In Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, Jack Black and Mos Def play old-school video store clerks who, having accidentally erased their entire inventory of VHS tapes, "remake" their own versions of such rental-house perennials as RoboCop and Driving Miss Daisy with a Camcorder and the kind of props that an eight-year-old might use to construct his cardboard puppet theater. "They call this process "Sweding", for reasons that Gondry has already made his best attempt to explain to the Los Angeles Times' Chris Lee: "'I wanted a name that meant nothing,' Paris native Gondry said in Clouseau-esque Franglais about the invention of the verb. 'I had in mind, like, the suede shoes -- a fake velvet. A sort of ultra-suede? But I always get the word wrong because I'm French.'" Hey, they say that the first step is just admitting that you have a problem.
Aaron Sugarman, New Line Cinema's senior vice president for interactive marketing, thinks that the key to selling the movie may be turning people on to the great new world of Sweding, which shouldn't be hard; the way he sees it, the process is already well underway. "Everyone's taken by this idea of taking these great movies you love and remaking them into your own thing," he says. "It's what half the stuff on YouTube is." (Not to mention this fan favorite, whose makers might want to have a little chat with Gondry and Sugarman about their sources of inspiration.) The movie's own website extends the idea to the Internet, offering Sweded versions of such sites as IMDB and MySpace, and encouraging visitors to apply the Sweding process to their own lives, which had better have a lot of spare time set aside. The filmmakers plan to set up a "Sweding suite" at the Sundance Film Festival and offer workshop space to potential Sweders at SoHo's Deitch Projects gallery; Sweded fan films will shown at the gallery and on YouTube, though Gondry, to his credit, drew the line at a cross-promotion with Blockbuster, saying that turning what's meant as a celebration of independence and amateur creativity into a deal with a big corporation would amount to "contradicting ourselves." Meanwhile, New Line is reportedly "reaching out" to such directors as Robert Zemeckis and Ivan Reitman, whose works are Sweded in the movie, and inviting them to return to favor by producing their own Sweded versions of Be Kind Rewind. Ivan Reitman's version of a Michel Guidry film? Sounds like a sure-fire formula for turning gold into straw, but when it comes to surreal thinking, few filmmakers could have anything on a senior vice president in charge of interactive marketing.