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'Girls' on set filming, New York, America - 14 May 2013
Zosia Mamet on the set of HBO's Girls. The actor and daughter of David Mamet has asked for more than $30,000 on Kickstarter to make a music video with her sister. Photograph: Zelig Shaul / Rex Features
Zosia Mamet on the set of HBO's Girls. The actor and daughter of David Mamet has asked for more than $30,000 on Kickstarter to make a music video with her sister. Photograph: Zelig Shaul / Rex Features

Zosia Mamet: the trouble with crowd-funding

This article is more than 10 years old
Sophie Heawood
Kickstarter seemed like a utopia for the skint-but-inspired to fund their work. Until the celebs got involved

Girls, the HBO series about bratty Brooklyn hipsters, got a kicking when it first aired from people who weren't sure they wanted to watch privileged young white women musing on their existential angst, or whether they might be up the duff, or if they just, kind of, like, accidentally smoked crack. The cast and creators all seemed to be daughters of the famous, including Zosia Mamet, who plays Shoshanna, and whose father is the hugely successful playwright David Mamet. It irked some.

Others (including me) argued that these girls are aware of their privilege, that the show is a knowing parody, and that it's dark and hilarious. But all that was before Zosia Mamet went on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to ask strangers for over $30,000 to help her indulge her creative side a little more. She and her half-sister Clara Mamet posted this week that they would like an excuse to spend more time together, which is why they have formed a band, written a sweet heartbreaky sort of song, and are going to make a video for that song. Which will cost lots of money.

Not their money. Not a record company's money. But your money, if that's OK – because the universe wants this for them.

As they wrote on their appeal page: "The universe has given us both an opportunity to make a living in our young adult lives as creative people and it is one of the greatest privileges a person could ask for, the ability to do what you love.

"This has become another opportunity for that privilege."

In what would seem to be a spoof of Luvvies in Private Eye, but is actually real, they went on to outline the ways in which their lives closely resemble those of Chilean miners: "Being in the entertainment industry has its lesser known downsides, like being taken out of the town your family lives in or the demanding schedules that prevent attendance at family functions."

Where to begin. Let's forget the fact that you can shoot a video for a lot less than that these days (for free, on your phone). Or that both sisters have great careers (Clara acts on US show The Neighbors). Or that their dad's got a massive house or three.

Let's just think up a better way to make the money – which they're going to need, as with nine days left they had raised only 6%. Dudes, you just need to attend a few corporate launch parties, be photographed holding some new hair straighteners, and give a couple of soundbites about how zingy and amazing these hair-straighteners are. Lily Allen used to do the odd branding thing like this, even when her career was at its peak. When asked why, she would say things like, "I do it for the money – I just want to be able to make a couple of albums and then buy a big house and fill it with kids" (which she did).

When Kickstarter began, it seemed like a new utopia for the skint-but-inspired to fund their work. That was, until the celebs got involved.

Zach Braff, Hollywood director of cult film Garden State, took to the site to fund his new film. He raised $3.1m, and then explained the Kickstarter crowdfunding concept to Woody Allen, who apparently "won't stop talking" about it.

Presumably Zosia and Clara feel the hair-straightener angle would be tacky and naff and interfere with the purity of their folk music, but so is online begging. You might feel that you're doing well by not asking your dad for the cash, but really you're just asking other people's dads. Strangers' dads. As Zosia's character on Girls once said: "I may be deflowered but I am not devalued." Step away from the crowdfunding model and leave it to people whose universes might not have given quite so generously thus far.

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