Kyle
Are you old enough to remember the days of HSX.com, before 9/11 it was the place to go to invest virtual money into real life actors, actresses and movie projects, called the Hollywood Stock Exchange. Now this wasn’t real you weren’t really investing money in a movie it was more of a game, kind of like fantasy baseball. If the movie did well the actors and actresses did well and then you made more virtual money.
Well shove all that aside because a St. Louis startup called passer.by is working on a crowdfunding website for real movies. Passer.by was founded by childhood friends Todd Metheny and Josh Clayton. Clayton has some experience in the film business but for Metheny it’s a new venture based on a love of movies.
Passer.by will be a way to get film projects off the ground with the help of many people, from friends and family. They have several funding options and plans they are working on. Metheny says they are riding out the “JOBS act” and the SEC to see if the entire crowdfunding model will be a go.
As for how much it costs for the film maker, right now they are launching the first 20 films with the film makers “paying what they choose”.
“It’s certainly a risk, but it’s exactly the kind of risk that we’re excited to take,” Passerby CEO
Todd Metheny said. “Some people will choose to pay nothing, but it’s a matter of trust. Our
mission is to be the crowdfunding option that puts filmmakers first, and to do that we need to
create a relationship with our users that is built on trust.”CCO Josh Clayton is exciting to see how filmmakers react to the “pay what you choose”
option. “We’d love to be ‘pay what you choose’ forever, and we very well might be,” he
said. “We just need to make sure it’s possible to cover the expenses related to running the
platform at that level. We believe it’s a favorable experiment for the filmmaker.”
We spent some time talking with Metheny about passer.by check out the interview below the break.