Variety: There are a couple of well-established paths to Broadway for a new play. “Blue Highway” isn’t taking any of them.
The new work by David Marlett (pictured at left) is being developed simultaneously as a play and as an indie film, with Off Broadway vet Mitchell Maxwell shepherding a Rialto staging he hopes to get up by the fall, and Hollywood-based Richard Middleton (“The Artist”) (pictured at right) pulling together a movie version he aims to start filming next spring.
Both the legit production and the film will draw from the same funding pool, currently being raised, of around $4 million. Producers hope at least $500,000 of that will come via crowdfunding.
1 comment:
“Blue Highway” is an out-of-the-ordinary production with ambitious goals in crowdfunding, casting, and publicity. Turning a screenplay for an indie film into a full-fledged Broadway production isn’t something that happens every day, especially not when making an attempt to overlap casting between the two fabrications. Expecting to raise half a million dollars through crowdfunding alone may be a stretch, though it is not unheard of, and the marketing team will have to be extremely effective in their ability to raise awareness for the show. Even creating a documentary on top of it all to narrate the privations of going from set to stage may make everything too busy and hectic, and though it could be used as another form of media to raise awareness about this expensive endeavor, there might be too many things happening all at once for the show to stay organized and on-track. It seems like a valid strategy to express this story through various forms of media, as although it was originally a screenplay, the failure of one production does not necessarily mean the failure of the others, ensuring a probable increased rate of success for the independent film/show/documentary combination.
Post a Comment