I’m all for viable funding mechanisms for projects, artistic and otherwise, that couldn’t get greenlit through conventional means. But as a CNN Money analysis of the top fifty most-funded projects on Kickstarter has discovered, enthusiasm for an idea doesn’t remotely translate to the ability to deliver on promises:

CNNMoney contacted the creators of the 50 highest-funded Kickstarter campaigns with estimated delivery dates of November 2012 or earlier to determine their shipping status. We found that only eight of those 50 projects hit their deadline. Sixteen of the 50 projects haven’t yet shipped. Among the 26 projects that shipped but went out late, the median delay was two months, although some outliers took much longer. The most delayed project in our data set, a home espresso machine being developed by ZPM Espresso, is nine months overdue and doesn’t expect to ship until mid-2013.

“To say we’ve learned a lot about engineering, design, manufacturing, marketing and customer service is … well … an understatement so extreme as to be laughable,” ZPM Espresso’s founders wrote in a recent update to their Kickstarter backers.

I’d hate to see donors start to turn away from the project of investments after getting burned, and I wonder if it’s time to start considering some restrictions that could lower the failure rate. In addition to setting a floor for the amount of money projects have to raise to go forward, maybe Kickstarter could offer an option to set a ceiling on the number of donations or donors a project will allow. That would both create a sense of urgency to get investors in the door, and set certain limits on the number of products that a producer, like the people behind the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, who intended to produce them by hand and had to figure out alternate, larger-scale production when they were deluged by orders that have lead to significant delays, can be required to deliver.

It’s probably also important to consider the question of refunds. If producers are about to blow deadlines, either a voluntary notification system that gives donors the option of withdrawing their investment, or a more structured appeals system that requires producers to justify the delays or be forced to refund donations to investors who want them. I’m sure these are not processes Kickstarter is interested in getting involved with, given the manpower they’d required, the fact that enforcement would probably scare some users off the site, and the dilution of the simplicity of the site in connecting inventors to investors. But preserving user confidence on the donor side may require that Kickstarter do some work to make sure the people pitching projects on it are actually capable of delivering.

Note: This post discusses plot points from the Hunger Games trilogy, Harry Potter, and Song of Ice and Fires series.

The death of Katniss’ sister Prim is the emotional climax of the Hunger Games trilogy: She dies a martyr, caught in a wave of explosives designed to target first-responders while working as a medic on the front lines of the final clash between the rebellion and the government in the Capital City. While there’s some dispute about who was behind her death, and whether it was necessary, there is no question left in most readers mind’s that the tactic used was monstrous. And yet outside the realm of young adult fiction, U.S. drone strikes uses a very similar tactic known as the “double tap,” against terror targets.

 

A joint report from Stanford/NYU on U.S. Drone policy released in September noted:

“There is now significant evidence that the US has repeatedly engaged in a practice sometimes referred to as “double tap,” in which a targeted strike site is hit multiple times in relatively quick succession. Evidence also indicates that such secondary strikes have killed and maimed first responders coming to the rescue of those injured in the first strike.

The same pattern emerged in @dronestream’s tweets of U.S. drone strikes from 2002-2012. So, while whether or not the double tap is official U.S. policy remains unclear due to the secrecy surrounding much of the U.S. drone policy, all of the evidence suggests the U.S. repeatedly employed a tactic that results in first-responder casualties. And it’s not just a questionable tactic: UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings Christof Heyns calls the second strike in a double tap akin to a war crime. But while there are efforts to bring armed drone strikes “out of the shadows” for a larger conversation and widespread disapproval of U.S. strikes in the global community, there’s no sign of major changes to U.S. drone strike strategies on the horizon.

Of course, it’s not hard to understand why it’s easier to see the inhumanity of using tactics that hit first responders when the person in question is the protagonist of your favorite series’ sister (whose protection was the catalyst for the entire trilogy’s plot) than when those rescuers are people you’ve never heard of half a world away. By its very nature literature builds empathetic bonds between readers and sympathetic characters; we get to know them, care about them, and mourn for them if they’re lost. But literature can also explore our own humanity and help us have challenging discussions about the morality of the world we live in and the policies formalizing that morality.

And “double tap” is just one of many examples of the disconnect between the ideal morality we hold high (and try to teach our youth through young adult fiction) and the policies that define our culture. In the Harry Potter series using the torture curse, Cruciatus, carries one of the harshest penalties in the Wizarding world (though one that doesn’t appear to apply to our protagonist when he uses it in the name of good). But in our real world, the U.S. government used extraordinary rendition tactics a European Court recently said “amounted to torture” against a terror suspect and relied on “enhanced interrogation tactics,” the nasty euphemism for torture, throughout much of the war on terror.

Straying out of young adult fiction, A Song of Ice and Fire’s Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane is a brutal character living in a brutal world, but one of his most well known atrocities is the murder of two royal children during the collapse of House Targaryen. Even in this context, the moral characters such as Ned Stark think of the murder of the children (and the rape of their mother) as an ugly stain on Robert Baratheon’s rebellion, even if they acknowledge it as politically expedient. In our real world, most people’s gut reaction is that there is no context when the wholesale slaughter of children can be justified. And yet there are rumblings that children are being considered legitimate targets by U.S. forces in Afghanistan after a current military officer was quoted in a piece published in The Military Times titled “Some Afghan Children Aren’t Bystanders.”

There’s no question that these characters, and these bad acts, all provoke powerful moral reactions in readers. But it’s not clear yet whether these stories shape their fans’ opinions off the page as well as on it. As a generation of young adults grows up both on protracted American involvement in ugly conflicts abroad and fiction that tries to outline moral laws of war, it’ll be fascinating to see whether their moral imaginations stay fired after they close books and walk out of movie screenings.

In the wake of the murder of elementary school students and their teachers, as well as the mother of the shooter, Nancy Lanza, in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday, Hollywood has struggled to demonstrate sensitivity in its programming and premieres. The Weinstein Company cancelled the Los Angeles premiere of Quentin Tarantino’s characteristically violent revenge period drama Django Unchained, which ends with a bloody gun battle at a slaveholding plantation. Though its finale depicted an act of terrorism rather than gun violence (though such violence was threatened, but did not emerge), Homeland put up a title card before the episode began that warned that some images in the show might be disturbing in light of the Newtown massacre. And shows from Family Guy to Best Funeral Ever have postponed episodes until later dates. It’s one thing for networks and studios to observe a mourning period. But the more interesting question is whether the massacre will prompt longer-term changes in the kind of material Hollywood considers both marketable and appropriate.

In a series of Tweets, Time television critic James Poniewozik laid out the problem with these short-term measures. “THR: TLC delaying BEST FUNERAL EVER bc of Newtown shootings. Apparently becomes appropriate again Jan 6,” he wrote in a series of messages. “This recurrent thing, postponing shows bc of sensitivities–I get it. But resist the idea that something is ‘inappropriate’ for like 2 weeks…Either it’s inappropriate in general or it’s not.” There’s something sadly perceptive in the cynicism of that proscribed period of sensitivity. Hollywood’s acting on the recognition that after these increasingly-common tragedies, the members of their audience not directly affected by the deaths are hyper-cautious for a brief period, call for changes in all sorts of culture and policy, and then return to their preexisting level of sensitivity and allow those demands for a different path to peter out. The studios that have pulled or labeled programming or cancelled events are acting like savvy marketers, rather than like moral agents.

This is, of course, their prerogative and purpose as large companies. But just as it appears that President Obama and members of Congress are, for the first time in political memory, renewing the push for gun control legislation, I’m wondering whether some networks may decide to change where the line is for what they’re interested in airing.

It’s been a period of intense cruelty to children on television. On Sons of Anarchy, the children of the main character, Jax Teller, have been kidnapped and in car accidents. This season of Breaking Bad reached a turning point when Todd, a newcomer to the meth cooking operation run by Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, shot a young boy who happened upon the men in the aftermath of a train robbery, though there was little evidence that the child understood what little he had witnessed. When children aren’t the victims of extreme violence, they are often being enlisted in those acts themselves. On Game of Thrones, while Sansa Stark is beaten by grown men and threatened with sexual assault, her sister Arya, on the run and disguised as a boy, kills another child to escape from King’s Landing, and must fight in battle to protect herself. And this season on The Walking Dead, Carl Grimes both witnessed his mother’s own impromptu caesarean section and then killed her to prevent her from turning into a zombie.
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I skipped over Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, about a fictional first lady substantially based on Laura Bush, when it was released in 2008, in part because in the final year of the Bush administration, I wasn’t in a mood to feel sympathy for anyone in the first family. But when I finally read the novel, four years removed from the Bushs’ departure from public life, and four years into the Obama administration, I found myself surprisingly touched. The journey of Alice Lindgren from small-town Wisconsin, to a job teaching public school, to marriage with Charlie Blackwell, the son of a prominent family, and eventually to the White House required me to confront the extent to which I’d put aside my tendency to be curious about people because of Laura Bush’s place at her husband’s side. And while the novel holds Alice accountable for her decision to subsume her independent political and moral instincts in her husband’s public life, it also makes clear the cost that she’s paid for a decision that, from the outside and in the real world, I treated as if it was despicable and idiotic.

First, there is the car accident. In real life, Laura Bush’s accidental killing of her high school classmate, a young man who has in some cases been reported to have been a current or former boyfriend of hers, when she ran a stop sign has sometimes been treated as a sign of frivolity or self-absorption. American Wife takes seriously the prospect that the boy Alice killed was, if not her boyfriend, about to assume that role in her life. In the novel, Alice kills Andrew, who had previously dated her best friend Dana, on the way to a bonfire that would have been their first official date. “I loved him, I loved him completely, and I knew that he loved me back,” she writes of the plan for that meeting. “Or maybe this is only what I think now. But it was all we ever had! Approaching each other, him from the gym, me from the library—this was when I walked down the aisle and hew as waiting, this was when we made love, it was every anniversary, every reunion in an airport or train station, ever reconciliation after a quarrel. This was the whole of our lives together.” Alice Lindgren was a person before she was First Lady, and she continues to be, even as she becomes a symbol. It’s easy to forget that people we dislike deserve that minimal courtesy.

And it’s interesting to see how people we might once have extended the courtesy of considering their actions in the most charitable light become the people we stop extending any courtesies to at all. With Alice, her withdrawal from her life as a teacher, and from the public performance of her own principals, begins when she meets Charlie, who is initially charmed by her dedication to her job as a librarian, but who has enormous reservoirs of need of his own. Alice speculates that her husband pursued office not “Because he wanted to prove that he was as smart and ambitious as his brothers, journalists speculated, or because he wanted to avenge his father’s own humiliating presidential run in 1968…[But] because of his fear of the dark. Because if he were governor, and then president, he’d be guarded by state troopers and later by agents, he’d never be far from people specifically assigned to watch out for him; he might be assassinated, but he wouldn’t have to walk down a shadowy hallway by himself.” What the novel doesn’t say is that public office also allows Alice to share the burden of Charlie once she begins to learn what kind of person he is, the contempt with which he’s regarded by his family, the enormity of his need. “I felt such an intimate kind of anger,” she thinks of him during one of their fights. “Was this what marriage was, the slow process of getting to know another individual far better than was advisable? Sometimes Charlie’s gestures and inflections were so mercilessly familiar that it was as if he were an extension of me, an element of my own personality over which I had little control.” His public life allows him to direct those gestures and inflections at other people, just as the arrival of Reverend Randy, the man who counsels Charlie through his addiction and brings him to born-again Christianity, lifts the burden on Alice to support Charlie where he is most unlikable.
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The bridge is yours.

-The holiday Hark! A Vagrant is absolutely wonderful.

-James Poniewozik is not fond of The Hobbit.

-Danny Boyle declined a knighthood.

-Hulu’s revenues are up 65 percent from the previous year.

-Now you can buy Game of Thrones beer!

I think about the way journalism is portrayed in pop culture quite a bit, and yesterday for Slate, on the occasion of the swan song of Gossip Girl, I spent some time writing about how television and movies fail to deal with a phenomenon the media itself has adjusted to: bloggers. In particular, I was interested in a bit of a gender split that seems to be occurring. Female bloggers are shallow, or gossipy, or in need of tutelage by older reporters (male and female), who are presented as a distinct species. But men may have it worse: they’re crazed conspiracy theorists:

If State of Play’s portrayal of Della was irritatingly smug, the way USA’s miniseries Political Animals treated its young female blogger was downright insulting. The miniseries countered old-school journalist Susan Berg (Carla Gugino) with blogger rival Georgia Gibbons (Meghann Fahy)—not just a shallow, style-obsessed chronicler of D.C. nonsense, but a selfish slut who was sleeping with Susan’s boyfriend. To the show’s credit, Georgia at least got a shot at proving she was competent, scooping Susan on a story when Susan’s old-school focus on source development lead her to delay the news too long. But even if Georgia got the story, she was still a bad girl, if personally rather than professionally, and Susan was the hero, even if she got so cozy with her sources that she ended up sleeping with the First Lady’s son. In this formulation, reporters get a free pass on crossing ethical lines, but their blogger counterparts are dumb little girls who need to be taught valuable lessons.

Male bloggers don’t fare much better though: While their female counterparts are merely unsubstantive, men who blog for a living are loons, and sometimes ones who do enormous damage. In Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, Jude Law plays Alan Krumwiede, a disgruntled blogger who keeps getting his freelance pitches turned down by a newspaper editor. When a global pandemic strikes, Alan sees his chance to become a prophet: He spreads the rumor that he’s cured himself of the disease using forsythia as an herbal remedy, and urges his readers to ignore public-health officials. His misinformation renders the population more vulnerable—including that newspaper editor, whom he leaves to die in the street—and he’s ultimately found to be in the pay of a pharmaceutical company eager to profit off the crisis. When, at the end of the film, Alan’s arrested, he claims he’ll be bailed out: He’s evil, but the stupidity of his followers may be even more dangerous.

Either way, it’s interesting that movies and television haven’t accommodated themselves to the idea that bloggers and journalists can actually be the same thing. Maybe now that Hollywood went gaga for Nate Silver, we’ll get hero bloggers, or at least bloggers with integrity, in a couple of development cycles. I’m guessing Jim Sturgess ends up playing Silver.

The Black List, a list of the best unshot scripts of any given year, as picked by a group of almost 300 film executives, came out yesterday afternoon. Reading through it, I was struck by some trends—lots of scripts by guys, lots of bank robberies, lots of science fiction but almost almost no fantasy. But I was intrigued by a lot of the projects on the list, and these ten which most caught my eye are just a few of the scripts that seek out political resonance, or have settings like the Dust Bowl or Bleeding Kansas.

Script: Rodham
Author: Young Il Kim
Description: “During the height of the Watergate scandal, rising star Hillary Rodham is the youngest lawyer chosen for the House Judiciary Committee to Impeach Nixon, but she soon finds herself forced to choose between a destined path to the White House and her unresolved feelings for Bill Clinton, her former boyfriend who now teaches law in Arkansas.”
Why I’m Curious: Hillary Rodham Clinton is a fascinating figure. And people have asked for years why she chose to stay with Bill Clinton, it’s an intriguing question how she chose him, and life in Arkansas, in the first place. There are a lot of movies that attempt to capture election zeitgeists, and I wouldn’t be remotely surprised to see Harvey Weinstein snap this one up for a 2016 release. But this is a smarter-than-usual way to approach a figure about whom so much has written that it seems like nothing new could be revealed.

Script: Story Of Your Life
Author: Eric Heisserer
Description: “Based on the short story by Ted Chiang. When alien crafts land around the world, a linguistics expert is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat. As she learns to communicate with the aliens, she begins experiencing vivid flashbacks that become the key to unlocking the greater mystery about the true purpose of their visit.”
Why I’m Curious: I’ve written about my obsessions with smart, alternative alien invasion scenarios over and over again. It’s been fifteen years since Contact, the last great movie about trying to talk to aliens instead of immediately going to war with them, and three years since District 9. We are long overdue.

Script: Shut In
Author: Christina Hodson
Description: “A woman who tries to raise her catatonic son on her own suddenly discovers a shocking secret about him.”
Why I’m Curious: Since Adam Lanza shot his mother, Nancy, before heading off to massacre students and administrators at Sandy Hook Elementary, there’s been renewed attention to mothers raising difficult children by themselves face, and what kind of support we could give them. I’m curious to see a strong psychological portrait that examines those kinds of challenges.

Script: Man Of Tomorrow
Author: Jeremy Slater
Description: “In an alternate 1940s reality, the US Government makes a deal with an indestructible gangster to kill Hilter in exchange for the city of Chicago, which he will build into his own utopia. Unfortunately his model city never comes to fruition and both he and his Bureau liaison get much of the slack for destroying one of America’s greatest cities and now the government wants him dead.”
Why I’m Curious: Urban planning, alternate history, and killing Hitler? I’m so game.
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