The Throes Of A Kickstarter, Starring Russ Russo

28th August 2012

“wants eleven dollar-bills

you only got ten”

The throes of a Kickstarter, starring Russ Russo

by Pablo D’Stair

I finally met Russ Russo, in the flesh, after months and months of trading just the briefest exchanges via e-mail and twitter, finally met him about two weeks in to his Kickstarter for a film he had written called Heat Wave. I was out in LA on account of I had written an article concerning he and his co-star Natasha Alam for The Arts Magazine, was out there to meet up with folks about another article about another film, too.

***

I didn’t know exactly what to expect of Russ, his e-mails usually succinct (I’d go so far as to say peculiarly so) and from which I had gleaned his honest love for the poetry of Blake, his seething hatred for much of modern culture—indeed he had been a long time coming around to seeing Kickstarter as anything but a form of egocentric-hipster-hoboism—and his very nearly naïve idealism about actual art being recognized somehow as not only that, by as that and by the masses, no less.

He showed up at Bourgeois Pig, a coffee shop he had chosen for our get together and one that, due to a misunderstanding of LA roads, had cost me seventy dollars to get the seven miles to from my hotel by cab. He ordered a tea, briefly lecturing me on its benefits as opposed to the coffee I ordered, and we sat out in front, shielded only barely from the bleat of the middle day sun and its reflection off the warped pavement’s burped cracks and coughed potholes.

Mixed in with the somewhat random talk of this and that—my bringing up a short film I’d seen him in recently, he mentioning some good fortune a film writer friend of his had recently had, our debating our slightly-at-odds-to-each-other’s reactions and opinions to the Casey Affleck, Joaquin Phoenix film I’m Still Here—he would soberly bring up some of the reservations he had about the Kickstarter process and how it was somewhat dragging on his spirits, the uphill grunt it was turning out to be to get interest, let alone donations. It was two weeks in and—due in part to some curveball setbacks and in part to it’s-just-the-way-things-go—the project was not even twenty-percent funded. Already, everyone working on the piece had whittled themselves and their resources to the bone, at least as far as they were reasonably capable, and Russo brought up intricacies of the nit and grit of getting a film off, all more or less foreign to me.

His mood was by no means sour, though, and we soon began an aimless walk around the area, me talking my usual mile a minute, he talking as much, but at more even a draw.

One of the most surreal aspects of his current situation was that his involvement in a small parody film called Batman Maybe (a mash up of the hit song ‘Call Me, Maybe’ and the film The Dark Knight Rises) had turned him into something of an underground pop culture thingamajig—he was confronted with random postings of his likeness every day, his name appearing in small articles everywhere—an amount of attention, he laughed, that dwarfed all the attention toward him from all the stage and film projects he had participated in over the past decade put together, and an attention based entirely around the fact that he looked a lot like Christian Bale and did a funny head jiggle dance.

I could see where that might be odd—seeing his name around variously in hundreds of places a day, while at the same time feeling like a failed panhandler Nowhere Man trying to eek out one dollar donations at a time for his passion project.

Russo explained that—and he felt it must be the same for a lot of working actors and writers and directors he knew—the surreality had kind of lost its edge, though, now was something he felt familiar with and even—he seemed he might be admitting but not wanting to put so fine a point on it—that he had resigned himself to, found a sort of comfort in.

He explained how only some few weeks previous he had been granted a general meeting with the casting agent for a popular primetime drama program on one of the major television networks. Showing up, he had been enthusiastically greeted, but only referred to as ‘Rockstar’ by everyone, patted on the arm, ushered into an office. The casting agent had proceeded to—with no ceremony—hold up various headshots of actors and to deliver scoffs and mockery, asking Russo—always saying ‘Right, Rockstar?’—for encouragement or input. Finally, Russo had been asked ‘When are you getting off tour?’ and it was only at that moment discovered that, due to a scheduling snafu, the agent thought he was meeting with the member of some popular music group and that Russo, the indie actor, would be his next appointment. This ended badly.

Russo seemed to think it was all pretty much a laugh, though, going so far as to correct me that I need not boycott the program, as the casting agent had nothing to do with the actual show, probably never even watched it.

This segued in to a discussion of indie film, in general, and to the idea of how it could be considered a triumph for a small film (he referenced on he had been in called Blue Collar Boys) to, after existing for three years as a finished product in a limbo, get a week long engagement on three screens in three cities, while at the same time a studio system film would be considered a miserable flop and ridiculed by folks far and wide for only holding the number five slot at the box office for two weeks before sliding down into the oblivion of ‘home video’ and grossing a mere worldwide hundred million.

As to Russo’s own film, he explained how one of the interesting dilemmas he was facing was that in casting Kiowa Gordon and Bronson Pelletier as the two leads, he knew there was no choice but to somewhat court these actor’s devotees, all the while knowing they were devotees for no reason other than that the two young men had played sexy shirtless werewolves in the popular Twilight film franchise. Russo—and for a moment I thought it might be a put on, except for the very somber way he kept taking breaths, like he was the one giving himself the hard time and no one else, we had even stopped walking, stood at the edge of a random lawn, the homeowner having a middle day beer and once or twice nodding at us—related that it made him feel uncomfortable to fundraise from an audience he knew was not the audience ideally suited to the material, that it felt a curious position to be in to even mention Twilight when his film was a Jarmusch-ian, slow burn existentialist riff more in the spirit of Waiting for Godot or Giuseppe Tornatore’s A Pure Formality than anything either ‘pop,’ ‘in-the-now,’ or that would make young girls giggle.

To lighten the mood, we generally bad mouthed all celebrities who took part in Siri commercials, up to and including Martin Scorsese—though in case anyone was listening (like the man drinking on his stoop) making sure to also point out all the masterful things these artists had done, it all the stranger they were endorsing an only marginally able-minded talking telephone.

I admitted that I was fascinated by the particular mathematics of Kickstarter—the other film I was in LA to meet people about had utilized the platform as well, though the folks producing it were much higher on the food chain and had made the money they needed, lickity-split, and then some—how I had offhandedly researched that the combined starring cast of Heat Wave had something in the neighborhood of three quarters of a million followers on various social media, not to mention their personal friends and connections, meaning that to generate the twenty thousand dollars they were after it was either a matter of point-two-five-percent of the people each contributing one dollar or of every person contributing two-point-five-cents or something silly sounding like that, but here were Russo et al., stuck well behind the eight with the clock hands spiraling into a close knot.

The thing with Kickstarter, in Russo’s experience, was that the money was hard to come by, but the participation poured in. His film had found its Director of Photography through contact related to the fundraising, cameras had been offered, dollys, cranes—during our conversation, even, I arranged it by telephone with my older brother to have not only his band provide some music, but my brother in turn had, within an hour, fifteen musicians willing to work on the project and two engineers willing to give time and studio space, all gratis, just for the sake of doing the thing.

All of this, Russo said, it seems should make things easier, but the budget had already been set to account for not having many of these things, or at least not to the degree the opportunities had come up, that these donations were gravy, but did nothing for the core nutrition needed. Russo had it that undertaking a feature length film project for no dough usually depended on random kindness—that or luck, or both—or else the film would be made but would have piece of shit music by a band who offered and the filmmakers had no choice but to include, every shot would be filmed as one take (and not for Paul Thomas Anderson effect) and other such amateurish horrorshow: the trick was to not overly compromise and say ‘Let’s do it for nothing and whatever it turns out to be is what it turns out to be’ while at the same time not to get overly caught up in a ‘money is always the answer’ mentality.

“You can’t throw money and get talent…you throw money, you get people that are only after that money, picking it up…the thing is for the film to entice, the work to entice.” This, Russo said, was always his way of approaching projects, and that this philosophy had put him touch with enough likeminded folks to have brought Heat Wave to the page, now it was a matter of lifting it off.

***

I had to break it to Russo inside of another week—his fundraising still only at about twenty-two percent of total needed—that The Arts Magazine had pulled some dipshit tactic, canceling on a photo shoot to accompany my article, so I had pulled the article from the publication, full stop (I was able to, through more random kindness, find a home for the article at the indie literature site Outsider Writers). Russo related some other woes that had come up concerning a misunderstanding about Norman Reedus being attached to the project and how the blowback from that had been putting a crimp in things.

Meanwhile, his name continued to be posted everywhere, his image in foreign newspapers as ‘the Christian Bale look-a-like’ or sometimes even as ‘Christian Bale’ by organizations that did less fact checking, the Batman Maybe video a full on viral hit. Even incorporating that little nugget of ‘fame’ into the fundraising seemed to have a kind of negative effect, he mentioned in e-mail at one point. It seemed people who would be thrilled to see him ‘look like someone else’ would think it awful of him to try to ‘cash in on that.’ This was something I honestly wondered what to make of: being made into a pop-culture in-reference and then chastised for pointing out that you have not only a past body of work, but future plans that don’t exclusively involve being remembered and joked around about by D-list celebs in another decade when VH-1 does a new I Love The…show.

***

As of writing this, there are two days left in the campaign and some last minute boosts have come into play. A single donor going by the twitter moniker @Faileas said that they would donate $100 for every retweet of a message, up to $5000—this being met inside an hour, the donor doubling down (having given a 48 hour window) that each retweet in excess of the 50 needed to make the 5k would generate an addition $10 pledge.

In essence, all that is left now is to hope that people are willing to spend enough of someone else’s money to make an artist work see light.

Considering the conversations I’ve had with Russo, I wonder if the surreality is numb on him, still, or if his own coupling with the absurd is renewed with vigor, will perhaps make its way into his film of two young men descending into an ever rising heat to arrive, hook or crook, at whatever nowhere they might.

***

TO SEE THE CURRENT STANDING OF THE PROJECT MENTIONED, VISIT: HEAT WAVE

***

Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer. Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing October, 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.

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