Actor / director / screenwriter Ron Ford has a ranch, some horses, horror-filmmaking experience and a hankering to combine the sweet chocolate of the Western film genre with the smooth peanutty goodness of werewolves. Chew on this:
MAN WITHOUT A SADDLE is based on Kipling’s classic story, Mark of the Beast, transferred from colonial India to the American west of 1870. Three ex-Army regulars, Strickland, Fleete and Barton, are hired to convince a Shoshone shaman to move on to the reservation. The shaman, Tanupah, guards a stone petroglyph, sacred to his people. Fleete, in a drunken fit, urinates on the petroglyph and dishonors its spirit. In retaliation, he is cursed by Tanupah, turning him into a raging creature, half man, half wolf.
This project has everything it needs to get off the ground except one crucial ingredient: $3,000 for authentic Western period costumes. To help raise that modest sum, Ford has put together a Kickstarter page with a thorough overview of the project, including a frankly endearing video appeal that contains 1) cowboy hats, 2) werewolf makeup effects by actor / makeup man Mitch Tiner and 3) nearly two minutes of blackness at the end that should probably be removed.
If you want to help out, you can pledge as little as a dollar to be listed in the film’s credits, or $20 to receive a DVD copy of the finished film. If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, just know that by “backing” the project, you commit to having your pledge amount charged to your credit card on April 18th 2011 only if the total pledges reach the $3,000 goal.
Crowdsourcing stuff like this is one of the many things that make the Internet awesome (maybe So Falls the Shadow should try this approach out), so if you have an extra buck, you could do worse things with it than pledge it to a Werewolf Cowboy Hat fund.
Werewolf Cowboy Hat-tip: ArcLight