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January 23, 2012
Q&A with Kickstarter’s Yancey Strickler
Cinespect
by Alexandra Marvar
Kickstarter is an online pledge system for financing creative projects—a pioneer of the “crowdfunding” movement when it was founded two and a half years ago. In that time, thousands of projects from design to dance have come to life thanks to the website, but the most prominent and profitable category has been film. So far on Kickstarter, 4,500 film projects have run their course, and a fair share of those are finding real world success with help from the funds—and fans—they’ve rallied.
...Cinespect sat down with Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler to discuss the magic of Kickstarter’s collaboration with the Sundance Institute, how many dinners with Russian oligarchs it takes to fund an indie film, and how crowd-sourcing support for films is shaking up the industry.
I don’t have a film background, I’ve had to get a crash course this year, but I had always imagined that someone like Jim Jarmusch just sat in a castle somewhere and looked at camera lenses for twenty hours a day and was like, “That one.” And, that’s how a filmmaker spends their time. But, I realize now that as a filmmaker, you are a perma-fundraiser. You’re having weird dinners with oil barons from Oklahoma, and Russian oligarchs, to try to get 100,000 dollars out of them, and meanwhile you cast their, you know, second mistress in the lead or something in exchange… There’s a really dirty part involved in how you have to fund these things.
Russian oligarch-funding was a non-starter for Battle for Brooklyn. Good thing there was Kickstarter.
What are some stand-out examples of Kickstarter film successes?
There’ve been a number of films that have had real world success. There’s a film called “Resurrect Dead”—a really, really interesting documentary about these weird signs that are imprinted into the asphalt, and it’s a guy trying to figure out what that is. He got picked up by Focus, won best documentary director at Sundance… He was cleaning houses before that. And he was shooting this on nights and weekends when he had time for five years. And suddenly he’s a filmmaker. That one’s really neat.
Two of our very earliest documentaries are short-listed for the Best Documentary Academy Award right now. “Battle for Brooklyn” is a documentary about the Atlantic Yards Project. They raised $25,000 the first year of Kickstarter, which was by far the largest film we’d had at the time. Also up for Best Documentary is “The Loving Story,” another really early one—I backed both these projects—a documentary about Virginia vs. Loving, the Supreme Court Case that first legalized interracial marriage.
Posted by eric at January 23, 2012 12:31 PM