You know your week is shaping up to be a good one when Kevin Smith backpedals into Sunday trying to neutralize Lloyd Grove. In today’s Lowdown, Grove cites a report from the University of Pennsylvania’s student newspaper detailing Smith’s recent speaking gig there, and while Smith does not explicitly back down from his salty assessments of “cunt” Reese Witherspoon and a sexual interlude Jason Mewes supposedly had with Nicole Richie, he wants you to know his lecture was supposed to be, you know, just between friends:

In two agitated E-mails to this column, Smith confirmed the essential accuracy of the (Witherspoon) quotes. “The sentiment’s roughly the same, but the wording wasn’t nearly that concise,” he advised. …

The director cautioned: “It’s not my story; it’s Jay’s. And it’s one thing to tell that tale out of school at a college Q&A [in the context of a far larger, longer story about Mewes’ hard journey from heroin abuse to three years of total sobriety], and a completely different thing to just pull the stuff about bathroom sex and run it in a gossip column. … [It] makes it all seem like unsavory locker-room chitchat.”

In fairness to Smith, reporter Shruti Dave’s story in the Daily Pennsylvanian does take a little more wide-ranging tack than Grove’s column implies. Of course, the piece online seems to have been sanitized since its publication March 23; only a fraction of the Witherspoon comments remain, the Mewes/Richie tale has been excised entirely and nothing appears that would be offensive enough to provoke the reader comment: “The DP has hit a new low with reporters. Did he/she even stay past the first 15 minutes??”
Then there is documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who made all kinds of new friends on his own recent trip to Philadelphia:

Morgan Spurlock, who porked up eating nothing but McDonald’s for his Oscar-nominated film Super Size Me, gave a profanity-laced speech that used the F-word and poked fun at the mentally challenged at a suburban Philadelphia high school’s health fair.

Speaking at Hatboro-Horsham High School, Spurlock joked about the intelligence of McDonald’s employees, the “retarded kids in the back wearing helmets” and pot-smoking teachers in the balcony.

While most kids ate it up, teachers weren’t lovin’ it – and quietly led the special ed pupils out of the hour-long presentation.

“It just wasn’t appropriate,” said Superintendent William Lessa, who disinvited Spurlock from a second appearance Friday.

A defiant Spurlock was uncowed: “The greatest lesson those kids learned today was the importance of free speech,” he said.

Meanwhile, over on his blog at indieWIRE, Spurlock offered his own I-apologize-if-I-offended-anybody-oh-and-by-the-way-fuck-the-media explanation:

As I told both the principal and superintendent of schools after my lecture, it is never my intent to insult or demean anyone – and I understand how some of my remarks may have offended some in attendance and if you feel they did, then I am deeply sorry. …

I do, however, believe it is very important for me to address many of the points made in the media.

First and most importantly, it should be made clear that the only person I called “retarded” was myself when I was unable to hear a question from the audience. Having done work with special needs children in the past, something this hurtful would never come from my lips. I did make an aside about kids sleeping in the back wearing helmets, which was done with no malicious intent (I was playing it as a slacker reference to the Jon Heder character in the upcoming film “Benchwarmers,” a reference which was lost and, as I was later told, there were no actual students wearing helmets in the back). …

Lastly, in the article it quoted me as saying that the greatest lesson those kids learned was the importance of freedom of speech. When saying that, I did not mean that you have the right to insult anyone at will (as many people have interpreted it.) I was referring to the fact that the group that hired me to speak asked that I not mention McDonald’s in any of my talk because one of their board members owns a franchise. That would be like asking Neil Armstrong to speak but tell him he can’t bring up walking on the moon, so needless to say, I didn’t agree to their censorship.

Please know that any comment I made in my speech was done in a comical tone without an ounce of vindictive purpose. While it may be too late for apologies for many in the community, I hope this in some small way can start to make amends with the rest of you.

Fair enough, but if my math is correct, the guy now owes Jon Heder an apology, and he still owes me 100 minutes for sitting through Super Size Me. Talk about digging yourself a hole.

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