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Watch: Mike White on Why Pierre Bismuth’s Truly Unique Hybrid Where is Rocky II? Needs Your Support
The term ‘hybrid’ has become increasingly debatable when discussing the divide between fiction and nonfiction, though it’s a rather apt description of the French artist Pierre Bismuth’s cinematic inquiry, Where is Rocky II? Perhaps best known for his Oscar winning collaboration with Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry on the script for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Bismuth became obsessed with a fake rock, called Rocky II, that Ed Ruscha placed amongst its geological counterparts in the Mojave Desert around the release of the eponymous Stallone film in 1979.
The pitch of Where is Rocky II?, Bismuth explained in an email, “is that a film director — me — hires a private investigator on an impossible task just in order to use his search as source material to produce a story and make a movie out of it.” The documentary sequences, in which Bismuth employed a private investigator to scour the Los Angeles art world for clues into Ruscha’s intentions, were all shot last year. From there, Bismuth hired two Hollywood screenwriters, DV Devincentis and Anthony Peckham, “to find out how the anecdote of a famous artist producing a fake rock to place it amongst real rocks in the middle of the desert could be the starting point, or even the center point, of a fiction.” It is that hypothetical fiction that Bismuth is currently raising funds for on Indiegogo, with a desired production start date of March or April. Bismuth will then blend the documentary and fiction components into Where Is Rocky II? for a 2016 release.
In the exclusive video above, Mike White, who plays a role in the narrative portion of the film, explains why you should donate to the cause. Whether or not this unique endeavor is your cup of tea, the Indiegogo page is worth checking out alone for inventive video and prize ideas for crowdfunding campaigns.
