Kimberly Emerson

Are you sitting down?  I have news that could re-shape the world of movie-making.  Or, you know, not.  But let’s pretend I know something important.    (Those of you worried that I am about to embark on a new form of animation using reshaped marshmallow fluff may relax.  I am not good with arts and crafts, and I doubt that will ever change.)

Kristin Bell as Veronica Mars. Don’t worry, she’s really a marshmallow.

Back in 2004, the world met Veronica Mars.  Sassy girl detective, solving crimes for fun and profit in Neptune, California, with the aid of her ex-sheriff dad and her pit bull, Backup.  Sure, she might seem a bitter teenager at first, thanks to the social disgrace she and her father have experienced ever since her father arrested one of the town’s wealthiest men.  Get to know her better, however, and you begin to see the truth expressed by her best friend Wallace:

…Underneath that angry young woman shell, there’s a slightly less angry young woman who’s just dying to bake me something. You’re a marshmallow, Veronica Mars. A twinkie!

Many of us loved her, but evidently not enough of us, because in 2007 CW (the network formerly known as UPN) took her off the air.  Her devoted fans, known as marshmallows, observed the ritual mourning period by mailing Mars bars to the network in protest.  The writer and creator, Rob Thomas (no, not the lead singer for Matchbox 20), tried his best to regenerate the series in another format, allowing Veronica to grow up a few years and join the FBI.  When that didn’t fly, he wrote a feature film around the character and pitched it to Warner Bros., the studio that produced the series and owns the Veronica Mars concept.  Warner Bros. didn’t think the film would make money and turned it down.

Fast forward to 2012.  Thomas pitches a new idea to the studio – he and series star Kristin Bell will raise the money for a low-budget movie on Kickstarter.com, fundraising site for the modern entrepreneur.  If they can come up with $2,000,000 for the movie, will WB allow them to go forward?  Yes, says the studio.  Why not?  Should this idea actually work, they won’t have to put up any cash and as owners of the franchise, they’ll still get a cut of whatever profit is made.  (Even with that, Warner Bros. almost pulled the plug.)

The Veronica Mars Movie Project went live on March 13, 2013.  Thomas and Bell both wrote pleas for fans to donate, and had negotiated a series of kickbacks depending on how much you donated.  (Rewards ranged from a pdf copy of the script at $10.00 to a very small speaking part in the film for $10,000.00.)  Would they succeed or, as Thomas postulated, “fail in spectacular fashion”?

Within eleven hours, they had the $2 million.

No, really.  Eleven hours, as in less than half a day.  Plus, they had twenty-nine more days on the fundraiser to see how much they could add.  The initial deluge has of course slowed.  At present, they have $3.7 million, from a total of more than 57,000 backers.  How much will they make in the end?  Too early to say.  There are still twenty-two more shopping days to go.

The whole episode fascinated me.  People donating to a writer to make a movie?  Sure, I’d seen it happen on a smaller scale all the time.  Creative people are always trying to raise money for some project or other, because filming anything is expensive.  Even an extremely low-budget film where all actors are at best making scale (actor minimum wage) can blow through a million bucks with ease.  Studios like Warner Bros. routinely spend $30 million on a “small film.”  (Their words, not mine.)

But Rob Thomas and Kristin Bell aren’t grad students looking for start-up money, they’re seasoned Hollywood professionals.  If this is a success – and I’m thinking raising almost double the amount you asked for qualifies – what message will this send to the industry?  On the one hand, I love that the fans helped to make this happen.  On the other, does this mean we’ll have to pay to have movies made from now on, as well as pay to go see them?

Comments on the website echoed both sentiments.  Many fans were ecstatic, no matter what the effect.  A Veronica Mars movie, at last!  Others saw this as the death of indie film making.  (“Kickstarter is for the little guys.  They  had a name attached to their project already!”)  I couldn’t quite get in the groove with the latter folks.  Rob Thomas had a dream, and he found a way to make it happen.  Yes, he had Kristin Bell, who by her own admission is dying to do the movie.  (“I would have put on Veronica Mars: The Circus to bring it back,” she told Entertainment Weekly.)  But perhaps the naysayers missed the part where the studio still turned him down?  As my actor buddy Diana reminded me, “Every time a star says they put their own money into a project, that means they asked other people for the money first and everyone said no.”  Really, despite the idea of my own personal movie costs going up, I couldn’t help falling a little in love with the idea that the fans made this film a reality.  Instead of a studio executive leafing through prospective scripts, the fans pointed to an idea and said, “We want to watch THAT movie.”  Yes, Warner Bros. will still make money off the deal, but then, they have agreed to pay for the distribution, which runs in the millions of dollars.

Rob Thomas gave a good argument for the system in an interview with the Huffington Post, pointing out that really, they weren’t charging extra, they were pre-selling the show.  (Any donation over $35.00 gets a digital download of the movie a few days after it opens, in addition to the pdf of the script and a t-shirt.)  Honestly, some of the gifts were pretty cool.  For a $400.00 donation, Rob Thomas and Kristin Bell would both follow you on Twitter for a year.  If I were in the position to spend money getting my name out there, I might have done that one and considered it a worthwhile publicity investment.

One way or another, the world won’t end because of this situation, and maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to it.  With stress at work and daily heartbreak in the news, it’s nice to relax with the thought of a good movie.  If I have to pay a year in advance to see something that I actually deem worth viewing, maybe it’s a decent investment.  How about you?  Intrigued?  Infuriated?  Let’s hear it.

At any rate, it beats the heck out of the studios all copying each other and allowing us to choose between five more rehashed vampire movies next year.

Kimberly apologizes to all the vampire fans out there.  She realizes that she may be in the minority, wanting to see the undead stay dead for the next couple of years. 

Tags: detectives, indie films, Kickstarter, Kristin Bell, marshmallows, movie studios, Rob Thomas, vampires, Veronica Mars, Warner Bros