I’m not sure if the name “Richard Dutcher” means anything outside of Utah, but he’s pretty well-known here in my home state. A writer, director, and producer of independent films, he single-handedly invented so-called “Mormon cinema” with his 2000 effort, God’s Army, a semi-autobiographical movie about LDS missionaries struggling with questions of faith. The relative success of God’s Army kicked off a fad of locally made movies that Dutcher would eventually disavow, as it became increasingly clear that their makers weren’t interesting in seriously exploring the Mormon experience… or even in making their movies accessible to anyone except the faithful. Dutcher himself, meanwhile, was drifting into increasingly edgy territory in his subsequent films, earning the enmity of many people who’d considered him a hero only a few years before.
His latest venture is something far less controversial than those films, though. It’s called Project 23, an exercise in guerrilla filmmaking intended to teach its participants the entire process of making a movie, from concept through distribution. The end result of this exercise is a feature called The Boys at the Bar, a warm-hearted, character-based comedy starring Dutcher himself, Bo Hopkins (a well-known character actor, possibly best remembered as the leader of the Pharaohs gang in George Lucas’ American Graffiti), and a former Playboy model named Scarlett Keegan.
The Boys at the Bar is now in post-production and, getting to the point already, Project 23 needs money to finish their movie. Like everybody else trying to do something creative these days without involving The Man, they’ve been running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funding. Only now the campaign is coming down to the wire, and it’s looking like they’re going to fall short of their goal… which, given the way Kickstarter works, means they won’t get anything. Not one penny.
I’ve seen a trailer for this film, and I think it looks like a lot of fun, in the same rambling, shaggy-dog vein as Diner, one of my personal favorites. I’d like to see it get completed, because I’d like to see it. And I have a personal connection to it, as well. It just so happens that two friends of mine — one of my high-school classmates and, in a brilliant example of how small this state can be sometimes, one of my high-school teachers — are part of Project 23. They worked on The Boys at the Bar. And I want to support them in their efforts to fulfill one of their dreams.
So here’s where I make everybody reading this all uncomfortable and squirmy by asking you to please go to the Kickstarter page for The Boys at the Bar and donate whatever you can to the cause. It doesn’t have to be much. Even five bucks will help, the price of a latte. Just go to the page, watch the video there, read the copy, and at least give it some thought. But don’t think too long. As of this writing, there are only four days left until the deadline…
(If you’d like to know some more about this whole deal before you donate, here‘s a good article in Filmmaker Magazine.)
