My theory: The "film" is merely a con-game [View all]

[cthulu2016]

Making a movie is a standard fraud-vehicle. It's exciting... something people want to be part of. The accounting is impossible. Potential investors know nothing about the biz. But everyone knows that some piece of cheese "might be the next Blair Witch Project," turning a sub-amatuer budget in a $100 million+ return.

Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space was funded by a church, and you can imagine how inventive Ed Wood's pitch was... Probably, "It is about the physical resurrection of the dead, as foretold in Revelations!"

For a small investment this guy gets to go around raising money for his film. (If "100 Jewish" investors contributed to a film that cost $60,000 that's a good profit, since one assumes the investors would be forking over more than $600 each. But of course there are probably no 100 investors. That's what you say to one investor because people perceive safety in numbers.)

Since the $60,000 came from his wife in Egypt, one assumes that was raised in the Coptic Christian community for a film about the travails of Egyptian Coptics. (That is what the people acting in the film were told it was about.)

So now you have this reel of film of people in a fake desert wearing middle-eastern garb. And you already have maxed out the Coptic contributions. So now you start peddling it to American fundamentalists as an expose of Islam, after re-dubbing the existing dialog. And you get whatever money you can get from them.

And you seek RW jewish investors, probably again somewhat changing your description of the project to appeal to that group, and creating a persona of an Isreali-American director for that purpose. (I doubt potential Coptic investors in Egypt were told the same... they would have been told that the director was an Egyptian Coptic living in America.)

And so on.

The 14 minutes of gibberish on youtube is "setting up the store," in con-game parlance. You have to establish a fornt... have something to show people. From interviewing the actors and technical people one can probably sort out whether the youtube excerpt is the entire thing. How many scenes were even shot?

But since one seeks investors to *complete* the project, nothing more is needed.

Since the screenplay was written while he was in prison for bank-fraud this all seems the likeliest explanation.