With just a month before her unfinished documentary would premiere at South by Southwest, the director Kristy Guevara-Flanagan faced an unexpected task: Scraping together $15,000 for editing, travel and other costs associated with taking her movie about superheroines to the film festival in Austin, Texas.
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Guevara-Flanagan and producer Kelcey Edwards turned to a team-up similar to those often found in comic books: Wonder Woman and the awesome power of the crowd.
"Kickstarter was huge," Guevara-Flanagan told Wired over tea at a San Francisco restaurant last week, just a day after sending the final edit of her film, Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines, to SXSW. "Having made documentaries for over 10 years, there's just never been anything as successful as this."
The filmmakers quickly set up pledge drive on the crowd-funding website, but almost a week into their campaign they remained $9,000 short. Then Lynda Carter -- the actress who played the Amazonian ass-kicker in the Wonder Woman TV series, and a subject of the documentary -- put out a call on Facebook and Twitter, telling her fans that Wonder Women! needed help.
Two weeks later, and just in time for the final SXSW push, the filmmakers hit their goal.
Using Kickstarter and other crowd-funding mechanisms to wrap post-production on a film -- maybe it should be called a "Kickfinisher" -- or pay for travel to a massive festival like SXSW are some of the latest novel uses of these online money-raising platforms. As Hollywood and the music business struggle to adapt to the digital era, Kickstarter and its clones give indie filmmakers and bands powerful tools that make it easier than ever for them to assume the mantle of executive producer.
>"Kickstarter was huge. I just feel like I don't know what we did before that."
With Kickstarter reportedly on course to put more money into projects this year than the National Endowment for the Arts, the crowd-funding platform has hit something of a tipping point.
Thirty-three Kickstarter-funded film projects are headed to the SXSW this year -- approximately 10 percent of the festival's slate, and nearly twice the number at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. (Sundance saw 17 films funded in part by Kickstarter, although there is overlap since some films screened at both festivals.) And filmmakers aren't the only ones turning to the service: Indie bands are using Kickstarter, RocketHub and similar services to fund the vans and promotional materials they'll need to showcase at the festival.
What's probably most surprising is that Kickstarter burnout hasn't hit yet, as some had feared.
"What's fascinating is the fact that it is still working for so many people and that fatigue hasn't set in," said Janet Pierson, the producer of SXSW Film, which starts Friday. "I thought it was a fascinating idea, then I thought it had overstayed its welcome, and now I'm thrilled that it's really a functioning device."
What might be making the barrage of "Help get us to Austin!" requests a little more palatable is that they're seeking a final push -- just the funds needed to get a band with a fan-favorite album to a SXSW showcase, or to let a director do a final edit on a film that's already generating buzz with a trailer.
The chances that donated funds will go to something successful are greater, and crowd-funding provides exactly the type of lightning-fast, low-budget financing filmmakers typically need to finish post-production.
"[Kickstarter] allowed us to keep working in that final homestretch when your production money runs out, but you're not quite ready for the festival," Me at the Zoo director Valerie Veatch told Wired at Sundance in January.
>"What's fascinating is the fact that it is still working for so many people and that fatigue hasn't set in."
The platform can also help bring films to festivals' attention. SXSW producer Pierson said she accepted Indie Game: The Movie within 24 hours of a colleague seeing it on Kickstarter. She also bent a few of her own rules about showing exclusive films at SXSW based on the online buzz brought by Kickstarter's involvement in the film Girl Walk // All Day, which raised nearly $25,000 despite only asking for $4,800.
"It combines all of the right tools in a near-perfect sharing mechanism," *Girl Walk'*s director, Jacob Krupnick, told Wired by phone as he waited outside the Kickstarter's New York office before a screening of clips of films funded by the platform. "They sort of found a perfect pitch with people."
Bands Like It, Too
Whereas in the indie film world Kickstarter has become a pretty standard go-to, indie bands still occasionally bristle at the idea of asking fans for cash. But with a struggling economy and gas climbing past $4 a gallon, Kickstarter becomes an enticing option for tour financing. Brad Schnittger, a member of Cincinnati band the Sundresses and artist coordinator at music licensing and services company The All Night Party, said his band and others playing in the company's Midwest By Southwest showcase could only get there with Kickstarter, even though it "has the feel of a fund drive and that's just not for everyone."
>"Although I'm really glad it exists ... I see its existence more as a result of a shitty music industry than a long-term solution for it."
"Although I'm really glad it exists, and I often suggest it to bands The All Night Party works with, I see its existence more as a result of a shitty music industry than a long-term solution for it," Schnittger said in an e-mail to Wired. "That being said, without Kickstarter, The All Night Party would be sending a bunch of bands off the same cliff every other band gleefully jumps off of when they go to SXSW."
The Midwest By Southwest Kickstarter already surpassed the bands' $4,000 funding goal, and other bands have gotten what they needed, too -- for example, Atlanta indie rock outfit Pillage and Plunder raised $2,595 for a van to get to Austin.
"We knew we wanted to play at SXSW one way or another, no matter what," said Hsiang-Ming Wen, the band's guitarist/vocalist. "Kickstarter was just a method of facilitating that goal."
It's not all gold, though. What happens to those that don't reach their goals? If they were banking on Kickstarter, and they don't hit their goal, they get nothing, leaving the artists scrambling to find corporate sponsorships or other means of financing, said Pierson. She imagines filmmakers would resort to maxing-out credit cards or dreaming up other methods, but the landscape is still far different than it was 25 years ago.
"My husband and I were investors in Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It," Pierson said. "I don't remember the individual numbers, but Spike was writing individual letters to every single person he'd ever met and knew asking them to send him money. That's how it used to be done."
One film still dangerously far from getting the dough it needs is Gimme the Loot. Despite offering video-powered make-out sessions with its cast for $15 pledges, it remained short of its $22,500 goal as of this writing. The film's Kickstarter campaign doesn't end until after SXSW, so the filmmakers hope they can leverage the festival hype. But if the goal isn't reached, producer Natalie Difford said her cast and crew would find a way to make do, without elaborating on how that could actually happen.
"People don't really realize what consists of the post-production process and how crucial this is to the end product," Difford said in an e-mail to Wired, adding, "Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing campaign and so are we."
>"Hell, I'll push the van there if I have to."
And the organizers of the Better Together decentralized dance party -- an event planned for an as-yet-undisclosed location in Austin on Saturday that's fueled by an iPod, a portable FM transmitter and scads of boomboxes -- remain a few bucks shy of their independent fundraising goal.
The indie spirit embodied and enabled by the crowd-funding trend speaks to the DIY ethos at the heart of SXSW, the annual event where the music, film and internet worlds collide and intertwine for a certain kind of March madness.
Just ask John Erhardt, pedal steel player in Cincinnati band Wussy, one of three bands on the Midwest By Southwest bill that will be tooling to Austin thanks in part to the Kickstarter fund drive.
"As for as getting to SXSW goes, we will get there if I have to sleep on dirt floors [and] eat only peanut butter sandwiches," Erhardt said in an e-mail to Wired. "Hell, I'll push the van there if I have to."
