Seth Rogen (Really) Makes a Porno
Kevin Smith’s upcoming comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno, with Elizabeth Banks and Seth Rogen, may actually be a porno. No, seriously. The MPAA is trying to slap it with an NC-17 rating, meaning you’d have a tough time seeing it down at the megaplex.
So what’s in this thing that makes it so, like, porny? We asked Seth, and here’s what he said…
“It’s like a romantic comedy,” Rogen told us this week, at the press day for The Pineapple Express, which opens in August. “It’s a romantic relationship moviewith a lot of porn and balls.”
Wait, whose balls? “My balls are not in it,” he clarified.
Still, Smith is fighting for an R rating, as he did when Clerks first got slapped with an NC-17simply for dirty language. “You can disembowel someone in a youth hostel in Romania, but you can’t show people having sex,” Rogen said. “I think it’s weird.”
If Zack and Miri does get an NC-17, Rogen thinks his hit flicks Knocked Up and Superbad should have, too.
“This is not anything outside of what we’ve done before,” he told us. “The word porno is in the title, and that kind of freaks people out.”
Well, that and the balls, maybe.
Zack and Miri Make an NC-17 Movie?
Does the MPAA have it in for Kevin Smith? It’s beginning to sound like it. First they made the filmmaker remove an unapproved red band teaser trailer (which featured no footage from the actual film) from the web, and not it looks like Smith is having issues getting Zack and Miri Make a Porno by the ratings board.
“The MPAA is gunning for us, I think. It’s a really filthy movie. I hear they are having some problems getting an R rating from an NC-17 rating, which is never good,” Seth Rogen told MTV. “A guy f—ing a donkey, they ain’t got no problem with. But a man and a woman having sex they seem to have real issues with, for some weird reason. It’s insane. It’s completely insane.”
I knew when the title was first announced that Smith and company would probably have a few hurdles to jump when it came time to go up against the MPAA. I doubt The Weinstein Co is willing to release the film with an NC-17 rating, which means that Smith likely have to make cuts to get a theatrical R-rating. But don’t worry, Smith always includes a ton of extra footage on his DVD releases. If anything is cut, you can expect to see it on the DVD. As for the MPAA, I highly recommend everyone rent or buy the documentary This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated. I understand the need for ratings but the whole MPAA process is beyond ridiculous.
First Official Look: Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno
With less than two weeks left on principal photography, the first photo from Kevin Smith’s new comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno has hit the interwebs. The film stars Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as broke friends who decide to make a porn video to pay off their debts. “In the process, they uncover romantic feelings for each other.”
“The two leads (and entire cast) have remained brilliant. The first porno scene is spellbinding; funniest scene I’ve ever put on film,” Smith writes on his official website. “And ladies? [Jason] Mewes does full-frontal.”
Jeff Bock, an analyst with movie tracking firm Exhibitor Relations, claims that Zack and Miri Make a Porno is “one of the best titles of the year,” and that with Seth Rogen as the leading man, Smith has the potential of making more than his usual $20-$30 million.
“What’s weird about it is, it’s dirty. But it’s so incredibly sweet,” Smith told the newspaper.
Expect Zack and Miri Make a Porno to hit theaters sometime in Fall 2008.
Discuss: Who is excited to see Zack and Miri?
source: USA Today
Watch Kevin Smith and Seth Rogen Make a Porno
reader Mallrat sent in this first bit of behind the scenes footage from Kevin Smith’s upcoming film Zack and Miri Make a Porno (don’t worry Kevin, it’s completely spoiler free from what I can tell). What at first appears just to be a shot of Seth Rogen riding an escalator in Pittsburgh’s Monroeville Mall, actually comes with a much longer story. Smith explains on his insanely entertaining weekly podcast the story of how everything went wrong on the first day of shooting.
“It was the first day of the shoot, we were outside the Monroeville Mall, and we had this whole sequence we were supposed to do outside. We started with cloud cover, which is perfect for what we were doing, then all of a sudden the sun came out, and that kind of fucked us for doing the remainder of the shots of that scene because it wouldn’t match at all… So when that happened, we had to abandon what we were doing and then go to a cover set which mercifully was right inside the mall.”
Producer Scott Moiser’s back up plan went into effect, and the crew moved indoors, to the Black Friday mall setting.
“Problem is, nobody really thought about moving inside, that the cover set means that we’re working in a open mall. It’s not like Mallrats where we’re shooting in a pretty much a closed mall - we did a lot of nights and stuff like that. Some days we worked and it was wide open but not a lot of traffic in that mall. But we’re shooting in the Monroeville Mall after school hours, like after three, four, five o’clock. It’s just a sea of fucking teenagers. And we have Seth Rogen from knocked up and SuperBad, who all these teenagers have seen over the summer. So it’s just a sea of cell phone cameras.” Everyone has a camera now. Shooting away, snapping away, walking up to him, snapping pictures, shooting from above and what not. And we’re shooting the scene which is a walk and talk with Seth and Craig Robinson, the dude from The Office. And people are shooting the scene a long with us on phones and shit. So much so that if our footage was fucked, we could find one of these people and ask if we could use the footage, because we lost the footage.”
Smith explains that shooting in public makes him nervous and somewhat self conscious.
“I hate shooting in public. I hate directing in public. It’s just tough. There are just more elements. It’s like there are people watching. Are they hearing the dialogue? Are they going to go spoil it online? Is that dude looking in the fucking camera? Are we catching that dude in the shot? Yelling during the shoot… there are just all these factors that makes it a pain in the ass. And I just hate directing in public because it’s just like - it’s such a stupid job. People see you doing your job and they are like ‘that’s it? he just sits there in a chair and walks over and says a few things?’ I don’t know, it just feels like a fake job to me.”
You can hear more about the string of bad luck which continued on into the second day of shooting in Episode 44 of the Smodcast.
Disclaimer: It should be noted that we can only assume that the mall sequence shown in the video above coincided with the first day of shooting, as it very well could have been a later shoot. But for the purposes of reprinting Smith’s story, we made the connection.
Photo thanks to Chris DiSabato of Gateway Associated Photographers via News Askew.