Filmmaker Smith denied another flight

"Clerks" filmmaker Kevin Smith famously suffered the indignity in February of being removed from a Southwest Airlines flight for being too overweight to fit in one seat. Now Kennedy Airport clerks have kept not only Smith but his wife Jennifer Schwalbach and his friend and collaborator Jason Mewes off a Virgin Atlantic flight there Monday.

Worse, Smith wrote in his blog, SilentBobSpeaks.com, the gate clerks refused to try to retrieve checked luggage containing his wife's medication.

"We were at the airport and checked-in for over an hour before departure," on the 11:45 a.m. daily Flight 409 to Los Angeles, Smith wrote. He had hired a concierge service that gets celebrities and others onto planes on time. Yet even though "we arrived at the gate at 11:35 - a full ten minutes before scheduled departure," he said in an e-mail to Virgin Atlantic, posted on his site, a gate clerk closed the Jetway door as they approached.

"We told him we were on the flight and he told us it was too late; the flight was closed. It was 11:36 . . . still over five minutes 'til the scheduled departure," Smith wrote.

Smith wrote to Virgin Atlantic - who, he said, apologized the same day and provided a refund for their later flight and offered free future tickets.

Smith had been on Long Island the day before, performing a stand-up comedy show at the NYCB Theatre at Westbury.