Not one person was happy when A Couple of Dicks — the first Kevin Smith directed movie that wasn’t also written by him — was forced to renovate itself with the new, family-friendly Cop Out title for marketing purposes. Smith was peppered from all angles, particularly on Twitter where he tries to answer as many fan questions as he can, and repeatedly clarified that it wasn’t up to him; it was up to Warner Brothers. He had been in an epic battle not too long ago when that movie’s backers wanted to drop the “porno” from his Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which he ended up (thankfully) winning.
While speaking to Entertainment Weekly recently, Smith explained the whole ordeal in great detail and laced with sharp expletives in true Kevin Smith fashion. Said expletives were censored in the original article, but I’ve gone ahead and uncensored them, because let’s face it: it’s a lot more fun that way. That means there is a tiny language NSFW warning on this one, kiddies.
Click on over to the other side to read some of the juicy bits we’ve included from the whole dirty thing.
Look, losing A Couple of Dicks was almost akin to losing my own dick. It was a perfect buddy-cop movie comedy title. Everyone knew it. You couldn’t say that title to somebody without a fucking smile crossing their face. But what I had gone through with Zack and Miri Make a Porno — “porno” had become very problematic, it became tough for us to advertise [the film], blah blah blah. Warner Bros. decided, “Hey man, we’ll call the networks and see if we’re going to get any problems [with A Couple of Dicks as a title], months before the movie’s ever going to come out.” The top 3 networks — CBS, ABC, NBC — said we can’t run one of your spots before 9 o’clock.
I’m like, “Well what about Inglourious Basterds?” And I guess, because of the spelling, they got away with it. So we were like, “Can we call it A Couple of D.I.C.s?” Because that’s the proper acronym for detectives, Detective In Charge. And [the networks] kicked that back as well. It was the pluralizing of any form of dick, whether it was d-i-c-k or any derivation.
So my feeling was like, it’s an R-rated movie, so who the fuck are we talking to anyway before 9 o’clock? Warner Bros’s feeling was like, “Hey man, we have to advertise to the sports audience on Saturday and Sunday and all those sporting events usually take place before 9 p.m. in the evening.” At which point, I was like, “Oh wow, you guys are way smarter than me.”
The trailer for Kevin Smith’s Cop Out was released this past week to fairly mixed feedback — I personally felt that you can very easily tell that the movie wasn’t written by Smith just by the feel of the trailer. Smith has answered these questions on Twitter as well: as he said in the quote above, the movie is R-rated, and because of this it’s not at all easy to cut a trailer (another thing he has no control over), and he still feels strongly that fans will be won over within the first five minutes. We can all only hope that this is indeed the case.
Cop Out stars Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan and will be released on February 26, 2010.
Very ironic new title, lol.