If you’ve ever seen The Last Airbender, The Happening or Lady in the Water, the answer just might be yes.
Three friends have launched a website called M. Night School. No mere pun, this is a serious venture to raise $150,000 to send the heavily panned director back to NYU to ply his craft and hone his skills all over again.
(More on TIME.com: See pictures of M. Night Shyamalan)
Copywriter and author Chris Baker is behind the idea and told NewsFeed’s sister site, EW, that he was inspired after sitting through the trailer for the horror movie Devil (to be fair to M., he didn’t direct this one). Baker recalls the audience laughing when the words, “from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan” came up.
After sending out a tweet proposing the idea, his copywriter friend Eric Roller said he was in, “but only if we can call it M. Night School,” and they in turn recruited Vanessa Castaneda, a pal from advertising school, who is acting as art director on the project.
(More on TIME.com:See where Shyamalan comes in the top 10 embarrassing celebrity commercials)
At the time of writing, the site has raised a little over $300, which is some way short of the desired goal. But what if they somehow achieve their aims? “We want to do a stunt where we present him with a giant check,” Baker told EW. “Obviously, the guy’s a multi-millionaire — he’ll refuse it.”
And in the event that did happen, the creators will hold a festival in New York for aspiring filmmakers hoping to attend NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, with the winner of the festival getting the money and thus a scholarship in Shyamalan’s name. And you don’t need a Sixth Sense to be able to predict that we think any winner’s first film should be the story of how he/she made it to film school in the first place.
(More on TIME.com: Is The Last Airbender the worst movie epic ever?)
