How Kevin Smith is Not Like a Sausage, and Why You Should See His Film "Red State"

Just last night, Imus thought to himself that movie director Kevin Smith would be a perfect guest for Opie and Anthony’s radio program. Until, that is, Rob reminded him that O&A had recommended Smith to Imus in the first place. Duh.
 
Appearing in studio today for the second time in a month, Smith observed that, like O&A, Imus actually lets his guests speak. “Not everybody does that,” he added.
 
Smith was back in town because his movie Red State, which does not open until October, will be screened tomorrow night at Radio City Music  Hall, the first stop in a series of viewings across the country. After the flick airs, Smith and the cast will speak for a bit, then take some questions from the audience. Tickets can be purchased at Coopersdell.com, and plenty are still available for Saturday’s show.
 
“My name is on the marquee right now!” Smith marveled, staring out the window onto Sixth Avenue. Because Radio City is “like a barn” and seats around 6,000 people, Smith suspects tomorrow night’s event won’t sell out. “I have no tiger blood in me,” he lamented.
 
He does, however, have an impressive filmmaking career in him, having directed movies like "Clerks," "Mallrats," and, most recently, "Cop Out." Red State is quite different from its predecessors, and not only because Smith is taking it on the road months before its official release.
 
“It’s a little horror movie about boys who go out into the woods to find online sex with some woman, who turns out to drug them,” he explained. “They wake up in a subterranean chapel surrounded by very frightening, extremely fundamentally religious people who have no good intentions for them.”
 
The group of fundamentalists in Red State is modeled after the infamous Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, and, according to Smith, “has been frustrated with their inability to penetrate the word of God in practical ways. So now they take the word of God into their own hands.”
 
As such, they pervert the bible so that it is permissible to kill anyone who does not agree with them, or anyone who sins. “Then, the government gets involved,” Smith said, admitting the movie is “like three flicks jammed into one.”
 
Red State stars John Goodman and Melissa Leo, the recent Academy Award winner for her role in "The Fighter." Smith has never won an Oscar, but one time he saw Ben Affleck’s.  But if what Smith says is true, nobody—not Affleck, not Opie, not Anthony, not his own mother—has an advance copy of Red State. Which means that despite his best efforts, Imus ain’t getting one either.
 
“Since we’re self-distributing it, we’re keeping it very locked down,” said Smith, whose own wife was instructed to buy tickets to the Radio City event if she’d like to see the movie before October.
 
In all likelihood, many of Smith’s fans are attending tomorrow night’s preview for the sole purpose of hearing Smith speak before and after. “I don’t get normal director Q&A questions,” he told Imus, and recalled one of the more interesting queries posed him a few years back in England.
 
“A kid was like, ‘If you could be half man, half sausage, which half would be sausage and why?’” Smith said. “I was like, ‘Lower half, all sausage. Because finally I’d be well-hung.’”
 
-Julie Kanfer