­to­ries for the remain­ing 30 per­cent to make sure it was cor­rect. That took the entire staff work­ing the whole week­end with very lit­tle sleep mak­ing sure the other 30 per­cent of the files were accu­rate. Even­tu­ally, they fin­ished and pro­duc­tion on the film was back up and running.

Iron­i­cally enough, exec­u­tives at Pixar were not happy with the prod­uct as it was at that point after they viewed it and they ended up ask­ing for the entire film to be re-worked.

That took nine months.  “Toy Story 2″ was released to the­aters in Novem­ber 1999.

They must really like Justin Tim­ber­lake around Stu­dio 8H at Rock­e­feller Cen­ter.  (That’s the actual loca­tion where they tape “Sat­ur­day Night Live.”)

Not men­tioned, but often teased at since intro­duced as a con­cept in 1990, the SNL “Five-Timers Club” was brought back to wel­come for­mer ‘N Snyc front man Justin Tim­ber­lake as their newest member.

For­mer inductees Steve Mar­tin, Chevy Chase, Paul Simon (not as host, but as musi­cal guest), Can­dice Bergen (the first woman mem­ber), Alec Bald­win (the cur­rent holder of “Most Times as SNL Host” at 16), and Tom Hanks all came back to wel­come him.  Also mak­ing appear­ances as “club staff” were for­mer cast mem­bers Mar­tin Short and Dan Aykroyd.

Here’s the orig­i­nal 1990 sketch with Tom Hanks being inducted.   As you can see, Steve Mar­tin and Paul Simon had already earned their mem­ber­ships, as well has come­dian Elliot Gould.  Staff waiter at the time was for­mer cast mem­ber Jon Lovitz.

Do take notice at who the door­man of the club is.  “Sean” might look a bit familiar.

Also, I can’t believe they left out the “Club Hand­shake” for Tim­ber­lake.  Guess he’s not “that great.”

First of all some house-keeping stuff regard­ing Pluto.

1)  It is still not a planet.  The few peo­ple who do astro­physics for a liv­ing still clas­sify it as a “Dwarf Planet.”

2)  This des­ig­na­tion is com­pletely under­stand­able when you actu­ally think about the size of Pluto.  Its entire diam­e­ter could pretty much only cover about two-thirds of the size of our moon.

3)  Blame the Kuiper Belt.  It’s a bunch of mas­sive disc of Pluto-sized masses on the edge of our solar sys­tem.  It being out there has made us reassess what’s “a planet” when you have a bunch of things float­ing out there the size of Pluto or big­ger (see Eris), you have to won­der are they all plan­ets, or just a sec­ond type of aster­oid belt?

4)  Pluto already has a num­ber of moons, three of which are named (Charon, Nix, Hydra) and two which are not.

It’s the nam­ing of the last two which is now in the news and thanks to some­one famil­iar with the term, “Vul­can” got a bit of a boost in the online voting.

After weeks of online bal­lot cast­ing by peo­ple around the world, the poll ask­ing the pub­lic to name two of Pluto’s moons — cur­rently called P4 and P5 — ended Monday.

As of 12 p.m. (1700 GMT) Feb. 25, the polls closed with a total of 450,324 total votes cast since Feb. 11 with ‘Vul­can,’ a Pluto moon name pro­posed by Star Trek’s William Shat­ner, is the clear winner.

“174,062 votes and Vul­can came out on top of the vot­ing for the nam­ing of Pluto’s moons. Thank you to all who voted! MBB,” wrote Shat­ner via Twit­ter.

Cer­berus came in a clear sec­ond with nearly 100,000 votes.

Vul­can was a late addi­tion to the Pluto moon name con­tenders, and pulled into the lead after Shat­ner, build­ing on his Capt. James T. Kirk per­sona, plugged the name on Twit­ter. Vul­can, the home planet of Kirk’s alien-human hybrid first offi­cer Spock, is not just a fic­tional world in the Star Trek uni­verse. It is also the name of the god of fire in Roman mythol­ogy, and offi­cials at SETI added the sci-fi favorite to the bal­lot for that reason.

“Vul­can is the Roman god of lava and smoke, and the nephew of Pluto. (Any con­nec­tion to the Star Trek TV series is purely coin­ci­den­tal, although we can be sure that Gene Rod­den­berry read the clas­sics.),” wrote SETI sci­en­tist Mark Showal­ter in a blog offi­cially adding the name to the list on Feb. 12. “Thanks to William Shat­ner for the suggestion!”

These votes don’t nec­es­sar­ily mean that P4 and P5 will end up being called Vul­can and Cer­berus, how­ever. SETI is going to rec­om­mend the win­ning names to the Inter­na­tional Astro­nom­i­cal Union — the orga­ni­za­tion respon­si­ble for nam­ing the moons. The IAU will take the results into con­sid­er­a­tion, but ulti­mately they have final say over what the tiny moons are called.

“Cer­berus” was the Pluto’s three-headed hell hound in who guards the gates to the Under­world in Greek mythol­ogy.  He’s known as “Ker­borus” by the Romans.

Also, this is not the first time that “Vul­can” has come up as the pos­si­ble name for some­thing in our solar sys­tem.  For years, ancient astronomers believed there was a small plan­e­toid mass between the Sun and Mer­cury.   The think­ing was they’d use “Vul­can” to sym­bol­ize the belief that such a mass would have to be hot, like a volcano.

Alas, it ended up being a stray aster­oid or some­thing and even­tu­ally dis­ap­peared; never to be seen or heard from again.

…and now there’s proof he likely fal­si­fied his data, lied about his find­ings and appar­ently even manip­u­lated his interviews.

“Seduc­tion of the Inno­cent?”  try “Seduc­tion of the Weak-minded” who bought into it.

While the find­ings of Wertham (who died in 1981) have long been ques­tioned by the comics indus­try and its advo­cates, a recent study of the mate­ri­als he used to write “Seduc­tion of the Inno­cent” sug­gests that Wertham mis­rep­re­sented his research and fal­si­fied his results.

Carol L. Tilley, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Illinois’s Grad­u­ate School of Library and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence, reviewed Wertham’s papers, housed in the Library of Con­gress, start­ing at the end of 2010, shortly after they were made avail­able to the public.

In a new arti­cle in Infor­ma­tion & Cul­ture: A Jour­nal of His­tory, Dr. Tilley offers numer­ous exam­ples in which she says Wertham “manip­u­lated, over­stated, com­pro­mised and fab­ri­cated evi­dence,” par­tic­u­larly in the inter­views he con­ducted with his young subjects.

Draw­ing from his own clin­i­cal research and pointed inter­pre­ta­tions of comic-book story lines, Wertham argued in the book that comics were harm­ing Amer­i­can chil­dren, lead­ing them to juve­nile delin­quency and to lives of vio­lence, drugs and crime.

“Seduc­tion of the Inno­cent” was released to a pub­lic already teem­ing with anti-comics sen­ti­ment, and Wertham was embraced by mil­lions of cit­i­zens who feared for America’s moral sanc­tity; he even tes­ti­fied in tele­vised hear­ings.

Yet accord­ing to Dr. Tilley, he may have exag­ger­ated the num­ber of youths he worked with at the low-cost mental-health clinic he estab­lished in Harlem, who might have totaled in the hun­dreds instead of the “many thou­sands” he claimed. Dr. Tilley said he mis­stated their ages, com­bined quo­ta­tions taken from many chil­dren to appear as if they came from one speaker and attrib­uted remarks said by a sin­gle speaker to larger groups.

Other exam­ples show how Wertham omit­ted exten­u­at­ing cir­cum­stances in the lives of his patients, who often came from fam­i­lies marred by vio­lence and sub­stance abuse, or invented details outright.

Wertham is pretty much seen as the man who did two things:  1) He gave the world the cul­tural “joke” that Bat­man and Robin were gay long before Burt Ward and Adam West did it back in the late 60s with the phrase “old chum” on national tele­vi­sion.  2)  He pretty much killed the indus­try for about eight years.

“Seduc­tion” came out in 1954 and by 1957, Mar­vel Comics fore­run­ner, Timely Comics had a series of mass lay­offs which nearly killed the com­pany.  For two years, the only employ­ees doing comics were Stan Lee and two or three free­lance artists doing West­ern and romance comics.  (Jack Kirby didn’t come on-board until 1958 and only after he had no where else to go.  Bad blood already existed between him and Lee from an inci­dent which led to Kirby’s ter­mi­na­tion from Timely in the 1940s.)  Books like Jus­tice League, Fan­tas­tic Four, Spider-Man and the Avengers were years away and only after DC Comics led the way first with rebooted ver­sions of their clas­sic heroes like “The Flash” and “Green Lantern” led the revival.

In the mean­time, all pub­lish­ers policed them­selves through “The Code,” short for the self-censoring “Comics Code Author­ity.”  The Code pretty much banned any hor­ror, crime, and ter­ror comics until the mid-to-late 70s.  For years, you couldn’t do a story at any of the pub­lish­ers which included the clas­sic hor­ror mon­sters of were­wolves, vam­pires and zombies.

Wertham would have hated “The Walk­ing Dead” one can only guess.

But the real irony to the “Seduc­tion of the Inno­cent” saga is that for what would sound like a Wertham was a few cen­turies ahead of Brent Bozell and the Fam­ily Tele­vi­sion Coun­cil, he was actu­ally a prac­tic­ing lib­eral.  His early stud­ies of seg­re­ga­tion were writ­ten about in the briefs used for Brown vs. Board of Education.

The Times says as much:

Michael Chabon, who researched the early his­tory of comics for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Amaz­ing Adven­tures of Kava­lier & Clay,” said that while Wertham had been viewed as “this almost McCarthyite witch hunter,” he was actu­ally “an extremely well-intentioned lib­eral, pro­gres­sive man in many ways,” pro­vid­ing men­tal health ser­vices to minori­ties and the poor.

But of “Seduc­tion of the Inno­cent,” Mr. Chabon said: “You read the book, it just smells wrong. It’s clear he got com­pletely car­ried away with his obses­sion, in an almost Ahab-like way.”

Word was that Wertham then wanted to spend most of the 1960s going after tele­vi­sion, but appar­ently couldn’t get a publisher.

Guess it was one of those “good inten­tions” things the Left keeps lec­tur­ing us about.

Any­way, fast-forward nearly 70 years and what do we have?  A comic book indus­try that is now more-or-less a loss-leader for major media con­glom­er­ates so they can make movies out of the prop­er­ties.  It’s watch­dog is no more — the Code offi­cially went under in 2011 — and its iconic logo is now owned by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a group ded­i­cated to end cen­sor­ship of the comic book industry.

Wertham will prob­a­bly go down in his­tory as a crank on the same level as Tip­per Gore when she went after the music indus­try in the 1980s.  Frankly, peo­ple are going to snap the same ways they always have — lousy child­hoods filled with vio­lence, uncar­ing par­ents who ever never there and of course — they just might be wired that way.  No media (or weapon) has been known to change that.

Of course, it is a lot eas­ier to blame a medium or a weapon than it is to blame the parents.