Reasons to donate/invest in movies at BuildMovies.com !

by Paul Reeves (click to see his bio, photos, news, etc.)

Star Wars, Indiana Jones, The Godfather, and Saving Private Ryan. Spotted a pattern yet?: ) None of these movies would have been made if it had not been for the investors of independent short and full-length movies.

A young film student called George Lucas won an award for his short movie THX-1138, just one of his many short films. This lead him to receiving a scholarship by Warner Brothers to view the making of Finian’s Rainbow in 1968, a film being directed by another young filmmaker called Francis Ford Coppola. George and Francis became good friends, and through this friendship they formed the independent moviemaking company, American Zoetrope in 1969.

Through investor’s money these independent moviemakers were able to begin their first full-length version of THX-1138. A significant movie for George Lucas, as it gave him the building blocks for another fairly famous sci-fi movie.

By this time Francis Ford Coppola had gone into the production of The Godfather, and George Lucas began work on American Graffiti, which Francis also was a producer on. The huge success of American Graffiti, gave George Lucas, for the first time, the authority and personal finances to begin his next big project that had been in the back of his mind probably all of his life. He began writing Star Wars.

Battle Squad, The Last Gun, and Escape To Nowhere, were all independent short movies created by Steven Spielberg in the infancy of his career. None of these short films would have seen the light of day without people investing in this young man’s developing skills as a director.

The making of these short films gave Steven the foundation to work on other full-length movies such as Amblin, which also went on to become the name of the production company, that produced many of his movies, one of the most significant being E.T.

Through a similar goal in life, and through the desire to create amazing stories, the paths of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg naturally crossed. And through the combined wizardry of these two now giants of the movie industry, some of the worlds most extraordinary movies have been made.

Without people investing in all of those early projects these men worked on, none of the amazing movies that these incredible story tellers have created would be here today. And these men have without any question, set the standard for what we all now know as “blockbuster”.

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