If every member of a major religion got raptured tomorrow morning, it would probably still be pretty impossible to get funding for an original screenplay idea in Hollywood. Filmmakers have been turning to crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter or Seed&Spark for years as a partial or full alternative to go around studio and streamer “mandates” for content, of course. But as the industry beats on, borne back ceaselessly into the past, filmmakers like Rekha Shankar are finding more and more established peers standing ready to help them do it themselves.
Shankar is the host of Dropout’s “Smartypants,” a UCB LA regular, former head writer at CollegeHumor, a writer on “Animaniacs” and “Digman!” and screenwriter of “Vidhya’s Guide to the Afterlife,” which she is now crowdfunding on Kickstarter in partnership with production company EffinFunny (“Legend of Neil,” “Code 5”). The film follows the two leftovers of a Hindu-specific rapture, in which a shady priest (Dhruv Singh) and a professional chef (Shankar) with a complicated relationship to her roots but a deep love for her grandparents try to stage a 13-day grief ceremony in order to get her family back.
The specificity of the story, which draws on Shankar’s experience growing up with her own grandparents in Philadelphia even as it threads a sci-fi tinged buddy comedy needle between “The Farewell” and “Palm Springs,” will only make the film richer and more meaningful and yet are exactly the kind of thing that would make major studios wary. Which is stupid — and at least one Duplass brother agrees.
“Every now and then you meet someone who is at the perfect time and place in their life to break through. Rekha has been writing, directing, and acting in comedy shorts and live theater for years, and this project seems like the perfect culmination of all of her skill sets,” Mark Duplass told IndieWire. “Couldn’t be happier to lop off some of my ‘The Morning Show’ paycheck to support this film.”
Duplass has pledged a match grant of $20,000 to Shankar and her team’s crowdfunding total on Kickstarter. “Vidhya’s Guide to the Afterlife” has already soared past that number on its way towards a $180,000 stretch goal. It seems more than a fair trade for “The Morning Show” going to space in Season 3, and will hopefully open the door wider for folks who want to tell stories with the same unabashed specificity as Shankar’s.
“Representation is so much more than just seeing a brown person with frizzy hair on TV — although that would DEFINITELY HELP,” said Shankar. “I want to see someone half-raised by her grandparents, who speaks toddler-level Tamil, who cried because as a kid light-eyed North Indians made her feel bad even though she was trying REALLY hard to learn the culture, and who loves baking. And I wanted to see all this specific stuff so badly I had to write it myself.”
Now, with any luck, we all will.
The Kickstarter campaign for “Vidya’s Guide to the Afterlife” ends on March 20th.
