When I wrote last week about the rising trend of Hollywood figures using Kickstarter to solicit backing for projects that they might or might not have been able to finance through the normal studio system, I got back two main objections to the idea of giving Kickstarter backers equity in the projects they invest in. First, there was the idea that Kickstarter is effectively a means of garnering charitable support, the cause being to liberate artists from the crippling influence of profit-making system. Second, there was the objection that expectations of equity would put pressure on filmmakers to generate profits, leading them to make more commercial decisions than they might have otherwise, and eliminating the advantage of working outside the studio advantage in the first place.

I’m not exceptionally sympathetic to the idea that Kickstarter is or should be a charitable enterprise for any number of reasons. First, there’s the idea, which I think animates a lot of the anti-Kickstarter sentiment, and which is not entirely fair to people working in Hollywood, that there’s something distasteful about giving large amounts of money to people who already make a great deal more than many of the rest of us. More pointedly, I actually think it’s worth interrogating the idea that liberating artists from the studio system is an inherently great idea, much less one worthy of major charitable giving.

There are absolutely movies that couldn’t have been made by traditional studios, and there should be more venues that support funding movies that are about people of color, that are about poor people, that are about political subjects that aren’t going to be hot sellers but that also might not be popular enough to attract support from a big non-profit outlet like PBS. At its meritocratic best, Kickstarter can be a place where projects like those get discovered by people who will love them, and get the funding and support that other outlets are too blinkered to survive. But that isn’t actually particularly what we’re talking about here. We’re addressing the argument that Kickstarter can give artists who have long records of working in commercial film and television and making projects with studio backing the chance to buy their way out of the system. In the case of the Veronica Mars movie, that’s not really what’s going on. The movie, as I understand it, will still be made in collaboration with Warner Brothers, which is handling distribution of things like rewards. In the case of Zach Braff’s project, his Kickstarter is explicitly set up so he can exit a commercial system that would have provided him with funding, but under conditions he didn’t want to accept.

With that clear, it’s worth remembering what working in the system provides. It means excellent facilities and equipment. It means getting hooked up with distribution. It means the ability to reach out to talent more easily than might have been possible otherwise. While there are absolutely edits from networks and studios that end up being bad for film and television, and that are cowardly, conversations between executives and creators are not inherently some sort of poisonous thing, and genius—or even mere inspiration—is not inherently best off when it’s left to flourish unsupervised. This is a common misnomer that people on the outside of creative professions seem to have, but almost everyone I know who writes, or makes art, appreciates second opinions, and editing, and advice on what will find an audience and what won’t. 30 Rock was initially going to be a show about cable news. Lena Dunham works with Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner for a reason. We can argue about the results, but one thing that working with NBC or HBO gets you is access to Lorne Michaels or Judd Apatow, particularly for artists who are leveling up. I would be much more interested in bending the curve on what studios are willing to take on than in exiting the system entirely, whether a Kickstarter demonstrates a strong core audience for a given creator or project, whether it becomes matching funds, or whether Kickstarted funds are what let an artist buy access to a studio’s resources.
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After the success of Rob Thomas’ efforts to crowdfund a Veronica Mars movie through Kickstarter, it was inevitable that some other auteur with a significant fanbase would follow his lead. That person is now Zach Braff, who as of this writing has raised about $954,000 out of a $2 million goal to make Wish I Was Here, a movie he’s described as a follow-up to Garden State. Not surprisingly, a lot of people are irked, mostly on the grounds that Braff is rich and could have, in their estimation, funded the project himself. I’m less certain of that, because in my experience, even having a lot of money by normal-person standards doesn’t allow you to fund a string of high-quality Hollywood productions, and I understand the desire to look for a funding base you could go back to time and time again. But I am anxious about the idea that Hollywood projects will start flocking to Kickstarter in droves to get financing for another reason: we’re a long way from making sure that these arrangements will be truly fair to fans who are investing in their dream projects.

Movie projects aren’t the only businesses where crowdfunding is increasingly seen as an attractive alternative to other funding options. As Kylie MacLellan wrote earlier this month, “As banks rein in lending due to tougher capital rules and greater regulatory scrutiny, crowdfunding, which originated in the United States as a way to raise money for creative projects, has expanded rapidly as an alternative source of finance.” But even though President Obama in 2012 signed into law a bill that would pave the way for crowdfunders to get equity in the projects they invest in, the Securities and Exchange Commission has yet to complete writing the rules that would regulate that process. That means there’s still no legal pathway for people who contribute to projects through Kickstarter or through other portals to get equity in said projects, or for the people who set up those projects to give equity to them. There are powerful interests, including venture capital firms, who would prefer not to see crowdfunding become an alternative to them. And apparently the SEC has concerns, including about fraud, that it’s still resolving in its rule-writing process.

Frankly, I can also see a situation in which Hollywood projects would prefer not to be able to offer equity to the people who are willing to pony up to support their projects. It might be irritating to do rewards fulfillment, particularly if a large number of people invest. But Warner Brothers is helping Rob Thomas and the crew of the Veronica Mars movie handle that element of the funding process. And giving out those rewards, even if it takes some manpower, is ultimately cheaper than having to give up a stake in the profits. If a movie project neither has to pay back a large investor, be it an individual or an institution, and is prohibited by law from giving crowdfunded donors equity in the movie, then the people making that movie will get to keep more of the profits from it, and will get to the stage where they can make profits much more quickly. In other words, crowdfunding may let audiences support projects they’re enthusiastic about. But they also eliminate the need to pay anyone back.
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Welcome to the Veronica Mars television club! As I’ve written here before, I grew up as a devoted reader of Rob Thomas’s young adult novels, particularly the exemplary Rats Saw God and Slave Day, but not as a television watcher. By the time I had television and a cable subscription for the first time, Veronica Mars was off the air, and when I began remedying the gaps in my television education, I prioritized shows that were still running, like Mad Men, or whose creators were currently working on projects that I’d need to review, like The Wire and Deadwood. But now that the Kickstarter to fund a Veronica Mars movie has been so successful, and has opened up such interesting questions about funding models for cult hits and the role of fans as investors, I’m pleased to have a chance to catch up. As I mentioned when I announced this project, we’ll be doing two episodes on Mondays and Fridays. So let’s start with the pilot and the second episode of the first season. Be cool, Soda-Pop…

“This is my school,” Veronica explains at the beginning of the pilot. “If you go here, either your parents are millionaires, or your parents work for millionaires. Neptune, California. A town without a middle class.” It’s a phenomenal thesis statement for a show, even without the murder mystery and private eye schtick that follows, given the class homogeneity of most shows about teenagers, whether it’s the overwhelming wealth of the kids on Gossip Girl, the kooky security of the families on Suburgatory, or even the cookie-cutter comfort of The Neighbors. And there are other intriguing details that Veronica offers up. “The day the company went public, Jake Kane made a billion dollars,” she explains of her ex-boyfriend’s family. “Everyone who worked for him, down to the secretaries, became millionaires.” The sudden transformation of working people into the extremely wealthy is a major change for a community to go through, particularly one with such sharp inequality.

But through the first few episodes, that’s a bit more thesis than a paper that’s ready to turn in. Veronica’s dad may joke that they can eat steak like “the lower-middle class to which we aspire,” but Neptune is a town where even poor teenagers have cars or motorcycles. Veronica tells us that her mother left after her father lost his recall election because “The loss of status, the loss of income, was too much for her,” though the show doesn’t really have time to show us what their lives were like before and after the election, and it’s hard to imagine that the sheriff’s job actually lifted the family up into the upper-class, given that we’re told that a respectable middle class doesn’t exist. Rich kids may use a code* to set up their parties to avoid infiltration by people outsider their clique, but they end up drinking on a beach in Eli’s neighborhood rather than doing something that would be genuinely inaccessible to the teenagers they want to exclude. Rich people in Neptune may have captured the sheriff’s department, but through the first two episodes, given the ease with which Veronica and Wallace subvert the sheriff’s department, the show’s set up a fairly equal contest. It’s not clear what inequality actually means for life in Neptune yet.
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I tend to be pretty lucky around these parts. Occasionally, someone will show up in comments here and complain about the fact that we’re talking about pop culture rather than politics, and y’all will set that person straight. Once in a very little while, a true creep will show up and comment on my looks based on a cartoon of my face, my sex life based on…I’m not even sure what exactly, or fantasize about seeing violence done to me, in which case the banhammer comes out, sometimes before y’all can even run them off. And as a media critic who does a lot of feminist work, I hate the fact that I’m grateful for the fact that I’m not harassed for doing my job.

Which is why I was so angry to hear about what’s happened to Anita Sarkeesian. For anyone who’s unfamiliar with her plight, Sarkeesian wanted to start a project to cover a subject that’s not exactly radical: the portrayal of women in video games. Her YouTube account, in which she explains the project, was flooded with comments equating her to the KKK, calling her a “fucking hypocrite slut,” comparing the project to an act of war, and flagging the video as promoting hatred or violence. Her Wikipedia page was vandalized, her picture replaced with pornographic images, and people tried to get the Kickstarter proposal Sarkeesian was using to raise money to support the project shut down. Fortunately, in this case, despite past issues with harassment victims, it seems like Kickstarter’s been more helpful to Sarkeesian than not.

But the whole incident is a reminder of how deeply some men are invested not simply in the structures that provide them tangible advantages, but in the conventions that let them wallow in culture that indulges their worst, stupidest impulses. And if folks are willing to fight this hard against someone doing criticism of culture, there are others who will do worse to preserve the laws that give them privilege in the world. Culture in this area, as in so many others, is a canary in a coal mine. And women who complain about online harassment aren’t being oversensitive: they’re trying to stop an ugly cycle before it spirals out of control. Both psychologically and substantively, it’s key to our ability to do our work.

The move by Electronic Arts to allow non-EA developers to sell games they funded through crowdsourcing and built on their own on the Origin platform for three months without charging them fees to do so strikes me as a really smart, collaborative decision.

One of the things I’ve been doing out in Los Angeles is visiting sets and talking to people about web television. As I think is clear to anyone who’s watched The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl or Husbands, or played an indie game, the challenge isn’t necessarily getting quality products into production—though extra resources and access to equipment never, ever hurt—it’s finding a way for those products to reach the full audience that would enjoy them if only those consumers knew the products existed, and to make those products sustainable. You can develop the best game in the world, but if no one other than the people who crowdfunded it know where to find it, your chances of using that method to leverage yourself into the next level of business so you don’t have to go back to Kickstarter next time are not great.

Legacy media companies, whether it’s video game distributors or the television networks, have an enormous asset in their distribution networks. Even without a big marketing campaign, if your game is populated in a categories list or popping up in a recommendations list based on your other purchases, or if your show automatically starts playing after another program is finished streaming, that’s a huge advantage over simply hosting that game or show on a website and hoping the audience will find its way there. Right now, these games and these shows are small enough that they aren’t necessarily going to compete with big studio productions—either they’re cheaper so it’s not a financial tradeoff, or the games serve different needs—so the studios lose absolutely nothing by opening up their distribution networks to give the indies a boost.

And these early experiments give them a chance to figure out what a business model for collaboration might look like. EA could end up deciding to let indie games stay on for 90 days for free and longer for a fee. They could shorten the free window to a month, and then let games stay for 5 percent of each sale or whatever fee would make this a viable proposition for indie developers who would be getting sales they never would have had access to otherwise, and for the company whose only costs are expanded maintenance of an existing customer service infrastructure. And legacy media companies could track sales and views and advertising revenue to spot new talent. Legacy media and indie media don’t have to be inextricably opposed, and EA’s opening up its sales platform is a perfect illustration of what an experiment in collaboration might look like.

Kickstarter, the company that allows entrepreneurs (often artists) to raise the funding they need to support their projects through small donations, has achieved a lot of positive press for the things it’s given life to, from the second season of Jane Espenson’s web series Husbands to Womanthology, the collection of comics by women. While it’s great to see donors embrace daring, progressive projects, it seems that Kickstarter may not have policies that match up to its promise.

Artist Rachel Marone reports that, after a project she created was spammed by her long-term cyberstalker and she let her other donors know what the spammer’s motivations were, Kickstarter suspended the project, and banned and then unbanned her on the grounds that the notification was a violation of Kickstarter rules. When Marone’s manager wrote in to the company to ask for an explanation, Kickstarter’s Daniella Jaeger wrote this less than charming response: “If there is any chance that Rachel will receive spam from a stalker on her project, she should not create one. We simply cannot allow a project to become a forum for rampant spam, as her past project became. If this happens again, we will need to discard the project and permanently suspend Rachel’s account.” Because clearly this is happening as a result of Rachel’s carelessness, or negligence, or lack of respect for the system.

One of the reasons that Kickstarter ought to be so special is that it offers people who have been excluded from conventional funding, whether because their projects aren’t the kind of thing that studios and networks are interested in airing because they’re too daring and unconventional a la Husbands, or because artists themselves have trouble cracking conventional funding sources. Stalking victims can, through no fault of their own, end up in the latter category. Stalkers harass their victims by contacting them directly, but they can also make life harder for them in general. Stalkers spread rumors about their victims. They contact their victim’s employers and try to discredit them, suggesting that their victims are crazy, unreliable, unprofessional, disloyal. If the stalker is more powerful than the victim, or more established, it can work. In an industry like entertainment, where employment is project-based rather than long-term, that kind of thing can be devastating.

Now, one of the risks of Kickstarter, of course, is that people will end up providing funding to unreliable donees or projects that aren’t actually viable. And providing a method of feedback for donors is important. But if Kickstarter’s brand is all about helping small donors fund worthy projects that major donors are dumb enough to miss out on, they should be concerned with making sure that their own system doesn’t replicate the pitfalls of conventional funders, and empower the same old abusable hierarchies.

Those of you who loved Jane Espenson’s marriage equality comedy Husbands should be delighted: Jane and star Cheeks are writing the second season of the show now. And they’re turning to Kickstarter to fund it. I’m so glad to see we’re at a point where it’s basically a sure thing that an established artist can get project funding from their fans now. Not all artists want to work this way, but for those who do, and who want to explore projects that aren’t necessarily going to attract studio funding (like, say, gay romantic comedies rather than gay family dramas), it’s logical and wonderful that they’d be able to go directly to the people who want to purchase that specific product.

The interesting question, though, is what’s the next step beyond single-project funding? People will put up $50,000 for a season of Husbands or $100,000 for the first edition of the female-created comics book Womanthology (which, it was recently announced, will run as a regular series). But would they fund a full run of Community? Would they give Joss Whedon a million dollars for a project they knew nothing about whatsoever? Or would they contribute to a general project fund for an artist or a group of artists?

I had a long conversation with Linda Holmes from NPR, the filmmaker David Dylan Thomas, and the author Kevin Smokler about this at SXSW, which David wrote up in a great post here, with particular insight into the artist’s perspective:

For this model, the term “crowdscourced patronage” seems especially appropriate. As an artist, it’s an exciting idea because I find that the thing holding me back as a filmmaker isn’t money for equipment, it’s a lack of time because I work a full time job. What I need is money to live, not money for tools. In this model, a large enough subscription base could make that possible.

We discussed how that might skew the relationship between the artist and the audience and how it might make one a little too beholden to one’s fan base–I mean how disappointed would you be if you contribute $1,000 a year to The Whedon Fund and Serenity 2 sucks versus just paying $12 at a movie theater and having Serenity 2 suck? But I feel it’s only an extension/refinement of the current artist/fan relationship and, if Serenity 2 sucks, you can cancel your subscription. Although I suppose there’s a risk there that “burned” patrons will be less likely to fund other artists.

As the scale gets larger, both in terms of the projects and the pools of money at stake, the questions get more complicated. A show like Husbands might sell some merchandise, but it’s not necessarily going to generate revenue above and beyond the costs of production. Something like Cabin in the Woods, on the other hand, has the opportunity to make a bucket of money. If it had been funded by fan donors, or a subscription fund, would the filmmakers be obligated to pay the fund back so it can continue its work? Will fans be content to be paid in swag unrelated to the products they’re funding, as is the case in most Kickstarter campaigns, if the projects they’re supporting become commercially viable?

This kind of power to get projects off the ground is fantastic, but at some point, it also starts to raise questions of infrastructure and fairness. There are valuable things that come from working within the studio system when you’re working on projects of a certain scale. And fan power is incredible, but that also doesn’t mean it’s attractive to exploit it. Fans are stakeholders. And if they start acting as investors, maybe they should be treated that way.

The bridge is yours.

-Drama at the Oscars afterparties!

-And what do we want from the Academy Awards, anyway?

-Is Kickstarter on a path to outpace the National Endowment for the Arts?

-A photoessay on addiction.

-Bill Pullman will be your president again!