A review of Kevin Smith's "Red Province" "Red State" Tour

We Kevin Smith fans are a tragically unattractive crowd, filled with the overweight (myself included), the ambiguously sexual, and a lot of virgins. This, of course, speaks to the very heart of the Smith movement — the SMovement, if you will: You don’t have to be Hollywood Hot to belong.

Likely, I am the only person other than Smith’s own mother, Grace, who’s ever attended a screening in pearls.

But this story isn’t about me. It’s about a fat kid from New Jersey who followed his heart and achieved every damn thing he put his mind to. He made a $28,000 movie on credit cards that kicked off a lucrative career with Miramax at the height of the indie film scene, married a good looking, thin blond who he has blissfully been with for 13 years, branched out into new media with SModcast Internet Radio, and is now ready to fold up his director’s chair for the last time.

Though first he has to make an epic 2-part period piece about Canadian hockey that spans from 1950 to 1980.

But before Hit Somebody even gets made, Smith is touring from town to town with his penultimate brainchild, Red State. A 4-year labor of love, Red State — a horror movie based on America’s favorite domestic villains, the Westboro Baptist Church — was made for the absurdly un-Hollywood price of four million bucks. By begging his stellar cast, which includes John Goodman, Melissa Leo and Michael Parks as the Fred Phelps character Abin Cooper, to work for pennies on the dollars they usually command, Smith was able to keep costs down.

Then came the moment of revolution at Sundance when he screened the flick for the first time, took to the stage brandishing a hockey stick, and told traditional marketing and media to get stuffed. He was going to market his little film ex-studio, and make back all his investors’ money in record time without the nonsensical and ill-placed $10,000 ad spots on Lifetime.

Realizing he had a built-in audience who would flock to his films with or without an expensive ad buy, he began to appeal to them directly, through SModcast, on Twitter and by launching Red State of the Union, a podcast of Q & A about the movie. Furthermore he gave web-savvy fans the opportunity to host posters and trailers on their sites by auctioning off the privilege and giving the money to charity.

The end result is a chilling 90 minute trip to Cooper’s Dell, where the Cooper family’s Five Points Trinity Church compound and its God Hates Fags message, leads to a Waco-like standoff with the ATF. Michael Parks essays the role of patriarch with such charm that for a brief moment you forget he’s the bad guy. The bad guy who believes Jesus is on his side.

John Goodman of Roseanne fame plays the lead ATF agent with the order to leave no witnesses. He struggles with the order, wanting to spare not only the children of Cooper’s Dell, but his own career as well.

The film is one of bad choices: Bad choices on the part of the boys who go wandering into Cooper’s Dell for immoral purposes, on the part of the Coopers who are killing in the name of the Lord, and on the part of the ATF, who frankly should have learned from their epic mistake in Waco. Every man had a chance to choose differently, and the choices they made led to an apocalyptic ending.

According to Smith, the movie — though excellent and far different than any movie he’s ever made in the past — is merely icing on the Kevin Smith cake. His real passion and profit is to show up in live venues, such as the Toronto Underground Cinema, which hosted the Red State screening, and talk.

He can talk for hours.

The pre-screening press conference alone was 80 minutes of Smith answering two questions, and a similar Q & A with the audience followed for nearly two hours after the film. His retro method of taking Red State from place to place, second-run venue to second-run venue, and hosting his Evening With Kevin Smith one-man shows alongside his film is a value-added entertainment package that his fans flock to.

The Toronto screening of Red State was sold out to the tune of 750 seats, as was his previous showing the night before in Montreal, and all other shows on the tour thus far. Whenever he plays Toronto – usually at Roy Thompson Hall – he regularly sells out whether his stay is one night or two.

While he may be soon bowing out of film making, Kevin Smith is far from leaving the entertainment business. Only now, as he says, he plans to focus more on the entertainment, and less on the business.