By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Seeing Red With Kevin Smith

Posted Monday, January 24th, 2011 - 1 Comment »
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Kevin Smith, you’ve met Harvey Weinstein, and you’re no Harvey Weinstein. Or he is? (See addendum below.)Although the maker of Clerks and now, Red State, which premiered Sunday night at Sundance at the 1,450-seat Eccles theater, hoped to make a killing with an undescribed kind of post-screening auctioning of the horror film, he instead took it off the market in a twenty-minute speech, for $20 out of his own pocket and announced he would be self-distributing in October. He blamed the state of the industry, saying, according to reports, “It’s too much fucking horseshit. I just want to tell fuckin’ stories,” he said. Here’s another story, this one from January 20’s Variety, reported by Gregg Goldstein. “Hiring longtime specialty exec [David] Dinerstein (whose film marketing consultancy also arranges self-distribution deals), bringing aboard Cinetic Media (which arranged service deals for sale titles like last year’s Banksy doc Exit Through the Gift Shop) with co-seller WME, and slapping the word “March” at the end of the teaser trailer has led many to suspect Smith has a self-distribution backup plan should an attractive offer fail to materialize. But is self-distribution or a service deal even an option they’re considering? “No,” says [co-producer Jonathan] Gordon. “We want to have someone who loves the movie, understands it, knows how to handle it and get the most out of it.” Someone’s riposte to that will likely be to bring up the greatest love of all, self-love, especially after Smith’s Sunday night self-description of himself as a “fat, masturbating stoner.” Based on first-night notices, and journalists’ Twittered opines, a straightforward exploration of the publicity stunts may be of more interest than any critic’s review. Exit through the Eccles door, and caveat scriptor.
ADDED 12:30pm: Smith’s New York publicists send the link to the roadshow dates of Red State: not exactly something whipped up overnight. Nor is their declaration of independents, one of the pages on the site:

The Harvey Boys have witnessed firsthand the vagaries of “studio math,” the byzantine numbers game that sees an uneducated media and public celebrating “huge” openings at the box office while ignoring the obscene marketing costs attached to reach those figures. We believe it’s a pyrrhic victory to simply “buy” an opening weekend by pouring millions of dollars into TV spots, billboards and print ads. As storytellers, why not instead use our creative abilities that resulted in a film in the first place to also creatively SELL that film directly to our public?

We believe the state of film marketing has become ridiculously expensive and exclusionary to the average filmmaker longing simply to tell their story. When the costs of marketing and releasing a movie are four times that film’s budget, it’s apparent the traditional distribution mechanism is woefully out of touch with not only the current global economy, but also the age of social media.

Therefore, The Harvey Boys will not spend a dime on old world media buys (such as TV/Print/Outdoor) as we self-distribute our film, Red State, in an admittedly unconventional, yet extremely cost effective, word of mouth/viral campaign.

Knowledge is power, and we believe in empowering the filmmaker – so the Harvey Boys vow to make the financials of Red State open and transparent from which anybody hoping to follow suit can learn. We will do what no studio has dared: open up our books for the world to see so anyone interested in pursuing a similar independent release strategy has a better understanding of the BUSINESS of Red State.

And if we’re successful – or even merely effective – at producing a film distribution apparatus that can stand apart from the cost-prohibitive studio model currently viewed as the only way to get a movie into a theater? It is our intent to use the groundwork we lay with Red State to aid other filmmakers in releasing THEIR films, via our newly launched SModcast Pictures.

Don’t hate the studio; BECOME the studio. Anybody can make a movie; what we aim to prove is anyone can release a movie as well

The Harvey Boys

Jon Gordon & Kevin Smith

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Posted in Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Originals | 1 Comment »

One Response to “Seeing Red With Kevin Smith”

  1. Leo says:
    January 24, 2011 at 12:08 pm

    He’s also offering his fans a chance to become filmmakers­!!! That’s the real story!!! Why is everybody ignoring that?! That should be headline news!

    http://wp.­me/p1gK9Y-­er

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon