With just a month before her unfinished documentary would premiere at South by Southwest, the director Kristy Guevara-Flanagan faced an unexpected task: Scraping together $15,000 for editing, travel and other costs associated with taking her movie about superheroines to the film festival in Austin, Texas.

Guevara-Flanagan and producer Kelcey Edwards turned to a team-up similar to those often found in comic books: Wonder Woman and the awesome power of the crowd.

“Kickstarter was huge,” Guevara-Flanagan told Wired over tea at a San Francisco restaurant last week, just a day after sending the final edit of her film, Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines, to SXSW. “Having made documentaries for over 10 years, there’s just never been anything as successful as this.”

The filmmakers quickly set up pledge drive on the crowd-funding website, but almost a week into their campaign they remained $9,000 short. Then Lynda Carter — the actress who played the Amazonian ass-kicker in the Wonder Woman TV series, and a subject of the documentary — put out a call on Facebook and Twitter, telling her fans that Wonder Women! needed help.