Please support our Kickstarter Project to Rescue our film “Bill and Desiree: Love is Timeless”

Short version:

We are running a Kickstarter project to raise money reprint BILL AND DESIREE: LOVE IS TIMELESS. For a pledge of $10 you will get a copy of this film on DVD. We need 196 $10 pledges to meet our Kickstarter goal, and that will be enough money to cover the cost of mastering, replicating, and transporting a new pressing. Here is the link to the project:

THE BILL AND DESIRE: LOVE IS TIMELESS KICKSTARTER PROJECT

The project runs until January 14, 2013. That will give us enough time to get the title pressed, shipped to the warehouse, and then for copies to be sent back out in time for Valentines Day. To get an idea of what this movie is like, I’d invite you to watch the clip embedded below. It’s entirely work-safe, and utterly charming.

So what do you say? For $10 you get a nice movie, support bold independent cinema, and one of your fellow Leaguers. Helluva deal, I say! Please make a pledge:

THE BILL AND DESIRE: LOVE IS TIMELESS KICKSTARTER PROJECT

Now for the long version.

The long version is that my wife and I were doing Kickstarter before Kickstarter was cool. In fact, we were doing Kickstarter before Kickstarter even existed. Here’s what I mean.

Our first film Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story, 2003 had been a minor hit (which is to say it sold out it’s first run of 1000 DVDs, stored in our garage, and we were about midway through the second pressing. We had shot another film, Xana and Dax: When Opposites Attract, in early 2004, but it still wasn’t finished, but we had been dribbling out clips to maintain interest in the work. On the strength of that interest, we shot a few more films in early 2005, even though Xana and Dax was still in post-production.

And oh, after the Indian Ocean tsunami we decided that we should start trying to conceive a second child, and if that didn’t happen quickly, we’d look into adoption.

So by spring of 2005 we had a handful of our erotic documentaries in various states of completion, my wife was pregnant with our second child, Marie and Jack was selling well, but not nearly well enough to live on, and money was tight.

So what did we do?

We decided we’d offer “pre-sales” of the unfinished titles, at about half price. As a matter of surety, we told people they could back out at anytime, for any reason, or for no reason at all.

And guess what? It worked!

Between the four titles we offered at a pre-release discount, we sold about 3,000 pre-0rders. Not enough to live on in the three years it took me to cut the films and master the DVDs, but it helped. We honored our refund policy, but only had about a 2% attrition rate. Sometimes we’d get angry letters, “Why are you taking so long!!!!” and we’d offer a refund, and the person would say, “No, I’ll wait.” (I guess they didn’t want to lose access to the discount price!)

Looking back on it, I can’t believe it worked.

An unknown film production company doing a reverse Wimpy; instead of asking for a hamburger today with a promise to pay on Tuesday, we were asking for people’s money now, and a DVD sooner or later. The only thing that explains it is that our films were so different from anything else that people were willing to take a chance, and willing to wait, and I suppose that says something about just how special these films are.

Of course this begs the question: if direct pre-sales worked so well then, why are we doing Kickstarter now?

The short answer is that the internet at the end of 2012 is a very different place from the internet of 2005, especially for the independent artists. You simply can’t set up a website and expect that anybody is going to find you, ever.

You have to be where the people are, and that means being on Facebook, or Amazon, or YouTube, or iTunes, or the Apple App store.

Or Kickstarter. And so that’s where we are.

And in a way that’s appropriate.

The Real People, Real Life, Real Sex series was a hybrid production. For the lovemaking, where we didn’t want to overlight, we shot film, using a pair of custom modified, eighties vintage Ecliar ACLs. That was the best way to make the lovemaking look lustrous and gentle. For the interviews, where we use more lighting fixtures and could have a make-up artist dash in and make “fixes” we used the latest 24P video cameras.

When we mixed them I “invented” (someone told me I could patent the process) an over-cranked telecine transfer technique that let us go straight from 24fps film and 24p video to 24P DVD without ever introducing pull-down. (Yeah, I know, this is deep in the weeds techie, but these films were as innovative in their technical approach to mixing film and video as they were in their creative approach to mixing sex and cinema, and I’m proud of that.)

And so now we’re going to mix up of old-school, Bruce Brown style, schlep your wares up and down Eight Avenue in a cart (Yeah, I did that. Putting up posters and selling DVDs ahead of Damon and Hunter’s New York City premiere in 2006) with nu skool Kickstarter crowd-funding. It won’t make us enough money to live on, (that’s what the neopaleolithic catamaran is for) but it will help keep a very sweet movie in print.

So what do you say? For $10 you get a nice movie, support bold independent cinema, and one of your fellow Leaguers. Helluva deal, I say! Please make a pledge:

THE BILL AND DESIRE: LOVE IS TIMELESS KICKSTARTER PROJECT