Congrats, needing so much with so little time left, I would have thought it was impossible to fund.  You guys did a good job getting the word out in the last couple of weeks.  Love to see this once it's finished.

Mike B.

I would expect all the new investors/backers will be getting their update soon, based on the 2nd Kickstarter promise

We anticipate setbacks, that's just the nature of film-making. But we're confident that we can meet our goals and deadlines. And if we don't, you'll be the first to know why and our plan to fix it.

Here's an  
There's a simple way for both of the films to see the light of day. The two producers should bury the hatchet with the first director and finish that project for which they (the producers) received $195k.  Then they can turn their attention to the 2nd project.

I mean, if what they say is true -- that both films are entirely different stories -- there's no reason they shouldn't and a 195,000 reasons they should provide the first investors/backers what was promised (the first film + any other rewards...remember there were rewards above and beyond just the film)

They have, what $55k or so from investors on the 2nd Kickstarter now?
Are they ensuring these new backers get what they were promised and not have this money routed into a legal defense fund? What about the other partners/investors/crew on this 2nd film? What happens if they start to think that their project will be completely derailed because of the two producers involvement in both films and that maybe...just maybe...that the first director really does have a legitimate beef? What if these investors/crew start to consider all their effort and money and time are possibly going to be for nothing, and then turn on these two producers? What if the companies providing equipment/studio rentals/time/space at free or greatly reduced rates in lieu of other paying projects start to get that feeling? Will pressure force the two producers to walk and get chalked up to "creative differences"? Or will the two producers do what's necessary to satisfy all of their investors/backers?

Some of you may know James and myself from a different D&D documentary project that was started on Kickstarter a couple of years ago. As projects like this go and part of the nature of filmmaking, there were creative differences that led to our new direction and separation from the previous project.

or, conversely
  Maybe they're already in talks with an entirely new 3rd crew about a completely different story they've discovered on the history of D&D    

Here's something along the lines of what Bracton already mentioned.  I supported the original, but not The Great Kingdom.  Not everyone is going to like this outcome, but at least there is, what appears to be, a resolution?

Project Update #51: Update
Posted by Iconoscope Films/Westpaw Films

Dear friends,

On July 30, 2014, the Supreme Court of New York ruled in our favor, and ordered an injunction against Fantasy Films, Andrew Pascal and James Sprattley. In brief, the Court reasoned that because Pascal and Sprattley are executive producers of this film, they therefore have a fiduciary obligation to the assets of the partnership. That fiduciary obligation prohibited them from taking actions which would undermine this film by wrongly using its assets for a competing project.

We support independent filmmaking, and we believe that the rich history of the people and the legacy of Dungeons & Dragons lends itself to multiple narratives.* Over the past 15 months, we tried to keep this out of court through extension negotiations, mediation, and arbitration with Pascal and Sprattley. The result? Time away from film production, and a failed settlement that forced us to pursue the matter in court.

Last week, the Court ordered that "The Defendants [Fantasy Films, Pascal and Sprattley] are hereby enjoined from having contact, for any purpose, with any of the parties or persons who were previously involved in the D&D production film and from in any manner advertising the film The Great Kingdom or making efforts to solicit funding for such film or any other film on the subject of Dungeons and Dragons." In order to comply with the Court's ruling, Pascal and Sprattley have taken down the Facebook, Vimeo, Kickstarter, Twitter, and Youtube pages associated with The Great Kingdom. If you'd like to read the Court's ruling, you can find a copy here: http://goo.gl/N9aqd0.

We would also like to reassure you that the Kickstarter funds have only been used for film production - the litigation has been funded out of our own pockets. We look forward to having this unfortunate incident behind us so that we can return to making a film that you can be proud of having backed (and so that our Kickstarter updates can return to news about film production rather than litigation).

If you are attending Gen Con, we are excited to share with you an advance screener of a 12 minute excerpt of the film. Our screener and panel will be on Saturday, August 16th, at 2pm, at the Westin: Capitol I (for those who are registered with Gen Con, please visit: Gen Con LLC | Gen Con Indy 2014). We look forward to a lively discussion about the history and influence of Dungeons and Dragons. (And for those not visiting GenCon, we're just working on getting all the rights and clearances for the footage and music before posting an excerpt of the screener online for backers only).

More to come! Thank you again for your patience and support.

Yours,

The D&D: A Doc Team

* There is a D&D film that we are really excited to be supporting. But we will leave that fun announcement for the filmmaker to share......

Howdy All,


There is no resolution as yet. The injunction does not prevent The Great Kingdom (TGK) from working on their film, only that they may not continue to raise financial support, publicly promote,  or contact anyone involved with the D&D Doc (DDD) until their day in court. The court date to decide the outcome is on October 1st.

TGK wants both films to be made, DDD does not want TGK to be made, so DDD is suing to make sure that happens. Both sides are funding the legal matters out of their own pocket and not their respective Kickstarter funds. Neither side has stolen money or film footage from the other.

The basics as I have heard personally and extensively from BOTH sides before and after the split and having read in the court documents are this:

The film was the idea of Andrew Pascal and he brought in a film industry friend James Sprattley. Later the asked another film guy, Anthony Savini to join the project.

As things progressed Pascal and Sprattley were increasingly cut out of creative decisions and were disallowed to see footage, other than the trailers everyone got to see. They pushed back and there ensued a tug of war over the project and despite the fact that it was supposed to be a majority rule partnership. Savini seemed to hold the chips. Savini had been in a situation where he had a film stolen from him in a previous endeavor and, being paranoid about this happening again, became increasingly acrimonious.

Pascal and Sprattley decided to get out. In their settlement agreement they pretty much gave Savini everything he wanted, including not having to handle all of the grunt work in fulfilling the Kickstarter rewards. They kept their executive producer credits, equity, remaining Diesel posters, and royalties on the back end. Creatively and ownership-wise, as it had been for some time, the film itself was entirely Savini's - he had wrested it from his two partners.

During the settlement negotiations, Pascal and Sprattley claim that Savini knew they were going to make their own film (TGK) and that Savini, through his attorney tried to get a non-compete clause on two occasions but both were flatly refused by Pascal and Sprattley through their attorney.

Pascal and Sprattley went back to making the film they wanted in the first place. However, their lack of complete of separation from D&D Documentary (DDD) caused issues. Savini claims that this caused harm to the success of DDD due to unfair competition (remember there was no non-compete clause in the settlement), took it to court, was denied an emergency injunction, but was later granted an injunction based on sufficient cause.

Now both sides DDD and TGK are gearing up for a court hearing on October 1st. Depending on which way it goes, reparations, penalties, and court orders will be the subject of a follow-up hearing.

The court documents can be read here (login as guest and search by name: Westpaw):

NYSCEF Login

However, that is all legal wrangling and will ultimately have only to do with *law* and not *justice*. Andrew Pascal had the undisputed creative idea for a D&D Documentary film, he entered into a partnership carry out his vision, one of the partners ursurped his idea and he lost creative control and even input, frustrated he walked away but felt an obligation to all of the people that originally supported his idea and so, naively, did not make a clean break, once he felt out of the broken partnership he rejoined his original partner, James Sprattley, and found a friend, Chris Haifley, as the new director, and then set off to realize his original concept. While Andrew's hope to regain control of his original idea may be seen in the eyes of the law as naively executed and thus, wrong, in the eyes of justice he is righteous.


Futures Bright,

Paul

As I said in the Facebook group tracking this legal battle, the situation really does seem to bring out the partisanship to which our community is unfortunately predisposed.

From my perspective, having also been involved in this process since the early days before the split, I see something more like a comedy of errors, where both sides have blundered and botched their fair share of the quest to bring a D&D documentary into the world. It is an oversimplification to lay the blame at the feet of any single party - there has been plenty of pettiness, feet-dragging and acrimony to go around. I don't see any heroes, I don't see any victims; as someone who invested time, energy and money into this I just find it exasperating all around. I still see paths for one or two films to be made, and I will support anyone who is responsibly promoting the history of this amazing hobby. I will appear on Anthony's panel at Gen Con in order to promote that history, and I would do so for Andrew and James too if circumstances permitted them to be there.

The Collector's Trove wrote in New Dungeons & Dragons Movie: The Great Kingdom:However, that is all legal wrangling and will ultimately have only to do with *law* and not *justice*. Andrew Pascal had the undisputed creative idea for a D&D Documentary film, he entered into a partnership carry out his vision, one of the partners ursurped his idea and he lost creative control and even input, frustrated he walked away but felt an obligation to all of the people that originally supported his idea and so, naively, did not make a clean break, once he felt out of the broken partnership he rejoined his original partner, James Sprattley, and found a friend, Chris Haifley, as the new director, and then set off to realize his original concept. While Andrew's hope to regain control of his original idea may be seen in the eyes of the law as naively executed and thus, wrong, in the eyes of justice he is righteous.

I don't think language like "in the eyes of justice he is righteous" is even remotely applicable to anyone or anything associated with this process.

Sigh.

Right now I mostly feel bad for the people who were interviewed, taking a chance at honest disclosure to get the past off their chests, talking about healed scars caused by bickering over D&D and creative differences ... must seem like a recurring nightmare.

I hope both movies get made but I can't really back a dog in this fight without causing someone else to get bitten.  I'm on the outside and just a vested backer.  I just want it to be over with, with as few injuries as possible for everyone involved.

From the NYT:
A Quest to Make a Dungeons & Dragons Film Turns Into a Legal Battle

By VIVIAN YEESEPT. 12, 2014

For a certain sort of fan, the crowdfunding pitch was impossible to resist. Here was a chance, it announced, to support a documentary about the immortal saga of the legendary game that all but revolutionized modern life. No pressure.

Three filmmakers promised nothing less than the origin story of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, "a cautionary tale of an empire built by friends and lost through betrayal, enmity, poor management, hubris and litigation," they wrote on their Kickstarter page in 2012. They planned to chronicle the bitter battle waged by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the game's creators, over credit and royalties.

In other words, they wrote: "Imagine ‘The Social Network'  " — the tortuous tale of Facebook's founding — "but no one ends up rich."

If the filmmakers saw a cautionary tale in the story of their shared passion, they failed to heed its lessons. More than $250,000 in Kickstarter pledges and two years later, there is no documentary, only broken friendships and a lawsuit.

The director of "Dungeons & Dragons: A Documentary" has sued his former partners for embarking on another documentary on the same subject. Gaming conventions like GenCon ("The Best Four Days in Gaming") and GaryCon ("a living memorial to E. Gary Gygax") are abuzz with rumors of backstabbing and creative theft. Gathering around their tabletop games and in online forums, Dungeons & Dragons fans are distraught.

"Every story has 20 sides," reads the tagline for the upstart second documentary, a reference to the 20-sided dice Dungeons & Dragons players use to direct their tabletop fantasy narratives. So far, this one has two.

It began, of course, with a game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Anthony Savini, 45, the director of the original documentary, and Andrew Pascal, now one of the producers of the upstart "The Great Kingdom," were junior crew members on "Law & Order" in the mid-1990s when Mr. Pascal asked Mr. Savini to play. Their group met a few times a year, even as Mr. Savini left television to work on documentaries like "Salinger" and "The Central Park Five."

Mr. Savini plays as a fighter named Klaatu, after a phrase in the 1951 science fiction film "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Mr. Pascal serves as Dungeonmaster, a kind of M.C. for gaming groups.

It was during one session a few years ago, Mr. Savini said in an interview, that the two friends, who both live in Brooklyn, hatched the idea of a film about their hobby. Mr. Pascal remembers it differently: In an affidavit submitted in Brooklyn Supreme Court, he wrote that he had heard about the game's history in late 2010 and floated the project to his friend James Sprattley, a cameraman based in Los Angeles. They approached Mr. Savini to direct it a few months later.

For Mr. Savini, who struggled with dyslexia as a child, the wizards, elves and paladins of Dungeons & Dragons had been a portal into the world of storytelling. For Mr. Pascal, it was his creative spark: "I would not be a filmmaker if it weren't for D&D. Plain and simple," he told one interviewer earlier this year. (Mr. Sprattley was more of a "noob," short for "newbie," Mr. Pascal wrote in their first Kickstarter update.)
Continue reading the main story

In many non-teenager circles, it is not quite the thing to admit that Dungeons & Dragons changed your life. But the filmmakers spoke of their subject with enthusiasm approaching veneration: When Mr. Savini heard about the game's history, he said in their Kickstarter pitch video, "There was a moment of awe, and then there was a moment of, ‘Do I want to go any further? Would I break the illusion by looking into this game?'  "

Hoping to finish by this year, the game's 40th anniversary, they began hunting down all the relevant talking heads: Mr. Gygax's relatives; game designers who had helped build Mr. Gygax's company, Tactical Studies Rules, which published the game's first set of voluminous rule books in 1974; and Dungeons & Dragons historians, who argue that its major innovation — individual role-playing — made shinier successors like World of Warcraft and even websites like Facebook and OkCupid possible.

Even as they prepared to raise funds through Kickstarter, however, tensions simmered. In June 2012, Mr. Pascal wrote in the affidavit, Mr. Savini "accused James and me of trying to steal his movie after we, as part of our job, merely offered suggestions for a possible narrative for the film."

Mr. Savini followed up with a chilly email: "Keep in mind the last time I made a film with two other people, the film was stolen from me, so I know what it looks like. All the warning signs showed up within a 24 hour period."

Meanwhile, Mr. Pascal wrote, the director kept refusing the producers' requests to see the footage. Mr. Savini acknowledged in an interview that "there were definitely some issues between the two of us," but declined to say more about the dispute.

Mr. Pascal and Mr. Sprattley declined to comment, citing the continuing legal tussles.

A cash infusion failed to smooth things over. The Dungeons & Dragons faithful had pledged more than $195,000 in exchange for rewards like an autographed copy of "Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's ‘A Song of Ice and Fire'  " for $65 or more and associate-producer credits for $1,000 or more. But by April 2013, Mr. Savini was asking for mediation, which failed.

While the documentary languished, the two sides turned to lawyers to negotiate a settlement agreement that would leave Mr. Savini with creative control of the film while the others retained half-ownership. But in January, Mr. Savini and his new partner, Cecily Tyler, discovered that his former partners were making their own film.

Mr. Pascal said in the affidavit that he had told Mr. Savini about their plans; Mr. Savini denies hearing any such thing.

Soon the breakaway filmmakers were contacting many of the same people interviewed for the original documentary — a move Mr. Savini argues sowed confusion among their interview subjects and financial backers, at best, and amounted to theft of the original film's proprietary assets, at worst.

Mr. Pascal opened a new Kickstarter, referring to "creative differences" and promising a "new direction." He even promoted the new film in a comment on the original documentary's Kickstarter page.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story

In interviews with gaming news sites, he and the new director of "The Great Kingdom" have insisted that the story of Dungeons & Dragons and its influence on contemporary culture — the scope of the original documentary — is too big for a two-hour film. Better, they say, to focus on the personalities who built it.

But the subtleties of Dungeons & Dragons filmmaking appear lost on the judge, who last month granted Mr. Savini's request for an injunction ordering the "Great Kingdom" team to put their project on indefinite hold, ruling that as former partners in the original film, they have a fiduciary responsibility not to damage it.

"It has been demonstrated that completion of the partnership film is being undermined, and its commercial value potentially diluted, by defendants' solicitation of funding for, and advertising of, its competing film," wrote Justice Carolyn E. Demarest. (The filmmakers filed an appeal last month, and the two sides have entered settlement negotiations.)

The lawsuit has pitted fan against fan, with some outraged at the second film's very existence and others celebrating what they see as its more intimate focus. Still others have contributed to both, delighted at the prospect of even more Dungeons & Dragons documentaries to watch.

"There's a place for so many documentaries on the subject, not just these two — many," said Victoria Ricks Perren-Cserep, 34, whose father created a precursor to Dungeons & Dragons with Mr. Gygax, who died in 2008. (She plays as a cleric named Lady Victoria of Schwartzenbruin, the capital of Perrenland.) She has participated in both films, and after the lawsuit was filed she started a Facebook group, "Are there really 20 sides?", to express her disgust with the lawsuit, which in her view boils down to "one person's ego trying to squash" the "more personal, and better" film from being made.

The Dungeons & Dragons creators of her father's generation, she said, are not getting younger, and deserve to have their stories told: "They're dying, these guys," she said, "and to lose that and those interviews is just a travesty to me."

Mr. Savini and Ms. Tyler, who hope to finish their film by December, have hastened to assure the community that they, too, would love to see more films on the game. They rejected the suggestion that their situation had any parallel to the fights that cleaved Mr. Arneson from Mr. Gygax.

"If you use the word ‘curse,' people will jump on you for it. ‘There is no curse!'  " said Ms. Perren-Cserep. "But there is. They were all best friends suing each other 40 years ago, and this is parallel. It's very sad."

[I tried to paste in a simple link to this article, but the NYT site is weird about that.]

d3rmond wrote in New Dungeons & Dragons Movie: The Great Kingdom:So looks like I lost the money I put on BOTH projects.

Most likely...

Anyone have an updated status from either group?