Kevin Smith and the Not-So-Friendly Skies
As a longtime fan of his films, a follower of his Twitter feed and a Smodcast listener of two years standing, I know two things for certain about Kevin Smith: he documents his life and interests with a kind of breathtaking detail that mere journal writing cannot remotely touch, and crossing this man is a terrible, terrible idea.
This weekend, it hit the wires that Smith, the director of “Clerks,” “Chasing Amy,” “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” and the upcoming “Cop Out,” was asked to leave a Southwest Airlines flight from Oakland to Burbank when the flight crew determined he was too heavy to fit in one of their seats.
In the hours following the flight, Smith sent out a flurry of Tweets from his popular Twitter account, @ThatKevinSmith, castigating the airline for ejecting him from the flight when he claimed he could easily pass the “arm rest test,” meaning he could fit between armrests in the seat.
According to Smith, he is not to the point where he cannot pass that test.
“I’m way fat, but I’m not there just yet,” Smith Tweeted.
Southwest Airlines issued an apology to Smith titled “Not So Silent Bob” on blogsouthwest.com:
First and foremost, to Mr. Smith; we would like to echo our Tweets and again offer our heartfelt apologies to you. We are sincerely sorry for your travel experience on Southwest Airlines. As soon as we saw the first Tweet from Mr. Smith, we contacted him personally to apologize for his experience and to address his concerns on both Twitter and with a personal phone call.
Smith normally books two seats as a comfort measure and, as he mentioned on a 1 hour, 27-minute edition of Smodcast (proudly NSFW), his semi-weekly podcast, he flies Southwest for flights within California or to Las Vegas and generally buys two seats as a preference because they are inexpensive.
One frequent comment on Twitter was the suggestion that Smith was using the incident to drum up publicity for “Cop Out,” the Bruce Willis/Tracy Morgan police comedy opening Feb. 26. In one of a series of candid Tweets on the subject, Smith told his 1.7 million Twitter followers that this was hardly the case.
“Sometimes it baffles me how little people think things through,” Smith wrote. ’Free publicity!’ = 200 new articles declaring I’m fat. Yay, me. Epic win.”
Anyone who listens to the enthusiastically profane Smodcast understands that it is nearly impossible to insult Smith about his physique: he is completely self-aware and often refers to his fitness level with deprecation. More important, this is a fine indication that in the current media environment, any discourtesy can reverberate and result in a corporate communications disaster and crashed Twitter accounts.
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[...] More about the situation at Staticblog. [...]