Rob

“Traditionally, Sundance announces the chosen few the week after the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s generally known that the lucky winners are notified in advance in the three days prior to that Big Thursday. Unfortunately for Bubba Ho-tep, it was not to be. It was a quiet Thanksgiving with no phone call. At the time I thought there was something wrong with my film, but I did not understand how the odds were stacked against all indie filmmakers. It’s all in the numbers. Using their own analytics, the odds are less than 1 percent in being accepted to Sundance. That means that for each film invited to the big dance, more than ninety-nine features—think about that—ninety-nine films that indie filmmakers have slaved over and poured all of their hopes, dreams, and in many cases gone into serious debt for, are not going to be selected.”
― Don Coscarelli, True Indie: Life and Death in Filmmaking

“Our film had also received rave reviews and many “pull quotes” that could be used for marketing. Nick Digilio of WGN Radio, who also happened to be a longtime Phantasm fan, gave us a sensational quote in which he called Bubba Ho-tep “an important piece of American cinema.” And in David Hunter’s review of our film in the Hollywood Reporter, he celebrated our star’s work by writing, “Bruce Campbell in a performance for the ages.” It all looked quite promising, and then Shultz mentioned just one more item—we would need some money to launch this endeavor. The roughed-up budget for this independent Bubba Ho-tep theatrical release came in at about a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. Yikes! But Dave Shultz firmly believed that if luck was with us, we could easily gross multiples of that number and actually turn a profit. For me it was an extremely tough decision. I had made a huge investment from my savings to pay for the production costs of Bubba Ho-tep. My dad in loyal fashion had also kicked in a chunk of change. With his background in financial planning he had always taught me that the best investments are when you invest in yourself and the principles you believe in.”
― Don Coscarelli, True Indie: Life and Death in Filmmaking

“By the early twenty-second century, the technology for self-replicating robots should be perfected, and we may be able to entrust machines with the task of constructing solar arrays and laser batteries on the moon, Mars, and beyond. We would ship over an initial team of automatons, some of which would mine the regolith and others of which would build a factory. Another set of robots would oversee the sorting, milling, and smelting of raw materials in the factory to separate and obtain various metals. These purified metals could then be used to assemble laser launch stations—and a new batch of self-replicating robots. We might eventually have a bustling network of relay stations throughout the solar system, perhaps stretching from the moon all the way to the Oort Cloud. Because the comets in the Oort Cloud extend roughly halfway to Alpha Centauri and are largely stationary, they may be ideal locations for laser banks that could provide an extra boost to nanoships on their journey to our neighboring star system. As each nanoship passed by one of these relay stations, its lasers would fire automatically and give the ship an added push to the stars. Self-replicating robots could build these distant outposts by using fusion instead of sunlight as the basic source of energy.”
― Michio Kaku, The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny BeyondEarth

“As he tinkered away inside his trailer—pumping himself up with power metal music—he was reminded of something that visionary game programmer John Carmack had once said about virtual reality: “It’s a moral imperative,” Carmack had described, touting the ways in which VR could empower anyone—of any socioeconomic standing—to experience anything.”
― Blake J. Harris, The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality