STAGED! Kevin Smith’s fatgate
fatgate 2010
I’ll admit, when I first heard this story I was sucked in and like, “WTF?”. But then I thought. Staged. At first glance, there wouldn’t seem to be a lot of obvious upsides to Kevin Smith’s getting ejected from a Southwest Airlines flight for being too overweight. Even if the director ranks very high among Twitter’s hottest topics currently, significantly increasing the number of media mentions for his new action-comedy, “Cop Out,” which hits theaters on Feb. 26.
However, while the incident — and Smith’s ensuing Tweetathon about the ordeal, dubbed “Fatgate” — continues to generate headlines worldwide, it isn’t the first time the “Mallrats” and “Clerks” writer-director has suffered a shameful, weight-related embarrassment just days before theatrically releasing a new movie. Coincidence? I think not.
Remember that in 2008, just before the roll-out of his poor-performing, sorry attempt of a romantic comedy “Zach and Miri Make a Porno,” Smith suffered a similar disgrace: He admitted that his self-described “morbid obesity” had been responsible for the destruction of a household appliance. And then, as now, he milked that episode for all it was worth on his blog, in tweets, and in interviews.
He told The Times, “I broke a toilet. That’s how heavy I am. I can’t take all the credit. That was an old toilet and a very water-logged wall. But still, there’s no excuses, dude. I cannot cognitively reframe it and be like, ‘It wasn’t me. It was the toilet.’ It was definitely me! And that’s a wake-up call.”
Asked why he would volunteer such a potentially embarrassing story about himself, Smith demurred. “It’s a good story,” he said. “It’s tough not to tell even though I’m the fat clown at the center of it. Putting it out there is saying, ‘I get it. I understand.’ ” To me this is a sad way to gain publicity. If you have to do this much to get attention to a movie, is it really worth seeing it?
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