Cinematical asks "Can Kickstarter Save the Indie Film Industry?"

Over at Cinematical.com, contributor Eric Snider explores the magic of Kickstarter.

The other day, Erik Childress spotlighted an effort to gather enough small contributions to produce a special DVD edition of the documentary The Way We Get By. The project is being coordinated through Kickstarter, a year-old Brooklyn-based organization whose name has been popping up on the Internet a lot lately. Call me crazy -- go ahead, I'll wait -- but I think this could be the way of the future for independent filmmakers and other artists to get their projects funded.

It works like this. Let's say I need $5,000 to make my documentary about the life of Charles Nelson Reilly. I launch a Kickstarter campaign, ask for pledges, and set a deadline by which the $5,000 needs to be accumulated. People can donate as little or as much money as they want, using a credit card and Amazon's secure payment system. (Amazon and Kickstarter are buddies.) But here's the twist: The donors' credit cards aren't actually charged until the deadline arrives -- and even then only if we've reached $5,000 in pledges. If we haven't, nobody pays anything, and that's the end of it, except for my sadness over not being able to bring Mr. Nelson Reilly's life to the big screen.

You can see the advantages here. As a donor, you don't have to pay anything right now, and maybe not ever. That's appealing. If they don't get enough pledges to fund the project, you're off the hook, but you still get the good karma points for offering.

As a filmmaker, I'm able to gauge interest in my project without wasting anyone's money. Since it's an all-or-nothing system, I can find out if it's even possible to raise $5,000 without any risk. It's better than a regular "pledge" system, where people say, "Sure, I'll give you $50 on June 1!," and then change their minds when you come around to collect it. With Kickstarter, you provide your payment info when you pledge, and if the minimum is reached by the deadline, your credit card gets charged. (Kickstarter does give donors a way to cancel their pledges before the day of reckoning, in case you have a financial emergency, or you realize you got wasted one night and pledged money to a hundred different projects in a fit of drunken philanthropy.)

There are several hundred projects on Kickstarter right now, about 300 of them in the Film/Video category. Lots of documentaries. The minimum pledge is usually about $5. There are usually perks for donating, like the tote bag you get when you pledge to PBS. If you have $20 to throw around -- or, more to the point, if you'll have $20 to throw around when the deadline arrives! -- you could donate to a few different projects. You can search projects by keyword to look for topics that are particularly meaningful for you, or search for the name of your city to see if someone local needs help. If you really want to feel good about yourself, use the "Ending Soon" filter and find something whose deadline is fast approaching and only needs a little more money to make it. You could be the hero who puts it over the top! They'll sing folk songs about you!

A casual stroll through the projects shows that many of the films have already been shot and now need money for post-production. That's the case with Melvin, a feature by Austin-based Chris Ohlson, who has co-produced SXSW films like The Overbrook Brothers and Lovers of Hate. Or there's How Do You Write a Joe Schermann Song?, a movie musical that Gary King hopes to shoot this summer. The minimum pledge is a buck. A buck! Surely you have a dollar for Gary. Or The Guarani Project, a documentary that will bring attention to an aquifer in South America that could solve the world's water-shortage problems. (Full disclosure: One of the Kickstarter projects is The Adults in the Room, a narrative/documentary hybrid in which I appear, briefly, in one of the documentary scenes. I think the water movie might be a more worthy cause, though.)

Kickstarter is only for creative projects like movies, not "important" things like raising money for orphans or helping disaster victims. So, yeah, if you have to choose between helping somebody make a movie and donating to a humanitarian organization, I'd go with the latter. But many of us can afford to do both, especially when we're talking about $5 at a time. For a lot of these ambitious guys and gals, making a movie is their lifelong dream. Wouldn't it be kind of awesome to help them do it?

By the way, if anyone has a film-related Kickstarter success story to share, let us know! Kickstarter been around for a year, so I suspect we'll start seeing movies soon that were partially funded this way.- Eric Snider (link: http://www.cinematical.com/2010/04/17/can-kickstarter-save-the-indie-film-industry/)

On a personal note. I have had great success with Kickstarter, using it to fund a short film that I'll be shooting the first weekend of May. Its a great resource!

Discuss: Getting Audiences to See Long Movies

The six-hour gritty crime drama The Red Riding Trilogy is slowly making its way around to big cities. It's really three movies, based on four novels by David Peace, adapted by Tony Grisoni and directed by Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, and Anand Tucker. Each entry takes place in a different year, 1974, 1980 and 1983, and some characters cross over from one movie to the next. The whole thing played on television in the UK, and as of now I'm still not sure just how the U.S. theatrical release will be handled. Will moviegoers buy one ticket for all three films? Do they sit through all six hours at once, or can they come back on a different day? Certainly the press screening here in my hometown happened all in one six-hour chunk, though I opted to watch the film at home on a screener. (I'm only one-and-a-half movies in at this point, but I like it a great deal so far.)

A few years back, an Italian mini-series called The Best of Youth was released theatrically in the U.S. as a six-hour film. It showed in two parts, and required two separate admissions, and it was a small scale smash-hit, selling out and extending runs. But a year earlier, Lucas Belvaux's three-part The Trilogy (On the Run, An Amazing Couple and After the Life) opened without much of a splash. One of the most highly acclaimed movies of the 1990s, Bela Tarr's seven-hour Satantango (1994), never got its own theatrical release. Those who were lucky enough to see it did so at repertory houses during retrospectives and festivals. Now it's on home video and viewers can watch at their own pace.

Similar problems cropped up in the 1980s for movies like Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz (15 hours), Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue (10 hours), and Claude Lanzmann's 9-1/2 hour documentary Shoah. Some repertory houses came up with interesting ways of packaging these movies in manageable bites, but sometimes requiring more than one ticket. Needless to say, all of these movies seem more suited to DVD.

On the other hand, Gone with the Wind is nearly 4 hours long and is still the (adjusted for inflation) all-time box office champion. No one has ever had one second's hesitation about seeing that movie in a theater, nor any problems about distribution or ticket selling. Likewise, I'm sure plenty of devoted souls have seen the entire stretch of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings in one sitting. So let's hear it, dear readers! How much movie would you be willing to sit through in a theater? What kind of movie would it be? Would you mind subtitles? How much would you pay for tickets? - Jeffrey Anderson