Kevin Smith Launches Entertainment News Site Movie Poop Shoot

(indieWIRE: 06.18.02) — Writer/director Kevin Smith is staking his claim in the entertainment news business, launching the new site, Movie Poop Shoot.com (www.moviepoopshoot.com). The site, named after the fictitious site that jumpstarts Smith’s recent Jay and Slient Bob movie (”Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back”), debuted yesterday.

Movie Poop Shoot.com offers daily news covering the movie, comic book, TV, and music worlds, with other features and columns as well. “I’m excited that I won’t have to check out 10 different websites for the stuff I’m curious about any longer,” Smith told indieWIRE by email, when asked about his reasons for funding the venture. “We’ll have it all under one roof with Poop Shoot.”

“The goal is just to offer a fun, sometimes irreverent and sometimes serious look at the great beast Pop Culture,” offered site editor-in-chief Chris Ryall in an email conversation with indieWIRE. “So we’ll do our best to provide real news next to inside information next to reviews and unique ways of presenting the material that infiltrates everyone’s head every day. Something like that.”

Continuing in his email to indieWIRE, Smith added, “We’re not trying to re-invent the wheel with Poop Shoot (and honestly, with a moniker like that, how could we?); we just want to add another spoke.” [Eugene Hernandez]

FILMMAKER KEVIN SMITH LAUNCHES NEW ENTERTAINMENT WEBSITE

Moviepoopshoot.com to Provide News, Columns, Reviews and Commentary About All Things Entertainment

Red Bank, New Jersey, June 14, 2002

Filmmaker Kevin Smith expands his web site universe on Monday, June 17, 2002 when he launches moviepoopshoot.com, a new site which will feature all things entertainment, according to Smith, writer/director of such indie hits as Dogma, Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

According to Chris Ryall, the sites Editor-in-Chief, Movie Poop Shoot will feature informational content focusing on the entertainment arenas Kevin is personally interested in; it will not, however, be about Kevin Smith or his or his work; that’s what NewsAskew.com does so well.

The domain name, featured in and later used to promote Smith’s “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, released last year by Dimension Films, is being re-launched and reformatted. The name of the site, according to Ryall, although innuendo-laden, actually refers to the inside information we provide.

The purpose for the site, adds Ryall and Smith, is to provide pop culture fans with a fun, slightly askew venue that offers a unique look at all the publics ever-increasing entertainment obsessions.

We realize that there are many entertainment sites that offer information on some of many of these subjects, says Ryall. But Movie Poop Shoot is our effort to offer fans one site that covers everything they may be interested in, and to do so in an irreverent and informative manner.

moviepoopshoot.com will feature:

Film release schedules and box-office reports.
Daily news about films, comics, books, music and television.
Weekly features about new film, CD, DVD and comic book releases.
Advance reviews of movie scripts, films, comics, books and music.
A wide array of pop culture offerings.
Regular and guest columns written by filmmakers, journalists, comic book creators, actors and others.
Interactive message board.
New weekly web comics created by industry professionals as well as new talent.

Ryall and Smith anticipate that Movie Poop Shoot will draw similarly to Smiths View Askew web site, which currently tallies about 100,000 unique hits per day. Movie Poop Shoot will be solely operated and will not solicit or accept advertising or sponsorship.

Smith starts production this summer on the romantic feature Jersey Girl, starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez and George Carlin, which he will direct from his own script for Miramax Films.

Sound Clip #1
Sound Clip #2
Sound Clip #3

From Rebel Without a Cause, by writer-director Kevin Smith:

In terms of predictability, Episode II (and Episode I) make Titanic seem like a veritable whodunit. We all know the Empire’s going to rise and eventually fall at the hands of Indiana Jones, the dude from Corvette Summer, the chick who wrote Postcards from the Edge, and an army of teddy bears. We all know that the Jedi will be hunted to extinction, with the exception of Alec Guinness. We all know that Yoda lives through the Clone Wars and matures into a Muppet. There’s little-to-no-mystery left in the Star Wars prequels, with the exception of seeing exactly how the space-shit winds up hitting the space-fan. And that should be enough to get even the casual fan into the theater.

Kevin quote #1 – “Neither of them really changed that much after the movie took off.” says friend and director Kevin Smith.

#2 – Despite the pressure to deliver at the box office, Damon says he is proud of his previous choices – all of them – and even allowed Affleck to poke fun at him last summer in Smith’s comedy Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

“I’m sorry I dragged you from whatever gay-serial-killers-who-ride-horses-and-like-to-play-golf, touchy-feely picture you were going to do this week.” Affleck taunts in a scene where the two actors are working on the fictitious sequel, Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season. “I take it you haven’t seen Forces of Nature,” Damon chides back.

“They felt like enough time had passed, and they were both of the mind of “let’s skewer the public personas and how people see us before someone else does it,” says Smith, who recently invited both actors to a party at the 7,500-square-foor Hollywood Hills hoem he now rents from Affleck. There, guests sampled catered Mexican creations and sipped margarits, while Affleck – who spent time last summer at the Promises rehab center in Malibu – stuck to his new drink of choice, Diet Coke.

#3 – Affleck is slated to star with Jennifer Lopez in Kevin Smith’s next film, Jersey Girl, which will be shot in Philadelphia this summer.

While attending the 28th annual Saturn Awards, Paramount Pictures president Sherry Lansing gave us a quick, exclusive interview in which she confirmed Ben Affleck would be coming back as Jack Ryan now that SUM OF ALL FEARS has done “Very well.”

“There will be a sequel,” Lansing told us. “There will be another one. Tom Clancy is writing a new book he wrote specifically with Ben Affleck in mind, and we’re waiting for that. We’ll be getting that in a few weeks. No one’s read it. Only Tom. He says to us, and he’s pretty good, he’s written it for Ben, and it’s spectacular.”

The book, Clancy’s RED RABBIT, is set for release in August. Here’s the wrinkle.

The recent release of SUM OF ALL FEARS, itself a radical rewrite of Clancy’s book of the same name, is set in the present day with Affleck’s Ryan being a relatively green CIA analyst of modern-day Russia.

RED RABBIT is set in the early 1980s, (when Clancy’s novel version of Ryan was about Affleck’s age) and chronicles a Soviet plot to kill Pope John Paul II only a few years into his reign. Looks like big rewrites for the big screen are coming again.

For her new film, J. Lo to be in Philly
By Carrie Rickey

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck will star in director Kevin Smith’s latest project, “Jersey Girl,” to be made here.

Here’s one reason Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez have been spotted together lately: They’re in preproduction.

Kevin Smith will film Jersey Girl, starring Affleck, Lopez and George Carlin, in Philadelphia for about 10 weeks beginning in mid-August, the director confirmed yesterday.

“I pushed to shoot in Philadelphia over Toronto because it’s in America, I liked the locations here, and because it’s a great production center,” said Smith, the Rabelais of Red Bank, N.J., by phone.

The Miramax film, budgeted at “upwards of $20 million,” will be the sixth feature from the writer-director of Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back.

The ’90s-era dramatic comedy costars Affleck and Lopez as parents, and Carlin as Affleck’s dad. The title character of Jersey Girl – the closest thing to a family film the defiantly profane 31-year-old has made – is the couple’s preschool daughter, who has not yet been cast.

“I don’t think I could have written this except for my experience as a dad,” noted Smith, spouse of actress Jennifer Schwalbach Smith and father of Harley Quinn, 3. (Smith, a comics geek, named his daughter after the Batman archvillain.)

“Unless the MPAA gets weirdly stringent, this will be my first PG-13 film,” Smith said. “It’s not profanity-laced, it’s not even profanity-dotted, which is weird because it’s Affleck, Carlin and me – guys known for cursing their brains out.”

Affleck, whose breakout role was as the smitten cartoonist in Smith’s Chasing Amy and who now stars in The Sum of All Fears, recently wrapped Martin Brest’s comedy Gigli, costarring Lopez as a lesbian hitwoman. The project is scheduled for release next year.

“He really had a great time working with Lopez and pushed her big-time for Jersey Girl,” Smith says.

“Are they dating? Unequivocally, no,” said the director, responding to rumors that Lopez, 31, who recently separated from husband Cris Judd, may be keeping company with eligible bachelor Affleck, 29.

“We’ve been excited about the prospect of hosting Kevin Smith in Philadelphia since we heard about the project in March,” Sharon Pinkenson, executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office, said yesterday.

With episodes of the CBS-TV drama Hack starring David Morse and Jersey Girl both in production here this summer, the film office is bucking the national trend of runaway productions going north where, because of the devalued Canadian dollar, budgets go further.

“We’re thrilled to be bringing millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs to the region,” she said.