Kevin Smith to Open Film School Camp in His Movie Theater

Kevin Smith recently confirmed that along with some business partners he’s now the proud owner of a movie theater. Having purchased The Atlantic Moviehouse in his native Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, Smith has already begun to reveal plans for events and other goings on that will occur, and now he’s revealed he’ll be putting on his mortarboard to dispense some wisdom. Speaking on his latest FatMan Beyond podcast, Smith opened up about plans for events that will occur at the theater, including plans for a summer film program where he’ll have attendees develop, shoot, and premiere a short film with his guiding hand helping them out along the way.

“To able to own a movie theater is a cool thing but I always felt like a movie theater during the day rather than show matinees they should rent it to a film school and let a film school just do their classes at it, that’s all,” Smith revealed. “When I went to film school it was a movie theater, and what is a classroom except a bunch of chairs a big white board in front, that’s a movie theater right there. So I was always like if I owned a movie theater I’d rent it out to some film school in the first half of the day and then five o’clock at night it would become a movie theater. Well now I’m about to own a movie theater and I’ve got like 30 years experience making Kevin Smith movies.”

Smith revealed that the intention is to have the program begin next summer, with a series of different attendees pop in every month for traditional 9 to 5 classes that will result in a short film. The filmmaker noted that the plan is more like Film Camp than a Film School, but revealed plans for the shorts to revolve around his characters Jay and Silent Bob.

“For the first week and a half you’re in pre-production, you meet all the instructors who go through everything, teach you how to do everything, how to order equipment, what equipment you would need, what this function is, what this person does, everything,” Smith said.” Next week and a half you shoot your short and then the last week and a half you post and then you premiere and stuff so you got a full month five day weeks and at the end of it you got this short that you all share.”

He adds,  “Since I would never want to be like ‘I’m a film school teacher’ because then people be like ‘F-ck you, you can’t even make a movie how can you teach someone else?’, which I could already hear on the internet right now, I made it fool proof by being like, ‘I’m not teaching you how to make a movie or a film, I’m teaching you how to make a Kevin Smith movie,’ and nobody can take that away from me.”

Take a look at Smith’s newly purchased movie theater below!