Another celebrities has taken to Kickstarter, but before you rolls your eyes, know that this is a “first of its kind” experiment by comedian David Cross. In other words, this project may be well worth your money.
Cross is gearing up to release dark comedy Hits, his directorial debut that stars Matt Walsh, James Adomian, Wyatt Cenac, and Amy Sedaris, among several other comedy greats. The movie is finished — they showed it at Sundance last year — but the team needs help getting it distributed. In addition to taking it to theaters, they want to release it via BitTorrent. In Cross’s own words:
We went to Sundance and while we received offers from some great distributors, their plans with the film were a little lackluster… so we decided to release it ourselves in an unusual way, as an experiment! We’re launching it nationally in theaters and on BitTorrent as a Pay What You Want release! It will be on iTunes and other platforms but they will be more traditionally priced.
This is where the money will go:
We want you to decide how much tickets cost and you pay artists directly, not distributors or studios. This is an experiment, a first of its kind to see if we can make it more sustainable for both fans, and filmmakers. In order to do this in theaters as widely as possible we need your help to raise $100K. We are distributing ourselves and there are costs associated with making all of this happen. In addition to theater rental fees, we need to cover our marketing and publicity efforts. We ideally want to be in 50 markets, but the more money we raise the more theaters we can be in, so if we go over $100k, we’ll just expand our plans, which would be great!
The prizes are pretty sweet, too. Individuals pledging $5,000 will get to be an extra in an upcoming Cross project, like the Mr. Show reunion or The Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Todd Margaret. If you fork over $7,500 or more, you can welcome Cross as your child’s new Godfather…or just hand over their social media account to him for a week, which is basically the same thing.
(Photo: Adrianne Behning Photography)
