One movie the Dallas Film Society’s artistic director James Faust can’t wait to see is writer/director Kevin Smith’s Red State. As it turns out, that film, which premiered Sunday at Sundance, may be Smith’s last as a director. The funny man who broke through in 1994 with the low budget, wry-witted vignette of Gen X suburban malaise, Clerks, says he is hanging up his directing gloves to concentrate on distributing independent films.

Speaking from the stage at Sundance, Smith held a mock auction of Red State during which he bought the distribution rights to his own movie for $20, EW.com reports. He then equated selling off his movies to studio distributors to having a baby and giving it to someone else to raise. From the article:

Smith said the one thing he can’t do in-house is get the movie onto screens. So he put out the invitation for theater owners to cut a special deal with him, which he pledged would be better terms than what they get from studios. “We want to partner up, man,” he said, taking a shot at his last movie, the critically slammed Warner Bros. comedy Cop Out: “We won’t screw you over. We won’t be like, ‘You gotta f—ing take this piece of s—. If you want The Dark Knight, you better take this piece of s— Cop Out.”

It sounds like Smith’s distribution scheme will try to leverage social media to get the word out about movies, rather than the traditional route of advertising, trailers, and press junkets. The charmingly (sometimes) foul-mouthed Smith even chided distrubutors at his screening: 

Studios make movies. Movies have trailers. So you guys make a lot of trailers; you’ve lied to me many times.

My favorite line in the piece comes from via a tweet by James Rocchi of MSM Movies, who poked at the irony of Smith’s sacrosanct proselytizing of true indie-ness, moments after the credits rolled on his film about a cult church.

“Kevin Smith intends to market Red State, a film about a church-cult, directly to his fans. The irony of ‘preaching to the choir’ is piquant,” tweeted James Rocchi.