If You Want to Find Out Who Your Friends Are... Crowdfund Your Movie

My old friends, Neil Gaiman and Stephen Fry, are two of the greatest writers and thinkers of all time and my new friend, Trace Adkins is . . . well, he has a really low voice. These guys would all do anything for me. If I asked them to help me get attention for a movie I was making -- they would help.
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Here's a little experiment you probably don't want to run. Yeah, keep this one a thought experiment. It shouldn't be more than a gedanken. You might not want this experiment to get empirical. You might learn things you don't want to know.

Try this: Think about all your friends who would do you a favor. Now think about how much more willing those friends would be to do you that favor if that favor was talking about what an asshole you are. Run that experiment, but only in your head.

I have wonderful friends. My old friends, Neil Gaiman and Stephen Fry, are two of the greatest writers and thinkers of all time and my new friend, Trace Adkins is . . . well, he has a really low voice. These guys would all do anything for me. I have called in favors from all of them many times and they always deliver. I owe them all for the rest of my life and beyond, and only one of them even believes there is a beyond. That's what good friends they are.

If I asked them to help me get attention for a movie I was making -- they would help. If I asked them to help me raise money for a movie I was making -- they would help. Two of the three would give me a false alibi under oath without being asked. One of them would lie under oath just for the sexual thrill. These are good guys.

The joke idea of our FundAnything.com campaign to raise money for "Director's Cut" is that I want to be a really bad guy. So, I asked a lot of my friends to make videos about how the campaign was working. How I was becoming a bad guy. We've posted a lot of these videos on the Fundanything.com page and there are still a bunch more to come. They're all really funny, smart, and really great. I'm getting a big kick out of this whole project.

Trace, Neil, and Stephen also came through for me. And when I first watched their videos explaining what an asshole I was and how I'd lost my moral compass, I thought, "Wow, they are really great actors." And then I watched them a few more times and thought, "Yeah, they're really good actors." There are some obvious jokes in Neil's and Trace's, and Stephen's is all one big joke, right? Stephen is a very experienced actor; he's in that Hobbit shit for christ's sake. So, the fact that he acts like I've really become an asshole is a tribute to what a great actor he is, right? I mean the way you can look into his eyes and believe him right to his core? He does no obvious jokes, because the whole thing is a big joke, right? Right?

I'm just telling you. This might not be an experiment you want to run with your friends. It can get a little creepy.

I won't think of it as losing all my friends, I'll think of it as gaining a movie.

For more information on Director's Cut, go to - http://www.fundanything.com/penn

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