The past few years have been trying times for old-fashioned American bootstrap entrepreneurialism, Bobby Ampezzan writes in Tuesday’s Style section.
Enter the age of “crowdfunding,” the direct-appeal marketization of online social networking popularized by Facebook and Twitter, made possible by online bill-pay mechanisms like PayPal.
“When it was explained to me, it was supposed to be the savior of independent film in a bad economy, and I got excited,” says Levi Agee, a Little Rock filmmaker and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette film columnist whose first outing, Rapture Us, wrapped up principal shooting over the weekend.
Sites like Indygogo.com and USAProjects.com helped him meet a $7,500 fundraising goal.
Read more about the crowdfunding phenomenon in Tuesday's Style section of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.