Kevin Smith Donating His Weinstein Film Residuals to Women’s Charity

Kevin Smith seems like a pretty cool guy. I don’t know him, but I was obsessed with his movies when I was in high school. To a guy who is a pop culture junkie, a romantic and an extroverted outsider, they were really relatable films. They were also, in large part, produced or distributed by Miramax, the studio run at the time by disgraced executive and sexual predator Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob, who is probably fine.

Well, Kevin Smith, in keeping with his “pretty cool guy” image, seems really personally hurt that he profited because of Weinstein while Harvey was at peak “harassing and possibly raping actresses and also jerking off into the ficus.” So he’s going to do something, and that something is donating his residuals from the films Harvey Weinstein produced or distributed, according to Vulture. Well, apparently he said it on one of his podcasts, but I’m not a big enough fan to sit through the ten or fifteen hours of podcasts he does every week. I could barely even care about my podcast when I did one.

“My entire career is tied up with the man,” Smith said of Weinstein on his podcast Hollywood Babble-On. “I just wanted to make some fucking movies, that’s it … And no fucking movie is worth all this. Like, my entire career, f**k it, take it. It’s wrapped up in something really fucking horrible.”

Smith is really hard on himself, and he probably doesn’t deserve it. For starters, all the money he made for the Weinsteins was probably wiped out by Jersey Girl anyway. And, as Smith said, he didn’t know what Weinstein was up to.

“I know it’s not my fault, but I didn’t fucking help,” Smith told his podcast audience. “Because I sat out there talking about this man like he was a hero, like he was my friend.” He added, “I didn’t know the man that they keep talking about in the press. Clearly he exists, but that man never showed himself to me.”

The charity Smith is going to support with his residuals is Women in Film, a non-profit that promotes gender parity in film and filmmaking. Since Chasing Amy and Clerks were both distributed by Miramax and that Mallrats sequel isn’t happening, Smith is basically going to have to scrape by on residuals from Yoga Hosers, so let’s applaud him for his sacrifice.