There's nothing quite like a tale of Hollywood desperation to get the copy flowing. And so it was that a variety of websites, including this one, seized upon an interview with Kevin Smith earlier this week that suggested that the Clerks director was planning to finance his new horror film via fan donations, with some relish.
Smith has now angrily taken to his blog to set the record straight over Red State. While grudgingly accepting that the quotes attributed to him by the Cinema Studies Student Union of the University of Toronto blog are fairly accurate, he rails against the "knee-jerk retards with poor reading comprehension and zero interest in investigating further" who apparently resulted in a number of rather upsetting "Kevin Smith begs for money on the internet" headlines.
"This fan-financed-film (aka, 'begging') hasn't happened yet, nor might it ever happen," writes Smith in his usual stream-of-conciousness style. "While it all sounds perfectly Amish, it's fraught with crazy pitfalls and tax problems that have required hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in legal fees to investigate even the possibility of the fan-financed idea's merit.
"I'm in a round table, I briefly talk about this idea we're looking into, some guy writes it up a bit, and suddenly, all the Rush Limbaughs of the movie blogosphere start getting insanely Republican about the whole affair; y'know – the one that doesn't involve them in the first place? *sigh*"
There's a whole lot more spleen-venting, and it has to be said that much of it successfully riffs on the modern-day tendency in film journalism to grab onto a fascinating quote and build a story around it. But from what I can make out, Smith did say those things, and he is (or was) considering the possibility of a fan-funded film, to the extent that he spent "hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in legal fees" looking into it.
I would politely suggest, then, that the best way to avoid salacious stories about Kevin Smith entering the blogosphere might not be for the entire movie media to pull its collective socks up. Rather, it might be for Smith himself to avoid shooting his mouth off in a public arena about matters which he would rather keep private, wouldn't you say?
