Spike Lee Reached His Kickstarter Goal With A Little Help From His Friends

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Zack Braff and Veronica Mars may have exceeded their Kickstarter goals quickly, easily, and with room to spare, but Spike Lee had a tougher go of it on the crowd-funding site. Thankfully, with only four days left to go, Spike Lee’s Kickstarter campaign for his yet-to-be-titled blood addicts joint has surpassed the $1.25 million it needed to get funded.

There’s an obvious difference between what Lee did on Kickstarter and those other high-profile campaigns. While Braff and Rob Thomas of Veronica Mars both relied on grassroots giving, with their movies getting an average of $66.75/backer and $62.26/backer respectively, Spike Lee’s Kickstarter is coming in at about $235.34/backer right now. And Lee relied heavily on $10,000 pledges from the likes of Steven Soderbergh to get his campaign funded. He gets by with a little help from his friends, I guess.

So where does Lee’s Kickstarter fall in the grand scheme of things? It’s likely an exception rather than a precedent. I’m as big a fan of Lee as the next cinephile and I have my autographed copy of Malcolm X  on DVD, signed in person by the man himself, to prove it. But there’s something unseemly about one of the best filmmakers of the indie era asking for money on the internet. That he needed so many pledges from so many high-end backers proves he was out of his element. I don’t think anyone wanted to see him fail, which looked like a likely possibility just a week ago. That would have set a rather disturbing precedent for all involved.

Yet, I don’t see someone like Soderbergh heading to Kickstarter because Lee was funded. Other established filmmakers have already decided to go to television instead, while the upstarts are sticking with Kickstarter and VOD to get their movies in front of audiences. Watching Spike Lee’s attempt at Kickstarter is like watching a Golden Age Hollywood director try to make movies in the New Hollywood era. There’s a simple lack of understanding inherent in his attempt.

Sure I’m glad I’ll be able to see a new Spike Lee joint. But my guess is 50 years from now, when historians and scholars dissect what happened to film in the 2010s, they’ll see Spike Lee’s Kickstarter for what it really is: An awkward misadventure.