Kines contacted fans of the young actors in his film-- people who had websites, mailing lists and so on. He told them about the movie, its website, and his need for funding.
Kines built areas on the site including galleries of the stars, "secrets" behind the film (some of them whimsical, some real), video clips, and cast tidbits.
"Those 200 pages on the website are filled up with as much material as I could find about the film that I could share with an audience," he says. "Everything from production stills to candids that I'd only had access to... Polaroids."
Soon the film attracted its first major investor, with $25,000, via the site. Also that January of 1998, Foreign Correspondents was selected as the Cool Site of the Day, jumping from 50 users one day to 3,523 the next. Cool Central also made the site its daily pick. By June the film found one more investor. In July, the site gained yet more attention as a USA Today Hot Site.
The money began rolling in: $1,000 here, $50,000 there, $500 the next day. Throughout that year, Kines raised $90,000 over the Web "from complete strangers."
Kines began using the Web as a key production tool, finding everything from legal advice to movie props.
"So I hopped on the Web and started searching for a 'dot fr,' just to see if I could find anybody with an email address from France. I found a couple guys, and I wrote to one of them and said, 'Hello, I'm a complete stranger to you, but I'm making a movie in Los Angeles and I need these French postcards, could you send me some?'"