In the 1990s, American cinema was in the midst of an indie renaissance. The newly adapted concept of the blockbuster saw the studio system starting to move away from smaller films to focus on their cinematic powerhouses. In response, a league of independent filmmakers rose up against the system, and in doing so, discovered a whole new kind of audience.
Amongst them was a chubby fanboy whose name would become synonymous with the revolution: Kevin Smith.
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Smith was born and bred in New Jersey, the son of a homemaker and a postal worker.
From an early age, Smith noticed how his father struggled to find the will to spend his days working a job he hated. From that point on, Smith vowed never to do anything that didn’t make him happy.
Smith struggled with his weight (and sometimes his grades) during his schooling, where he spent most of his time making friends through his humorous observations on the world. When not creating comedy skits in the vein of Saturday Night Live, he could often be found videotaping the school basketball team’s games.
Upon graduation, Smith was left with no clear future. His girlfriend left the state to attend college, and he began working at a local convenience store. After a while, he joined the New School for Social Research to study creative writing, but was kicked out for throwing water bombs from his dorm window. He then went to Vancouver Film School, which offered an 8 month tech program. Feeling disenchanted by the experience, he returned home and to his old job at the convenience store, but not before meeting future collaborators Scott Mosier and Dave Klein.
On his 21st birthday, Smith went to see Slacker, the cinematic debut of Richard Linklater, and the film credited with igniting the independent film movement in the USA. On the drive home at 2AM, he told his friend that he planned to become a director. “I viewed (Slacker) with this mixture of awe and arrogance, where I was amazed at the movie, because I’d never seen anything like it and it was so original. The arrogance comes in when I’m sitting there going ‘well, shit, if this is a movie, I could make a movie.'”
And so he did…in the most reckless, ambitious way possible.
Clerks was filmed in the Quick Stop where Smith worked, and was financed through a dozen maxed-out credit cards and the sale of Smith’s beloved comic book collection. The film was raw, the dialogue quirky and casual in a style later defined as the ‘conversational film’.
Clerks screened at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, and won the Filmmaker’s Trophy. That night, Miramax kingpin Harvey Weinstein invited Smith to have dinner with him, and offered to buy the film. Smith accepted, and Clerks went on to be awarded the Prix de la Jeunesse and International Critics’ Week Prize at Cannes. It is generally considered on of the most important film debuts of the 1990s.
The film also introduced the world to Silent Bob, a mute stoner who, along with his partner Jay, would become a staple character in most of his early films. Interestingly, Smith himself did not smoke weed until working with Seth Rogen on Zack and Miri Make a Porno in 2008.
After the success of Clerks, Smith began work on his followup film, Mallrats. Though not a direct prequel to Clerks, the film takes place the day before the preceding movie in a timeline called the View Askewniverse, after Smith and Mosier’s production company, View Askew.
Mallrats was not well received. Roger Ebert famously suggested in his review that the film felt like something the studios had forced Smith into making (Gramercy injected $5.8 million into the film’s budget).
In 1997, Smith released Chasing Amy, a movie many believe to be his best. Dealing with themes of sexual identity, Quentin Tarantino called it “a quantum leap forward” for the filmmaker, and it went on to win Independent Spirit Awards for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Jason Lee. The film made $12 million at the box office on a budget of $250,000.
Dogma marked a massive evolution in Smith’s directorial career. The $10 million film was released in 1999 amidst controversy – its irreverent treatment of religious doctrine was denounced by the Catholic League as blasphemy. Miramax (with Disney as its parent company) announced that it would be selling the film to another distributor. The scandal helped the film become a success, as did its lead actors, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.
A lifelong comic fan, Smith started writing for the medium. He wrote an eight-issue story arc for Daredevil, before heading over to DC to work on Green Arrow. Around the same time he worked on comics based on his own characters, including a series of Clerk comics, and later Bluntman and Chronic, a realisation of Jay and Silent Bob’s superhero personas.
After making Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (in which fans finally got to hear Smith speak), he released a drama, Jersey Girl. It was planned to mark a new direction in Smith’s career, but the film was a box office bomb. Many blamed its poor performance on the casting of Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, a real-life couple whose poor on-screen chemistry had resulted in the atrocious Gigli a year earlier. Whatever the case, Smith had to find a way to save his career.
The sequel to Clerks was released in 2006. It received an eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes.
The following year, Smith and Mosier established SModcast, a comedy podcast initially distributed through their website. A massive success, it spawned a digital radio station and internet television channel, and allowed fans an unfiltered insight into Smith’s wonderfully geeky mind. Today, he runs two other podcasts: Fatman on Batman, and Hollywood Babble-On.
Over the next few years, Smith struggled in his filmmaking career. Zack and Miri Make a Porno was destroyed by censorship, and became bankable star Seth Rogen’s biggest box office flop.
“I’m sitting there thinking ‘That’s it, that’s it, I’m gone, I’m out. The movie didn’t do well and I killed Seth Rogen’s career! This dude was on a roll until he got in with the likes of me. I’m a career killer! Judd’s [Apatow] going to be pissed, the whole Internet’s going to be pissed because they all like Seth, and the only reason they like me anymore is because I was involved with Seth! And now I fuckin’ ruined that,” he told the Huffington Post.
Cop Out released in 2010, but publicity for the film was hampered by gossip surrounding Smith and star Bruce Willis’s hate for each other.
His next film was a horror called Red State. The Weinsteins, who had been involved in most of Smith’s films as distributors, refused to support the film. He self-distributed the film due to a lack of interest (mostly resulting from the story’s parallels with the infamous Westboro Baptist Church), and soon-after announced that he would retire from filmmaking after the release of his next film, Clerks III.
This was not to be the case. Before Clerks III was released, he launched Tusk, the first of the ‘True North’ trilogy of films that would also include Yoga Hosers and Moose Jaws, and then declared that Mallrats II would be his next film.
Though his films had trouble finding an audience, Smith has a legion of supporters, predominantly because of his pop-culture influence. He is often invited to spectate productions such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and even work on some like the television series The Flash, knowing that his involvement gives the projects an added sense of legitimacy in the eyes of fanboys and fangirls worldwide.
He continues to work across a range of mediums, from graphic novels, to non-fiction books detailing his career, an often makes guest appearances in films, TV shows, and video games. He also owns Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, a comic book store in his hometown of Red Bank, New Jersey.
For all the talk of retiring, Kevin Smith isn’t done yet. Though he may have moved away from the indie cinema that brought his ideas to the world, he has gone on to establish himself as a leader in the world of pop-culture, and a visionary in his own right.