Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good by Kevin Smith Page A

the glass hockey puck case off the speaker, and hid it in the back of the closet.
    Thank God for weed, is all I can say. At the end of every workday, I’d go back to my apartment, spend time with my family, then blaze out and edit the previous day’s raw footage. It didn’t occur to me to bake a smoking lunch to bring to set until halfway through the show, when I saw Willis having a drink one afternoon. It was nothing scandalous: just a lunchtime stiff one. Dude’s entitled—he’s a grown adult. But so am I. So as grown adults were making choices to imbibe alcohol with their lunches, I’d smoke up in my trailer and play NHL 08 with friends and various puck-heads from the crew. I should’ve spent lunches napping, since I wouldn’t get much sleep at nights, editing ’til the wee hours of the morning. But a nap wouldn’t make working with Bruce easier to take—THC would. By the end of lunch, it was back to work on the set, crisp and ready to roll with oceans more tolerance for Mr. Morose.
    To be fair, Bruce wasn’t always doom and gloom on the
Cop Out
set. One time, I saw him lose it and laugh hysterically. We were between takes at video village—the arrangement of monitors that allows you to see exactly what the camera’s seeing, so everyone on set has a general idea of what’s being seen in the frame. My friend Malcolm was cracking people up when Bruce told us all we didn’t know comedy. He asked us if we wanted to see true comedy. Alaptop was brought over and Bruce instructed us to go to YouTube and look up Red Rose Tea. In doing so, we were presented with an old black-and-white commercial from the ’60s. It was a spot for Red Rose Tea in which chimpanzees in suits were “playing” instruments and “singing” over and over, “Red Rose Tea. Red Rose Tea!” At first, it was charming to see Willis crack up at the clip: Apparently, all mirth hadn’t abandoned him yet, and maybe Anakin Skywalker was still buried somewhere behind that mask. But upon the third straight viewing of the primate pitchmen, when the laughter was over for everyone but Bruce, I started to wonder if the apes were still alive and if they were available for day-play on the show—simply to put a goddamn smile on this man’s face while he was on set. It seemed that the only way to the eight-hundred-pound gorilla’s heart was with a bunch of chimps.
    Following years of anti-Hollywood sentiment at Miramax, I believed the studio was the enemy. But in reality, the studio was lovely every step of the way. Even when they told us we were going to have to change the title
A Couple of Dicks
, they were more collaborative than condescending. Having seen what I’d gone through with the ratings board on
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
, Warner Bros. called the networks and asked if they’d have trouble running spots for a buddy-cop movie cheekily entitled
A Couple of Dicks.
The networks said they loved the title but wouldn’t run the spots before nine at night. The studio explained that they couldn’t be expected to market the movie effectively if they couldn’t run TV spots before nine, so they asked for a title change. Producer Adam Siegel and I were deflated that we had to trash an entire sequel campaign hatched with Robb Cullenfor
Dicks 2: Dicks Come Again
, with poster taglines like “Things just got harder” or “Get Dicks-slapped!”
    The
Cop Out
budget was thirty-five million dollars, but since we shot fewer full days than all the half days on the other flicks I’ve ever shot
combined
, we brought the flick home for thirty-two million—saving money, just like we always tried to do at Miramax. All that propaganda I’d been fed about how the studios didn’t care about their flicks and how all the execs were just collecting paychecks? Utter horseshit.
    Not only had I spent my entire career stupidly believing in the anti-studio rabble, I was plagued by other childlike beliefs as well: I’d given up lots of money to work beside a guy