Friends along the freeway! We hope this finds you in the midst of a great story, be it an absorbing book, a podcast you just can’t turn off, or a film that’s immersed you in another world.

Michael is late to writing this post because he spent all morning finishing Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a book equal parts engrossing and horrifying and sumptuous and depressing. You know any books like that?

It’s a great reminder of the art we want to make at 83 Midnight: riveting, reflective of some deeper mythos, and prooobably a bit more empathetic than the Old West.

This reminder came to Michael—to me, hi, I’m authoring this one—just as 83 Midnight and its associates began advertising our crowdfunding campaign for The Last True Fan. What is TLTF, you ask? It’s a short film Michael wrote a few years back—ChatGPT was just breaching the news cycle, the Writers’ Guild of America was mid-strike, and COVID’s quarantine still occupied my psyche. The uncertain future of our industry felt more tenuous than it ever had.

Fortunately, it made fantastic fodder for a story, and so TLTF sprang from Michael’s head onto the page. A few years later, and Kerry and her twenty-or-so page struggle has won Quarter- and Semi-Finalist at a number of screenplay festivals. It’s been identified as belonging to the top 9% of all discoverable projects on Coverfly. (Rest in peace, Coverfly). You can find the breakdown on Michael’s website.

Screenplay festival recognition is validating, but scripts are blueprints, not monuments, and Ryan and Michael want to make TLTF what every screenplay yearns to be: a film.

Enter Ryan Michael Dunn. Ryan has been spending the past few years in Los Angeles training to be a master filmmaker at California State. When they saw TLTF as the perfect opportunity to put their abilities to the test, they elected fellow filmmakers Em Perez as the film’s director and Ann Li as the associate producer. The Last True Fan has a great team, and for the past couple years we have been working towards shooting the short this summer.

Which brings us to the present day. Our budget is locked; our filming dates are in our calendars; edits and re-edits of the script are complete. Now comes the most difficult part of pre-production: fundraising.

In a couple weeks, on April 12, we will be launching our GoFundMe for the film. The team has been hard at work maximizing the cost-efficiency of the production; Cal State provides resources such that our equipment costs are covered. Now, we just need help to pay our team for their work.

We believe in our work because we know it’s more than just fun dark comedy. 83 Midnight is driven by a desire to create art that is moving and meaningful. Heat of the Summer brought stories from inside America’s broken psychiatric system to the stage; God’s Favorite reimagined a patriarchal ur-tale as a woman’s fight for agency. Now, The Last True Fan stands for human connection and the relentless search for truth in a world where deception is rampant.

A foundational principle of 83 Midnight as a production company is that, regardless of the scope of a production, we compensate our teams for their efforts. When we launch our GoFundMe, every dollar we raise will have the express purpose of supporting our collaborators in bringing The Last True Fan to life. For that, we rely on the support of our followers, our fans, and the people who believe in us.

Our dear friends at Spilled Coffee Creatives, themselves experienced crowdfunders, have taught us that the first hour of any crowdfunding effort is the most pivotal. It’s the initial numbers from this window that spur the confidence of further prospective donors, and that nudge the algorithms towards the project’s visibility.

Over the next couple weeks, we are going to be advertising the coming fundraiser to bring together the resources needed to support our team throughout the filming process. As we do, we’re asking for your support.

If you have the capacity and the interest in donating to our efforts, please keep an eye out for when our fundraiser launches two weeks from now on April 12—we will be publicizing it on all our channels.

If you don’t have such capacity, please tell people you know about the project: friends, family, film enthusiasts, any big-league producers you may know. You can send them to the Midnight Bulletin’s subscriber page, or you can send them to our Instagram:

If you have any thoughts on resources we might turn to in producing this film, we’re all ears; we have our share of experience fundraising for independent projects, and we also know there’s always more for us to learn.

We are thrilled to be filming The Last True Fan this summer. We are eager to launch our fundraiser in two weeks! And we are grateful for any help we can get along the way.

Frankly, if you’re subscribed to this newsletter, you’ve probably had our back before. We’re grateful for you, our community, and we’re so excited to share this project with you.

See you at midnight 🌕🛣️