Alexander Stuart

The Canyons, trailer image. Acclaimed author Bret Easton Ellis is making an original foray into filmmaking with his partners, director Paul Schrader (who wrote  Martin Scorsese's astonishing Taxi Driver and Raging Bull , and directed the classic, Giorgio Moroder-scored American Gigolo ) and producer Braxton Pope , with a project called The Canyons - set in contemporary LA and financed in part through Kickstarter , the radical new crowd-funding social platform. The trio set out to raise $100,000 to add to the money they were putting into the project themselves - in order to bypass the interminable Hollywood studio development process - and wound up exceeding their goal and raising almost $160,000. I know Bret a little, from a series of dinners we had a few years back, when I was interested in turning Bret's outstanding, self-referential horror novel, Lunar Park, into a film.  Several of his books have been adapted as movies - including both the zeitgeist-definin