Congratulations to Lexpatriate and Henry Clay High School alum Archie Borders on getting the $44,000 Kickstarter funded for his upcoming movie, Pleased to Meet Me, which begins filming in Louisville in a few weeks (starring X’s John Doe, Aimee Mann, and Loudon Wainwright).
“We wanted rock stars who could act, not actors trying to be rock stars. Some things you just can’t fake.”
That’s what Louisville director and screenwriter Archie Borders tells us in his Kickstarter video for “Pleased To Meet Me,” a feature film starring John Doe (Of X, The Knitters and The Flesh Eaters), Loudon Wainwright, and Aimee Mann in an extended narrative of Starlee Kine’s “This American Life” classic known as “Everybody Speaks Elton John.”
So Borders (a Lexpatriate and Henry Clay High School alum) got real rock stars — and good ones — and though he has most of the funding for his project, he is raising $44,000 on Kickstarter for equipment rental, post production costs, and most admirably, actual pay for PAs.
Watch the Kickstarter video for “Pleased To Meet Me” here.
The story is an adaptation of the “Classifieds” episode done for “This American Life” in which Kine placed advertisements in the Chicago Reader for a group of six musicians who didn’t know one another to come together to record one song in one day. (With the underlying tension that maybe “this could be something big.”)
What comes out is ego, confrontation, self-doubt, self-knowledge, collaboration and the universal language: “Rocket Man.”
Listen to the original This American Life segment here
In the feature film version, Pleased to Meet Me, Borders explains, the premise is much the same.
An aging punk rocker (John Doe) gets a chance at possible fame redux doing a similar classifieds exercise with an group of “Six Complete Unknowns” and his former producer who also happens to his former love — played by Aimee Mann.
With the title echoing a major label endeavor (this could be something big) by that one Minneapolis band, the underlying question may be: Are we talking about the Replacements here?
Borders doesn’t say. And so we don’t need to worry who is going to play Tommy Stinson. It sounds like a story that we all know happens over and over again in side sheds, practice rooms and studios from Burbank to Denton, Texas to Flatbush and if anyone can handle it, it is John Doe, Loudon Wainwright and Aimee Mann.
And if it’s The Replacements, all the better.
Also appearing in the film is Joe Henry, whose soundtrack credits include “The Devil Wears Prada” and “I’m Not There” and who is also the music supervisor for “Pleased To Meet Me”s soundtrack — which may be, well, great.
Borders, from his work, and from local reports from those who have worked for him, is director/producer who gets right at his vision and runs a professional set. He was a regular Ace contributing film critic in the 90s.
Borders wrote and directed “Paper Cut,” about three college grads who start “Gonzo,” an alternative newspaper. He was a producer on “The Grey,” a recent award-winning Kentucky film about a little boy’s introduction to the frightening home culture of cockfighting. (The success of “The Grey” gave rise to “Bloodworth” for another Kentucky filmmaker.) And Borders was a producer on “100 Proof,” the Sundance-honored film that is a thinly-fictionalized re-telling of the true tale of La Fonda Fay Foster and Tina Marie Hickey Powell, and their night of multi-modal murder in Lexington.
The Kickstarter campaign for $44,000 had raised $2,300ish on its first day and will run through mid-August. And with that number for all those goals, you can be pretty certain they won’t be hiring a Strada crane with it.
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