The cocoon, plus the cast and crew for Kevin Smith's "Zack & Miri Make a Porno," are gone.

"The whole show, we've been kind of in a cocoon and not really talking to anybody," the writer-director said earlier this week in Monroeville as filming wrapped. "But it was incredibly productive for us to work that way."

Moviegoers and members of the media generally left the production alone, even though some knew about locations or spotted tell-tale trucks around places like Monroeville, McKeesport, McKees Rocks and Hazelwood.

"Everyone was really nice about it. If we were shooting any place else, we wouldn't have gotten the kind of privacy that a movie like this kind of requires. There are a lot of naked people walking around."

Still, Smith added, "Some people think it's a nonstop party, but you're talking about 12-, 15-hour days that take their toll. You've got a lot to accomplish in a very short window."

Nevertheless, he managed to finish two days ahead of schedule, which prompted Seth Rogen to chime in: "All I keep thinking is I wish I did more takes. That's about a thousand more jokes."

He and Elizabeth Banks star in the comedy -- dirty, sexy but sweet, Smith promises -- about two friends who decide to make a porn movie for the money but discover they have feelings for each other.

Rogen was a trouper, returning to Pittsburgh the day after he was a presenter with fellow funnyman Jonah Hill at the 80th Academy Awards. "It was a little hectic, schedule-wise, because I had to fly out of here and fly back and I worked on Monday, but not till the afternoon."

Smith said Rogen could have insisted he pick another scene to shoot that day, but he didn't. "He was a true champion, man," the director said.

As for Rogen's red-carpet and Oscar experience: "It was really weird. It was a lot of fun. I kept expecting someone to ask me to leave. It was great, I was shocked that they asked us to do it. The whole thing was just kind of thrilling, it was really cool. ... It was great watching Philip Seymour Hoffman not laugh at my jokes."

Oscar-winner Hoffman, a nominee for "Charlie Wilson's War," was among the A-listers in the front rows of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. "Never before have I not made such famous people laugh," Rogen quipped.

Smith and the table of Pittsburghers had no trouble laughing. In fact, the director said of Rogen and Banks: "Both of them were, hands down, the two best actors I've ever worked with. I know you're supposed to say that cause it's the current movie but I've worked with [expletive] Matt Damon."

Not to mention the likes of Alan Rickman, Rogen volunteered. "Make a list of all the people we're better than," he said, laughing. (Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette movie editor)

A study by The Nielsen Co. found that the PG-rated movies with the least profanity made the most money at the U.S. box office.

Sexuality or violence in those films had less to do with success than the language, the Nielsen PreView group said in a study released yesterday.

"The reality is that profanity, within PG, is the big demarcation between box-office winner and box-office loser," research and marketing director Dan O'Toole said at ShoWest, a conference where studios unveil upcoming movie lineups.

The research firm cross-referenced box-office data on 400 films in wide release from fall 2005 to fall 2007 with their ratings for sex, violence and profanity given by Critics Inc.'s Kids-In-Mind.com Web site.

Controlling for marketing and production budgets of films, as well as depictions of violence and sex, movies that scored an average 0.8 on a 10-point profanity scale collected an average of $69 million. Those that averaged 2.8 for profanity averaged $38 million. All PG movies averaged 2.3 on the profanity scale.

The Nielsen unit, which launched a fee-based research Web site for studios on Tuesday, also listed other early predictors of success. The company found that movies that received approval from more than 70 percent of critics, regardless of their stature, earned far more at the box office. In addition, Internet buzz about a horror film had little relation to its eventual box-office draw. Other films, however, saw paydays increase in relation to Web chatter. (Associated Press)