The Chutry Experiment

I’ve been thinking about crowdsourcing and crowdfunding quite a bit lately for a couple of writing projects and have become increasingly fascinated by the techniques people use to ask for funds on sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. For this reason, I’ve become intrigued by the reaction to the spectacular failure of the “Katie Allen is Getting a Life” campaign. As this indieWire article illustrates (see also the Film School Rejects superb takedown), the project has become aligned with “what not to do” when seeking to raise funds.

What’s odd about the Katie Allen campaign is that it seems to have quite a bit going for it, including three talented indie film actresses, but for someone who has expertise on the industry, Linda Stuart’s appeal is otherwise completely tone deaf. Including the actresses’ names in the space for the title makes little sense, and the lack of a video also seems like a missed opportunity, especially given that Thora Birch, Heather Matarazzo, and Jennifer Elise Cox are ostensibly attached to the project. I won’t repeat all of the points raised by the indieWire piece. It’s so astonishingly bad, though, that I have to wonder if Stuart posted this precisely to provide an object lesson on the ways in which directors attempt to pitch their projects to the public.