Is it me, or are there a slew of twelve year olds hanging around on the board lately?

Would you all kindly stop picking fights and then dramatically exiting the board only to show up again mere posts later? Thank you.

Sorry for my absence. I’ve been knee-deep in the new script. I’m almost done, too. Got a title and everything.

‘Course, it’s a little too early to share any of the particulars of the film with you, but I’ll start talking about it soon enough. Suffice it to say, it’s pretty much the biggest 180 you can make from ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back’.

Speaking of which, another reason I’ve been MIA: I was off licking my box office wounds. Don’t get me wrong – thirty million is nothing to sneeze at (ask the ‘Rock Star’ folks if they’d be happy with a thirty million box office take). But the feeling was that we’d do better than ‘Dogma’, as the movie wasn’t a niche film about Catholicism. However, we forgot that the flick was, ultimately, a niche film about the View Askewniverse. Oops.

That being said, I’ve since made peace with what we’ll wind up making. Once the expectation was cleared away, it was kind of nice to know that me and Mewes “opened” the movie ourselves – to the tune of eleven million bucks (and I’m not even movie star pretty… or a movie star at all, for that matter). That’s all due to you folks – the ladies and gents who’ve encouraged our nonsense, flick after flick. Because of you all, and your fierce loyalty, I get to continue making whatever flicks I want to make. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: thank you.

So, as we place thirteenth at the box office for this week, drop down to twelve hundred or so screens, and prepare to do our last lap toward that thirty million dollar figure, some have asked what my perspective on ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back’ is? Was it worth the effort?

Fuck, yes.

It was a blast. We made the ultimate fan’s flick and were extremely well reviewed, by and large. I got to put my wife and kid in the movie, as well as all of my friends. We made the exact film we wanted to make that the large majority of you really dug – and it’s a flick that’ll be very profitable for Dimension, when all’s said and done.

Yes, dear friends and peers, I’ve dodged yet another bullet.

But box office, shmox office – let’s talk about something that really matters.

Good Lord, the horror of Tuesday the 11th…

I was on the west coast during the attack, sleeping. The phone woke me up at around seven thirty, west coast time. My mother had left a message, urging me to turn on the television, as the United States was under attack. What I saw when I did so shocked the hell out of me. The burning WTC. The reports of people jumping from the building. The Pentagon broken. After watching about ten minutes of coverage, for me, the whole tragedy crystallized into one thought…

This is what happens when people take their religion far too seriously.

My prayers go out to the survivors of the attack and those who’ve lost loved ones, but my heart goes out to the hijacked passengers and the folks who populated that grand monument that always made New York City seem bigger than life, the World Trade Center. These were the folks who wound up as afterthoughts to some misguided lunatic’s political statement, and I can’t imagine a worse way to go than dying for someone else’s self-righteous cause – and doing it while being held in check by a box cutter and the threat of a phantom bomb.

As a Nation, we’re sad. We’re horrified and scared. We’re outraged. We’re hungry for vengeance. That was all to be expected.

What wasn’t expected – but should have been, really – has been watching us band together as Americans.

The candle-lit vigils I witnessed dotting the streets of L.A. Friday night.

The report that there have been more food donations made than can be handled in NYC.

The news that volunteers had to be turned away, so many were there offering to clean up the debris at what was once the World Trade Center.

If you’re not proud to be an American this week, I urge you to get your jaded head out of your ass and stand in front of a flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance with as much fervor as you did when you first learned it in grade school. Because all that rhetoric we’re usually fed during election years about patriotism and love for our country that normally seems like bullshit? That rhetoric has become a reality again. And I’d like to think of it as the parting gift of the passengers of the hijacked airliners and the nearly five thousand innocents who perished in both towers of the World Trade Center. That’s the silver lining to the dark and evil cloud that loomed over our country just long enough last week to remind us why we’re all on this particular land mass to begin with…

Because we choose to be Americans.

I’ll check back with you later.