Sundance Film Festival   Kevin Smith: Indie King or God Complex?
Kevin Smith Red StateKevin Smith protests the Westboro Baptist
Church.  First there was the hype, then there was the letdown,
and now, a day after Kevin Smith screened his latest film, RED
STATE at Sundance, there is the residual anger. On Sunday, the
CLERKS writer-director stunned audiences and film buyers alike
by announcing that he was not, as promised, going to auction off
the distribution rights to RED STATE, a movie he touted as a
“horror movie” inspired by Westboro Baptist Church leader Fred
Phelps.  Instead, Smith bought the rights himself, for twenty
bucks, and said that in an act of anti-studio-system protest,
he’d sell his own film, starting things off with a 15-city tour
this summer. Smith’s disingenuousness was made all the worse by
the overload of characteristic Smith hype that preceded RED
STATE’s screening. (The protest/counter-protest outside the
Eccles Theater being just one piece of his elaborate fabric.)
Not helping matters