Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (14 page)

Then my Weinstein training kicked in.

Between films, you can normally find me touring the country, doing Q&A wherever anybody has set up a microphone and gathered a couple of warm bodies. For the last two years, I have stepped up my live gigs considerably, including taking live podcasts on the road—so much so that, lately, I’ve earned more just being me on a stage somewhere than I have for directing film. And since I did
Red State
for no money, I was going to spend the next few months touring the country again, earning by speaking.

I started thinking about hitching up a screening in the afternoon of any show I was doing—so you could pay to see
Red State
first if you wanted, before seeing my separate Q&A show later that night. Then we figured, just
combine
the two: movie
then
Q&A—all at one price. And rather than increase the price of what folks were already paying to see me do, Q&A
without
the movie, we add on the movie that evening, essentially “for free.”

Together with Jeff Hyman (the man who puts my fat ass on stages across the world), Jon Gordon and I plotted a
Red State
tour that could run from March to April. We’d hit a bunch of major markets where I’d previously sold out Q&A shows, knowing we had built-in audiences to vend to. And while profit is always the overall goal, we devised a theater rental schedule that’d allow us, more important, to not
spend
anything in advance, using advance ticket sales to pay
for each venue. This is not inspired or new; this is called
four-walling
: renting the theater and selling the seats yourself. We chose Boston’s Wilbur Theatre, Chicago’s Harris Theater, the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, Clowes Memorial Hall in Indianapolis, the Midland Theatre in Kansas City, Clark State PAC in Ohio, the Warner Theatre in D.C., the Paramount Theatre in Denver, the Paramount in Austin, the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in Atlanta, McCaw Hall in Seattle, and the Wiltern in Los Angeles. Eventually, we’d add Minnesota and New Orleans venues, but we knew we had to kick off the tour in New York City at Carnegie Hall. Sadly, it was booked for the date we wanted to launch the tour. But Jon’s a native New Yorker and I’m from across the river in Jersey, so since we couldn’t get
that
iconic New York City theater, we opted for another—the one where, ironically, I’d attended the
Live Free or Die Hard
premiere with Bruce Willis years prior.

Radio City Music Hall is a 6,000 seater that I knew we could never sell out in a month with no advertising spend. But that didn’t matter: It was the idea that two fucking movie dorks like me and Jon could actually rent Radio City Music Hall
at all
to show our weird little flick in that made it sound fun. There’s a short list of movies that have actually played at Radio City in the past twenty years, and we’d be on it. The moment Jon compared it to Spicoli getting Van Halen to play his birthday party, I was
in
.

It’s a giant barn, but thankfully all we had to sell were 1,700 seats: That was the break-even point—the amount of tickets we had to sell so the cost of our rental of Radio City that night would be covered. After that, every ticket sold would be gravy. The rest of the shows across the country
were all under half the size of Radio City, so our break-even numbers everywhere else were far lower. But the moment we hit 1,700 tickets sold at Radio City, I assure you—we uncorked champagne and unclenched our assholes.

But in order to get
Red State
out into the world without spending money, we needed to launch as high profile as we could. We had to shoot out of a
cannon
. We needed to make a big splash in the adult pool, along the order of hiring Alan Dershowitz to rep
Clerks
at a press conference about censorship. We’d named our company the Harvey Boys, so we asked ourselves not “What would Harvey
do
?” but rather “What would Harvey
have done
back in the early ’90s?” And suddenly, we knew:

He’d Barnum and Bailey the shit out of it.

In November, before we knew whether or not we’d gotten into Sundance, I gave an e-mail interview with
SlashFilm.com
about eventually retiring. In it, I included a line that I knew would get picked up by a lot of online news sites …

“Here’s something that’s not so much news as my stated intentions for
Red State
: If it gets into Sundance, my plan is to pick the
Red State
distributor right there—IN THE ROOM—auction style.”

Within 24 hours, lots of sites were writing that I intended to auction
Red State
right after the screening, to the highest bidder. But look at how carefully I worded it: I didn’t say anything about selling the film. Yet in every article and news item generated from that SlashFilm story, that’s what was extrapolated. The press literally put words into my mouth. It wasn’t exactly what we were hoping for: It was even
better.

After that, we lit the match: We released the teaser trailer for
Red State
online. This was the least Kevin Smith–looking flick I’d ever made, so it created lots of chatter. And mind you, it was following
Cop Out
—so already, the boring “Is Kevin Smith back?” question started popping up in blogs and online articles linking to the trailer. I was about to embark on the “We Forgive You” tour yet again.

I’d first dealt with it on
Chasing Amy
—the patronizing omniquestions every journalist you speak with gets to ask so that you can sell your flick:
“So, this movie is good, but what happened with that last one?”
Or some of that
“Now that you’ve learned your lesson …”
kinda shit. Ugh … so fucking gross. They want you to be contrite—to apologize for a movie they didn’t like, in exchange for which they’ll tell people about your new, “good” movie. They all work from the same
Behind the Music
three-act structure: You did well, you fucked up, now you’re back. Celebrities can be boring enough without the help of an even less imaginative profiler. They criticize you for making a movie that’s been done before, yet they write the same, lame three-act profiles over and over again.

It’d irritated me whenever I’d see Ben Affleck do an interview for
The Town
: In each sit-down or profile, they’d bring up Bennifer and his string of flops. Before they’d give him his props, they’d cut him down to size—right in front of his face—and tell him his previous work was shit. And in order to get the coverage needed for his new flick, Ben had to sit there and grin through it.

And here I was, about to dance this tired dance yet again. “
Chasing Amy
made up for
Mallrats
,” the locusts chirped. “
Clerks II
made up for
Jersey Girl
.” And I was
about to face another round of that sickening condescension: “
Red State
makes up for
Cop Out
,” would say the people who never risk anything. And if I hadn’t done it twice already in my career, maybe I’d have been able to slap that grin on my face one more time and bare their condescension so I could sell my film. But Dad died screaming. Life’s too short. And there’s more than one way to skin a cock.

And I knew the cocks would scream for my blood when I’d announce on the Sundance stage a month or so later that the Harvey Boys were buying the movie themselves, the auction they’d inferred I was holding, merely a figment of their imagination. We needed their ire: It was free ink. I’d been in the business long enough to realize that if they were writing about
Red State
, good or bad, it was free ink to the mainstream crowd, that wouldn’t affect the core audience one way the other.

But had I known we’d eventually be joined by marketing partners at our
Red State
debut, I wouldn’t have needed the theatrics of the phantom auction to launch the
Red State
USA Tour at the fest. I could’ve just written, “If we get into Sundance, expect a holy war.”

M
ost folks know the Phelps family of the Westboro Baptist Church as the shiny, happy
God Hates Fags
people. They’re a family church of fewer than fifty members from Topeka, Kansas, who show up at funerals of AIDS victims, fallen soldiers, or high-profile celebrities, brandishing placards and signs indicating God’s displeasure with lots of shit.

The villainous religious extremists in
Red State
are satires of mini-churches like Westboro, but with a ridiculous amount of guns thrown in. In an interview I’d given in the UK years prior, I name-checked Fred Phelps as the model for my bad guy. Since then, the family seemed morbidly curious about my flick, and kind of in love with my fat ass.

They’d even protested me back in March of 2010, when I’d played the Midland Theatre in Kansas City. In advance
of my arrival, they issued a Bible-inflected, jeremiad of a press release deeming me a “fag-enabler” who’s leading his audience to Hell, and announced their intent to protest outside of my Q&A show.

At that protest, Westboro didn’t wave a single protest sign that had anything to do with me: there were no
GOD HATES FATS
placards. They did, however, take issue with the Easter Bunny, which they also depicted as having anal sex with a stick-figure man, surrounded by a
Ghostbusters
“NO” circle and line.

Since then, I’d hear from the Phelps clan from time to time via social media. Fred Phelps’s granddaughter, Megan Phelps-Roper, would tweet the fuck out of me, talking fire and brimstone. I’d tweet her back stuff like, “Megs, my wife says that if it’ll save you from that cult, we can all have a three-way together.”

Shortly before Sundance, Westboro issued a press release announcing their intentions to picket the Sundance
Red State
debut in Park City. No strangers to the road, the Phelps clan log lots of air miles as they crisscross the country in an effort to hold up signs at funerals, generally making everyone’s day a little more shitty. Without even seeing it, they knew what
Red State
really was: my cinematic version of holding up a shitty sign at
them.
Why wait for a funeral? Remind them in
life
how ridiculous they are by painting ’em with a satiric brush at twenty-four frames per second. Pull the monster’s teeth out, paint them like clowns, and throw ’em up on the big screen so everyone can point and laugh. Credits.

And here they were, crashing our Sundance party. Jon and I wasted no time in releasing our own press release …

We had a crew at Sundance, staying in a rented condo: me, my wife, Jen, my assistant, Meghan, and her man, Alan, Mewes and his wife, Jordan, Zack Knudsen and Joey Figueroa (who were shooting the behind-the-scenes stuff), Tim Isenman (who was handcuffed to the print), the flick’s spiritual godfather, Malcolm Ingram, and Clovis Scott—our intrepid bus driver. With all the touring and road shows I’d been doing, I’d bought my own bus: a used Prevost that was in pretty cherry condition. It’s brown like our dachshund, Shecky, so we named it the Sheckladore.