Coming off a 13-hour marathon that had him signing geek memorabilia almost until dawn at his Broad Street comic book store, filmmaker Kevin Smith entertained 2,000 fans in Marine Park last night with a mixture of endless approachability and profanity.
Local politicians, including Mayor Ed McKenna and mayoral candidate Pat Menna, all but kissed Smith at the start of his open-air Q&A and rocked with laughter at his early answers. But they grew increasingly rigid of jowl and then vanished from stage right as the director of the recently-released ‘Clerks II’ worked his way through an hour of audience questions with dozens if not hundreds of graphic references to sex.
Until a host finally interceded, many of the questions came from self-described aspiring filmmakers asking for jobs, advice or an opportunity to have picture taken with Smith. Increasingly, such requests elicited groans from the audience.
But as he had at Jay & Silent Bob’s Secret Stash on Monday, when he stayed past 4a to greet every fan who turned out seeking an autograph, Smith indulged most questions and requests, no matter how inspired or insipid. Twice he spoke by cell phone to friends of audience members, and agreed to sign one man’s penis after the event.
And consistent with the studied edginess of his films, nearly all of Smith’s answers contained a word or bit of carnal imagery not likely to appear anytime soon in a Borough Council resolution, let alone the Asbury Park Press, The Hub or the Two River Times.
To wit:
‘When did I fuck Superman?’
‘Sportfuck.’
‘Suck me off.’
‘Suck off a guy.’
‘You love Wolverine? That means you love cock.’
‘Is your dick really small, like mine?’
‘I’m 36 and I still wear a shirt in the fucking swimming pool.’
‘That’ll make a dude lose his hard-on fast, if he sees my name over his lady’s ass crack.’
‘There were a lot of butt-fucking jokes in that movie. Did you understand them?’ (This one was in response to a girl who said she’d seen the 1999 film ‘Dogma’ when she was 5 years old.)
‘I like my wife. I like fucking my wife. I want to continue fucking my wife.’
Smith’s sundown appearance preceded a screening of his 1994 indie hit, ‘Clerks,’ which he described as a $28,000 film in which “people just basically sit around and say ‘fuck’ a lot.”
When a fan remarked on Smith’s cinematic skills, as evidenced by his ability to draw such a large crowd, Smith objected.
“That doesn’t say a lot about the quality of my movies,” he said. “It says a lot of people got nothing better to do on a Tuesday night.”
