Here’s your easiest route ever to associate producer status on a documentary film. The Brooklyn-based studio Rumur has spent the last six years producing Battle of Brooklyn, a documentary chronicling Daniel Goldstein’s fight against the Atlantic Yards development project and his effort to save his home at 636 Pacific St. Now Rumur is short on cash and time, and the studio needs some help to save its own project. With the help of the funding platform Kickstarter, they’re trying to raise $25,000 by December 1 to receive a matching grant that will meet the rest of their needs. You can pledge $1 (or more, they prefer) at Rumur’s Kickstarter page. There are several donation levels and each gets you a copy of the movie and Rumur swag like T-Shirts and DVDs. High rollers (not us) who donate $2,500 get an associate producer credit, but the producers’ perhaps more realistic hope is to raise $25 each from 1,000 people in exchange for a DVD. As of this writing, they had raised $5,381 from 66 backers. (Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner also has a deadline to make—plans to develop may be nixed if bonds aren’t issued by Dec. 31.)
Kickstarter, a Brooklyn-based enterprised that launched over the summer, seems to actually work: dozens of projects have met, or even exceeded, their funding goals on the site so far, including a comedy improv game, a “floating doctors,” medical-relief cruise, a design chronicle of the Obama campaign and a pop-up camper attached to a shopping cart, along with lots of other lofty endeavors that are entertaining but difficult to discern from the descriptions.