Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (13 page)

Jon introduced me to Elyse Seiden, a family friend who’d read and loved the
Red State
script. Elyse introduced us to a businessman in New York City who wanted to invest in a film. At our first meeting, I asked him if he’d read the script for
Red State
. He said that wouldn’t be necessary.

“I saw your name on a movie with Bruce Willis in it, so I know you’re legit.”

Then he wrote me a two-and-a-half-million-dollar check—half the budget of
Red State.
I felt like Andy Dufresne: After crawling through the river of shit that was working with Bruce Willis, I had emerged from Shawshank’s guts and fallen into a stream of revenue. Years after writing
Red
, we were finally gonna start shooting.

I say this with no hint of irony: Shooting
Red State
was a religious experience. It was one of those shows that’s more like summer camp. The cast and crew were amazingly patient and brought their A-games, all working for scale wages or less. I was surrounded by new faces in front of and behind the cameras, but by the end of the first day, we were bonded for life as family. That’s the way it goes on an indie film: In lieu of having money, people have love for what they’re working on as well as for the people they’re working with to bring the flicks to life.

John Goodman is both America’s dad in
Roseanne
and America’s best friend in
The Big Lebowski.
I’d been a fan since his panda-bear turn in David Byrne’s
True Stories.
Goodman improved any movie he was in, so I wanted him to play my conflicted ATF agent Joe Keenan. And here’s what a good man Goodman is: He didn’t get paid much at all. If I told you what we paid John Goodman to be in
Red State
, you’d find me and kick me in the balls, screaming, “He’s a treasure! An American treasure, you fat prick!”

We scored his
Treme
costar first, however, when Melissa Leo from
Frozen River
read the script and signed on to play Sara, Abin Cooper’s daughter. By the time we rolled cameras months later, Melissa was already receiving lots of Oscar buzz for her performance in
The Fighter.
When she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar early the next year, she broke new ground for the potty-mouthed set by uttering “fuck” during her acceptance speech.

One of my biggest regrets in life will always be not seeing Michael Parks say “fuck” while
he
collects awards for his work in
Red State.
Parks put the spine, balls, brain, and soul into the flick, giving a performance so otherworldly and next generation that you’d imagine they started engraving his name on closets full of awards. Parks knocked that shit out of the park.

Jon and I made Elyse a producer and formed a new production company, calling it the Harvey Boys in honor of the man who taught us everything we knew about filmmaking, distribution, self-marketing, and independence. We imagined our sensei would eventually see the film Jon and I made all on our own, using the lessons he taught us years prior, and we dreamed he would say to us, “This movie’s everything that we used to do at Miramax! You boys were paying attention! I’m so proud!”

That’s what I felt in my head and heart. I was forty years old, but this “adult film,” as I called it, was gonna be my movie-biz bar mitzvah (or bar SMitzvah, if you will).

But on day four on the set of
Red State
, while watching all the beautiful people in my cast and on my crew pull together to make this ugly little story, I started thinking about how the marketing dollars spent to open this film eventually would be four or five times the amount that all the generous filmmakers on my cast and crew (who took drastic cuts in salary to work on the flick) ever had to work with in their departments to actually
make
the flick. I was asking the cast and crew to eat gristle when, postpurchase, the choice cuts would go elsewhere.

What would even ultimately happen to our love child
Red State
? We all hoped someone would eventually buy the film when it was finished, but how much would they buy it
for
?
Happy, Texas
sold for $10 million at Sundance back in 1999, but those days were long gone.
Buried
sold for $6 million in 2010, but that had Ryan Reynolds in it.

And if it got bought, what would happen
then
? Like, let’s say Lionsgate picked up
Red State.
Lionsgate spends an almost-standard $20 mil to open any flick (which is lower than the industry norm; LG is actually one of the more frugal studios, spending less on marketing than the majors). So now, my flick doesn’t cost $4 million anymore, it costs $24 million. It’s gotta make $24 million to break even and start seeing profit. But the studio/distributor doesn’t get
all
that box office, so assume the studio only gets back
half
of that announced box-office figure. Suddenly my little four-million-dollar movie has to make $50 million
JUST TO BREAK EVEN
. Like … what
happened
? Instead of spending
all that money trying to make the movie, the money is spent on trying to convince people to come see your shit.

And where’s that $20 million go? It’s called “P&A”—prints and advertising. But the print portion of that equation—physically creating the reels of film that make up the movie—is pretty low: It costs between two and three grand to make five or six reels of a motion picture (the costs of a digital print are lower). So let’s say you make a thousand prints: You’re looking at $2 to $3 million dollars.

That leaves $17 to $18 million of the P&A to account for. Where’s
that
big chunk gonna go? Try TV spots, full-page ads in newspapers and magazines, billboards and bus-stop posters, thousands of mini-prints of trailers, press junkets, airfare …

But this far along in his career, why would you even
spend
money to market
any
Kevin Smith flick to the casual or ardent View Askew/
SModcast
/Kevin Smith fan? What would be the point? If you’re remotely a fan of that shit, you’re already aware of whatever it is we’ve got coming, because Fatty McNoFly never shuts up about it. And he’s had lots of practice.

In 1995, we opened
ViewAskew.com
—a Web site that consisted of lots of
Clerks
and
Mallrats
jpegs, sound bytes, and mpegs, with a shit-ton of text by me, and perhaps the most important feature, and the one that would change my life: The View Askew Message Board.

On that message board, back in 1995, I was essentially tweeting. We called it
posting
in those days, but it’s the same idea: Someone who liked what I did for a living could ask me questions and I could respond. It was direct contact with the audience, along the lines of a postscreening Q&A.

Back then, Peter Jackson and I were the only filmmakers treating the Web seriously, responding to folks who dug our stuff. And while Peter Jackson eventually concentrated less on the Web and more on wowing audiences with his Oscar-winning epics, I opted to concentrate more on the Web, wowing audiences with my creepy omnipresence and inability to answer questions in less than two sentences.

By
Dogma
, we started to realize I had a deadhead thing going on with my audience. There were four films, interconnected, that lots of folks caught up with on video. And the folks who’d notice and dig on the interconnectivity were mostly Web-babies: the generation born online. They’d hear you could talk to the fat guy who made those flicks and those commentary tracks right at his Web site, where he holds court, talks shop, and hawks merchandise. They’d find out it was not only true, but that the
Clerks
guy would also throw mini film festivals of flicks he and his friends made; or that you could go to his comic book store and see people from his movies. And it was no coincidence that the box office for the flicks grew exponentially as the board membership jumped into five and six figures.

But rather than be embraced and appreciated by the powers that be, that audience was always dismissed or minimized. I’d see trailers or posters for our flicks that didn’t resemble the movies at all, and any time I said, “My audience is gonna hate this …,” I was told, “Your audience is already coming, no matter what. We’re reaching
beyond
your audience this time …”

All the marketing materials, you see, had tested positively in a mall: Studios pay marketing firms to bring movie trailers to malls and ask set demographics to yay ’em or nay
’em. That’s about $5 to $10 thousand, depending on how long you want to grab samples—samples that don’t include actual fans, who always reported being turned away for answering affirmatively to the question, “Have you ever seen
Clerks
,
Mallrats
, or
Chasing Amy
?”

Going after that mythical new audience was always costly, too. Millions spent trying to convince people who wouldn’t like my shit anyway, to pay to come see it. Millions spent to beg a disinterested crowd to join our party. And any time I spoke about my audience, I’d get the pat on the head: “That’s cute, Kevin.” The intent to bring me into the mainstream was always flattering, but let’s be honest: What I do in film (or anywhere, for that matter) isn’t
for
everybody. For lots of folks, my flicks are about cuss words and inept framing; for lots of others, they’re the stories of their lives.

It just started to gnaw at me. Many cats were breaking their backs to see us hit an ambitiously low budget cap, but whoever bought the flick would then give people who never worked on the movie way
more
money to simply sell it to an audience that didn’t care about or want it. And after nine flicks, I just couldn’t see my way clear to doing it the old way one more time; not with a budget as low as
ours
. Four million bucks? We could make that make,
without
all the crazy marketing spending.

The first person I spoke to about the idea was Jon Gordon. I’d said, “What do you think about self-distribution? Like …
not
selling the flick when we’re done.”

It was the next day when Jon and I rejoined the conversation that we started figuring out what we had at our disposal. The idea was to combine everything I’d learned over the years to work together, all at once: nearly two decades in
filmmaking, seventeen years of standing on a stage and answering questions with as many cock jokes as I could muster, and almost four years of heavy-duty podcasting. We could combine all three by taking the movie out ourselves, on a cross-country tour.

The idea to control our own destiny came not just from years of watching Harvey and Bob work, but also from the music business. When Trent Reznor and Radiohead unplugged from their labels and began dealing
directly
with their audience, they started a fire that would ultimately help change the music business forever, putting control back into the hands of the artist. But what happens if you try it in
film
? The musicians started a fire; this filmmaker wanted to see if the fire would rise.

When we rolled cameras on
Red State
, Sundance hadn’t been part of the plan. When we were looking at an early August start, there was a good chance we could edit the film into something showable by the Sundance submission deadline. But it took longer to close on all the financing with our New York and Canadian financiers than we’d planned, so we pushed our start date by a month and change. At that point, we assumed we wouldn’t be ready to submit the flick to Sundance in time. The thought, then, was to instead aim for a Cannes debut in May.

I not only write and direct the movies I make, I edit them as well. In production, whenever I’m not on set, I’m in the editing room, chop-sockying the flick together on my Avid. On
Red
, I spent the entire shoot editing the flick every night and during any free time I had during the shoot days. Every day at wrap, DP Dave Klein, AD Adam Druxman, and I would discuss the next morning’s work: the first shot
of the day as well as the rest of the set-ups for that scene. Then, in the morning at call-time, the crew would set up without me, leaving more time for me to edit, hitting the set at the last possible second before we’d roll on the first take. The beauty of this? After the first take (or sometimes before), I could gather the cast and crew around the monitor and show them the actual flick, edited—which had only been shot the day before. And watching the movie take shape as something recognizable (an edited film) always gets the blood going and keeps the cast and crew enthused. The film, at that point, is no longer theoretical—it’s real as raincoats.

So at the wrap party at my house—about a day and change after the final shot on
Red State
—the cast and crew were able to watch the same cut of
Red State
we’d eventually screen at Sundance. Over two hundred people were packed into my living room, including Michael Parks, watching the flick and enjoying the love for him and his performance in the room, with one of his tea-cup dogs in his jacket. We were unexpectedly finished enough with the film to show the flick to the Sundance folks before the submission deadline. John Cooper, Trevor Groth, and the rest of the Sundance kids who make up the selection committee saw the flick and gave us the acceptance nod, and suddenly, seventeen years after the fact, I was going to be returning to Sundance—the film festival where I started my career. There, Jon and I would announce our intentions to self-distribute
Red State.

After Miramax picked up
Clerks
at Sundance 1994, from February forward Scott and I took the movie from film festival to film festival, college screening to college screening, getting the word out
well
in advance of our October 19
opening. But who’d pay for all that
this
time? Back then, Miramax would foot the bills. Any awareness screenings we were gonna do with
Red State
were gonna have to be paid for. We didn’t have a studio or a distributor with deep pockets this time: It was just
us
.