Where Spike Lee Turned to For Funding His Next Movie

Spike Lee, director of the iconic movies such as 'Do The Right thing', "25th Hour', 'Malcom X', and 'Inside Man' has turned to crowdfunding website Kickstarter to fun his latest movie project.  Was it successful?  Let's just say he had a goal of raising $1,250,000 and managed to raise a whopping $1,418,910 through 6,421 backers by the deadline on August 21, 3013.

Here's Spike Lee's Kickstarter funding website:
 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spikelee/the-newest-hottest-spike-lee-joint

What is Kickstarter, you ask?  It's a crowdfunding website where people of all walks of life can pitch their project with a funding goal and deadline, and backers can pledge different monetary amounts to fund the project and help it meet its goal by the deadline.  Usually, the project proposer will give the backer an item, experience, or incentive for each amount.  Spike Lee offered signed jersey's, t-shirts, posters, and other rare merchandise from past movies he's made.  Backers could give as little as $5 to receive an autographed patch, pin, or bumper sticker.  The higher backers who pledged $250 got two tickets to the premiere in a city near them (L.A., Chicago, New York City), all the way up to the $10,000 backers who got dinner with Spike Lee and his wife along with attending a New York Knicks game at Madison Square Garden- 29 backers will enjoy this experience.

Kickstarter apparently got some flack in the media from letting Spike Lee promote and get backing for his movie on Kickstarter (because he's not an unknown like many of the project hopefuls are), so they put up a blog post called "The Truth about Spike Lee and Kickstarter" to set the record straight:  Spike Lee has helped Kickstarter gain recognition and a lot of other projects get funding.  So there, naysayers!  Read the blog post below:
  https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/the-truth-about-spike-lee-and-kickstarter-0

Many backers for Spike Lee's project had never even heard of Kickstarter, or been to it's website, so that generated a lot of traffic to it's site and may have funded other projects going on at the same time.  Overall, this use of social media and crowdfunding on Kickstarter was a huge success for Spike Lee, and of course, a huge success for Kickstarter as well.  Kickstarter is a great way for people to get backers for projects where they would otherwise not have the money to get their project off the ground.  It gives backers a feeling of being part of something greater than they are, and they get to be a part of making it happen.  In this case, just seeing the movie when it comes out may be all a backer wants in the end, but they also have a piece of memorabilia or a once-in-a-lifetime experience to go along with it.