Worried M. Night Shyamalan Fans Raise Money For the Director to Return to Film School

In 2011, M. Night Shymalan has swept the Razzie Awards (with five wins for The Last Airbender including Worst Picture, Worst Director and Worst Screenplay) and announced that he will be directing Will and Jaden Smith in an untitled sci-fi film for Sony (if that ever happens). It's hard to gauge which career development could be more demoralizing for the Oscar-nominated writer/director, but his fans are certain of one thing: it's time for an M. Night intervention.

Three such fans launched a website this week with the intention of raising enough money to send Shyamalan back to film school, and -- more important -- to create enough buzz to give him a much-needed wake-up call. The mission statement of the website is as follows: "We're crowdsourcing enough money to send M. Night Shyamalan back to film school. Certainly, there must be 150,000 of us film lovers out there who are tired of his schlocky plot twists, canned dialogue, and over commercialized image as an 'auteur.' If we all donate just one dollar, we can send M. Night back to NYU so he gets the help we all so desperately need."

According to EW, the campaign organizers were motivated to start the site after sitting through a poorly-received trailer for the Shyamalan-produced horror film Devil:

Chris Baker, the copywriter and author who came up with the idea for the site, tells EW that he was first inspired last summer at a screening of Inception. The movie was preceded by the trailer for a silly horror movie called Devil. When a title card at the end of the spot revealed that the film came "from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan," the theater's audience burst into raucous laughter. (A similar incident was captured on camera and quickly went viral before being yanked off YouTube.) He sent out a tweet proposing the Shyamalan film school campaign, and his friend Eric Roller -- another copywriter -- replied that he'd like to help, "but only if we can call it M. Night School." Baker and Roller then recruited Vanessa Castaneda, their buddy from advertising school, to serve as the nascent project's art director.

If the site succeeds in raising $150,000, the founders plan on presenting M. Night with a comically over-sized check. If he either refuses the check or refuses to meet with the three "fans" who have publicly derided his latest career decisions, the founders "plan to hold a festival in New York for aspiring filmmakers hoping to attend NYU's Tisch School of the Arts" and award the check to the winner.

Currently, the site has raised $333.28. If you'd like to contribute, click here.

· Think M. Night Shyamalan should go back to film school? There's a website for that. [EW]