The line on this particular Saturday night snaked down Santa Monica Blvd. full of eager fans ready to pack into a small nondescript 50-seat theater in Hollywood’s Theater Row. Nothing out of the ordinary for this neighborhood, except that they were all here to watch a web show. I tagged along with this crowd for opening weekend of Kevin Smith’s SModcastle, the new home to his burgeoning network of podcasts with his friends.
When you walk into the place, you can tell that the Clerks director and New Jersey native had his hands dirty with every detail of the renovations on the place, right down to the New Jersey Devils carpeting and hand railings made from hockey sticks. I’m there for what seems to be the flagship show of this theater, a taping of Smith’s already popular weekly SModcast 3D show with his co-host (and producing partner) Scott Mosier.
The two take the stage for an hourlong back-and-forth intellectual diaspora of pop culture, movie references and hypotheticals—you know, the kind of 3am conversations you had in college with your buddies while re-watching Lebowski for the 18th time. They rarely look at the 50 or so of us in the audience, instead fixated on each other, only passingly aware that anyone is eavesdropping.
Smith goal is to host podcasts every night, making a physical homebase for developing audiences for a gambit of mostly comedy shows with names like Highlands 3D, Gay Clown, Jay and Silent Bob Get Old and even Blow Hard, a new Sunday night podcast with Smith and fellow director Malcolm Ingram that leaped to #1 on the iTunes podcast charts in just 24 hours after its launch.
