The New Boys Club

Sitting before an audience of 6,500 in cavernous Hall H at Comic-Con this past weekend, Kevin Smith squinted at the message that was written on the back of his name placard, then read it to the crowd: "Please be aware that many of your audience members may be less of 18 years of age,"

The director of Clerks waited a few beats, then calmly requested a sexual act to be performed upon him.

There was no protest from the audience, fanboys clad in iconic (and ironic) t-shirts gathered to worship at the altar of directors such as Smith, Judd Apatow and the current king, Zack Snyder.

The screenings were done: Apatow's Pineapple Express was getting a lot of buzz, Frank Miller's The Spirit had been previewed briefly and been mostly greeted as properly dark, and Snyder's Watchmen (a kind of thriller set in a grungy, alternate reality 1985), unveiled footage met with both rapture, and the requisite bit of fanboy web carping.

Snyder is well aware that Warner Bros. picked the project up after a Paramount front-office change put it in turnaround. And while the studio was game enough to adopt it, complete with a reported $100 million budget, it still has some wishes it's not shy about.

After all, in a potential franchise based on the best of a 12-volume series, there are almost certainly some toys left in the chest if this film can even match Snyder's 300 numbers.

But for directors such as Apatow, Smith and Snyder, they are the brand and don't want to lose that to the corporate side of the movie business. Even Warner Bros., for example, as of yesterday didn't have an available dub of the Watchmen reel Snyder had shown.

The studios don't want to disrupt that image, either, and risk upsetting a group of fans that actually still goes to the movies. The suits keep a low-profile at Comic-Con, lest the fans be reminded that movies are greenlit first of all to make money.

Though politic in the big hall, with Warner executives Jeff Robinov and Alan Horn inconspicuously in the audience, Snyder later pointed to some fights he had won, like keeping Richard Nixon--a four-termer in the fantasy plot-- as a palpable presence in the film. "I didn't compromise as much as they wanted me to."

Snyder came to the event with the most at stake. Even after updating George Romero's Dawn of the Dead and going on to adapt the celebrated graphic novel 300 to some acclaim and $211 million U.S. box office, he wasn't guaranteed a free pass with what his film's villain, rising British star Matthew Goode calls, the Citizen Kane of graphic novels.

And while Snyder seemed a bit sulky to be lumped with his fellow geek gods on the panel, he later spoke realistically about the processes of bringing such particular project to a skeptical marketplace.

"You create a hype machine to make it part of the zeitgeist," he said. "And you start this relentless dumping of the material [on the audience]."

Although Snyder worried aloud to the crowd that there's "No money, no physical money left in the economy anymore," he really didn't have to sell his film to the crowd. Smith happily took on that task and then recalled giving Snyder, whom he'd never previously met, a hug backstage.

"He pushed back a little bit," said Smith, "Like, 'It's not that big a fraternity, fat boy.'"