Philadelphia Weekly

For two hours, Kevin Smith kept me waiting for his phone call. Two hours of his assistant checking in, letting me know he's on a very important conference call, telling me that ol' Silent Bob hasn't forgotten about me. By the time the man himself finally gets on the line, he is refreshingly apologetic about his tardiness. "I'm sorry, Smith says. "Unfortunately, I have corporate masters now."

So, what exactly was he and his "masters" talking about for so long?

Why, they were talking about dicks.

More specifically, A Couple of Dicks, the new movie Smith has directed that's coming out in February. The night before the interview, Smith screened the movie, a buddy cop comedy starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, for an audience, to make sure it's as funny as Smith and his masters believe it to be -- and it was a smashing success. The audience, which included family, friends and contributors to Smith's View Askew Productions Web site, ate it up.

Smith is happy. The studio is happy. Now, there's only one problem:

The title.

Clever and, of course, dirty as Dicks sound, if they go ahead with keeping the title, TV networks may only play ads for the movie after 9 p.m. So, they've been thinking of alternative titles. But none of them are as good as the original. "Nobody can let go of DIcks," he says, before adding, "which sounds very erotic."

After working with longtime idol Willis (anyone who has seen Smith's last Q & A DVD, Sold Out: A Threevening with Kevin Smith, knows how much Smith wanted to work with the fellow New Jerseyan again after appearing together in Live Free or Die Hard) and the unpredictable Morgan for three months, Smith is quite ready to give up the title if it means getting this sucker out into theaters.

Smith went through a similar battle a year ago with his last movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Both networks and newspapers refused to give out the full title in ads, just cutting it off at Zack and Miri.

But, for Smith, that was actually the least of his problems regarding that movie's reception.

While the movie, which had Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as down-and-out buddies who make their own skin flick as a get-rich-quick scheme, did get some love from critics (hey, even our own Sean Burns liked it!) and managed to gross a reasonable $31 million, Smith had higher expectations for it.When those expectations weren't met, Smith kind of got in a funk.

"Long story short though," he explains, "was I depressed? No. Was I disappointed? Absolutely. But it wasn't so much about the gross of Zack and Miri, as it was realizing that I couldn't continue being the same Kevin Smith that I've been my whole life, in terms of being a writer. Because I was so disconnected from the source, you know, at this point in my life."

So, there it was: Kevin Smith realizing he wasn't that young up-and-comer from Red Bank who sold off most of his comic-book collection to make his first film, Clerks, fifteen years ago. The man lives in L.A. now. He'll be 40 next year. He's been married to the same woman for a decade. They both have a 10-year-old daughter. Other people pay his bills, for Chrissakes!

He couldn't go on returning to the same format on-screen, of stoners and slackers "sitting around in front of the camera, talking about pussy and Star Wars and shit like that." Especially when Judd Apatow and his crew of ad-libbing man-children have been taking that same formula and spinning comic gold at the box office. (You could say that Zack and Miri was Smith reminding audiences that Smith was Judd Apatow long before Apatow showed up.)

"These dudes do what I used to do and they do it way better than I've ever done it," he admits. "Or, at least, they reach more people doing it. And that's the name of this game. People don't care about who did it first. They care about who does it most profitably."

Thanks to consuming "tons of weed" during this time, Smith came to terms with what he had to do. He knew he had to stop making "blogs as movies," as he calls it. Besides, he has other venues where he could riff on pussy, Star Wars and other Smith concerns: Twitter, his stand-up Q & A gigs (which he'll be doing on Thursday night at Merriam Theater), the "SModcast" he does with longtime producer Scott Mosier on his Web site. (Transcripts of said podcast's most uninhibited moments can be found in Smith's new, aptly titled book, Shooting the Sh*t with Kevin Smith: The Best of SModcast. )

It was time for Smith to get out of his self-pitying, marijuana smoke-filled haze and become a genuine, straight-up, goddamn filmmaker!

Luckily, someone threw Dicks in his lap. An exec over at Warner Bros. thought Dicks would be an ideal project for Smith since the script (which he didn't write; a first for a Smith film) has a "Clerks as cops" vibe. But Smith says he also jumped on it because it's the kind of traditional movie his dad would've appreciated. "If I made this movie," he says, "my father would've been like, 'Oh, you do make movies for a living.'"

While it may seem like longtime indie boy Smith has officially sold out by working with a major studio, he actually has nothing but praise for Warners. "Like, they're the ones taking chances now," he says.

"They're kind of what Miramax was back in the mid-'90s. These are the crazy cats who are like, 'Yeah, let's make Watchmen. Yeah, let's make Where the Wild Things Are. Yeah, let's put fucking Guy Ritchie on Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, let's put Kevin Smith on, like, a buddy cop movie from the '80s.' Didja see Observe and Report? What fucking studio makes that movie? I was like, "Wow, it's insane that a studio would get behind a comedy that out-there."

So, there may be a very chance that Dicks or whatever the hell it may be called come February may be the breakthrough, box office smash Smith has been looking for lately. I just hope he doesn't blow up to the point where he doesn't apologize for being late for phone interviews.

People like Smith when he's making movies about dicks -- not being one.

Kevin Smith 8pm, $39-$66. Merriam Theater.