Spare Some Change?

Every now and again I worry that I watch too much TV, but then people start talking about some shows I have never heard of before and that lessens my guilt a little. Judging by my lack of knowledge concerning the shows everyone tells me I should be watching, it appears I am not watching nearly as much TV as most people (either that or I'm the only one watching certain shows). For example, yesterday everyone was talking about the show "Veronica Mars" because they are about to make a movie out of it. If you are like me and not aware of it, the show was on for a few years in the mid-00s and started Kristen Bell as a teen crime-solver, a la Nancy Drew. Now I had heard the show referenced before but had never seen an episode and never thought it was a particularly big hit, so obviously didn't know there had been a movie in the works for a while but they had run out of funding. Since I didn't even know that you can imagine my surprised to learn that the show had such a loyal following that the fans are stepping up, anxious to cover the production costs. Bell and the show's creator went to the website Kickstarter, where independent artists make internet pleas for public funding for their various projects, and said they needed to raise $2 million in the next month to get the movie to happen. Well, they hit that total in about 11 hours and the donations continued to roll in, which means the movie is a go. While I am happy about for the cast, crew and fans of the series, I am slightly concerned about what this could mean for the future of movie-making.

In some ways, this is truly awesome for the fans to know that they can have this much influence and get the movies they really want to be made put into production with a little pushing. Thanks to the internet it doesn't even take big donations from a single person - a few thousand people kicking in whatever they can adds up pretty quickly. If this caught on it could seriously change the way movies and TV shows are made, because this is proof that not only was the studio wrong to cancel the show, they were also wrong to drag their feet about making the movie for this long. (Honestly, someone is getting fired over this because if the fans could raise that kind of money in the same amount of time it would take you to fly to Rome, just think about how good the opening weekend box office could have been.) Also, I would imagine that being listed as one of the producers of a movie is going to be a fun aspect that will top just about any other fan interaction they could have. I don't care how much "Star Wars" memorabilia someone has, they can't say they helped get the movie off the ground. Lastly, if you donated enough money you were given a walk-on role, which is pretty much the pinnacle of fandom. Being in a movie always beats watching a movie.

However, it does slightly concern me that movie stars are asking for our money to make these films, especially on a site like Kickstarter, which is supposed to be for struggling artists and not Hollywood people with a long list of credits to their names. This isn't some guy trying to produce, direct, edit and star in an important documentary about starving children in Africa and desperately needs cash to be able to rent the equipment - this is Warner Bros. Studios, the company which produced more hit television shows than you can imagine. (Seriously, their Wikipedia page is crazy.) $2 million may be a lot of money to you, me and anyone else in the world, but they probably spend that on catering. Under normal circumstances I would be concerned that perhaps the studio had fallen on hard times, but the reality is their finance people took out a formula for expect cost versus expected profit, had a number in mind and weren't giving the producers more than that. At least they were smart enough to have Bell ask the internet for money because I hardly think movie studios should be looking for a handout from the fans, especially when the money these fans contributed to the movie's production is not going to lower the cost of a ticket and you know damn well the studio won't give people a return on their investment, even if the movie made hundreds of millions.

It just seems to me that raising this money shouldn't be the fans' responsibility. Isn't paying $10 a ticket, $4 for a drink and then having to sit through commercials anyway enough? Between product placement and merchandising it feels like these movies are doing just fine making money without our help. Still, I have to concede that no one made these fans donate money to the billion-dollar film industry. And who knows, maybe some good came out of it? I'd like to hope that if the people were on Kickstarter and had a few extra dollars left over they looked around and found a less-publicized project to donate too while they were there. At least that way some smaller projects got an unexpected bump. That positive would be in addition to the fact that in the end everyone is getting what they want: Bell and "Veronica Mars" fans are getting their long-awaited movie and the studio isn't sinking any more money than they have to into the project. I'm sure my hesitation at the way they raised money only comes from the fact that I was not a viewer of the program and have no intention of seeing the movie and that if the project in need of funding was something a little closer to my heart I would have been more than willing to kick in a few bucks. Which reminds me, how much do you think I would have to raise to get them to do a "West Wing" reunion show?