Oh he is Bolt, it's showtime.
People say, good money to see this movie.
When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the protection booth.
Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Ut it off.
I've never seen that kind of humor before, that kind of irreverent comedy. I immediately became.
People have never seen anything like it.
Institutions, our culture was being satirized.
The people who have said they've read Mad shot us and we expected more from that trankment.
Mad started during a time of repression in the United States.
The Red Thread, the Hollywood Blacklist, and the copy.
Is and then people were afraid of anything in print.
Kids were being told to get under their seats when the tire went off and that they would be okay, and the kids were saying, I'm going to get turned at the dust. So they were starting to question the adult world. Man was a product of the times or anti product of the times, if you will, Jared, who Addison list has sabotaged you American ideals.
You'd come across some article where you go, oh, am I reading something bad here.
A lot of anti comic book stuff was going on.
People who were going after comics as creating delinquency and destroying the youth of America.
Because med came out of a comic book and it was a magazine, and they couldn't touch it, couldn't censor it.
They were so concerned about stamping out everything that was dangerous, and they let the most subversive thing continue.
They call all the contributors the usual gang of idiots.
Teachers would say, Drew, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I said, I want to be an idiot.
No one would think of making fun of what the government was doing. No one think of making fun of giant corporations. And Bill was up for all of that.
Bill Gaines, he was absolutely out of his mind.
We have no philosophy, we have no politics, We don't take sides.
We got letters from Bill saying that if any of you are sued for anything you write that I publish, don't worry. You will be defended by all lawyers.
We said things that other magazines I mean, he did not.
They sued for twenty five or thirty million dollars.
It could have killed the magazine.
From the magazine's standpoint, it made mad magazine something that was forbidden. It just started selling and selling and we did two million copies.
We're in a corporate age, of a corporate image. I said, we need logo.
Alfredyman represents the kind of blithe stupidity.
Personalized and embodied the whole spirit of the magazine that I wanted to do, which was kids were smart and they had a certain outlook, like Jesus, you know, I'm facing this terrible world and the hell, what were you worried?
I don't know if it's the uh, you know, the way that it deals with the forty figures, or trying to figure out your place in the world, or dealing with the fact that everybody's lying to you when you're that age, it really speaks to you.
Rolling Stone called Mith the best political satire magazine in the country.
Now, oh, Mad the number one magazine of good taste.
Hey, folks, want to do a special episode of the Projection Booth. On this episode, I'm talking with Alan Bernstein. He is the writer and director of When We Went Mad. It is a documentary all about Mad. Magazine been following the project since twenty thirteen. I think when the kickstarter is out, I've been bugging Alan ever since to have an interview with him, as you'll hear in this interview, so we finally made it happen. Twenty twenty four. The
movie is out well, it's touring around. It will be playing in Detroit on November fourteenth at the Redford Theater. I highly recommend this film. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed the interview. When was the first time you remember reading a Mad magazine?
The first moment I remember it was nineteen seventy six. We were vacationing in California and I was a little bit bored during some downtime, so we stopped in a drug store going through the magazine sections. I picked up a Star Trek coloring book, and while I was making my way back to meet at my parents, I saw a Mad on the shelf, first time I had ever seen it.
Didn't know what it was.
It said Mad and seemed interesting, and you flipped through it and it was cartoons, but it wasn't cartoons, and it had words, and I just found it interesting and thought, oh, can we get this too? And my parents didn't blink an eye. They made no indie cation whatsoever. That they knew what I had in my hand. They weren't opposed to it, nor were they ahh here, okay, this is a big step for him, none of that. So I went,
I bought it, and I went in completely blind. When I found out later on that it wasn't a one off like a coloring book would be. There was another issue on the shelf months later, Oh, another one, okay, And from there it just it. That's how it started.
That must have been around the time where Cracked and Crazy and were there other kind of pretenders to the throne that were going out right around there?
Yeah, Cracked Crazy, I think a few years later there was one called Wacko.
Right, it was Sick, I don't remember.
I don't know if Sick was still in publication at that time, around seventy six, but it was. It was the heyday of periodicals. Magazine shelf, even in a drug store was just stacked with monthly issues of everything. I don't have any recollection whatsoever of seeing a crazy or a sick or any of those other than it was just it was the mad. It had that kind of in a moment that I didn't know what I was in store.
For especially since you've just spent the last how many years working on this documentary.
This is twenty twenty four and my first interview was in January of two thousand and eight.
What was your inspiration? How did you come to say I'm going to make the ultimate documentary about Mad?
It was really quite simple, So I went into film production. That's what I chose to do, That's what I wanted
to do for your career. And as the years would go by, I kept, frankly waiting for someone better than me to make a Mad documentary, and I never understood why Mad seemed to be left off the interest level of telling their story documentary style, And quite frankly, I was starting to read newspaper headlines of Mad artists and writers who were passing away Dave Berg and I think it was either Don Martin or Antonio Proheas who did
Spy verse a spy. Reading that, I was like, obviously this is not happening fast enough.
I'm going to do it.
So what was your approach? How did you even decide how to get your arms around a project of this size?
You don't look at how big it really is. You just go in head first and Al Feldstein, who was the longtime editor of Mad, who oversaw Mad's rise to its iconic status that it became. He was in town in the Detroit area for actually a exhibit at Eastern Michigan University on the history of the Alfred y Newman character.
A good friend of mine, John, who is also a fellow MAD collector but also lives in the area, I arranged this exhibit and brought al Feldstein in, and while Al was in town for that weekend, I just approached him, Hey, do you mind if I sit down and interview you. I'm thinking of doing a documentary. You're my first interview. I have nothing other than what I'm hoping to do, and let's see what happens.
And he was fine with it.
He sat down, and I actually ended up interviewing him a second time a couple of years later when he was in town for a comic book convention, just to fill in the blanks. So he was the first interview. And like you asked, how do you take on something so daunting you don't know it's daunting. You go one interview at a time and you just chip away at it.
I was going to say from two thousand and eight to twenty twenty four. That's a lot of time and a lot of interviews that you must have been doing over the years. Obviously there's so many in the movie, it just becomes us who's who of Mad writers as well as fans.
Without even thinking about how this would cut in a documentary, I just felt, more than anything, I wanted to get.
Their stories down.
Over the years, there had been Mad interviews. Sixty Minutes did a segment on Mad magazine around nineteen eighty seven, and there had been others throughout the years, but they were all three to four minute, maybe seven minute segments where they interview the key players, the editors and the publishers, and maybe an artist or two. And because of my fandom, my fanboy attachment to Mad, those were just some of
the names that I knew. So many of the other artists and writers who I quite frankly wasn't even sure what they looked like, because no one had ever done an interview with them, or at least I had never seen one, And so the goal was to get all of their stories while I could, because every one of them has their own individual stories, and Mad was the connecting fiber that brought them all together, and that was the goal, really was to get everyone on camera before
they passed away, and then figure out what to do with it after that.
Usually when you're doing a documentary, it's on a person or there's the people that you have to convince, take me seriously, please give me this interview. Sounds like you were being taken seriously pretty much right off the bat.
Yes, And I don't know what I did to convince them other than be sincere, and in some regards it became a domino effect. Once I think I earned the trust of the people, the staff at MAD, the editors and our department art directors, I would approach other outside freelancers, and I think on occasion they would call the guys at Matt and say, what's the story with this guy? And they would say, no, he's okay, we think he's okay, we.
Think he's okay. Yea.
I think that was part of it, and the other thing I'd like to think that part of it was they were just genuinely touched to have someone want to sit down and record their story. Other than some people who might have called Matt and did the background check on me, most of them were just yeah, when do you want.
To do this? Come on over.
So some of them I actually interviewed in their living room. There were some that I interviewed on a sound stage. But again some of these, some of the guys were so welcoming. Hey, we have a light kit and a camera and some microphones. Do you mind if we come over? And they're like, nah, we've got some room. We'll make some room for you, come on over.
Wow.
So it couldn't have worked out any better.
How many miles are you putting on your credit card? At this point?
It was two or three trips to New York and back. Obviously a drive to North Carolina where a few mad writers and editors were there for gathering, flight to Los Angeles and back. Obviously credit card. I don't even want to look at what that was. But between that and the mileage, I took it as far as I could with the out of pocket. And from there the crowdfunding started to catch on, and so we did a Kickstarter and we were able to raise enough money to get
us to a good rough cut. We were still missing some celebrities. I was able on my own to get weird Al and Gilbert Gottfried the two name celebrities that most people would recognize. And then once I got to the point as far as I could take it that you ask did these interviews? Did they take me seriously? The MAD folks did. It was hard getting to other celebrities. I knew it was important to get more iconic celebrity people who read MAD, who could give it that fan perspective.
Right now, I had an entire documentary of artists and writers telling their story. We needed to hear from people who were personally affected by MAD and who better than you know celebrities to do that. I was having trouble
getting through them. So between the money needed to finish the film in general and also trying to get some celebrities, I teamed up with Chessis Media, which is run by Adam Carolla, comedian, and their producer, Nate Adams was able to get us the rest of the celebrity interviews and raise the funds to finish the film, which is where we are now.
I was amazed with all of the interviews, but of all of them, Brian Cranston just seemed so tickled to be talking about it.
I know.
It was just a great interview and there's the reason why the celebrities are at the status they are. They're just so good at this, and it obviously helps that they have an affinity towards mad magazines, so to get them to publicly speak, which is their specialty, about something that has an importance to them.
He was terrific. They were all terrific.
They all brought their own something to it, and yeah, you're right. Brian's interview was great.
Did this ever become a full time job? Were you working other things throughout this or was there a point where you said, I have to spend all my time on this documentary.
I still had to earn a living, so I still had my quote unquote day job. I work in freelance television, and so it's not a traditional nine to five when I am working, It's usually a one to eleven. So on work days, I would plot myself down in front of the computer at eight and work until I had to leave for work, And on off days, I would plot myself down at eight and generally wrap things up at around eight at night or longer, depending on how
knee deep I was into it. At that time, it was a full time job while still maintaining a full time job.
How did you catalog all of these interviews and try to start pulling out this is what it's going to be in the final product.
Well, the first thing you do is you find a really good editor. And the first editor who worked directly with me, Eric Weimer, did this for free. He's a professional editor, and it was sounded like a fun project for him, and between the two of us, he would rifle through the footage and find the bites that he thought really stood out. And the goal was I think we both had the idea early on to try to treat telling the documentary as if it were a Mad magazine.
And so what do you find in Mad magazine when you find the movie section, You find politics, and you find and so for each section of a Mad magazine, those became kind of the chapters of the documentary. And then we would add more like we're going to do a chapter on the artists and writers themselves, as they're called the usual gang of idiots. We're going to do a chapter on the fold in and so in a
way that made the structure pretty easy. Now we just need to hone down the interviews to tell those chapters.
The best way possible.
What were some of the things that you had to get rid of that you really regret.
More than anything.
When Eric was editing, he learned pretty quick what a fanboy I was, and I knew what a fanboy I was, and I did my very best to not go too deep in the inside baseball, so to speak, of telling the stories that only.
You know if you know you know type people.
I really wanted to tell the Mad story that anyone who grew up reading Mad, or had a brother, sister, or parent who read Mad and knew about it, it.
Would appeal to them as well.
I needed it to appeal to the died in the Wolf fans who could fact check me, and I needed it to appeal to the general reader who just remembers it as a part of their life for a brief moment. So there were a number of stories that the Mad folks would tell, personal stories or favorite articles that I thought were iconic too Mad, but didn't move the story along, or it was just one more story story of another
great thing that Matt had. And we have enough. We got to pick the best of the best, and there are a number of stories on the cutting room floor or back of the hard Drive if you will.
Are you looking forward to a deluxe Blu ray edition with tons of extra scenes?
Boy? Would I? Do you know anyone who wants to fund that? No?
Exactly how long did we say this documentary took. I don't want to spend any more time cutting more what I would like to do, and we've started doing it a little bit. I think the best thing to do is to take all of the interviews and break them down individually into a podcast. There could be enough interesting bits in each individual interview. If I re recorded my questions so it sounded appropriate for podcast, we could do. Here's forty five minutes chatting with Al Jaffe about his background.
Here's forty five minutes talking with stan Hart, the mad writer. I think that's the best way to go. Just for expedients. All of the interviews were essentially shot on green screen. Any type of deluxe edition with more interviews requires removing green screen. And now we're getting into special effects and all of that stuff, and that's where both time and money are prohibitive.
Speaking of special effects, tell me about the effects for this, because I love some of the things that you're doing, especially where you've got the people framed in the magazine itself.
That goes back to the idea of imagine yourself reading a Mad magazine and let's place the movie into it. And so we'll make our own version of it. And where do.
You find these interviews?
They're taking place at the start of each chapter, and then we dive into those interviews and they go from magazine to full screen and yeah, that was the basic idea of it. And then from there we include examples of specific articles that people are talking about, and that was an interesting challenge because you only have a limited amount of time to show them on the screen before the subject changes. You want to give the audience enough time to get the gist of that one particular panel
that you show. You can't show the whole article, so you have to show the best panel from an article that explains or supports what the interview was saying. And that was a fun challenge in figuring out how to do that.
Well, I'm pretty envious of anybody that gets to see this on the big screen because speaking of framing this, like the magazine having those little drawings on the side, which were some of my favorite things from the original Mad magazine, and trying to see those on my TV not so good. But I imagine seeing that projected in a movie theater must be spectacular.
It obviously helps to have it as big as possible. Yes, so what those are generally referred to as the term they use is chicken fat. It's the fun little stuff that they include, not only in the specific article, but on outside the edges, the little marginals that Sergio Aragones
would draw. That was chicken fat. And I wanted to include chicken fat in the movie itself, again trying to mimic that Mad magazine feel, and that's what you find in a mad So let's make sure that we populate the movie with that as well.
Speaking of seeing it on the big screen, when did you have your premiere?
The world premiere was August twenty second in New York at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, and it went great. We had a sold out show. We had an number of Mad artists and writers attend. We also had a number of family members of people we interviewed who had since passed away, and then we just had a bunch of Mad fans and it was great. It
couldn't gun any better. You never know what the response will be when you premiere any type of creative piece that you've done, and it was to me it was doubly nerve wracking because there were people who were in the movie, who were in attendance who had never seen it and had no idea what to expect, and there were family members who were there on the behalf of people in the movie who were no longer there, and as far as I could tell, everyone seemed to really
enjoy it. I got some just wonderful personal thanks at the screening, and I also got some wonderful emails afterward, And as far as I concerned, if I got their approval, everything else is sprinkles on top of the ice cream.
I know that it could be very easy to fall into a trap of making this a documentary about William Gaines, who's just got such a great, big personality. And I really commend you for looking at all of these other artists. Of course Gaines is there throughout the whole story, but just to find out more about these folks and when did eclectic background of so many people just all coming together for one common purpose.
That was the really the main reason to do this. I wanted to give credit to as many people who worked on Mad. As possible gains was rotten Center. That was really the main reason to do this. I wanted to give credit to as many people who worked on Mad as possible gains was rotten Center, the center of the universe. Everything orbited around him. But he if you were a follower of MAD and you had seen interviews, he was one of those who would always be interviewed,
and the interviews are great. It helps to be the greatest fan for your own publication. But again I wanted to hear from everyone else. Everyone else had their own story as well, and I want to know what brought them to MAD and who they were.
That was goal one.
As much as this is a history of MAD, I wanted it to be a celebration of the people who made MAD. And that's asking a lot to cram into a regular hour and forty minute film, but I think we pulled it up.
You have such a rich group of photographs, especially behind the scenes, especially of these people that never were on the page, that were or rarely on the page until they were in the advertisements and things like that, which I found fascinating. Where are you able to find these photos? Is this all of the artists bringing them themselves, and.
All of the photographs are donated by the creative staff the artists. I even was able to get a home movie shot by one of the artists, Angela Torres, while he was on vacation. One of the famous Mad things was Gaines would take the staff and trips around the world each year, and so I have one of the home movies of the Mad guys enjoying various countries of whatever trip they were at at the time. A bunch of still photos we found a This is one of my absolute favorite things.
I think I'm.
Still amazed to see it. We found a sixty minute style interview show shot in Canada in nineteen sixty seven and they went to the Mad offices and interviewed everybody, and I was able to track down the footage and for the entire duration of our rough cut, the footage that we provided by the CBC was black and white and fuzzy, old time TV looking, and approached them to get to here's what we're here's the footage we're using,
what's going to run? They sent us full color HD film footage of these of that episode, and six seven years of looking at the black and white footage and then suddenly seeing this staff at MAD in nineteen sixty seven. It is still blowing my mind at how cool that is.
It was so nerd cool.
I somehow saw a clip of it, of some of the footage in color, and the first thing I did was called the editor Eric, oh my god, the stuff we got from the CBC, it's actually in color, and he was, you're kidding, Oh, this is it's so cool.
Wait do you see this stuff? Wow? So yeah, nerd. Yeah.
It must have been a lot for you to not nerd out during some of these interviews too, where you're getting these inside baseball stories and you're just like, yeah, tell me more.
It was less nerd and more just I love hearing their stories, their history. Some of the folks who worked for MAD escaped the Holocaust. To me, their stories and the pure fascination to hear them tell as many Mad stories as possible, but just to hear their background.
I just loved hearing that stuff.
And to be perfectly honest, we do these marathon interviews where we'd interview four or five of them each time that we would go to New York on a day, and then a year or two later, we'd go back and we'd interview. We actually set up a whole thing in the Mad obfice. They invited us over and we flew in artists and writers from all over and we'd do these other marathons, and when you're in it, you're
just going through it. And it wasn't until they had all left and you do the kickback and you're like, holy crap, I just talked to Al Jaffy, Paul Kocher, I talked to my heroes, and only now as it's sinking in, and yeah, it was great.
Who were some of your toughest interviews? To get?
The celebrities were the challenge, But beyond that everyone, I can't think of any of anyone from Mad who were tough. It was just convenience flying out to LA and interviewing people. That was the difficulty. Driving to New York and spending a week there and interviewing. So it was the physical act of getting the interviews that was the challenge, rather
than getting people to agree. I guess I'm still amazed that it were so amenable to this dude from Detroit who they didn't know from anyone else and agreed to just do it and in their living rooms. No less, I will say that the weird Al interview was unique in that, again, we have no money. We need to find a way to do this as cheaply as possible. And it turned out that weird Al was going to be performing in Traverse City at the Traverse City Cherry Festival.
I'm based in Detroit, so that's a reasonable car ride because both cities are in Michigan. It's about a three hour car ride. So once we were able to get Al's people to lock him down and say, come on up, we'll interview before the show. How you pack the car up and drive up to Traverse City and we set up in one of those little portable offices behind the stage. You set up up and sweat your butt off because there's no air conditioning, and weird All walks in and hey, guys, what's going on.
Well, I'm just doing a little interview. All right, let's do it. And it was great.
It was terrific. He was so kind about it. So it showed a real interest in what we were doing with it. And it's terrific.
Who are you showing this to throughout the editing process to hone it and get feedback.
Quite frankly, and this isn't meant to sound like we're the smartest guys in the room. We just trusted ourselves. Between myself, Eric, the original editor, Jonas became the main editor, and once Chassis came on board, Jonas Menskar we all just trusted what we liked and once any of our disagreements were settled, we figured it out. And during the process of editing it was really limited to just the few of us. We didn't do a whole lot of showing other people to get their take on it.
You talk a little bit in the doc about some of the merchandise that is related to MAD, and I see you've got quite a healthy collection behind you.
There's a little bit of a shrine behind me there.
What are some of your favorite things?
Let's see. I'm gonna do a little pan here.
Let's see.
So I don't know if you could see it or not, but pardon me, I need to get up real quick. I had right here is a what is called what is a MAD straight jacket, which was something now that was offered by Mad back in the late fifties. You could clip out and I forget how much it was a true Mad fan can fact check me on that, but you would send away for it and you'd get an actual Mad straight jacket.
Wow.
Next to that is the original artwork to Mad cover. I'll for it as the greatest American hero nice I you could see there's a Mad skateboard, and then just a bunch of other just wagging material that they put on over the years. Is this is a right back there, it's artwork for a Don Martin cartoon. Wow, This right here is a and a slot machine that used Alfred's
image on it. So yeah, and I have a pretty sizable collection, but it's compared to some of my friends, it's a tip of the Iceberg collection, which is crazy to think about.
I love how you go through the evolution of Alfred Y Newman, especially those pre Mad versions of him. That was remarkable to see.
It really is because he's so iconic to Mad that you assume that he was created.
Specifically for Mad.
All of the other humor magazines that follow the Cracked and the Crazies, if you pay any attention, it's obvious that they thought we need to have our symbol as well, and so they would create their characters. But the amazing thing about I find about Mad and Alfredy Newman is he. The image was not created.
Specifically for Mad.
It was a pure happenstance that an editor saw or had a postcard from im imagined from the forties or thirties with the Alfred image, and he thought, let's have a funny face, let's throw it on on the book. And it had no meaning other than I imagine that he just thought it was funny. And so as far as the Mad history goes, over time they would use it more and more and it never really had a meaning.
It had different names, and eventually Al Feldstein, the editor, decided when he took over as editor, that they needed a true icon. I needed an image to go to, and he talks about how Playboy had the rabbit and Arcia had the dog looking into the speaker of the phonograph,
jolly green giant type thing. Everyone needed their branding, and so he basically had a mad artist, Norman Mingo, create the definitive Alfredy Newman to be specifically used for Mad, and Feldstein named him ALFREDY Newman and then from there on it goes.
He becomes the icon of Mad.
But what I also find really interesting about the Alfred image is if you look at that the history of that image, you in a sense are seeing the history of I don't want to be too broad and say the history of America, but there are many people who can, I think credibly pinpoint the origin of Alfred's image to anti Irish immigration political cartoons in the late eighteen hundreds, and from there it would move on to advertising. Alfred's image was used for painless dentistry or miracle cures that
contained cocaine or narcotics in it. But I think you could do a small study on the history of the Alfred image and how it was placed throughout America at the time, and how it would change. How it went from this horrific anti immigration cartoon to selling products and even later on it was the image was used as an anti fdr image that had anti Semitic undertones to it, and somehow it all gets flipped and owned by mad and becomes the cover boy.
You talked a little bit about the premiere, but what's next for the film We.
Are preparing for or our Detroit premiere which will be November fourteenth at the Redford Theater in Detroit. If you have not been to the Redford Theater on November fourteenth is a terrific night to make it your first night there. But it is a classic movie palace, restored from the twenties, where all they do is show essentially other than the occasional new movie, they show classic films and it is just a great night if you are a film lover
to go to see a film at the Redford. They have a live organ playing before the movie, and the best concessions in town and cheapest concessions in town if you're going to the movie. The whole thing is nonprofit. So that's November fourteenth. All the while, we are pursuing selling the film for streaming wherever it lands, whatever streaming service we're hoping to find a home for and get our investors paid back.
Are you thinking that a live screen of it is pretty rare and should definitely be taken advantage of.
Absolutely.
I would love to see this film in the theater as much as it could be, but for the moment, we have Detroit coming up, and that's it right now. We want to have a screening in la We have many people out there who both invested in it and also have direct ties to mad out in La who would love to see it as well, So we want to do that. And yeah, I would love to show it in as many towns as possible. Hopefully a distributor will do that for us.
If you get it transferred over to film, they might show it the New Beverly there you go.
Yeah, hopefully we can get a line to Went in Tarantino and he'll let us show it at the Vista. Someone suggested. A friend of mine suggested to try getting it at the Vista, and that would be pretty darn cool. That definitely, which is a vista is a screen in La.
I got you and hopefully the people at home will go, well, So what's next for you?
It Quite frankly, I haven't really thought about it much.
I'm still in it as what we're done with production and now we're onto getting the film out, and that involves tying up the look of the poster or any type of advertising for it. We're in the middle of that, but beyond that, as far as other endeavors, for better or for worse, I haven't really turned my brain towards that direction yet, So.
I don't know. I'm open.
After sixteen years of working on one thing. Maybe it's time to relax a little bit.
I feel like I'm going through a little withdrawal. When you do something that's sustained and that regular, Like I said, you get up at eight, you PLoP yourself down, and you start animating and you start editing. That's a rhythm that's hard to break clean. I'm going against my better judgment of Oh, I can always tweak that animation. We can always punch that up a little bit. No, the movie's done, We're done. I've got to gotta breakaway.
Is there a good place online for people to.
Keep up with you?
The best way is through Facebook, at old people's form of social media. We have when we went mad, Facebook page, and other than my personal page, that's where right now most of the any news announcements are coming from. We do have a web page, but it is woefully underutilized, and so Facebook is really the best place right now.
Hey, granted it was very hot when you started this documentary.
Let's be honest. My space was very hot when we started this thing. Fax machines were still in the mix when we were doing this.
I'm trying to remember, was your Kickstarter around like twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. It was twenty thirteen, okayteen.
The goal was to raise fifty thousand, and thank goodness we were It got us that rough cut, but it was never going to be enough to finish the film, right. I just needed to get enough done that we could show people and show we had something really good here, and it worked.
I'm just glad that for the last eleven years you've been keeping everybody up on this project, and I've just been so excited to talk to you about it for all this time, and when I finally sat down to watch it, you blew my socks off that it was better than I ever could have hoped this documentary would have been.
You specifically would check in every now and then, Hey, you have something to show me yet, And when you have people waiting that long, it's understandable that it could be underwhelming.
Believe me when I tell.
You, I'm truly thrilled to hear that you enjoyed it on again. Like I said, with the screening, with all the other people who gave me their kind words, you never know, and with something that took this long, you truly never know. Yeah, it's great to hear that you enjoyed it.
More than enjoyed it, absolutely loved it. So thank you so much for making this, and thank you so much for your time tonight.
It was my pleasure. Really, thank you.
It's a gas Bastian.
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Rob Roada