A big thanks to Britt for getting us the text of all the View Askew & Kevin Smith related items in last week’s way cool 10th anniversary issue of Entertainment Weekly. Not only was it a really fun and well-assembled issue, but there was a ton of stuff we wanted to post here, as well. Here’s a page by page breakdown:

• Sound Bites – 1997 (pg. 15): “He’s a consummate actor… His hairline can be fixed.” Director Kevin Smith, on the befuddling proposition to cast Nicolas Cage as Superman 5/16
• Sound Bites – 1999 (pg. 16): “White meat. The breast. Though actually, I’m more of an a–man, so I should propbably like dark meat better.” Ben Affleck, on his Thanksgiving preferences. 11/26
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (pg. 26): It was 1991, and things were looking grim. Kevin Smith, not yet the Slurpee auteur behind Clerks and Chasing Amy, was 20 years old, living in New Jersey, and weighing the prospect of a long and dutiful career in the American service sector. “I assumed that maybe one day I would buy into a deli or a convenience store, and I’d run that,” he remembers. “Because that was about the only thing I knew how to do.”
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (pg. 27): On his 21st birthday, Smith drove into Manhattan to check out an odd, rambling little film called Slacker – and had an epiphany. “Oh, I would like to do this. If this counts as filmmaking, I want to be a filmmaker too. I can do this,” he thought. “This was the first true independent film I’d ever seen.”
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (same page): ……Within months, Smith was starting work on a raunchy $28,000 comedy called Clerks,…
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (pg. 34): … Kevin Smith remembers the time he and his partner, producer Scott Mosier, needed film stock to shoot Clerks. They could buy a reel at a 15 percent discount as long as they flashed a student ID. Slight hitch: Neither guy was a student. So Smith headed over to the New School for Social Research in New York City. “I looked through the catalog to find a one-day course,” he remembers. “There were two. One was Understanding Your Homosexuality. The other was Roasting Suckling Pig. I understood my homosexuality just great, so I quickly signed up for Roasting Suckling Pig. I got my student ID and I went back uptown to Kodak.” The store sold him the celluloid. “Then I quickly went back downtown and dropped the course and got my $45 back,” he says.
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (same page): …Smith still laughs when he looks back to a panicky early screening of Clerks in 1993. “I remember sitting there in the theater and being blown away by how filthy the f—in’ movie was,” he says. “Just sitting there in public watching the characters constantly saying ‘f— f— f—’ and talkin’ about sex. And I remember goin’, ‘Oh God, what have I done? This is a joke that went too far. I can’t believe I spent 28 grand on this filthy f—in’ movie. I’m in debt! This was stupid! Nobody’s going to watch this!’ ” He was wrong. Now, Smith says, “people go, ‘Hey, man, Clerks was the movie that made me want to be a filmmaker.’ Somewhere down the road, one of those people that saw Clerks, they’re going to make The Great American Film.”
• Top 5 triumphs for New Jersey (pg. 66): #2 Kevin Smith’s Garden State-based Clerks released (1994)
• Theme No. 3: Sincerity vs. Irony (pg. 78): …Kevin Smith’s 1999 flick Dogma (in which Linda Fiorentino takes a leave of absence from an abortion clinic to battle satanic poo monsters for Jesus) incited full-fledged picketing.
• Theme No. 4: Break Throughs (pg. 84): Chris Rock is given a short bio and props from Nelson George, author of Hip Hop america (great book)
• Theme No. 5: Cults (pg. 105): Ben Affleck’s film bio is given in 4 segments: Humble Origins…(Became a Kevin Smith regular with Mallrats, chasing Amy, and Dogma), Crossed Over..(..with his Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting,…), Arrived…, True to His Roots..
• Theme No. 6: Size (pg. 112): Short article on Bob and Harvey Weinstein sale of Miramax Films to Disney for an estimated $60 million in April 1993.
• The EW index (pgs. 172-174): Tally of people on EW covers: Matt Damon (12 times), Ben Affleck (6 times), Chris Rock (5 times), Salma Hayek (one time), Alan Rickman (one time), and alas, Kevin Smith (zero times, but there’s still time!).