At this year’s Academy Awards, Inocente became the first Kickstarter-funded film to win an Oscar (for best documentary short). Around 10% of the films accepted by the Sundance, Tribeca, and South by Southwest film festivals were funded using Kickstarter. And several weeks ago, a high profile Kickstarter campaign was launched to fund a movie version of UPN/The CW television series Veronica Mars. The goal of $2 million dollars was reached within the day, record breaking both in its quickness and the amount of money raised. As I write this, the total amount has surpassed $4 million. The attention on Kickstarter these days struck me as significant in the current production landscape, and I set out to write a post on new trends in production financing. Almost as quickly as the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign succeeded in its goal, my colleague Myles McNutt published a post that addressed what this campaign might mean for teaching fan cultures in the future and suggested that perhaps participating in a Kickstarter campaign might be more about being involved in the experience of a project’s creation, being a part of the journey, than the final product. While the topic of this specific Kickstarter campaign has been widely discussed, I’m curious how it relates to broader trends in production financing.

Although people who give money to projects on Kickstarter do so in order to create a final product, the idea that Kickstarter provides donors with access to the experience of the production process is an important aspect of donating. Looking at Veronica Mars as an example, the incentives for donating include email updates throughout the production process and a copy of the final shooting script. These engage donors with the process of filmmaking; indeed, part of Kickstarter’s appeal and success seems to come from the fact that people enjoy feeling like they’re part of the action. The campaign also just announced that it would offer email updates for the $1 tier donors (lowering the barrier for people to get involved) in an attempt to bring an even larger number of people into the project and break the record for number of backers. Financing a project through upfront, donated funds differs from traditional funding methods (where production cash is often borrowed and repaid after the release of the product and subsequent earnings). We have yet to see how big budget projects will be affected by receiving up front financing with no need to repay loans (although it should be mentioned that a large production like the Veronica Mars movie could be budgeted at much higher than $4-5 million, depending on the discretion of producer Warner Bros.). With Veronica Mars, people who contribute more than $35 receive a digital copy of the movie, and therefore will likely not pay to purchase it after the film is completed. Since they have a copy of the movie at the time of its release, it is also questionable whether some of them will skip the theatrical release and just watch their own copy, potentially cutting into future profits.

The concept of grassroots fundraising is by no means new. In my own area of study, independent LGBT films and filmmaking, I know of numerous instances where filmmakers raised money from friends, family, and others who were dedicated to seeing alternative images than those offered in Hollywood films. Nicole Conn, for instance, raised money for her 1992 film Claire of the Moon by finding lesbian backers who were interested in creating a film that was made by and for lesbians. The lack of lesbian images in film at the time inspired people to give money and create their own images. Conn is an interesting example in this context because she funded her most recent film, A Perfect Ending, in part through a Kickstarter campaign. Using the same foundation, grassroots financing from a fan base dedicated to creating more lesbian images in film, Conn has updated her methods to make the most of emerging technological opportunities.

This idea of user supported media extends beyond Kickstarter and other particular fundraising practices. Emerging digital distribution models can offer another area of direct audience support and participation. Again pulling from my own area of study, niche marketing sites such as BuskFilms offer audiences around the world the chance to support filmmakers more directly. This site offers a large selection of lesbian films (and is expanding into the full range of LGBT films) available for streaming rentals. Unlike larger distribution companies that have high overhead costs, BuskFilms is able to give a larger percentage of rental fees directly back to filmmakers who can then re-invest the money in future production projects. Similar to the process of grassroots fundraising, this model of distribution allows for greater audience participation in supporting filmmaking projects.

User supported distribution models are not limited to film. To give another example, this time outside my area of study, the Cultural Capital project (or CultCap) focuses on resolving the difference between the music industry and cultural music consumption by creating an online, non-profit patronage system and social network that uses an adaptive “algorithm to allocate equitable compensation via micropayment.” By eliminating middlemen and gatekeepers, the site would in theory fund musicians through fan engagement. Although the site is in a theoretical rather than functional state at the moment, the drive behind the site’s linking of fans/consumers with artists/creators of content reflects the same impulse of Kickstarter and Buskfilms.

Taken together, these examples suggest both a desire for users to play a more direct role in production of media projects that they feel passionately about and the potential that technological advancements and internet connectivity can offer the industry. I do not mean to imply that utopian ideals of directly user-funded and supported content will imminently wipe out established modes of production, although the success of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter might tempt studios to engage with “pre-selling” future projects. People invest in media production every time they pay for media (whether through buying a movie ticket, downloading a song through iTunes, paying for a cable subscription, etc). However, the concept of putting in this money before or during production, or paying media makers more directly, carries significantly different connotations. While some have speculated on the effects Kickstarter might have on the future of filmmaking, only time will tell how these shifting models of funding and distribution will affect established modes of media production.

This is an impressive use of a paratext (commenting on other paratexts, no less!).

The Simpsons’ opening sequence always offers fun variants in the blackboard and couch gags. Some of Bart’s blackboard lines have been provocative (such as “I did not see teacher applying for welfare”), but we mostly know what tone to expect. As with all opening sequences, it’s a familiar totem. Messing with opening sequences is thus always interesting, and here it’s especially effective. The tone changes, the color changes, and it’s prolonged – way beyond the length of most couch gags. It’s also made clear that this is from a different author (hence the Banksy tags all over the first part of the sequence), which makes it all the harder to work out who is talking here. Is FOX in on the criticism? Is Matt Groening? The whole Simpsons crew? While we might be familiar with guest directors on television shows, this is the first time I’ve heard of a guest director of an opening sequence. Once it’s over, no less, the show returned to business as usual. While the clip above doesn’t fully convey the effect of this, its cut from a dying unicorn back to the peppy Elfman theme song gives us a hint of it, since it’s transported us so far away from The Simpsons and The Simpsons opening sequence that we know that going back is awkward and feels wrong. What I like about this is that it makes the audience complicit – now that we’ve seen this criticism of the show’s production, we’re just going to go back to watching an episode about a little league baseball team? What does that say about us – not just about Rupert Murdoch, FOX, and The Simpsons – and about our role in facilitating all this?

The sequence therefore poses a dilemma and a problematic that must be solved or reconciled. It requires discussion. After all, the other part of this is that it leaves us wondering who signed off on this. Immediately afterwards, given the sequence’s attack on FOX, I started seeing many, many variants on Twitter and blogs of the following sentiment, “Wow, I’m amazed FOX let that on.” First, let’s dispel a myth – FOX can’t decide what goes on The Simpsons. James L. Brooks negotiated a “no notes” policy into the show’s contract, so FOX can either play something or cancel the show; they don’t get to nit-pick. But in pointing that out, I’m nit-picking. Since what’s important here is not whether FOX did know about and approve the sequence, it’s how this makes people think of FOX differently, especially when so many people likely believe FOX either approved it or didn’t know it was happening. So, once more, it requires some unpacking.

And finally, it leaves us with uncomfortable questions about Groening and co. How are they complicit, and are they simply making this a joke so that they and we can say, “Oh yes, that is bad, isn’t it? But we know about it, so it’s all okay. Let’s just get back to business as usual, shall we? Pass the Cheetos”? I was left with many conflicting responses here myself, on one hand thinking it was a brilliant statement, on the other hand feeling deeply uncomfortable that this is the show’s response to its labor practices – making an opening credit sequence rather than actually fucking doing something about them. Yet, the contestation of authorship in which the sequence engages leaves us wondering whether the American animators (who are largely responsible for the couch gags, by the way – these rarely involve the writers) can do anything about The Simpsons Factory. Those American animators, after all, aren’t a wonderfully privileged lot – they’re paid more than their Korean counterparts, for sure, but they’re still jobbing animators, who FOX makes pay huge sums for their own artwork if they want to give a cell to a kid or friend for a present, for instance, and who are hardly tearing around Burbank in their new $80,000 sports cars. As such, the sequence not only draws our attention to the deeply problematic labor practices that surround the show, but also to the contested and conflicted nature of production and authorship, reminding us that there are many different people involved, and inviting us to ask who precisely does what, and how much control anyone has.

Inevitably, the sequence’s critics dislike it because of their own answers to the above questions. But for me, the sequence works precisely because it doesn’t offer its own answers, instead posing a whole slew of questions. That may piss a lot of critics off, as satire often does when people want cute, simple answers, but this is Bart’s blackboard, not Beck’s.

… Yet I also feel obliged to tack on a concern with the racialization at play. It has yet to be confirmed that the Korean animation studio is a “sweatshop,” as depicted here – yes, its workers make less than Americans would for the same task, but the leap from this to “sweatshop” has always struck me as racialized (we don’t call production studios in Vancouver or Prague “sweat shops,” for instance), especially when some critics slip and think the show is animated in China or (as a reviewer of my Simpsons book insisted) in “South East Asia.” The sequence’s creation of an undifferentiated, silent and obedient, animal-torturing Asian here only exacerbates that racialization. The Simpsons is animated in South Korea (not the North, as the uniformed head of the studio here might suggest), dolphin-killing would seem to be Japanese, and pandas – along with much construction of toys – are Chinese. Yet they’re all in a big Asian factory (albeit also housing a unicorn, and hence clearly fantastical). Sadly, this aspect of the sequence doesn’t offer itself up for discussion, and much of what I’m seeing online skips over it entirely.