Okay people, time to step up to the bar. A month ago, a new project was announced on Kickstarter starring my friend and colleague Lew Bryson. The project is being produced by Rudy Vegliante of Green Leaf Productions and the idea is to create a series of six half-hour television shows starring Lew. With 30 days to go, only 6% of the needed funds to make the show a reality have been raised. A mere 65 people have pledged $3,716 of the $60K needed. Frankly, that’s pathetic.
C’mon, beer people. I’ve pledged $300, and would have gone higher if I wasn’t trying to make a rather large purchase at the moment. Surely, there are more than 65 people who have benefitted from Lew Bryson’s reviews, laughter, rantings, writings, speaking engagements, etc. Just his being in the beer community makes it a better place. We’ve all seen what happens when non-beer people try to make a TV show about beer. At best it comes off half-baked, full of misinformation, half-truths and propaganda. At worst, it’s a disaster. I’ve personally been involved in trying to get several such projects off the ground. None have gotten very far. It’s tough. Most people outside our rarified community don’t quite get why we’re so passionate about it, and that shows in the finished products that have been made so far.
So here’s a chance for one of our own to be the voice of craft beer, celebrating it in a way we can probably all agree with. And with guaranteed laughter, guffaws and unbridled chuckles thrown in for good measure. Lew is the right big galoot for this job.
Lew has just over 2,500 twitter followers, I have a little over 4,000. Even assuming for some overlap, that’s got to be around 6,000. If each one of you pledged just $10, Lew would be home for Christmas, with all the funding he needs. It’s the price of about two pints, give or take. Surely that’s not too much to create a one-of-kind television show about craft beer, by craft beer, for craft beer. Think of it as giving back to the beer community that has enriched your life, in the spirit of the holidays. Give Lew Bryson a Malty Christmas and a Hoppy New Year.
You can get all the details from my previous post or, better still, directly from the Kickstarter project page for American Beer Blogger.
Okay, I’m climbing back down off my soapbox. Resume holiday merriment.
Me and Lew at Berkeley’s Triple Rock last year.
I hope the music they used in the video on the Kickstarter site is not their theme for the show. It just doesn’t come off as something the kind of people that might actually watch it on TV would be into. Which brings me to the incentives/gifts for donating. I’ve known a few people that’s used Kickstarter for projects that have been successfully funded. I know this is a big project, but they have to offer more, particularly at the lower levels. There needs to be more digital offers, 1. To cut down the overhead to contributors and 2. Know your potential audience more. For me, there’s nothing interesting to me until $100–which is out of my league. $5 is all I’m drawn to donate because anything less is petty. Since I’ve seen better concepts from web only beer shows, anything more seems unearned. Now if they offered a digital download of the pilot for $25, I might be there. Completely different level of production, but Louis C.K. just did an entire one hour comedy show for digital download or streaming only for $5. You also got a download of a DVD labal and case cover if you wanted to burn a DVD of it. He made $500,000 in sales the first five days. I’m 31. I don’t have cable anymore. There’s NO reason for me to have cable. None of my close friends have cable anymore–some of which are in there 40s. I now run my computer strait into my TV. I mean learned about this project and writing this with my phone for crying out loud. Why would I want a physical promo card? I’m not saying I don’t want them to succeed, it just seems as if they are setting themselves up to not succeed.