‘When I’m Dead, You Can Stick Me in Porn’: Kevin Smith Defends Postmortem Cameos in ‘The Flash’
Somehow, I doubt the phrase “Dead Kevin Smith” will ever pop up on Pornhub’s search trends.
Superhero fans who watched the recently released DCU film The Flash, a film supposedly so good it would make us forget about Ezra Miller’s many alleged crimes, were treated some unexpected Easter eggs — to spill some mid-level spoilers, many different performances of the many different superheroes in the film were represented in some way or another through the magic of CGI. Notably, the likenesses of George Reeves, Christopher Reeve and Nicolas Cage each took turns donning the red S of Superman.
Of course, the lattermost of that group never actually played Superman — Cage was supposed to star as Kal-El (after whom Cage would name his second son) in the planned 1998 film Superman Lives, which was famously slated to be written by Kevin Smith before Warner Bros. unceremoniously scrapped the project. Speaking on the nod to his would-be Superman film, Smith celebrated the historic cameos of The Flash and defended the use of the late Reeves and Reeve’s likenesses, telling Rolling Stone, “When I’m fucking dead, you can literally do anything to my image or to Silent Bob in a movie. Anything you want. You could stick me in fucking porn, dude.”
Or, maybe, we’ll just have a funeral?
The saga of Superman Lives story is the stuff of legend — so much so a documentary about its failure, The Death of "Superman Lives": What Happened?, was released in 2015. The pertinent points are this: Disagreements between the studio, director Tim Burton, legendary producer Jon Peters and the screenwriter hired to clean up the mess (Smith) marred pre-production with rewrite upon rewrite, fundamentally altering the film each time Peters insisted on something even crazier than his last demand. Most notably, Peters staunchly lobbied for Superman to fight a giant spider in the film because “spiders are the fiercest killers in the insect kingdom.”
In The Flash, Cage’s Superman does end up fighting that giant spider to Smith’s great delight — he recalled of the moment he learned that The Flash would include such an homage, “I just about passed out when I heard that,” conceding, “I thought when I saw it at the premiere, ‘Goddammit, it would have worked.’ As much as I used to make fun of Jon Peters, that looked badass.”
On the topic of the late actors returning to the Superman suit, Smith said, “It didn’t bother me at all. I thought it was just a really nice homage to the past. It didn’t feel like an insult. That felt like an homage.” Other outlets have criticized the decision, which Smith addressed, saying, “Some people are like, ‘Yeah, but they’re not alive to say yes or no.’ And you know, I don’t know any actor who would be like, ‘Don’t use my image when I’m dead.’”
“Like, you don’t go into this business to try to be shy, right? You want to be seen,” Smith continued before positing the pornographic potential of his own image. If Smith is so eager to get into smut, he doesn’t need to wait until he’s in the ground to do it — Jay and Silent Bob 3 could be a startling departure from the previous installments if Smith simply has an uncomfortable but necessary conversation with Jason Mewes.
