The Funding of Vanessa Del Rio

Vanessa Del RioBack in June of 2012, Mr. Pink’s reported that Radley Metzger’s 1975 landmark adult masterpiece, The Opening of Misty Beethoven was seeking crowd funding for a Blu-Ray release through Kickstarter. After raising almost the entirety of its $10,000 goal, Kickstarter suspended the project and left 435 Productions seeking an alternative crowd-funding avenue. Cut to February 2013 and reviews are starting to appear praising the completed Blu-Ray, with Twitch calling it “a remarkable release” and the film “an incredible document of a time when the future of cinema was still being formed”.

Now, another legendary (naked) woman of the screen might finally be getting her due… if the donations keep coming in, that is. With a projected budget of $300,000 and less than $10,000 raised so far, a proposed biographical feature film based on the life and work of Vanessa Del Rio hopes to depict and define a central figure of porn’s Golden Age, a woman who bridged the porn world and the mainstream entertainment industry with later TV roles (NYPD Blue, for one) and earned herself a spot in AVN’s illustrious Hall of Fame.

Using crowd-funding website IndieGoGo, director Thomas Mignone, the man responsible for 2007 feature On the Doll and music videos for Morbid Angel, Mudvayne, Soulfly, Slipknot, System of a Down, and Sepultura, hopes to raise the funds required to bring his take on Del Rio’s life to the big (or at least small) screen soon. With rewards ranging from digital downloads and DVD/Blu-Ray copies of the finished film to a visit to the film set and an associate producer credit – the latter what David Mamet calls “what you give to your secretary instead of a raise” – all donations tie contributors to the film and perhaps even to an indelible part of pornographic history.