Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Kevin Smith's latest film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, will open this coming Friday. The film, likely to be labeled as Smith's most sex-filled movie, has The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, and Superbad star, Seth Rogen, in the lead role.

"I saw Seth in '40-Year-Old Virgin,' fell in love with him, and said: 'My god, this dude would be fantastic in a leading role,'" Smith recalled during an interview at last month's Toronto International Film Festival.

Art imitates porn in this dully shot and edited comedy about a couple of desperate, platonic roommates (Rogen and Elizabeth Banks) who decide to do a cheap porno together to make the rent. When Zack jokes that their high school classmates are one target audience and doing a spoof of Star Wars will give them another, he's breaking down Smith's marketing scheme. Put "porno" in the title and Star Wars in the plot and the Smith-heads will line up.

Sex was an endless topic of conversation for the characters in director Smith's 1994 breakthrough hit, Clerks, and in his new movie, sex is more than talked about, it's on display.

According to Reuters, advertising the film, which is being released by the Weinstein Co., has proven tricky. Officials in Philadelphia, for instance, declared their bus stops off-limits to ads because the film's story involved pornography, and TV spots are airing as just "Zack and Miri" without "make a porno" being spoken along with the title.

"I'm stunned that people have that big of an objection to the word," Smith said. "Porno is not a bad word, it's a word that describes something. It's a word that describes a genre or a field of filmmaking," he said.