On Friday, Kevin Smith posted on Twitter a message saying the cast and crew of his new film, Red State, would be treated to the first screening of the film at the wrap party. Smith notes the film is currently edited down to 92 minutes without credits and his current plan is to take the film to the 2011 Sundance Film Festival without a distributor and see how it plays.
If you’re unfamiliar with the picture, I conducted an interview with Smith back in 2008 in which he said the film was “about political and religious fundamentalism, and even governmental fundamentalism, gone amuck. What happens is all those parties concerned take it to the next level.” Although that description doesn’t read as horror, Smith has been describing the film as such because he feels “the subject matter is so horrifying it can’t be anything but a horror movie… [It] takes so many twists and turns and it covers a couple of different genres, none of them comedic. So, I don’t think people will be wrong if people call it a thriller, but that’s not what the movie is completely either.” He also says it has “supernatural elements” and “people running around cutting people up” so it should be an interesting experiment.
With that said, he may be heading into Sundance without a distributor, but he’s already trying to put together a small bit of marketing material and today he posted the following teaser poster on blog and titled it “The Holy Ghost.” The poster was created by Melissa Bloom, assistant of Red State producer Jon Gordon, and Smith says the following of the image:
So we’ve got a marketing image that was put together by someone who was on set every day, integral to the process that produced the film which inspired this image. This isn’t the work of some gun for hire who’s doing six other campaigns; we’re not just one of many. The marketer is actually family, RED from pre-production all the way through wrap, so she’s got an insight into the flick that no ad agency could ever boast (not even one-time Glo-Coat golden boy Don Draper over at SCDP). I’ll take passion over pedigree any day.
When we first looked at Melissa’s poster, someone said “You should give this to the ad agency as a guideline.” Guideline? Was an ad agency gonna make us any happier than Melissa’s image made us? The Holy Ghost is kinda perfect, and more importantly? It gives us a starting point from which to launch our home-grown marketing campaign. There’s an immediacy to it, but also: anybody could’ve taken the initiative and did this themselves. If folks were wondering why Melissa was skating up near the blue line, far from the corner where the puck was, it’s because she saw where the puck was gonna be, and just waited to make her rush on goal. She shoots, she scores.
It almost sounds like Smith wants to go the current route of Francis Ford Coppola and distribute his own film. It will be interesting to read the reactions to the feature out of Sundance, the festival that pretty much launched Smith’s career when Clerks debuted there back in 1994.
Beyond that, here’s the poster in all its glory. Any thoughts? I added a larger version and the first pic of Parks as the film’s lead in the RopeofSilicon gallery right here if you desire a larger look.
