MR SMITH GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
If you want to know how to make it in the movies, don’t ask writer-director Kevin Smith. He’s just a ‘dick and fart guy’ with an attitude.
If Hollywood is the film community’s Jerusalem, then the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is its High Temple. While King Herod decreed that Jerusalem’s biggest mountain be entirely enclosed by stone blocks then filled with rubble to create a higher plateau, the Academy simply invented the Oscars.
So when Kevin Smith – writer and director of Clerks(1994), MallRats(1995), Chasing Amy(1996) and Dogma(1999) – stepped onto the Academy stage, flanked by 20ft golden Oscars, it seemed he had returned to the bosom of his true church.
Smith hadn’t come to collect though, he’s come to deliver The Marvin Borowsky Lecture On Writing For The Screen. He ascended to the podium in baggy jeans and hooded sweatshirt, topped with a mop of unkempt hair and bushy beard. He handed a tiny infant to a svelte woman in tight black leather trousers announcing with a mischievous grin: “That’s my wife. That’s who I fucked to get that kid.”
He had, he said, rehearsed for this moment many times. On a Saturday evening his wife would put on a ballgown and sit in the front with their two dogs while he delivered his Oscar acceptance speech, so when he received the Academy’s invitation to lecture he jumped all over it before they realised what “a huge fucking mistake” they’d made.
“We got who?” he mimicked. “The Clerks guy? That dick-and-fart guy? Couldn’t we get anyone else?”
“Basically, I’m a dick-and-fart guy,” he began, “not a lecturer. So what we’re gonna do is have a little Q&A. You line up behind the two microphones in the aisles and I’ll answer your questions.”
The first declared himself a writer and asked how to get people to read his scripts.
“I don’t know,” replied Smith. “Would I read it? Fuck no! Just make it. Finance it yourself and stick with dialogue – talk is cheap to film, leave your big action scenes ’til your next film, when you’ve got money.”
The next asked if he used improvisation.
“No, never. I hate improvisation, I’m a writer. I only became a director because I want what I write to appear onscreen word for word, and I hate ad-libbing. Actors are always ad-libbing. Ben Affleck never fucking stops. We were doing this scene in Chasing Amy where Joey Adams describes being fisted to… I guess this is the first time fisting has been discussed in the Academy? Anyway, Joey says, ‘We only do fisting on special occasions.’ And Affleck’s Line is: “‘So what do you do on non-special occasions?’
“So we start filming and Affleck says, ‘So what do you do on non-special occasions… get hit on the head with a baseball bat?’ And I say, ‘Excuse me, but where does it say that in the script?’ And he says, ‘I just thought it would be funny. Leave it in, it will be funny.’ So I said to him, ‘Look, why don’t you take that and all your other little ad-libs and put them in your own fucking script because they’re not in mine.’ And I can say this because Ben’s not here, so fuck him!”
Next up was a girl who announced that tonight was her 21st birthday.
“Yeah, well this isn’t about you. This is my night, so what’s your question?”
She asked if the dead characters at the end of Dogma had gone to heaven.
“You tell me?”
She replied she thought they probably just got cleared away with the trash.
“Well, that’s a nice outlook to have at 21. There is no God, we’re all doomed. I’m glad I’m not coming to your birthday party.”
As she promised to think more about it, Smith looked impressed.
“If I can make people ask themselves a question then I think I’m doing my job. I’m certainly not going to give any answers, hell no! I don’t have any.”
He did admit, however, that he once broke that rule in a focus group at the end of a test screening of Chasing Amy in which he was sitting incognito. One member of the audience said he had a problem with the question mark that hung over the sexuality of Banky. He admitted he could “totally identify with him until his sexuality is put in question” and asked what that meant.
“I just shouted from the back of the room, ‘It means you’re fucking gay!’”
Next. When a man asked what made Smith think he could make fun of the Catholic Church (in Dogma) and get away with it, he said it had never occurred to him it would be a problem. The furore, like the death threats, took him totally by surprise.
“It got a little bit scary when I started getting letters saying, ‘Take the Jew money you made from this and invest it in flak jackets because we’re coming for you with shotguns’ signed ‘Your brother in Christ.’”
“I really wanted to know where these people, who had never seen the movie, were coming from. So when it came to Jersey and I heard there was going to be a protest, I called my friend Brian and he came over to my place and we made these placards. Mine said, ‘Dogma is Dogshit.’ His said, ‘Shame on Dogma.’ We took them down to the mall and were a bit disappointed to find out that there were only ten people protesting. One old lady looked at my sign and said, ‘That sign isn’t appropriate.’
“‘This movie isn’t appropriate,’ I said. After some negotiation I agreed to bend the corner back so it read, ‘Dogma is Dogsh.’” Later, when a channel 12 reporter recognised him, Smith simply denied it. An hour-and-a-half later, he was at home watching himself on the news.
“Even though I had to say I was ‘Brian’, it was still really cool to see myself on TV.”
Smith doesn’t just enjoy his relative fame, he revels in it, as his Academy audience heard. When Emma Thompson sent him a letter telling him she couldn’t accept the role of God in Dogma as she was going to try for a baby, he was over the moon.
“The paper had her name embossed on the top and it had a little elephant at the bottom. I stuck it straight on my wall and called my friends and told them I had a letter from Emma Thompson.”
Although he was standing on the stage of the Academy he denied that he’d “made it” in Hollywood. Holding his thumb and forefinger a half-inch apart he explained that he’d come “that close” when he got asked to write the new Superman.
“I got a shitload of money, which was great, but ultimately it was ditched. So no, I don’t think I’ve made it yet.”
He said some of the studios had been sending him scripts to read but he couldn’t understand why they hadn’t followed up with offers of work. Then a friend suggested he stop saying all the scripts were quite good.
“With Superman I thought, this is my chance. So I called them up and said, ‘This is really shit.’ They called me in right away, sent a big car, but they still didn’t offer me the job – they just kept sending the car and bringing me in to repeat what I’d said to someone else. I went back 17 times until I reached the top-guy-but-one. Then he said, ‘OK, you should go and talk to [producer] Jon Peters.’
“So, I go out to his house in Bel Air, and Peters lies on his couch and I tell him a few of my ideas and he listens quietly. Then he looks at me in the eye and says, ‘There’s just one thing I need from you – a fight with a giant spider in the third act.’
“When I got back to the studio they asked me if Jon liked my ideas and I told then he did. Then they asked me if he’d mentioned the giant spider. ‘Yes, funnily enough, he did,’ I said, and they all shook their heads and mumbled, ‘He’s been going on about that spider for years.’”
Smith was given the job of rewriting Superman (to be directed by Tim Burton), but Burton moved on to Planet Of The Apes, Superman was shelved and Smith went back to developing his own projects.
A year-and-a-half later he was sitting in a movie theatre one afternoon “watching Star Trek VII or thereabouts” when all of a sudden a giant spider appeared on screen.
“Totally freaked me out! I never got my shot at the title, but Peters got his fucking spider…”
Kevin Smith is currently in LA directing himself as Silent Bob in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
