Literary LA documentary falls short of Kickstarter goal

Tom Lutz of the Los Angles Review of Books and filmmaker Kurt Olerud had high ambitions for Kickstarter: $23,000 to help fund a film of interviews with literary figures in Los Angeles. Alas, the campaign expired yesterday with just $1,268 pledged.

Lutz talks about the review's financial situation briefly in an interview posted Wednesday at The Outlet:

Q: How far has LARB come, exactly, from when it didn’t exist to where you want it to be? Over halfway?

We are launching a membership program this week, like an NPR station, and knew we needed some premiums to offer people. I thought maybe the world had enough tote bags and coffee mugs for the moment, and we hit on the idea of a print journal — one thing we know about our prospective members is that they like to read — as a premium, a free subscription for members. We will be launching a book line as well. The books will also be offered as premiums at a certain level of membership, and both the books and journal will be available in books stores, physical and online.

How far have we come? In some ways we’ve already come farther than we first imagined. I didn’t expect to have thousands of readers in India, thousands in Germany, France, Turkey, Brazil, and China — over 30% of our readers are outside the US. And in some ways we haven’t come as far as I expected — I though publishers would step up faster to support us, as they did for the New York Review of Books when it started. We are not halfway to the budget we need to thrive.

It is a communal, living project, and so it continues to evolve in ways that I wouldn’t have predicted, and I wouldn’t necessarily want to be able to predict where else we are headed. We have dreams of doing much more, we hatch new conspiracies every day….

LARB has a new Facebook page here.