Today and all week long, there will be “Jersey Girl” press in newspapers ’round the country (and Lay-the-Podium-Down-Land). I always see the stories online and in fax form, but for the View Askew archives, we like to get our hands on hard copies (the actual articles and sections of the newspapers they appeared in). So if you come across any pieces about “JG” or me in your local papers, today or all week long, drop ’em in an envelope and send them to…

View Askew West

c/o Kevin

PO Box 93339

Los Angeles, CA

90093

In exchange, we’ll send you back a l’il something-something (though not a personalized poster; I’ve learned my lesson on that one).

Kevin Smith on Jersey Girl & The Green Hornet

Source: Fred Topel

Don’t think Kevin Smith has gone soft just because he made a sensitive family drama without Jay and Silent Bob. Jersey Girl is about a man adjusting to fatherhood, but only Kevin Smith would deal with this man walking in on his daughter and a friend showing each other their private parts. But, to be clear, he staged the scene with utmost concern for the well being of the child actors.

“You tell them that it’s a normal thing, that all kids do it,” Smith said. “And thankfully, you’ve got their parents going, ‘Do it, do it.’ That really helps. But it was weird because you have to go through all sorts of caution measures. Like both of them are wearing underwear under underwear under underwear, so they’re fully protected. There’s no chance of a naughty bit getting hit by the air or anything like that, but it’s tricky. It’s tricky because remember, Bryan Singer got in trouble on ‘Apt Pupil’ when they did the shower scene. There were people complaining afterwards, who were in the cast, that they had to disrobe and jump in the shower and sh*t like that. So you don’t want to do that. You don’t want to have people crying foul after you wrap and sh*t like, ‘You f***ing prostituted my child.’ So you’re very careful and there’s a ton of people standing around, child safety monitors. You go through more effort than you would do if you were actually throwing a kid off a roof in a stunt.”

Smith based the film on his own feelings about becoming a father and realizing that work had to play second to his family. However, at least one character in the film is a total invention. “I’ve been to many videostores, [there’s] nobody like Liv Tyler working at a video store. They all look like me and there’s no romance to be had. No, unfortunately Liv Tyler is a very fictional character.”

Tyler plays a video store clerk who romances single father Ben Affleck. At first, Smith was hesitant to use another video store. “It was weird when I was writing the script, I felt like can I do this? Can I put her in a videostore? Because of Randall. Then I said, ‘You know what? I haven’t really done a video store in a while so I think I can go back to it.’ That to me is indicative of the real world. People go to video stores all the time. It’s an element that I felt okay jumping back into. But there was a point when I was writing it where I was like, ‘Ooh, I could make it RST Video.’ Then I was like, ‘No, can’t do it. Can’t reference back to the other ones.’ I wanted this one to stand by itself. Part of the challenge of making ‘Jersey Girl’ that I had set up for myself was to make a movie that stood on its own. ‘Clerks’ was the only movie we made up until now that had to stand by itself. There was nothing that came before it to lean on. But ‘Mallrats,’ ‘Amy,’ ‘Dogma,’ ‘Jay and Bob’ we could always lean back on the previous movies including ‘Clerks’. So I wanted to do one where there’s no safety net, no Jay and Bob and it doesn’t tie back into that world. It just stands by itself.

Smith has spent much of his press tour for Jersey Girl responding to the Ben and J-Lo backlash, but he assures fans that he only cut Lopez scenes in the interest of storytelling, just like he cut other actors’ scenes. “Some of [her scenes] were longer than they were [in the current cut]. Some of them are exactly the same length they are in the montage. But with the exception of lifting out the wedding scene itself, or the wedding shot, it’s only 12 seconds, nothing was cut because of that. It was just cut because the movie was chunky and it took a while to ramp up and get going. So, when you edit a movie, you just pull sh*t out. There’s as much stuff from Liv and Raquel and George as there is from Ben and Jen.”

When it was announced that Smith would direct a movie version of The Green Hornet, some fans wondered why that character? He was never one of the characters commonly referenced in Smith’s films or talks. But Smith does recall an affinity for the character.

“I did collect it back when I was a hardcore collector in the late ’80s, early ’90s. And I was a big fan of the show when I was a kid because they would sometimes run it back to back with ‘Batman’ which I always watched when I was a kid. But they didn’t have a lot of episodes. They only had one year worth of episodes, where ‘Batman’ I think had two and a half years. So you didn’t see a lot of ‘Green Hornet’. You didn’t see as much ‘Green Hornet’ as you did ‘Batman’. But yeah, I always kind of dug him. I remember liking it so much more as a kid. I re-watched all those shows recently and with the exception of those guys in the mask and Bruce Lee kicking ass, the rest of it is kind of boring. It’s always them after mobsters and racketeers. They didn’t have very colorful villains like the ‘Batman’ stable. But I was always kind of a fan.”

Smith will create a new villain to oppose the Green Hornet in his film. “Having him go after gyp artists doesn’t really make for a big action movie. If you listen to the old radio shows, that’s what he’s always doing is going after mobsters, racketeers and gyp artists. There was one radio show I listened to where he’s going after an insurance scam racket, and it’s like why do you have to put on a mask to do that? There’s nothing really from the run of the comics that I read that I was real fond of. It’s just something I’ve got to create, come up with for the purpose of the movie.”

Though big action scenes will be expected of the film, that is the one aspect that Smith likes the least. “For me, even on the few action sequences we’ve had in, say, ‘Dogma’ or ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back’ are always the most painful for me to shoot because it’s boring. It’s really boring. You work your whole day and get two seconds of usable film, two seconds of actual movie time. I’m used to getting like seven pages of dialogue done in a day. So it’s just a matter of rewiring the brain and just being like all right, we’ll work many long hours to get a few seconds of film, but we’ll make it a really interesting, really fun looking film.”

Ollie’s Music Pimp T-Shirt

When he wasn’t sporting suits and spinning press, Ollie Trinke was wearing this – the t-shirt that spelled out his profession in the frankest manner possible. Even 7 years after his departure from the music PR biz he still wears this shirt because it looks great.

Ollie’s ‘Music Pimp’ t-shirt is an exact replica of the one worn by Ben Affleck in the movie ‘Jersey Girl’ from it’s bold blue color to it’s worn logo (that’s called vintage, folks). The vintaged logo is screenprinted on a 100% blue cotton heavyweight t-shirt and comes in sizes Medium to XXL.

Jersey Girl Baby Doll T-Shirt

The ‘Jersey Girl’ T-Shirt features our alternate ‘Jersey Girl’ logo which was used during the shooting of the film on our special ID badges, special cast and crew shirts, on the backs of the cast and crew chairs and it is the logo which currently resides on Kevin’s travel bag. The logo was designed by the legendary Scott Purcell (the man behind the ‘Mooby’ and ‘Nails Cigarettes’ logos) and features an inside reference (the Exit 37)

The green and white logo is screenprinted on a 100% white cotton heavyweight t-shirt and comes in a nicely fitted Baby Doll size which is specially cut to fit the fine female form.

Jersey Girl Standard T-Shirt

The ‘Jersey Girl’ T-Shirt features our alternate ‘Jersey Girl’ logo which was used during the shooting of the film on our special ID badges, special cast and crew shirts, on the backs of the cast and crew chairs and it is the logo which currently resides on Kevin’s travel bag. The logo was designed by the legendary Scott Purcell (the man behind the ‘Mooby’ and ‘Nails Cigarettes’ logos) and features an inside reference (the Exit 37)

The green and white logo is screenprinted on a 100% black cotton heavyweight t-shirts and comes in sizes Medium to XXL. Baby doll sizes also available (see above)

AT: In the first section of the movie, Ollie and Gertrude Steiney, (Affleck and Lopez, respectively) fall in love, get married, and have a baby. In watching a rough cut with Mr. Smith in November of 2002, that section of the film was much longer than it is now. Some editing of JERSEY GIRL took place very late in the movie’s post-production process that either shortened or cut completely a lot of those scenes. How do you feel about the final cut of JERSEY GIRL?

BA: I think this is the best version of the movie. I think it was a mistake to fatten what was always, structurally, a prologue. The inciting incident in the movie is really the wife’s death. You have three full acts in the movie that happen after that. To have anything longer than a ten or twelve-minute prologue is awkward. There was pressure at one point to make [the death] the midpoint of the movie, because there was this idea like ‘Let’s jump on this bandwagon of The Ben And Jen Show!’ I also think [cutting those scenes] has allowed them to market the movie more honestly. Otherwise you’d have seen me and Jen on the poster, and I’m glad that didn’t happen because that’s bait-and-switch marketing anyway. And I don’t know if Kevin would admit this, but Kevin’s more willing to be ruthless with his own material now. It’s the first time that I’ve worked with him on a movie and haven’t sat there and said, ‘You still should have cut those four lines.’ It was not pulling teeth to get Kevin to take his own stuff out. He’s able to see it with a more mature eye. It’s really uncommon with writer-directors to be able to get them to part with [material]. Every time I’ve worked with a writer-director, I’ve always thought they’ve included things they shouldn’t have put in the movie.

AT: You’ve got some really intense emotional scenes in this movie. To be honest, you spend a lot more time crying in JERSEY GIRL then I would have ever imagined. There’s one scene in a hospital that I was struck by a real sense of honesty in your performance, a reaction to tragedy. I myself have stood in that emergency room, and I myself have gotten that kind of news, and I know that your reaction is exactly what happens. I know it’s difficult to talk about where you go as an actor when you’re preparing to do a scene like that, but can you shed a little light on your technique in that moment?

BA: It’s just being able to realistically imagine getting that news about somebody that you really care about. You have to make it real to yourself to make it work. It was a combination of a couple of things. I haven’t had to be in that particular situation, thank God and knock wood, but eventually most of us are. I’ve been around it and seen it. I had some memory of what it looked like from the outside. A moment like that, when you read the script, always stands out. You think about the fact that, ‘Okay, this is going to be a big deal. How am I going to do this?’ For me, I just put it in my subconscious and work on it over time. You get there on the day, and it’s scary because either it just happens, or it doesn’t. You can’t fake it. It was a brave and new thing for one of Kevin’s movies, too, so all of us were wary and respectful of it…When something is well-written, it’s easier to play than trying to imbue some asinine wooden scene with some resonance. With JERSEY GIRL, there are so many cues that the writer gives you as an actor to tell you where the character is. You can fall into it. It’s refreshing. Every day I felt like I was coming to work and contributing something, not being part of some giant story juggernaut that sort of rolls over everything with effects. The time was time taken, and the attention was spent, and there was patience that said, ‘We have to get this right.’ It was a great opportunity for me, and it’s the kind of thing I want to continue to do.

AT: You speak a monologue during the movie, standing over the crib of your daughter. That speech is rather epic in length. How long did it take you to shoot that?

BA: We took all day. That was another one of those highlighted scenes. Kevin sent me forty pages of the story, and like any first draft, half of that stuff’s not in the final draft. [The crib] monologue was there [in the end] word for word. I got to that in my reading, and that was the moment where I thought, ‘This movie’s going to work. You haven’t seen anything like this. It’s a really interesting idea, this guy talking to his own daughter who isn’t even able to understand, but he’s giving himself over to her.’ In a weird way, the conservatism of this movie is kind of radical to me. There’s the suggestion that we live in a society that is very professionally oriented, and that everyone takes for family for granted, that these goals that we have in our profession are not what we should be pursuing. Playing it kind of reminded me that, particularly being an actor with a bunch of stuff swirling around me, there’s a tendency to want to be able, at some time, to say, ‘Forget it. I give this up. I want to just have this simpler life that’s about something more intimate.’

USA TODAY – “Kevin Smith shares the ‘Jersey Girl’ love”

…He says of Jersey Girl, “If somebody put a gun to my head and said, ‘Make one kind of movie for the rest of your life,’ it would be more of this. This is what comes natural to me. You scrape away the sex and fart jokes and the cynicism of the other movies, and you find a romantic underneath.”

The timing couldn’t be better for Smith to play to a more mature crowd, given the outbreak of conservatism that has gripped the country after Janet Jackson’s breast-baring Super Bowl stunt. “Thank God I wasn’t promoting Dogma right about now,” he says. “I’d be up a creek.”

He didn’t have to struggle too hard to sanitize his script. “You take Jay and Silent Bob out of any flick, and 75% of it is going to go clean immediately.” But Smith retains his knack for shock humor: Affleck’s character refers to the long-running Broadway musical Cats as “the second-worst thing to happen to New York.” Yes, it’s a World Trade Center joke.

“It’s very subtle,” he says, smiling somewhat sheepishly. “I don’t know if anybody picks up on it.” The line pre-9/11 was “the worst thing.” Afterward, “I tailored it back. Then I thought, ‘Is that kind of tacky? No, it’s in keeping with what I said in the past.’ ”

[FULL STORY]

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MIAMI HERALD – “One from the Heart”

Q: The most surprising thing about Jersey Girl is that it reveals what a softie you are. Who knew?

A: I’m a sap for movies like this. I didn’t really grow up watching hardcore indie stuff. That came later in life. I grew up watching movies like this, because my Mom was into them. I’m a huge fan of Terms of Endearment.

Q: It’s also a very straightforward and earnest movie. Even though it’s often very funny, there’s no cynicism or irony in it whatsoever.

A: It doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It’s chock-full of clichés, and it had the potential to become one big cliché. It’s how you handle those conventions that makes all the difference. School of Rock is a great example. I don’t know that I would have necessarily dug that movie in someone else’s hands. But [director] Richard Linklater did something with it that I thought was real interesting and cool. It’s nice to see a dude whose work I’ve always admired do something in a very familiar genre but bring his particular flavor to it.

Q: You’ve described Jersey Girl as your most personal film. But isn’t comedy, by its very nature, extremely personal? The particular things we laugh at are very revealing of our personalities and who we are.

A: I’d agree with that. Some of the comedy that I’ve done — and I’m certainly not disowning it by any stretch of the imagination — is stuff that I find funny and can observe, but I’m not really a part of it. I’m not a stoner and have never been a stoner. I love sex and I love talking about it with my friends, but I’m not like obsessed with sex. The characters in my movies are, because it’s much funnier to play that out on the page.

But if someone held a gun to my head and said I could only write one kind of script for the rest of my life, it would be more like this one, because this is closer to who I am and the stuff I really enjoy. I’m the dude who loves movies about grief and where people die. That stuff is actually easier for me to write than the comedy.

[FULL STORY]

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CHICAGO SUN-TIMES – “Jersey boy Kevin Smith gets personal, but not too serious”

…”At any given moment, people could be like, ‘Hey, the emperor has no f—–‘ clothes!’ and suddenly you’re out on your ass,” Smith said. “So I try not to treat it very seriously, and it’s not a cure for f—–‘ cancer by any stretch of the imagination. You just hope to connect with an audience. You hope to move them, you hope to make ’em laugh. You hope that the movie means something to them.”

If it doesn’t, if they deem it crap and bluntly tell him so (as a number of bitter souls have), he’s hurt. Fame and wealth have brought lots of things, but thicker skin isn’t one of them.

“If it’s good criticism, like, well-thought out, I don’t take it personally,” he said. “But I do tend to take the s— that’s like, ‘You’re a hack and this s— blows!’ very personally. And I don’t know why. ‘Cause that’s not really criticism. It’s somebody trying to get under your skin. And that’s the stuff you should be able to blow off easily, but unfortunately that’s not the case. It’s the stuff you wind up dwelling on. It finds the chinks in your armor.

“I don’t know about other people, but I know I sit there going, ‘I suck, I blow, I’m a hack,’ in the wee small hours of the morning, or in the dark. And so when somebody nails it on the head and nails your insecurities on the head, it really draws blood.”

With his most heartfelt work to date debuting shortly on hundreds of screens across America, Smith is doubtless due for another round of pummeling. Alas, all he’ll have to blunt the blows are a loving family, fans galore, piles of cash, a Tinseltown casa and global fame.

[FULL STORY]

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THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS – “Jersey Guy”

…But Jay and Silent Bob fans shouldn’t feel abandoned. The comedy tag team, which features Jason Mewes as the motor-mouthed Jay and Smith as his silent partner Bob, should strike back again soon.

“I told Mewes if he would get and stay clean, I would think about going back into Jay and Silent Bob country,” Smith says. “On April 6, he will have been clean and sober for a year, off booze and drugs. So hopefully, Mewes can stay on point and yeah, we’ll think about heading in that direction again.”

[FULL STORY]

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TV GUIDE – “Meet J.Lo’s ‘Daughter'”

…”I’m hoping that, after this movie, people will realize who I am,” she giddily says, “because I like signing autographs. I want to be able to go to the mall and McDonald’s and everything, but I want to sign autographs because it looks pretty cool.”

The fourth-grader has been diligently practicing, just in case adoring fans start asking for her John Hancock. “I can write in cursive,” she declares proudly. “I learned how when I was in third grade. [My signature] is not like people usually do it. I do it nice and you can understand it. But I want to learn how to [sign my name] fast, like Ben does.”

[FULL STORY]

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THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS – “Jersey Guy”

…But Jay and Silent Bob fans shouldn’t feel abandoned. The comedy tag team, which features Jason Mewes as the motor-mouthed Jay and Smith as his silent partner Bob, should strike back again soon.

“I told Mewes if he would get and stay clean, I would think about going back into Jay and Silent Bob country,” Smith says. “On April 6, he will have been clean and sober for a year, off booze and drugs. So hopefully, Mewes can stay on point and yeah, we’ll think about heading in that direction again.”

[FULL STORY]

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HOLLYWOOD REPORTER – “Publicist to the Stars Poised for Stardom”

“I wanted to make Tony Angellotti the most famous publicist in the world — short of having him hit someone with a car, a la Lizzie Grubman,” Smith said Wednesday while riding next to his soon-to-be famous spokesman. “I wanted to do it a bit more peacefully. And he kind of balked at the idea of hitting someone with a car, but that’s how publicists get famous. You have to hit people.”

The filmmaker spared a few lives by inserting the Angellotti company — Tony’s Studio City-based entertainment marketing and PR firm — into his upcoming Miramax Films release. The scene finds Ben Affleck (news)’s character in the middle of the Angellotti company’s glamorous (and very movielike) Manhattan offices for a job interview.

“We put an Angellotti office onscreen as if it were sculpted from God’s own bathroom,” Smith joked. “But did we spell it right or wrong?” he asked as he turned to Tony in the car, “Oh yeah, we did. Good.”

[FULL STORY]

…The most impressive performance is Affleck. In a role that is not showy (there’s no blowing up of asteroids, Japanese World War II-era Zeroes, retarded kid or bad accent for him to hide behind), Affleck is the rock the movie is built on. Dealing with a pretty involved character arc, Affleck’s work in Jersey Girl is that of an actor, not a movie star. Summoning believable tears, rage, frustration and clear feelings of love, longing and doing it all within a realistic relationship with the young girl playing his daughter, Affleck never lets Castro overshadow him, nor does he pull her along with him. The character’s maturation is interesting to watch, particularly with an actor like Affleck, so convincing at being self-involved and mean in previous movies.

Always at his best working with an actor who challenges him and makes him react (Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting, Gwyneth Paltrow in Bounce, Joey Lauren Adams in Chasing Amy), Affleck is lucky to have Castro, Carlin and Tyler, who are all capable of that. Much of the credit for the performance must also lie with Smith, who certainly wrote the character with his own voice, but wrote with the actor in mind. This is Affleck’s fifth movie with Kevin Smith, and it’s clear that Smith knows how to direct his muse.

Ultimately, this is Kevin Smith’s movie. Working with an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), lends Jersey Girl a look never before seen in Smith’s work: classy. That’s not a knock on Smith so much as it’s a compliment to Zsigmond. But it’s Smith’s script and direction that make the movie work. There are clear moments of corniness that show Smith’s relative unfamiliarity with material like this, but for the most part his willingness to focus on the task at hand makes the film more cohesive than the majority of his previous efforts. Even the music used throughout the film works extremely well. This is not to say that much of Smith’s trademark humor and edge aren’t present; they certainly are, but he’s found a worthwhile balance. It’s as though Smith has gone through a very public film school over the past ten years, and if Jersey Girl is the first film out of the gate, post-graduation, we have a great deal to look forward to.