The Washington Post profiles left-wing documentarian Robert Greenwald and his innovative approach to film financing and distribution:

Greenwald’s documentaries generate more heat than coin. Their take at the box office is tiny (mostly they’re seen on DVD). “We weren’t raising anything,” says Greenwald, sitting on a recent afternoon in his office, located in what appears to be a converted motel behind the Sony Pictures lot, as his team rushed to complete the project for its debut next month.

The usual bankers of political documentaries — left-leaning organizations and high-roller liberal donors — weren’t rushing to write Greenwald any checks. Greenwald doesn’t know why. “Maybe I’m a lousy fundraiser,” he says.

Then Gilliam had his idea. Robert, why not go on the Internet and just ask for the money? “I thought he was crazy,” Greenwald says. “I thought this would never work.”

On April 25, Gilliam — weak at home in Newport Beach, his lungs scarred and ruined because of earlier cancer treatments, but still able to type — sent out a mass e-mail to thousands of people who had purchased DVDs or expressed interest in Greenwald’s movies or causes through the company’s various Web sites.

The e-mail alerted potential supporters that Greenwald was committed to making “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers,” and though they had not shot a single frame, Gilliam promised “it will have an enormous impact when it comes out shortly before the elections this November.”

The pitch? Gilliam wrote: “To start shooting, we need money. Overall, the film will cost $750,000. We can expect about $450,000 to be offset by DVD sales, selling foreign rights, and an advance from our retail store distributor, but we still need $300,000. A generous donor just stepped up and will contribute $100,000 if we can match it with $200,000 from someone else. That someone else is you! 4000 people giving $50 each. We’ll put everyone’s name in the credits.”

They got $267,892 in 10 days.

[...]

Small-scale independent filmmakers, the kind who bring their documentaries to the Sundance Film Festival, put together funding however they can — with art grants, money from educational or journalism foundations or from relatives and friends — and in many cases by racking up hefty balances on their credit cards.

Gilliam and Greenwald say they know of no one who has ever raised hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Internet to make a movie. (Though this year at Cannes, a do-it-yourself director named Melissa Balin attempted to auction her finished movie — “FreezerBurn” — on eBay. It sold in one market: Lithuania.)

“For all practical purposes, this is the first time I’ve heard of raising money for a film this way. I’ve got to hand it to them. I’m very impressed. It’s clever,” says Lawrence Turman, a veteran Hollywood producer of over 40 films (from “The Graduate” to “American History X”) and author of the how-to book “So You Want to Be a Producer.”

Turman says the Internet funding seems well suited for “political and in your face films” like Greenwald’s documentaries. “You’re not going to raise $40 million, but you might raise $1 million,” he says.

“I think this is the future,” Gilliam says. Not for standard Hollywood fare, he admits. But for niche product, for indie stuff. “It is my dream to pull this off,” Gilliam says. “To figure out how to fund movies out of the control of corporations. Our goal is to fund and distribute any movie we want to make completely outside of the system.”