KickStarter Apocalypse Now RPG by Monty Markland - terminated with extreme prejudice!

[Bester]

"It's ok guys, you never know what can turn up, especially in the entertainment business."

I called this on the 2d day.

 

[Old One]

I can't believe there's going to be an Apocalypse Now! game before there's a Mork & Mindy game.

 

[Sigourn]

Dead campaign.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fringerider/apocalypse-now-the-game/posts/1798098

Update #8 - "Never get out of the boat." Absolutely goddamn right! Unless you were goin' all the way...
By Montgomery Markland

14 February 2017

Before reading the below announcement, as a Kickstarter Backer, you are eligible for a free tier-upgrade.

You are our hardcore supporters and we know you'll never get off of the boat.

The best way to get your free tier-upgrade is to back at the new site at ApocalypseNow.com (the site will not charge you until we reach the necessary raise).

Then, forward this original email to info@apocalypsenow.com. We will take care of the rest.

As a Secondary Option, if for some reason you are unable to forward the original email, you may take a screenshot of your Pledge on Kickstarter and email that to the same Apocalypse Now email address.

If you have any questions at all about how to obtain your free upgrade email montgomery.markland@apocalypsenow.com.

Announcement
Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope and the team of game industry veterans developing the Apocalypse Now videogame adaptation have moved the project from Kickstarter to a dedicated platform at ApocalypseNow.com. The new platform will serve as a rallying point for the community and represents the team’s long-term commitment to both funding the project and sharing details of the development process.




ApocalypseNow.com will be an engaging space where fans and backers can get the latest updates, communicate with the team making the game and continue to support the project through the entirety of the game’s development cycle. The team will rely on this dialogue with the community to help them to create an Apocalypse Now game worthy of the motion picture in every way.




“We are making a unique interactive experience with the Apocalypse Now videogame -- it’s like Fallout: New Vegas on acid in Vietnam,” said game director Montgomery Markland. "The Apocalypse Now team plans to raise $5 million to produce an authentic game that the people want to play."




Through the new platform, the team making the game have created a long-term plan for the community to guide and influence the progress of Apocalypse Now. The development team will be able to entertain and engage with fans, and provide continuous entertainment culminating in the videogame release. The community will start receiving rewards shortly after successful funding and regularly over time.




ApocalypseNow.com will also be a virtual playground for fans, built around the narrative of the original motion picture. The Apocalypse Now community will see real-time updates on the game through posts, livestreams and group community events. Backers will directly communicate with the team through the premium site, creating a systematic and regular flow of conversation, updates and news.




Begin your mission at ApocalypseNow.com, and never get out of the boat.

ApocalypseNow.com Website

Game Facebook

Motion Picture Facebook

Twitter

Instagram

Game Reddit

Motion Picture Reddit

Tumblr

 

[Bester]

Best part:

said game director Montgomery Markland. "The Apocalypse Now team plans to raise $5 million to produce an authentic game that the people want to play."

 

[Sigourn]

MEDIOCRE

 

[Outlander]

Monty should have hired Perkel

 

[duanth123]

“We are making a unique interactive experience with the Apocalypse Now videogame -- it’s like Fallout: New Vegas on acid in Vietnam,” said game director Montgomery Markland. "The Apocalypse Now team plans to raise $5 million to produce an authentic game that the people want to play."

Every single aspect of this quote is shocking to me.

 

[ColCol]

EHhhhhhh, so moving the project to a platform where it will be easier to take the money and run (or build a shit/failing project)

 

[Seaking4]

Apocalypse Now is an amazing movie. It's one of my favourite movies of all time. I'm sure this is a sentiment shared by many.

However, I have no interest in playing an Apocalypse Now game. This is most definitely a sentiment shared by most.

There was no way this campaign was ever going to succeed.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fringerider/apocalypse-now-the-game/posts/1807348

Revolution #9 - FAQ

To answer all the clarifications that have been requested by our backers, here are the FAQs for this morning's Update #8:

When do you get charged?
The ApocalypseNow.com website operates like any crowdfunding platform, you will not be charged unless we are successful in raising the money we require to make the game you deserve.

What is a Reward Tier Upgrade?
All of our early backers, if they pledge at ApocalypseNow.com will receive a reward tier upgrade.

So if you pledged $25 here, you can pledge $25 on the ApocalypseNow.com site and we will have our web team manually upgrade you to $35.

You will not be charged immediately, just like on Kickstarter.

You will receive the extra rewards associated with the higher tier for free.

The same would be true if someone pledged $500, they would get an upgrade to the $1,250 tier.

Who is this available to?
This offer is only available to our early, hardcore Backers like you.

Our web engineers will run a manual upgrade for the early Backers on the backend so you might not immediately see the upgrade (email info@apocalypsenow.com if you don't see the upgrade within a few days).

You can also forward the Update emails you receive today and that will help put you into the database.

When can I take advantage of this?
If you supported us on Kickstarter? At any point in time in the future, whenever you are ready and confident in our mission at ApocalypseNow.com

This is about our hardcore backers
We care about all of our backers and so we'll take whatever steps we can to ensure you are rewarded greatly and have a fun ride in exchange for being our early supporters and making it possible to get upriver.

In Closing
A veritable army of engineers, designers, lawyers, crowdfunding experts and finance professionals have ensured the security, transparency and stability of the site ApocalypseNow.com

Anything not covered in this FAQ about which you are curious can be answered by emailing either info@apocalypsenow.com or montgomery.markland@apocalypsenow.com




Revolution #9

 

[Excidium II]

Best part:

said game director Montgomery Markland. "The Apocalypse Now team plans to raise $5 million to produce an authentic game that the people want to play."

lol do they mean $5 million entirely with crowdfunding

 

[Bester]

Why yes. See, they wrote all updates prior to launching the campaign and didn't think to adjust anything. By their estimates, they should've gotten like 2 mil by now, so it was a logical move to open a site where they can pull a star shitizen.

It's kind of sad seeing updates being posted by some program. It's like the Dead Hand nuclear-control system that was supposed to annihilate the US automatically if nobody at home was alive after the US nuked us out of existence. It's just some AI posting updates, transmitting messages after the humanity is gone. A post-apocalyptic concept. A sad thing to behold.

 

[Zombra]

Update #10 - Terminate the Colonel's Command With Extreme Prejudice

Kickstarter Page is Terminated.

 

[Infinitron]

Why yes. See, they wrote all updates prior to launching the campaign and didn't think to adjust anything. By their estimates, they should've gotten like 2 mil by now, so it was a logical move to open a site where they can pull a star shitizen.

It's kind of sad seeing updates being posted by some program. It's like the Dead Hand nuclear-control system that was supposed to annihilate the US automatically if nobody at home was alive after the US nuked us out of existence. It's just some AI posting updates, transmitting messages after the humanity is gone. A post-apocalyptic concept. A sad thing to behold.

It's not an AI, it's MLMarkland being all too stylish for a lost cause. You deserve better, Monty.

 

[Desert Fish]

The movie is excellent. And I really enjoyed Fallout NV, despite the mediocre gameplay. Yet I'm not really excited about this.

I was intrigued about the prospect of VR, though. That kind of immersion would immensely amplify the horror aspect and sounds like just what the game needs. Or maybe it would be too much and give people nightmares.

 

[vortex]

Irony is that developers said publisher would request shooter genre for this game instead deep RPG horror adventure.
Does this Kickstarter campaign mean majority of player population would actually want shooter type ?

 

[MLMarkland]

I'm back. First I had to get our main website launched (which required an enormous number of bureaucratic hurdles with the European Union)

We've raised $164,735 in 36 hours and keep trucking.

https://apocalypsenow.com/pledge

We will raise about as much or more on our site in the first 48 hours than we did on Kickstarter in three weeks.

We were never supposed to just launch the Kickstarter, our bad.

We have hundreds of days left.

Never get off of the boat.

I'll post a lot of information tomorrow. Today I spoke with several thousand people individually through a variety of methods of communication and I'm going to watch Bladerunner right now.

Pledge on our site. It's well built. Extremely vetted by very serious lawyers and producers on our team. It won't charge you until we raise all the money needed for the game.

It's better than Kickstarter in my opinion. Look at this: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/kickstarter.com

We've got 6 members of the Aliens game team officially on our team now.

Number 1 priority is putting out an extended gameplay video.

We're going to finish a high quality game just like Francis Ford Coppola finished a high quality movie.

Any obstacle in our way we will attack full force.

[Will reply to every individual comment in this thread and the other over course of tomorrow morning]

 

[Bester]

MLMarkland while Steam still has Greenlight, get in there and post a link to your website, you'll get your last influx of 100k people, some of whom will pledge.

After that, you're dead in the water.

You still won't get funded, but whatever. Seems like your sanity boat is long gone.

 

[MLMarkland]

MLMarkland while Steam still has Greenlight, get in there and post a link to your website, you'll get your last influx of 100k people, some of whom will pledge.

After that, you're dead in the water.

You still won't get funded, but whatever. Seems like your sanity boat is long gone.

Absolutely, I agree that Steam Greenlight is a valuable next step.

We're professionals, we're gonna fight until we succeed or not. It's really just that simple.

Let's see what the main strategy and site leads to.

 

[MLMarkland]

Dead campaign.

The Kickstarter campaign was dead in the first 6 hours. Everything else has been figuring out what to improve and getting our main site launched (which has been developed for a year).

We'll see what happens there now.

https://apocalypsenow.com/pledge

We don't do equity on the site. We don't have a deadline, just a goal. We don't charge you until we raise the full amount.

It's a significant improvement on 1st generation crowdfunding platforms.

And it will get better and better over time.

 

[MightyHoax]

MLMarkland; the Cleveland Mark Blakemore of America

It almost like Reading cleve's posts

Spoiler

I'm back. First I had to get our main website launched (which required an enormous number of bureaucratic hurdles with the European Union)

We've raised $164,735 in 36 hours and keep trucking.

https://apocalypsenow.com/pledge

We will raise about as much or more on our site in the first 48 hours than we did on Kickstarter in three weeks.

We were never supposed to just launch the Kickstarter, our bad.

We have hundreds of days left.

Never get off of the boat.

I'll post a lot of information tomorrow. Today I spoke with several thousand people individually through a variety of methods of communication and I'm going to watch Bladerunner right now.

Pledge on our site. It's well built. Extremely vetted by very serious lawyers and producers on our team. It won't charge you until we raise all the money needed for the game.

It's better than Kickstarter in my opinion. Look at this: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/kickstarter.com

We've got 6 members of the Aliens game team officially on our team now.

Number 1 priority is putting out an extended gameplay video.

We're going to finish a high quality game just like Francis Ford Coppola finished a high quality movie.

Any obstacle in our way we will attack full force.

[Will reply to every individual comment in this thread and the other over course of tomorrow morning]

 

[Sigourn]

The Kickstarter campaign was dead in the first 6 hours. Everything else has been figuring out what to improve and getting our main site launched (which has been developed for a year).

We'll see what happens there now..

Have you considered the problem is the game itself, and not so much the campaign? I would explain in greater detail, but I'm pretty sure you have heard it all already, so I'll be brief: you are taking a very famous film and turning it into a videogame. But the question is: what do you expect the player to get from the videogame? Why should they back a 5.9 milion dollar project?

This is purely my personal opinion and I can't really back it up, so take it with a grain of salt: at first glance "unlimited time" seems like a good thing, but I don't think it is: that Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire raised that much money means there's demand for that game, and it will sell. That Apocalypse Now raised a miniscule fraction, because of its name alone, doesn't speak well for its future.

All things considered, good luck with your game.

 

[MLMarkland]

The Kickstarter campaign was dead in the first 6 hours. Everything else has been figuring out what to improve and getting our main site launched (which has been developed for a year).

We'll see what happens there now..

Have you considered the problem is the game itself, and not so much the campaign? I would explain in greater detail, but I'm pretty sure you have heard it all already, so I'll be brief: you are taking a very famous film and turning it into a videogame. But the question is: what do you expect the player to get from the videogame? Why should they back a 5.9 milion dollar project?

This is purely my personal opinion and I can't really back it up, so take it with a grain of salt: at first glance "unlimited time" seems like a good thing, but I don't think it is: that Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire raised that much money means there's demand for that game, and it will sell. That Apocalypse Now raised a miniscule fraction, because of its name alone, doesn't speak well for its future.

All things considered, good luck with your game.

Thank you for the best wishes. And we definitely consider, for years in this case, whether people will actually want the game. We don't know yet.

As for Kickstarter, we've got hard data.

We believe that four things happened with Kickstarter:

1) Kickstarter like all prior generation mainstream media platforms suffered a massive web traffic crash in the past 30-90 days. I'm not making that up. Go look up most California and New York based media sites. Here's a list

CNN
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cnn.com

Kickstarter
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/kickstarter.com

Twitter
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/twitter.com

Time
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/time.com

Newsweek
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/newsweek.com

Variety
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/variety.com

Pretty much everywhere the initial announcement was covered has suffered 50-200% web traffic crashes in Q1 2017.

2) Gamers are not very familiar yet with the property and will become more so over a longer time on our site.

3) Movie fans are not yet gamers or crowdfunders. This movie came out just after I was born.

4) We did not, as intended, fully launch our main site on Day 1 and so the headlines we're inaccurate and claimed "Coppola raising $900,000 on Kickstarter" which is fundamentally absurd.

None of the professionals on this team, who have shipped 50+ games, worked on 6-7 crowdfunded projects and literally developed whole game engines for multiple console generations would expect to make an Apocalypse Now game for $900,000.

The goal has always been $5.9 million and if you check wayback machine on https://apocalypsenow.com I think you will find that (though maybe it didn't get picked up on the first day we were live three weeks ago).

You are absolutely correct that maybe the world does not want an Apocalypse Now game. We have no way of knowing. The long term website will, over time, cause our adoption curve to approach our interest curve. And then we'll know.

This is as much an experiment for us as it is for fans of the movie, gamers and crowd funders generally.

MLMarkland; the Cleveland Mark Blakemore of America
It almost like Reading cleve's posts

I enjoy the reference and it is funny and there's always at least a bit of truth in something funny.

(But I have shipped a lot of entertainment products and video games for real)

 

[Infinitron]

Whoa, drama: http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/14/14612286/apocalypse-now-video-game-kickstarter-killspace-problems

The long and troubled history of Apocalypse Now, the video game
The horror

In late January, an exciting and unlikely project showed up on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter: a request for $900,000 to make a video game adaptation of Apocalypse Now, officially blessed by the film’s director Francis Ford Coppola. The page described the game as a survival-horror adventure with a sophisticated branching narrative, allowing players to create their own storyline for protagonist Benjamin Willard — whether that meant single-mindedly pursuing the rogue special forces agent Colonel Kurtz or sitting on a boat dropping acid. “I’ve been watching video games grow into a meaningful way to tell stories,” said Coppola in a statement, “and I’m excited to explore the possibilities for Apocalypse Now for a new platform and a new generation.”

Today, three weeks after launch, Apocalypse Now studio Erebus LLC effectively ended the underperforming Kickstarter campaign. While the campaign may officially stay open, Erebus is moving fundraising efforts to its website, seeking $5 million. The hope, according to the site, is to give Erebus complete independence from traditional video game publishers. The team leads think this will avoid problems that helped doom the project a decade ago, at a small and short-lived studio called Killspace. But former Killspace employees contend that the problems ran deeper than Apocalypse Now’s developers admit.

Apocalypse Now screenshot, 2017.

Killspace was launched in 2009 by two Erebus co-founders, Montgomery Markland and Larry Liberty. The roughly 40-person Los Angeles studio kept a low profile, and it completed only one game over its three-year lifespan: Yar’s Revenge, a little-known Atari remake that was released in 2011. As Markland describes it, Killspace was a casualty of the Great Recession, a small company damned by its reliance on foundering giants like Atari, which filed for bankruptcy in 2013.

To former employees, though, the picture is more complicated. After the Kickstarter launch of Apocalypse Now in January, The Verge talked to half a dozen former Killspace developers, two of whom say they were directly involved with the original Apocalypse Now project. Employees — who spoke on condition of anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements — complained of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages, erratic and out-of-touch management, and financial decisions that made an already bad situation worse. One person called Killspace “the worst-run company you could possibly imagine.” Another simply referred to their time there as a “nightmare.” And all of them expressed serious misgivings about the crowdfunded Apocalypse Now.

From the beginning, Killspace was an ambitious studio, aiming to build transmedia franchises spanning games, movies, and comics. Markland and Liberty had come directly from Obsidian Entertainment: the former had worked on a canceled Aliens role-playing game there, while the latter was still acting as senior producer on Fallout: New Vegas. Markland was installed as Killswitch’s first CEO, and the two hired a mix of industry newcomers and veterans — primarily from Obsidian and the then-recently closed Pandemic Studios, developer of military action games Mercenaries and Full Spectrum Warrior. Killspace soon secured a deal with Atari for Yar’s Revenge, and with Ubisoft for the rhythm game Rocksmith. It shared an office with Emergent Game Technologies, in exchange for porting Emergent’s Gamebryo engine to consoles.

Face model for Killspace’s original Colonel Kurtz.
Photo: Mike Bolger

By 2010, employees say that the payments from Ubisoft and Atari were enough to cover small, dedicated groups, but Markland also wanted to grow the studio quickly by pitching as many games as possible to new publishers — which required larger, fluid teams. Four employees claimed that to do this, Killspace shuffled a substantial amount of resources from contracts to unrelated prototypes, and moved developers around on short notice to the point of leaving the main teams shorthanded. Killspace’s projects included a horror title called Sleep, a cartoonish brawler named MARM (for "Mutant, Alien, Robot, Monkey"), and a sci-fi Western called Out Here the Good Girls Die.

"There was a lot of experimentation, a lot of just flat-out creativity, just all kinds of ideas being thrown out," says one former employee, praising the studio's willingness to consider game proposals from rank-and-file employees. "It was a real breath of fresh air, after working in AAA game development." The crown jewel of the projects was Apocalypse Now. Francis Ford Coppola's son Roman and writer Rob Auten connected Killspace to Coppola's studio American Zoetrope, and Killspace assigned a small team to it, putting a prototype in the works.

None of these prototypes ultimately secured publishers, though — including Apocalypse Now, which fizzled after the creation of a non-playable demo. The transmedia efforts also seemingly didn't amount to much, beyond inflating the studio's numbers with people who weren't directly working on games. "It was much too big for what it should have been," one employee tells us. "I think we had something like five or six writers."

Apocalypse Now, 1979.

Markland denies that any funds from one contract were moved around to buoy another project. “We kept things very compartmentalized in terms of money,” he tells The Verge. Far from a too-large team working on blue-sky projects, he describes Killspace as a studio on the verge of signing several contracts, only to see them snuffed out as publisher after publisher went bankrupt. THQ, one of the companies Markland mentions working with, filed for Chapter 11 protection in late 2012. Emergent sold off its assets at the end of 2010, ending one of Killspace’s major revenue sources. Atari officially went under in January of 2013. “We managed a game studio during the worst economic time since the Great Depression, and our game studio never went bankrupt,” he says. “We landed the airplane softly.”

Whatever the cause, funds were spread thin, especially after Ubisoft took Rocksmith production in-house. Former employees say they were going months without pay: one person says the company ended up owing them $3,000 in wages, and another puts the number at upwards of $9,000. “There were some people who were crashing on couches forever because they didn’t have any money,” this employee says. A third person described developers being given company equipment in lieu of money.

Markland doesn’t deny the general financial problems, but he says that Killspace management did all they could to fix them. “Atari started being late on their payments almost immediately,” he says, and the industry’s larger financial woes cut off new sources of funding. “I bet if we went back and looked we could find ten thousand, twenty thousand game developers [who] were laid off with two weeks, four weeks, six weeks notice — sometimes no notice.” He says that he and Liberty personally put a total of $200,000 toward paying employees, with Liberty mortgaging his house to do so.

Yar’s Revenge, a 2011 remake of Yars’ Revenge.
Photo: Steam

Funding problems, including missed paychecks, are sadly common in the games industry. But Killspace’s management and its employees give markedly different explanations for them. Three team members, for example, say the studio’s relationship with publishers was damaged after employees leaked details about their working conditions. One employee believes a near-final deal with 505 Games had evaporated almost overnight when the publisher found Killspace wasn’t paying employees, as well as because of what he describes as “erratic” behavior by Markland. Markland says it fell through because Killspace’s key point of contact at the publisher departed. (505 Games’ parent company Digital Bros did not respond to a request for details about the deal.)

Even against the backdrop of the Great Recession, every former employee I spoke to blames Killspace’s management for the bulk of its problems, and five specifically complain about Markland’s leadership, characterizing him as abrasive, unpredictable, and unresponsive to their complaints. “We would have these big meetings, the centerpiece of which was Monty giving this big speech to everybody. And the developers around [him] were like, we can’t make games like this. We can’t just start making a game with no money. We don’t have a license, we don’t have any of this stuff,” one developer recalls. “He told us that our concerns were absurd — that this was the way to secure more money, and that we would continue forward and that the money would come. People started looking for new jobs almost immediately after that.”

This contrasts starkly with Markland’s own account of his care for employees. “Me and Larry put in our own money. Larry mortgaged his house just to help our employees. We didn’t do it because we thought the company was going to survive. We did it because it was the right thing,” he says. And as for tensions at the studio? “I would guess that the companies that went bankrupt without notice were much more unpleasant places to work than our company.”

Leaked Apocalypse Now concept art, 2011.
Photo: Shogun Gamer

There are also two different accounts of a major leadership change in the fall of 2010, when Markland stepped down as CEO and Liberty took over Killspace. “The plan was always for [Liberty] to come be the CEO of the company at the conclusion of Fallout: New Vegas’ development, and I would be the president and CCO,” says Markland. “And that is essentially what occurred.” But there are signs that the transition wasn’t smooth. Four sources describe Markland being effectively forced out because of problems at Killspace, and two tell The Verge that security literally barred him from the premises at one point. Markland confirms this report, but says it was the work of “one individual at the company who took some steps that were ill-advised,” and “was terminated for cause shortly thereafter.” (An interview with the full Erebus team, which includes Liberty, was scheduled and canceled twice, and questions sent to them were not returned.)

Former employees speak positively of Liberty, but they say the studio was beyond saving. “We had already lost the contract for Rocksmith. We weren’t doing any pitches for Apocalypse Now any more, or any of the other games,” says one developer. “It was pretty much, everyone that had experience making games was working on Yar’s Revenge, and anyone that didn’t have experience was gone.” After the game shipped in early 2011, Killspace’s work was effectively over. Markland says the studio didn’t formally close, but it was no longer a “going concern” by the start of 2012.

In some ways, the Apocalypse Now crowdfunding campaign seems like an overt attempt to avoid the problems of Killspace — or at least to learn from them. Erebus is described as a single-project studio, not a wide-ranging one; in fact, its name is specifically a reference to the boat in Coppola’s original film. The studio is also not supposed to be reliant on outside relationships, beyond the deal with American Zoetrope. “I think the most important lesson for any game industry creative ... is if you do not control top-line revenue, you are an employee,” says Markland. “I’d rather the people be the boss than the establishment be the boss.” And he points out that the Great Recession was a singular period for all kinds of industries, including gaming. “It was an unprecedented series of events,” he says. “I’m not sure we could have done much different.”

Apocalypse Now screenshot, 2011.

Markland and Liberty have both worked on successful, well-received games since Killspace’s closure: Liberty was an executive producer on DC Universe Online, and Markland has worked as a producer on Wasteland 2 and the upcoming Torment: Tides of Numenera, two highly funded and successful Kickstarter projects. But neither has been in charge of an independent studio since Killspace, a fact that has their former employees worried. “People are plunking down money to see something, and to play something, about a property that they like,” says one person. “But I think that they’re just probably about to be set up for some disappointment.”

And while it’s not beholden to publishers, Apocalypse Now is still reliant on funding sources that don’t seem ironclad. “I’m very confident that we will reach that number and more before the game is launched. I have zero doubts about that,” says Markland, when I ask about the $5 million budget. But before its closure, the game’s Kickstarter campaign had raised under $200,000 of its $900,000 goal, with only 10 days left. According to Kickstarter’s records, only five gaming projects have ever broken $5 million, including the party game Exploding Kittens and the Ouya microconsole. That’s not a direct point of comparison, because Erebus is looking to collect the total funding over a long period of time, not a month-long campaign. But it’s still difficult to know how much people will ultimately pay for Apocalypse Now, or where the money might come from if the public doesn’t contribute enough.

Whatever happens, Markland says he’s committed to getting Apocalypse Now out the door in its best possible form, regardless of funding. By way of inspiration, he calls back to the movie’s own famously troubled history, which included drug problems, grave robbing, millions of dollars in unexpected costs, and a typhoon. “The one thing I do know,” he says, “is that Francis Ford Coppola went into the jungle planning to shoot for 14 weeks — but didn’t come out of the jungle until 500 days later.”