I was amused by the tales of shipping woes. Every other kickstarted I've done has been a pre-order on a book, where the whole point is shipping thousands of items

Oh, btw, did the Pink Five DVDs ever ship? I know I didn't get mine, so I was just curious. And, Trey, your memory was a bit off as I know I kicked in for the DVD plus every other item, so it wasn't just a DVD-only option

Like Zach Braff, Spike Lee is using Kickstarter to preserve his artistic vision. Interesting.

I'm not aware of a controversy regarding her use of Kickstarter. As I recall, it was more that after breaking crowdfunding records, and raising over 11 times what she asked for, she put out a call for designers or something and tried to play the "I can't afford to pay, labor of love, do it for the exposure" card. To which the reply was "Amanda, the ENTIRE INTERNET knows that's complete bullshit. You just got over a million dollars in free money. If you want work done, fucking pay for it with the money you raised for that exact purpose."

It's the million dollars. Kickstarter runs on goodwill and she was shown a lot of goodwill, people would like to see some of that returned. This has nothing to do with Kickstarter itself and everything to do with human interaction. It's a question of decency. Was is wrong? Legally, no. Socially, possibly, someone certainly thought so and then the internet happened.

I think some of it can be attributed to the tone and wording on her call out for musicians. Also I wouldn't be surprised if this had been a none-issue had it been a reward, as you suggest, and framed as a privilege instead of a plea.

I think I expected to see Spike Lee hopping on Kickstarter at some point. Back when he had budget problems on his Malcolm X biopic, he asked several black-American celebrities to help get the project to the finish line. Big names like Michael Jordan and Oprah wrote fat checks. They were not investors, and they (the story goes) had no say in anything. All Lee promised them was that if they gave him a donation—i.e., a gift—he'd use that money to finish the film.