Kevin Smith’s first feature film, Clerks (1994), was shot after closing time at the convenience store where he worked in Leonardo. After winning prizes at
the Cannes and Sundance film festivals, this low-budget, black-and-white, cheerfully vulgar independent film was picked up for distribution by Miramax.
Since then, writer/director Smith and his production company, View Askew (based in Red Bank), have released Mallrats (1995), Chasing Amy (1997) Dogma
(1999), Jersey Girl (2004), and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001). This last film’s title characters, played by Smith’s boyhood buddy Jason Mewes and
Smith himself, have appeared as minor characters in all of Smith’s other films. New Jersey’s suburban convenience stores, malls, highways, and amusement
arcades are also perennial settings in Smith’s films; in the controversial Dogma, God relaxes by playing Skeeball on the boardwalk in Asbury Park. Besides
films, Smith’s other major interest is comic books. The main characters in Chasing Amy are comic book writer/artists; Smith himself has written for the
Batman and Spider-Man series, among others, and he owns a comic book store, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, in Red Bank.

Flickchick: Unlike many projects that have been kicking around as long as this one (since the mid-1990s), Miramax’s The Green Hornet still has real life in
it, and writer-director and long-time serious comic-book geek Kevin Smith has just signed on. Smith owns a comic-book store called Jay and Silent Bob’s
Secret Stash in his native Red Bank, N.J., and has written Daredevil and Green Arrow stories for DC Comics — he revitalized the Green Arrow, an older
character who’d fallen into a sorry state of neglect — and also worked on the doomed Superman Lives before it finally died a painful death. The Green
Hornet even has a tentative opening date: August 2005. What it doesn’t have is the square-jawed George Clooney and Jet Li. Clooney dropped out in ‘97 and
Li hung in a while longer, but eventually moved on. Over the years, rumors have attached a wide range of actors to the role of newspaper editor by
day/costumed crime-fighter by night Britt Reid — notably Mark Wahlberg and Hugh Jackman — but Smith has been talking to Jake Gyllenhaal, who was briefly
considered to replace Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 2 when Maguire and the studio were wrangling over start dates. The Green Hornet was created some 70 years
ago as a pulp-radio hero by producer George W. Trendle and writer Fran Striker (who was a man, in case you were wondering). They also created the Lone
Ranger and slyly connected the man of the West and the then modern-day hero by making the Ranger — whose real name is John Reid — Britt Reid’s great uncle.
The Green Hornet show aired from 1939 to ‘52, and the character made the transition to comic books in 1940 under the now forgotten Helnit Publications
banner. There were two Green Hornet movie serials in the ’40s, but it’s the ’60s television show starring Van Williams as Reid and Bruce Lee as his
chauffeur and sidekick, Kato, that’s primarily responsible for whatever name recognition the characters have today.