Hi, I’m Famous. May I Have Your Money?

??????????????????????????????????????????????Thought experiment: Of the following three kinds of street-people looking to take your money, which are you most likely to give to?

A.)  A con artist who tells you he’ll use your money not for himself but for you, he promises he’ll use it to build you something just absolutely fantastic, though you yourself are not allowed to see this thing until it’s built, and also there’s no guarantee he’ll actually end up building it, and he’s never going to pay you back

B.)  A sad-looking, pitiful little Dickensian street-urchin who’s dressed up to look like the absolute picture of charity, who promises you nothing but also swears he’ll use it to buy something of substance, food and shelter and stuff, clean himself up and get off the streets, though of course he’s never going to pay you back, or

C.)  A crack addict who approaches you with zero pretensions whatsoever and simply tells you he’s going to use your money for crack, directly and honestly, and laughs at the thought of ever paying you back

Pencils down. I ask this question because a craftily empty-your-pockets website called Kickstarter.com has been making waves recently and I’m really lost as to why. Kickstarter, in case you don’t know, is a website where creative people try to raise money for their projects—films, books, video games, albums, you name it—by asking fans to donate a buck or two toward getting it accomplished. Which, like any really good con, sounds harmless and innocent and even kind of progressive, in a way, asking people to put their money toward the arts. Hang on though, because not only is there a catch, there’s an Orobouros-style series of catches that ultimately amount to the thought experiment at the beginning of this article. To name a few:

For one thing, the artists themselves have to come up with an arbitrary sum of money for their project—and I do mean arbitrary. There’s no print-out of how much anything costs or exactly what your cash will be paying for, and the excess of round numbers makes it pretty transparent that a lot of these dollar-amounts came straight out of the artists’ asses. Secondly, let’s say the goal is a million dollars. If not enough people pledge, if the project makes say $990,000 rather than the cool million, then the project does not—cannot—get made, and all the people who donated that $990,000? They aren’t allowed to have their money back. Third, unlike shareholders or investors or studios, fans aren’t entitled to a share of the profits. In fact, the site specifically stipulates that you can’t donate for a profit. You can, however, get condescending little bone-throwers like a signed copy of the script or something, which is kind of like making someone write me a check and letting them keep the pen. Or how about the fact that there already is a system whereby fans give money to help filmmakers make projects—it’s called paying for your ticket to their previous film. Or how about the fact that these fans never get to see the actual project, any part of it, until it’s done? Or how about—and maybe I’m being a bit elitist here, but bear with me—the fact that the site is doing to art what Wikipedia did to information, i.e. turning it over to The People so that there’s no quality control? There’s a difference between someone who gets a painting in a gallery because they won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and someone who got the money from anyone who felt like lending it to him.

Or let’s even just look at three examples, the film project-analogs to choices A, B, and C above. A.) Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas managed to raise over $5m (only having asked for $2m) by promising that the cult hit would be made into a film—with your help. And okay so that’s actually a pretty decent promise, and what fan of a cult show wouldn’t want to see it revived and optioned and put up there on the screen? But the promise is just that, a promise, and no one has any idea if the thing’ll be any good, of course, and—again unlike studios—the investors here, the fans, have no say in the creative process or the final cut even, and promising an associate producer credit to fans is just the saddest attempt ever at acting like you’re getting anything in return (and made even sadder by the condescending little “associate producer is largely a symbolic title” fine print in the plea video), and anyway, what is Kristin Bell doing making garbage like When in Rome if she isn’t getting paid seven figures? Can’t she finance this thing?

Surely Zach Braff can. B.) Zach Braff is trying to make a follow-up to Garden State, a movie I’d pledge two million dollars not to have seen. In Braff’s plea video, he makes no Veronica Mars-style promise to deliver Garden State fans another Garden State. Rather, said follow-up is not a sequel but simply another self-indulgent film about Zach Braff complaining about what it’s like to be Zach Braff—or “a continuation of the tone” as he puts it (I’m interpreting). So here we have a case of an actor freely admitting this is for him and not you, at least to a point, but in the video there’s a lot of that Adam’s-apple-wiggling and voice-at-the-timbre-of-a-whisper stuff that Braff would do at the more sincere moments in Scrubs, and you can’t think of anything but JD so of course you feel real bad for him (though, again, where is this guy’s money? Scrubs has been in syndication for almost ten years—you’re telling me Zach Braff can’t afford to supply the extra two million for his own vanity project? Did he spend it all on prescription drugs? What ever happened to good old fashioned Mel Gibson-style self-financing?). Somehow the fact that his current backers think Denzel Washington is a better actor than Donald Faison is supposed to make us think they (the backers) are artistically bankrupt, but at least you can tell Braff wants to make this flick, misguided though that may be.

Because with C.) we have Melissa Joan Hart, seen in a video explaining it all to us (get it?) and making what might be the worst pitch anyone’s made to anyone in the history of anything. The project here is called Darci’s Walk of Shame. Her mom’s in the video explaining to her what a walk of shame is (ew), using the phrase “booty call” as though it’s still 1999 (ew), and then telling MJH she thinks her daughter would be perfect in the film as the titular walking-in-shame Darci (ew, Mom!). MJH will be making out with hot guys—doesn’t the world want to see that? Isn’t that a great idea for a project guys? Guys?

It’s not, and everyone knows it, and that’s why she fell $1,950,000 short of her $2m goal. Though really, I get to wondering why the first two projects here broke records with the speed at which people forked over their hard-earned cash and the third failed pitifully, when in the end the con is the same for all three. Personally, I’d give my money to the crack head. At least he’s honest.

Ted McLoof

About Ted McLoof

Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.

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  1. Welcome to showbusiness…lol… having said that- i do like the idea of Kickstarter- creating something without the big corporations telling you what to do, when and how… however, one would need to have really deep pockets to participate…. ;o)

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