An Evening With...

Kevin Smith did a Q&A at the Warfield in San Francisco on Friday night. It was hilarious (as his Q&As usually are). I heard a few stories I've heard before, whether it be from hearing it SModcast or something else. But I heard a lot of new stories that I hadn't ever heard before. One of those never-before-heard stories was actually the story I was most curious and intrigued about. That was the story of how he handled the box office performance of Zack & Miri Make A Porno after experts telling him that the movie SHOULD open big[but it didn't]. After making his R-rated comedies for 10 years, and never really passing that $30 million mark at the box office, he thought that was the ceiling for R-rated comedies. That's as high as the numbers will go for the type of movie. Until one day, Mr. Judd Apatow comes along and makes these R-rated comedies EXTREMELY profitable. Smith spoke on how he read in an article somewhere, "With the arrival of Judd Apatow, Kevin Smith has become irrelevant" and how that just ate at him. How he isn't ready to leave. He's not ready for this all to be over. So Smith saw Seth Rogen in The 40 Year-Old Virgin and immediately loved him. Started writing Zack & Miri with Rogen in mind. He got Rogen[one of Apatow's "boys"] signed on, the movie was testing well, experts were telling him how much this movie would make and how profittable it would be, Smith was excited. This was it. This was his "comeback" of sorts. His validity of relevance. And when it didn't do gangbusters at the box office, like he had hoped, that's when he realized, it was over. The way Smith spoke about the realization that he is no longer that same person who made Clerks, Chasing Amy... He's no longer an angry, young man. Over the course of his 15 years of filmmaking, he has become a better filmmaker[in regards to technique] but he has lost a little bit of that genuine fire and he is not in that place anymore where he can make HIS movies. Where does he go from here? What will Smith do now? Apatow has come along and made "Kevin Smith" movies better than Kevin Smith. It's now become a genre. The "bromantic comedy" and a new one comes out every other weekend. Just the self-realization and acceptance that Smith has was absolutely mind-blowing. It truly gave me chills. Almost brought a tear to my eye. I am not kidding. It was one of the most raw and insightful things I have ever heard and it was amazing.