So the wife and I went to see Kev speak at the Writers Guild Foundation’s Writer’s on Writing ‘Spring Storytellers’ series.
It’s the third or fourth time I’ve seen him speak. Mr. Smith was going to catch a red-eye to the East Coast to receive an honorary doctorate from a school whose name escapes me now (sorry) so it was a short night. Started at about 7:45 – ended no later than 9:15, if that. So, the shortest engagement ever on record for Kevin and at the end, he was definitely sorry to have to cut it short.
We all know Kevin likes to just softball questions from the audience. Well, the MC, some guy who ‘wrote articles for Empire Magazine and some ‘movies’ for the PS2′ and was filling in for a Cannes Film Festival bound FX Feeney, didn’t get that. Didn’t want to get it. He had his agenda and by God he was gonna get to it all. He wanted to cover all Kev’s flicks in detail – and I have never seen anyone more annoyed at Kevin in my life. Kev would go on his usual rambling stories and this cat would just be antsy to get to his next question.
Note to the Writers Guild Foundation – find yourself a better substitute host. One who bothers to check out how his interviewees work – although anyone who DOESN’T know Kev rambles has to live under a rock.
Kev also threw a couple of funny one-liners his way which the guy totally ignored with responses like ‘Well, yes, and let’s get back to writing’. This guy was a flipping tool. Once, Kev talked about the NC-17 Clerks almost got and said something to the effect that they wanted an R because they couldn’t get adverts in large newspapers with an NC-17 and then how could they ‘put the flick in every mall in America’. To which tool-boy responded – ‘Yeah, and a lot of large newspapers won’t advertise a movie with an NC-17 rating.’ It was like “Hello, jackass? What did Kevin JUST SAY?”
Despite the terrible MC, Kev was his usual chatty and entertaining self.
Some of the highlights – and despite the short running time, there were a lot –
Kevin has a framed letter from an ex-girlfriend’s mom that says something to the effect that ‘Kevin Smith will never be a successful writer because he has no drive’, which on the day it was over w/ said girlfriend, her mom handed to him as he walked out the door saying ‘If I’m wrong, find me and I’ll eat these words’. I’ve heard this one before but his response to her — years later after all his success, when she found him and told him she was glad he didn’t find her and make her eat her words – was ‘Well, I figure your daughter did enough eating while we were going out’.
He really loved Kill Bill vol 2, especially the last 30 mins or so when it becomes what Kevin terms a ‘family melodrama’. But when he and the wife walked out of it and she said ‘Now doesn’t that make you want to go write Green Hornet?’, his response was, ‘Fuck no, that made me wanna go see Kill Bill vol2 again.’ He essentially said that just because QT made a great flick doesn’t mean he (kev) has one in him as well. He also said he has no idea how the hell Vols 1 & 2 ever could have been one movie, since their tone and pacing are so wildly different.
In terms of writing (for those in the View Askew audience who care, like me), Kevin just vomits out a draft on the page – apparently his Fletch Won draft was about 200 pages if he had set the margins and type size to normal modes, instead of reducing the size to 80%. I think Mallrats was the same size, he said. It’s a process of getting it out once and for all, then editing it down to a more manageable length. Somewhere Syd Field and Robert McKee are crying.
He writes conversations like he wishes they were, not as they really are. His friends and he speak much more monosyllabically – ‘What’d you do last night? Got laid. You? I fucked. Cool.’
Kevin talked about the strong male relationships in his films – sucky MC guy mentioned the somewhat homosexual undertones to Randal and Dante’s relationship (and the hermaphrodite porn) and the more obvious Banky/Holden dynamic in Chasing Amy. Kev says he’s just more interested in deep, emotional male relationships because ‘you’re always a bottle of booze away from a cock in the mouth’. He talked a little bit more about the way women seem to be comfortable with/ allowed feelings of intimacy (physical and otherwise) that men are not remotely comfortable with and it’s a theme he likes to go back to.
He brought up the 10th anniversary Clerks DVD several times. Mosier was telling him that while they were remastering the sound, they listened to the old Nagra sound tapes for the first time in a loooooong while. Mosier said he was surprised at a lot of the conversations they had – how they were just regurgitating things they thought were real film terms. That Kev yelled at Mewes. A lot. (apparently there is five minutes of Mewes saying something like ‘Relax, brother that was never natural enough for Kev) But mostly Kevin was saying that you can just hear the passion in these guys – they HAD to make this move.
Also the sign Jay and Bob plant over Randall’s head that says ‘I eat cock’ – it was derived from a sign Vincent and Kevin had put up for a brand of margin called something like ‘Wonder Boy Margarine’ which they had in stock forever, but decided to throw a sign up that said in a big blurb ‘NOW IN STOCK’ that so incensed one guy he yelled at Periera. Then they put a small ‘I eat cock’ word balloon over a small picture of Vinnie’s (I think) girlfriend’s picture and offended a woman.
Apparently Mel Gibson was up for directing Good Will Hunting, which he liked because of all the grab-ass between the guys. What grab-ass he was mentioning nobody knows. Michael Mann was another possibility. (Also, for the record, Kev reiterated that Damon and Affleck wrote the script, not William Goldman, who only helped the guys get off track a bit with an FBI sub-plot. Which is what Goldman keeps saying and nobody seems to hear anyway.) He also got more into the behind the scenes BS with Castle Rock and the script.
There were many other things – about Kevin’s ‘Jenny’s’ tattoo he got on the last day of filming J&SBSB, getting to walk on the red carpet at Cannes for Dogma and his kid pitching a fit playing ‘Baby Silent Bob’, to the millionth fanboy to ask him if he really hated Daredevil, ’cause, you know, my friends and I thought it sucked.’ – all of which Kevin made as entertaining as usual.
It was too short, ended kinda abruptly (for which Kev apologized for more than once) and contained the usual (and a few new) anecdotes, but was worth every penny – Kevin was charming, fun and entertaining as usual and I have said it before and will never stop saying it – if you get a chance, you have to see him in person – as great as the ‘Evening with….’ Disc is, it doesn’t do justice to the real deal.
Now, if only Fan-boy and Steve-Dave had been there to bitch-slap the annoying MC…..
