The relationship between Kickstarter and celebrities isn’t always rosy. Though the crowd-funding site’s role in the effort to breathe life into the long gestating Veronica Mars movie was widely celebrated, the gallery of haters grew as other celebrities launched projects. Zach Braff faced a barrage of criticism when he partially financed Wish You Were Here through the site, and Melissa Joan Hart found only sad failure on Kickstarter when she fell approximately $1,950,000 shy of her $2 million goal.
To some, the perception is that celebrities are wildly rich and they should pay for their own passion projects. Just like Kenny Rogers did when he dreamt of running a chicken franchise. But now that David Cross has taken to Kickstarter to fund the distribution for Hits, his directorial debut, no one seems to be scoffing and carrying on about all of his “Netflix F*ck You Money”.
Perhaps that’s because Cross isn’t just giving away t-shirts as rewards. Homeboy is offering backers ($7,500) a chance for him to handle your child’s religious instruction as Godfather and a role in The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret ($5,000).
What’s better, Cross also spilled the beans and gave confirmation that the New Year’s Day meeting of the Mr. Show minds that Stacey told you about is, in fact, a precursor to some kind of reunion that will film in March or April. And for just $5,000, someone other than you is going to be an extra in whatever that project winds up being because that reward has already been snapped up.
Besides the rewards, it’s also worth noting that Cross is only asking for $100,000 worth of help to distribute the film (which based on the trailer, seems like the kind of film that will benefit from continued independence) and he’s also willing to get experimental with a “pay-what-you-want” BitTorrent release that is akin to the model used by Radiohead, The Beastie Boys, and Brian K. Vaughan’s Private Eyes comic book.
We want you to decide how much tickets cost and you pay artists directly, not distributors or studios. This is an experiment, a first of its kind to see if we can make it more sustainable for both fans, and filmmakers. In order to do this in theaters as widely as possible we need your help to raise $100K. We are distributing ourselves and there are costs associated with making all of this happen. In addition to theater rental fees, we need to cover our marketing and publicity efforts. We ideally want to be in 50 markets, but the more money we raise the more theaters we can be in, so if we go over $100k, we’ll just expand our plans, which would be great!
As of right now, Cross’s campaign is up to nearly $10,000 with 28 days left, so he’s not likely to get Melissa Joan Hart’d, but if you want to do your part, you can check out the campaign here.
Source: Splitsider
