Alternative Financing

The press loves a Cinderella story. When Jeremy Saulnier premiered Blue Ruin at Cannes, the media quickly crowned it the ultimate Kickstarter triumph—a brilliant film entirely crowdsourced by the internet. It is a lovely narrative. It is also a lie. Kickstarter did not finance Blue Ruin. Terror and credit card debt financed Blue Ruin. The Illusion of Crowdfunding The reality of independent financing is far more brutal than a successful marketing campaign. The crowdfunding push accounted for roughly 10% of the film’s $420,000 budget. The true engine of the production was absolute, terrifying personal risk. Saulnier emptied his family’s savings. He refinanced his home. He famously racked up $80,000 in American Express credit card debt. He did not ask the internet for permission to make his film; he forced the film into existence by wagering his own financial ruin. ...

The modern filmmaker is obsessed with begging. They beg the studios for development money. They beg the streamers for acquisition. They beg the gatekeepers for permission to exist. Bref, it is exhausting to watch artists prostrate themselves before a machine designed to grind them into dust. Jim Cummings, however, decided to simply bypass the guillotine entirely. For his feature The Beta Test, Cummings rejected traditional studio financing and refused the charity model of Kickstarter. Instead, he treated his audience as genuine financial partners. ...

The modern independent distribution model is largely a parasitic enterprise. Distributors convince desperate filmmakers that they are incapable of releasing their own art, offer them a humiliating minimum guarantee, and then steal the rights to the film in perpetuity. Jim Cummings and the team behind Thunder Road recognized this scam for what it was and decided to dismantle it. Alternative Financing: The Micro-Budget Blueprint Bref, Thunder Road was willed into existence for a meager $200,000. Cummings utilized his Sundance-winning short film as a proof-of-concept to raise an initial $36,000 on Kickstarter. The rest was cobbled together through private equity and personal savings. ...