Kevin Smith made Zack and Miri Make a Porno in the land of George A. Romero, and Cody Hamman has Film Appreciation for it.
Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a movie in which the worlds of two of my favorite filmmakers collide. A Kevin Smith film made in the land of George A. Romero. When Smith was writing the screenplay he envisioned the story taking place in Minnesota, as he wanted to return to the area where he had made Mallrats more than ten years earlier. But when Pittsburgh turned out to be the better filming location for the budget, Smith took the opportunity to pay homage to Romero within his comedy. Specifically, Zack and Miri features tributes to Romero's classic Dawn of the Dead. The story is set in the Pittsburgh suburb of Monroeville, which is where much of Dawn was filmed. The character Miri works at a mall, and maybe when Smith wrote that into the script he was thinking of returning to the mall where Mallrats was shot. Since he ended up in Monroeville, he instead filmed scenes at the Monroeville Mall, the mall where Dawn of the Dead was filmed, where a group of characters sought refuge in the zombie apocalypse. There's a hockey team in the film, and Smith chose to call that team the Monroeville Zombies. There are also cameos from Romero's frequent collaborator Tom Savini, who headed up the special effects department on Dawn and also appeared in the movie, and David Early, who was also in Dawn (and several other Romero films).
The Romero nods in Zack and Miri have always warmed my heart, and you'd think that a Kevin Smith comedy that shows love to George A. Romero would be one of my most-watched films, but the fact is I have only seen this movie a handful of times. It came along a bit too late for me to watch it over and over; by the time it reached home video in 2009, I didn't really watch new movies on repeat like I did while growing up. If Zack and Miri had been made ten years earlier, I'm sure I would have watched the hell out of it.
When Smith first started talking about making Zack and Miri Make a Porno in 2007, he was talking about shooting it back-to-back with Red State, his first foray into horror. He even expected to make Red State first and then segue into the comedy. As it turned out, Red State wasn't quick to get off the ground. It didn't get made until a couple years after Zack and Miri, which was an easier project to push forward - so easy that it got a greenlight from The Weinstein Company based on the title alone. But the story of Harvey Weinstein greenlighting a movie simply because it had "Make a Porno" in the title isn't so cute these days.
It was also easier to get made because Smith had written it with a specific actor in mind for the role of Zack, and this actor's career was taking off in a big way at the time. That actor was Seth Rogen, and Smith felt that he had pulled off a major coup when Rogen agreed to star in the film. From 2005 through 2008, Rogen had been involved with a string of comedies that had been massive hits, crossing the $100 million point at the box office, some of them closer to $200 million. With Rogen in the lead, it was looking like this film could be a major breakthrough for Smith. None of his previous films had made it out of the thirties at the box office, and people involved with Zack and Miri were hyped that this one might bust through that glass ceiling and climb all the way to $100 million. But that didn't happen. Zack and Miri Make a Porno performed like a Kevin Smith movie rather than a Seth Rogen movie. It did make more at the box office than any previous Kevin Smith movie had, it broke out of the thirties and reached $42 million, but by that point the number was a letdown rather than a triumph.
As for why Zack and Miri Make a Porno underperformed, I would say that instant greenlight title had something to do with it. The movie was poorly marketed and released at the wrong time (on Halloween), but the title caused some of the trouble with the marketing because "Make a Porno" couldn't be on the poster in some locations. Everyone had been making a big deal about the great title, and now it looked like it was just being released as "Zack and Miri". The shortening of the title continued on home video; copies of the movie sold at Walmart removed the "Make a Porno" part of the title.
Plus, while the raunchy brand of comedy Smith had always specialized in had become mainstream, I think the more successful films Rogen had been in had more widely accessible set-ups, that stories of a 40 year old trying to lose his virginity or a career woman finding herself impregnated by a slacker are more appealing to moviegoers than the idea of people making amateur porn.
The Zack and Miri who make a porno are Zack Brown and Miriam Linky (Elizabeth Banks in a role Smith had originally written for his Clerks II star Rosario Dawson; Dawson had scheduling conflicts), friends who went to school together and now share an apartment. Miri works at the local mall, Zack works at the Bean-N-Gone coffee shop, but they aren't making enough money to cover their bills. Although there's an eight year age difference between Rogen and Banks, Rogen looks older than he is and Banks looks younger, so they match up pretty well. The day before Thanksgiving, their characters go to their ten year high school reunion where the age of cast members are all over the place - Kenny Hotz of the show Kenny vs. Spenny, born in 1967, reminisces with Rogen, born in 1982, about the days when they were in high school together.
Miri goes to the reunion with plans to seduce her school crush Bobby Long (Brandon Routh), but it turns out that Bobby is there with his boyfriend, gay porn star Brandon St. Randy (Justin Long). To disguise the fact that he had a cold, Long gave Brandon a really deep, deadpan voice that makes the delivery of his lines even funnier than it would have been otherwise.
Zack and Miri return home to find that all of their utilities have been shut off. They're desperate for money... and since Zack has just met a porn star, the idea of making porn is at the forefront of his mind. Zack and Miri decide they need to make a porno to make some cash. The majority of the movie follows the troubled making of this porno every step of the way - securing financing from Zack's henpecked co-worker Delaney (Craig Robinson); recruiting Zack's hockey pal Deacon (Jeff Anderson of Clerks) to be the cameraman, since he used to be their school's sports game videographer; finding studio space; and assembling a cast.
Zack and Miri go into the making of the porno with the idea in mind that they won't have to have sex with strangers, they'll only have sex with each other. The other sex scenes will star community theatre actor Barry (Ricky Mabe), the oddball Lester (Jason Mewes), stripper Stacey (actual porn star Katie Morgan), and a sex worker (former porn star Traci Lords) who has a unique talent that has earned her the nickname Bubbles. These will be their co-stars in a Star Wars porn parody called Star Whores. At least, that's the plan until they lose their props, costumes, equipment, and studio thanks to a shady Tom Savini.
Backed into a corner, they come up with a new plan that involves a coffee shop porno being shot in Zack's place of work, the Bean-N-Gone, after hours.
Soon after the Clerks cartoon was cancelled by ABC, Smith mentioned that he was going to write a Clerks animated feature called Clerks: Sell Out, which would be about the clerks Dante and Randal deciding to make a movie in the Quick Stop convenience store. Basically, he would be turning the making of the real movie Clerks into a cartoon. Since Clerks: Sell Out never got made, when Zack and Miri Make a Porno was released I sort of saw this movie as Smith's way to make up for not being able to make Sell Out, because this is pretty much the story of the making of Clerks, if Clerks had been a porno. It's a group of suburban folks scraping together some money and making a movie in the business where the director works.
Recently Smith announced that he's writing a script for a live action Clerks III that will be about Dante and Randal making a movie in the Quick Stop, so clearly Zack and Miri Make a Porno did not take care of that desire to make a comedy inspired by the making of Clerks.
One thing I've loved about Smith's movies since the beginning is how much heart he puts into them; he has even described these movies as chunks of his heart that he has torn out of his chest and put in a projector for everyone to see. (He was using this description back in the days before his heart attack, I don't know if he wants to talk about his heart in that way anymore.) Most of his comedies aren't just a bunch of nonsense being thrown at the screen. The characters tend to be relatable, he delves into some interesting subjects, and there's usually an emotional element that makes you care about these people and what's going on with them. That all holds in true in Zack and Miri Make a Porno, where a sweet but complicated love story plays out between Zack and Miri in the midst of all the vulgar jokes, nudity, and the biggest grossout gag of Smith's career. Once they're in this situation, both of the titular characters realize they don't want their friend having sex with other people on this production. They're in love with each other.
A big moment in the love story of Zack and Miri is set to the Pixies song "Hey", and every time I see that scene I have flashbacks to when Smith joined YouTube the day the Clerks II trailer was released online. In a joking attempt to get views, his first video was a spoof of one of the earliest YouTube videos to go viral, a video that was made by two girls in Israel and just showed them dancing around the house and lip syncing to Pixies' "Hey". A few years later, he decided to put the song into Zack and Miri, and we have those two girls from Israel to thank for putting it in his head.
Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a good movie that I haven't shown nearly enough appreciation for in the eleven years since its release. Smith wrote a funny script, and the cast did a great job bringing it to the screen in the most amusing way possible. There are a lot of great laughs in this movie, and I didn't even mention the actor who gets some of the greatest ones - Tyler Labine.
Labine, who Smith worked with when he directed the pilot for the CW show Reaper, only shows up for one scene, interrupting the porno shoot as a drunk Steelers fan hoping to score a cup of coffee. His screen time is very brief but he's unforgettable. I think the most popular thing about this entire movie is Labine's delivery of the line, "Huck it, chuck it, football!"
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