I will only stop writing about this movie’s endless failures when they send me a DVD copy. Have you ever backed a Kickstarter project and had the company just totally flake out? It’s happening more and more lately – people want the quick money from crowdfunding but don’t actually think ahead to the work it takes to make a finished product.
When The Canyons first hit Kickstarter, the project was pitched as an indie pic where even the actors would be crowdsourced – the website LetItCast.com would be used to select the finalists for the main roles. Of course, as anybody who has followed the production knows, director Paul Schrader and producer Braxton Pope totally ignored that and cast Lindsay Lohan and a porn star, then made what is looking to be one of the worst movies in years. Can you imagine how pissed off you would be if you spent as much as $10,000 dollars (as one backer did) on this? I’d be pretty enraged about the whole deal.
Anyways, the latest humilation leveled against the film is its rejection from the SXSW film festival. The Canyons already got the brush-off from Sundance, but the SXSW rejection is even worse because the festival claims it was due to “quality issues.” One of Pope and Schrader’s main defenses of the movie is that nobody actually knows how good it is because the trailers they released aren’t representative of the final product. Now here’s people who have seen the final product and are not shy about saying that it sucks.
Pope’s agency, William/Morris Endeavor, is going to attempt to sell the film to distributors at the end of the month. I’ve got a bunch of old gum wrappers and paperclips, so I’m going to assume that I’m already the top bidder.