Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (16 page)

Some of the bloggers and press who’d come to watch me hold an auction to the highest bidder that they themselves had created were fucking
pissed
that I deked ’em out. The long, sharp knives came out almost immediately after the first screening ended, but that was okay: It was all part of the plan.

After years of letting inferiors insist in print that I was bad at expressing myself, I was done with the critical community and film press. The concept no longer made sense to me: a handful of loudmouth crackpots who make their parasitic living off of self-expressing about someone else’s
self-expression, telling that person, essentially, that he or she is expressing themselves
wrong
.

How the fuck can self-expression ever even be classified by someone who’s not expressing it
themselves
? It’s like someone telling you you’re dreaming incorrectly. Only someone who doesn’t understand art tells an artist their art somehow failed. How the fuck can art fail? Art can’t be graded, because it’s going to mean something different to everyone. You can’t apply a mathematical absolute to art because there is no one formula for self-expression.

And for the privilege of this? I’m expected to show critics, bloggers, and other members of the movie media my film
free of charge.
The audience has to
pay
to weigh in on my art, but the critical crowd? They get a free meal, then get to throw it up in my face, shit in my sink, and head out the door, unscathed.

Nobody likes to be downgraded from a perceived position of authority, but that was exactly what critics had done to me in their reviews: I was downgraded from a good filmmaker to a bad filmmaker. And I wanted to see what would happen if I did the same to
them
.

So after years of being told by many critics that I wasn’t very good at my job, I decided to return the favor. And it all started after I read this tweet by @coked_up_Jesus (likely not the one true Christ):

I responded, all in tweets, 140 characters at a clip . . .

Well, the critical community went more emo about getting criticized for how
they
express
themselves
than I
ever
did when they’d do the same to me. They scorched the earth defending themselves and their life’s work in countless hatchet-job articles, simply because I dared to tell them—as they’d told me so many times before—that they
failed
in some way in
their
careers.

This was not merely sour grapes: This was an absolutely essential step for me as an artist. I knew I could never make something as fucked up and fearless as
Red State
if I gave even a quarter ounce of a shit about what critics would have to say about it eventually. I made
Clerks
without ever once thinking about what a critic might say about it, and that was the purest art I ever put my name on. After that flick, though, I started paying attention to the critics. I started believing what I was told by others: that I had to fear and respect the power of the written or televised critical word, as it could make or break the opening of my film. And when you do that, the art’s not pure anymore. I love
Chasing Amy
, but it’ll always be tainted for me a bit because it exists as a response to criticism: It’s the film I made in order to prove to a select group that
Clerks
wasn’t a fluke and that (contrary to what they’d written)
Mallrats
wasn’t bad.

I didn’t want that for
Red State.
Even in scripted form, it was already an experimental film, way outside the box, and far outside my comfort zone. I was already planning on tackling lots of the critically instilled self-doubt I had with regards to my craft, but I figured none of that was going to be possible if I didn’t face down the biggest creative fear I’ve labored under for nearly two decades: critics.

So to make
Red State
in as similar an artistically free space and mind-set as I was in when I made
Clerks
, I removed the critics from my equation altogether by telling them to go fuck themselves—thus ensuring shitty reviews of the film that would mean the most to me since
Clerks.
Gone was the “What will the critics write and say?” mentality I’d had from
Mallrats
forward; I knew
exactly
what they were gonna write and say at this point, after I’d pissed in the Klean Kanteens they received as gift-bag graft from some studio junket they attended. I’d called down the thunder, so my flick was gonna
get
it! Go read the post-Sundance reviews—particularly the bile from the blogger set, who tried to burn down my house within an hour of the first screening’s conclusion. You inspire
that
kind of passion in someone by telling people you’re going to deviate from the norm. They
want
to see you fail at that point—and it shows in their prose. And that prose lives online forever, as a testimony to what’s more important to them: reviewing a film honestly, or stabbing at the filmmaker with their steely knives. Bitches, you just can’t kill the beast. Understand the intelligence K-Z has: If you don’t like my lyrics you can press fast-forward.

Despite a Chicken Little–like litany of “It’s never gonna work” pieces, or charges that I was “imploding,” a month and change after Sundance the SModcast Pictures crew took
Red State
on tour across America. It was like a tent revival meeting every night: houses packed with hard-core fans who came to see movie in which a whack job preaches fire and brimstone to a devoted group of followers. And after the credits rolled,
another
whack job would gleefully bound onstage and reveal how all
his
magic tricks were done to a
devoted group of followers. The irony was not lost on any of us.

Jon Gordon, Jen Schwalbach, Meghan Quinlan, Alan Wysocki, James Smith (no relation), projectionist Trevor, and I all lived on the bus for the better part of two months, going to sleep in one state and waking up in another—just like the kids in
Almost Famous.
Clovis kept the moving house party safely on the road while Jen would lead wine-fueled sing-alongs well into the night after each show. Making
Red State
had been a liberating exercise in punk rock filmmaking, and being on the
Red State
USA Tour made you feel like you were in an indie rock band, gigging night after night.

At the tour opener in Radio City Music Hall, we made $160,000 from one screening and landed on the list of Top 10 per-theater averages of all time, behind a slew of Disney cartoons. With the exception of Parks (who doesn’t like to fly), most of the cast was onstage for the Q&A. John Goodman brought the house down when he channeled a little
Lebowski
, screaming “SHUT THE FUCK UP, DONNY!” to an elated audience member.

In Boston, we started counting the audience’s spontaneous applause moments: nine in all. At each screening, I’d sit in the balcony or back row and live tweet my observations and the crowd’s reactions, hash-tagged under various, SModified city names, like #SMoston and #SMohio. I’d write about the regional differences and reactions to the violence, making me feel a little like The Architect in
Matrix Revolutions
:
“Interesting: Your predecessors didn’t find Goodman’s ‘giant cross’ line as amusing as you. Ergo, they were numbskulls.”

It was the way releasing a film
could
be, far from the assembly line of spin and hype. Gone were the junkets, gone were the eight-figure marketing campaigns: It was just filmmaker, film, and audience, communing like hippies. I’d gotten very lucky with
Clerks
inasmuch as my first flick was plucked from obscurity and nursed to good health by Harvey and Co., looked out for by scores of caregivers. I didn’t have to struggle like most indie filmmakers, and I suffered no loss of livelihood or home trying to make my art. Once Miramax bought
Clerks
, I could call myself an indie filmmaker while enjoying the benefits of a studio filmmaker: I knew that every flick I made would get a theatrical release. But here I was, nearly two decades later, learning to crawl again. Investing all that time and giving up all that money ultimately paid out in the most treasured coin there is: contentment. And for the first time since I made
Clerks
, I truly felt like the indie filmmaker I was so often described as.

But nobody in this business cares about how good
Red State
may have made me
feel
. Film is a commercialized art form, which means there are those who’ll always grade what we did on the least interesting, least creative aspect of the medium: what it cost and what it’s made. Dollars, not sense. So for those folks, here’s a look at the
Red State
spread sheet …

Over the course of the fifteen shows of the
Red State
USA Tour, we made almost one million dollars from ticket and merchandise sales. A few times we had the highest per-screen average in the country. We averaged eleven hundred people a night per screening.

The flick cost five million to make but four million after the California tax incentive. Our
Red State
investors were
very cool about letting us handle the American theatrical distribution ourselves, providing that their investment would be covered as soon as possible—something very few production entities even offer, let alone deliver on. Invest a million dollars in almost
any
production and you
rarely, if ever
, get your money back within five years, let alone within the year. You take the million we made on the tour, you add that to the two million we pulled in from foreign sales, and you add to
that
two million more from Lionsgate for the VOD and home video rights, and another million from Netflix for the streaming rights, and you’ll notice our gains were higher than our spending. And without any dopey marketing figures to have to recoup, simple math dictates
Red State
is in the black.

And for that, I have you, the audience, to thank. Many, many thanks for making me look like the smartest guy in the room.

But none of it would’ve been possible without a slew of people helping make this whimsy a reality. Jenny Schwalbach, Jon Gordon, Meghan Quinlan, Jeff Hyman, David Dinerstein, our New York financier, our Canadian financiers NVSH—these are the “
Why Not?
” people.

There are plenty of “
Why?
” people in the world. Whenever you hit them with an idea, they start in with their bullshit.

“Why bother?”

“Why try that?”

“Why do you think you’re better than everyone else?”

“Why?”

To counteract this, simply surround yourself with folks who ask only “Why
not
?” As in …

“Wanna make a movie?”

“Sure. Why
not
?”

Remember: It costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever. I’ve spent the better part of my career getting up after movies and encouraging potential artists in the audience to give it a shot, pointing to myself as proof that anybody can make their dreams come true. I don’t do this altruistically: I’m selfishly insuring that I have cool shit to watch one day by encouraging
anybody
to follow passions like film or storytelling. I’ve been sending a message to the next generation of filmmakers for the last two decades: get ready, ’cause you’re up next.

As I left the Sundance stage after my post-screening filibuster that night, I bumped into two such future filmsters: a couple of twentysomething dudes in the crowded hallway exit who were telling me how much they dug the flick and the speech, until one of them nearly knocked me dead when he said, with all the earnestness and passion of indie film
incarnate …

“You can do this.”

The whole
Red State
Sundance premiere sometimes feels like a dream, but that kid and his imparted sentiment of encouragement? He was about as real as raincoats. That guy was a thinner, better-looking, more-pussy-getting version of me, circa ’94. And 1994-me didn’t say, “You fucking idiot! Do what everyone else does and sell your flick and spend to open it!” He kinda said, “Skate, bitch …,” knowing full
well that if I pulled this off, it’d be easier for him to get
his
flicks out there and express
himself
.