If he was appearing at Comic-Con, Kevin Smith would have been booked into the event's largest hall.
The line to get in would have snaked across the San Diego Convention Center grounds. And Smith would have kept the raucous crowd in stitches with his outspoken and hilariously profane monologues.
But Saturday's event was the Producers Guild of America's significantly more sedate Produced By conference on the Walt Disney Studios lot.
So Smith was simply one member of a panel booked into what was not the biggest of the three spaces.
The room did fill up, though without a long line or lengthy wait to get in. But yes, he did keep the reserved crowd in stitches.
His words focused on the business of independent film -- specifically, on how he's found that the traditional distribution model doesn't work for his movies, and how he hit on a strategy that had him traveling around the country with his newest film, "Red State," screening it as part of Q&A sessions like the ones he'd been doing for years for audiences who simply come to see him talk.
"Michael Bay's special effect is that he can make robots fight and f---," said Smith, who appeared on a panel entitled "The Sky's the Limit: Entrepreneurial Media and Indie Innovators." "David Fincher is a master storyteller, that's what he brings.
"I don't have those skills. My special skill is that I'm the only director who, when the movie's over, I can come out and say, 'Wait, let me tell you what really happened! I got in a fight with Bruce Willis, I got thrown off a plane … '"
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That skill -- and the fact that he'd built up an audience through his sporadic one-man tours, where he simply sits on stage talking to the audience and answering questions -- led Smith to take a different tack with "Red State," particularly after the Weinstein Company turned down the film.
"I knew the movie wasn't commercial," he said. "I knew that if somebody bought this $4 million film, they'd put $10 to $15 million into marketing it, and it wouldn't make that money."
The bottom line, he said: "I can't compete in a world where it's all about the first three days in theaters."
So he held onto the film instead of selling it, making that announcement at a Sundance Film Festival event that left some potential buyers angry and unamused.
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Then Smith turned a 15-show nationwide tour into a marketing campaign for his movie. Rather than doing his usual one-man gabfest (or SModcast), he used the first half of each show to screen the movie, then the second half to talk about it and take questions.
Between tickets and merchandising, he said, the 15 shows brought in "close to a million bucks," which he used to help pay back his investors.
