I ASSURE YOU, WE'RE OPEN
In which I work my way through Kevin Smith's surprisingly prolific catalogue.
A little over a year ago, my friend Dan started a group chat with another friend, Jacob.
“Trevor. Jacob hasn’t seen any of the Kevin Smith films. Give him a rank order so he can rectify this situation.”
Surprised and excited, I replied, “I feel like I’ve never been more equipped to discuss a subject.”
The timing was impeccable, because I was slowly working my way back through the filmography myself. It was a very casual rewatch, and I just barely finished it last week. It’s also the first time I had revisited a lot of them in a long, long time. Sort of weird because Kevin Smith has been a pretty big part of my life for—no joke—30 years now.
CLERKS was released in 1994, but I didn’t catch it until it hit VHS a year or so later. By the time I saw it, I was vaguely aware of the movie’s origin story. Smith financed the production himself on credit cards, got into Sundance, sold the movie to Miramax, and was heralded as one of the new voices of independent filmmaking, along with Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and Steven Soderbergh. I laughed pretty hard during CLERKS, but also remember thinking “You’re allowed to just make movies about your shitty job with your friends? And people will pay you money for it? I could make this movie.”
Smith’s whole self-deprecating thing—that pretty much anyone could do what he does—really appealed to me. He wasn’t special, had no industry connections, and he wasn’t wildly visionary. But he was determined, funny, and wasn’t afraid to put his own money on the line. Smith’s first five movies were a huge part of shaping my sense of humor when I was younger, and his site, ViewAskew.com, was one of the first websites that I knew how to access when I got the internet in, like, 1997. There wasn’t a lot happening on the internet back then, and the ViewAskew message board1 was the first online community that I knew about, and I spent HOURS on that thing. I had to wait until my parents had gone to bed though, because all we had was dial-up internet and I couldn’t tie up the phone lines too much.
I gave Jacob a list, and told him to go in order of release2. Start with CLERKS, then MALLRATS, CHASING AMY, and DOGMA. Those are the big four, and then told him that he can top it off with JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK if he really wants to, but it’s not necessary.
I wasn’t a comic book guy when I discovered Smith’s movies, so worldbuilding was a fairly unique concept to me. I loved digging into everything, and finding little references to other movies. Then I started seeing it everywhere else—Tarantino movies, Elmore Leonard novels, etc. It’s no longer a novel concept in movies, but it’s still really cool when it’s done well.
He “closed the book” on what he called The View Askewniverse after STRIKE BACK, and branched out, trying to make other kinds of movies. That didn’t always work. Around the same time, Smith moved away from message board posts, and into blogging around 2005, which was also around the same time that I discovered LiveJournal and Blogger. I couldn’t make movies like him, but I could blog. So that’s what I did.
A few years later, he started a podcast with his producing partner, Scott Mosier. It was one of the first podcasts that I was aware of3 and those weekly shows made my long walks between classes on the University of Utah campus way more enjoyable. I also figured that if he could make a podcast, I probably could too. So I followed him down that road. Trying to explain what a podcast was to people in 2009 was pretty hard, and showing them how to find and listen to them was even more difficult. But it was fun, and we even got a little bit of local press for being on the cutting edge of technology. It didn’t last long, and it cost us way more money to produce than we ever made from it (which is zero dollars), but it was really fun.
Smith was still making movies, but they were becoming less and less entertaining. I saw pretty much everything up until TUSK, when I checked out. I forced some friends to see that with me on my birthday in 2014, and then spent an hour afterwards apologizing to them. I passed on almost everything he did after that until JAY & SILENT BOB REBOOT, which was pretty dumb but kind of fun.
CLERKS III pulled me back in, and I really liked it, and that’s when I started going back through his filmography. It was almost serendipitous when Dan asked me to give Jacob my recommendations.
Smith came to town in November of last year, and did one of his, part stand-up comedy, part spoken word, mostly one man live podcast shows that he’s been doing for the last 15 years or so. He told a few stories that I’ve heard before, but talked mostly about wanting to settle back into making movies with his friends again, the way it was at the beginning. He did that with CLERKS III and JAY & SILENT BOB REBOOT, and he’s been talking about making TWILIGHT OF THE MALLRATS for years. The big news from this show was that the rights to DOGMA have reverted back to him, finally.
DOGMA was a Miramax release, and one of the only titles that Harvey Weinstein somehow retained ownership of when he went to prison. It’s one of the only Kevin Smith releases that’s really hard to find online.* I think Jacob had to watch it on YouTube broken up into a bunch of parts. He talked a lot about his relationship with George Carlin, and the making of the movie, and how excited he was to finally have it back. 2024 was the 25th anniversary of the release, so they’re going to get a new deluxe Blu-Ray ready, and then take it on tour. He did that with REBOOT, and it was fun to see the movie with a crowd, then listen to him and Jason Mewes talk about it afterwards. This will be the same kind of thing, and I’m excited for it. He also talked a lot about potential sequel ideas for that movie, too. It felt like he was brainstorming in real time, and probably had been at most of the shows he’s been doing. I wouldn’t be shocked if DOGMA II came out before TWILIGHT OF THE MALLRATS, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if neither of them ever have a single frame shot, either.
The years between JAY & SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK and CLERKS III were pretty weird. He worked a lot, but almost every movie felt like he shot the first draft of whatever screenplay he half-heartedly conjured up while recording a podcast. He’s made 16 features, which is so many more than I thought. That’s like a movie every two years for 30 years—and that’s not including all the TV episodes he’s done. I’m kind of surprised he’s done as much as he has. For as much as he appears to slack off, the dude is always working.
JERSEY GIRL - The ill-fated Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez movie that he drastically changed during the editing process because the real life couple broke up. He was so sick of hearing about the two of them that he torpedoed his own movie to avoid talking about, and because of the poor reception to GIGLI.
CLERKS II4 - After JERSEY GIRL bombed, he went back to his original playground and made this. It’s not very good. I made everyone in Cherem sneak into it with me while we were on tour in 2006. No one liked it, but they did like the idea of not having to hang out at a mall for a while.
ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO - This one came out while he was doing SModcast, and he basically had a mental breakdown over the box office performance in real time. This is the movie that broke him.
COP OUT - The only movie he directed that he didn’t write, and the only upside to it is the stories that he has about Bruce Willis.
RED STATE - A nice idea that doesn’t really work.
TUSK - We covered this already, and I’ve given it more attention than it deserves.
YOGA HOSERS - I don’t even want to say anything about this one.
KILLROY WAS HERE - I didn’t watch this one because it was released as an NFT. Anyone that falls for those kinds of scams deserves to lose their money.
I thought I was finally caught up, and started working on this post a few days after the show. Then I found out that he had a new movie. It had been released about two months before his appearance in Salt Lake City. It’s called THE 4:30 MOVIE, and it’s about a group of friends sneaking into movies all day in 1986. It’s a not-so-stealth origin story of Smith himself, with the main character learning he wants to become a director. It should be kind of sweet, but it’s just not very good. I can see why he didn’t mention it a single time on stage the night that I saw him.
I’m curious to see if anything ever happens with TWILIGHT OF THE MALLRATS, and I’ll definitely be there for the screening of DOGMA if he comes through Salt Lake. Until then, I’m going to periodically fire up MALLRATS to pay my respects to the late, great Shannen Doherty.
Let’s never mention TUSK ever again.
I checked to see if the site is still up, and it is. Hasn’t been updated in about ten years, but it’s there. The messageboard, however, has been co-opted and redirects to a porn site. I found that out in the middle of this busy coffee shop on my giant laptop screen. That was pretty fun.
Jacob watched everything in reverse order for some reason. I still have no idea why.
SModcast, and our own GCAcast both predate even the Joe Rogan podcast which didn’t start until late December 2009. Unfortunately (but probably thankfully), not a single episode of our show is still available, since we stopped paying the Libsyn bill sometime around 2010.
If you can find CLERKS: THE ANIMATED SERIES anywhere, watch that. I don’t know if it’s as funny as I remember, but I bet it holds up better than CHASING AMY.