Years ago, a screenwriter friend of mine found himself in a large hotel ballroom surrounded by Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists.
He was a writer, doing research, and sometimes during the fact-gathering process a writer has to hang out with some unconventional and eccentric folks. He was working on a psychological political drama, and he wanted to get the atmosphere right. There was – and still is, I’m told – a large community of researchers and interested people who remain convinced that the assassination of President Kennedy was part of a complex conspiracy and not the work of a single gunman.
These days, of course, people with similar interests find each other on the internet. Back then, though, my writer friend found out about the group from reading some badly photocopied flyers pinned up to a bulletin board in a local coffee shop. So he went to the meeting – what we would now call, I guess, a “meetup” – and wandered around the tables and talked to people carrying huge binders of clippings and (according to them) evidence.
The script didn’t get sold. I’m not sure why. Back then, movie studios made lots of pictures about all sorts of things. A studio might release 30 or 40 movies a year, and they thought nothing about greenlighting a movie that might have limited appeal.
Studios don’t make a wide variety of movies anymore. Mostly, they make pictures where giant spaceships try to blow up recognisable world landmarks – or something very similar.
The television business is different. On television, with a universe of channels, things can get very granular.
This is why, if you’re a typical television audience member, you often hear about shows from friends or the media and they’re described as “hits” or even “monster hits” and you’ve never heard of any of them. Never seen one. Wouldn’t know where to find it if you were looking.
A hit, in its current end-of-Hollywood definition, is any project that has enough passionate loyalty from its audience to, if it wished, organise its own Kickstarter campaign.
Kickstarter is a crowd-sourced funding engine on the web where anybody can pitch any kind of creative product and gather investment funds from the largest and most unpredictable audience in the world – the internet. And the people who seem to be using it the most profitably are show business people.
Veronica Mars, for instance, was a television series that was cancelled in 2007. It never had a large audience – not large enough, anyway, to keep it in production – but the people who watched it were passionately devoted to it. And they remained committed to it for years. Enough, apparently, to participate in a Kickstarter.com campaign to finance, as a group, a Veronica Mars movie.
The audience, in other words, didn’t wait for some studio executive or narrow-eyed accountant to greenlight the movie. They greenlit the project themselves. The campaign raised more that US$5 million for the project – it was orchestrated by the creator and executive producer of the show – and took the matter into their own hands.
It was released last week and did pretty well at the theatre. So far, it’s grossed a little more than US$2 million, which isn’t bad for a limited release in the first weekend. It’s on the track to make all of its money back, and then some. Of course, the trick is, those who kicked into the Kickstarter were entitled to download the movie on its release, which means that the biggest and most hard-core fans – the kind, in other words, who might be tempted to gather in a conference room at a hotel with binders and leaflets – weren’t compelled to buy a ticket. But they have managed to create enough momentum that it doesn’t really matter. The experiment was a success
Which means that lots and lots of television writers and producers with failed television shows in their pasts are thinking the same thing: “I wonder if I could have my own Kickstarter?”
If my friend had only written his assassination-loving script today, instead of the old days, before the internet took hold of us all, he wouldn’t have worried about selling the script to a studio. He could have Kickstarted it himself. That hotel conference room wasn’t just filled with people who “love the assassination.” It was filled with investors. They just didn’t know it yet.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
