If he was appearing at Comic-Con, Kevin Smith would have been booked into the event’s largest hall.
The line to get in would have snaked across the San Diego Convention Center grounds. And Smith would have kept the raucous crowd in stitches with his outspoken and hilariously profane monologues.
But Saturday’s event was the Producers Guild of America’s significantly more sedate Produced By conference on the Walt Disney Studios lot.
So Smith was simply one member of a panel booked into what was not the biggest of the three spaces.
The room did fill up, though without a long line or lengthy wait to get in. But yes, he did keep the reserved crowd in stitches.
His words focused on the business of independent film — specifically, on how he’s found that the traditional distribution model doesn’t work for his movies, and how he hit on a strategy that had him traveling around the country with his newest film, “Red State,” screening it as part of Q&A sessions like the ones he’d been doing for years for audiences who simply come to see him talk…