Silent Bob Speaks Out
Writer-director Kevin Smith crashes a Disney DVD party to muse with foul-mouthed candor about everything from Tim Burton to his script for The Green Hornet.
By Larry Carroll
Last week, Disney’s Buena Vista Home Entertainment division hosted an elaborate release party at Hollywood/Highlands for its upcoming autumn DVD slate. It was a PR event to behold: belly dancers, a “New Jersey”-themed room that served food from the Garden State, an Oscar-winning artist creating hand-drawn sketches of Disney characters for guests, and so much else at the complex’s titular and swanky nightclub that you could barely take it all in.
For the hordes of assembled media, however, the show that had been arranged to hype such discs as the upcoming Aladdin and Mulan Special Editions made its greatest impression with an appearance by someone who couldn’t be any more un-Disneyfied if he tried.
Kevin Smith, there to support the upcoming DVD releases of (Disney owned) Miramax films Jersey Girl and Clerks, set the tone as soon as he walked out on stage and greeted the crowd. “As a New Jersey native, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say that I am a gay American!” he joked, alluding to recent events surrounding Governor James McGreevey. “There’s something in the water back home, I swear.”
Smith, the writer-director and silent actor whose face is familiar to most moviegoers tucked between a baseball cap and a black trench coat, stood before the crowd on a small stage, wearing jean shorts, two-toned Chuck Taylors, and a bowling shirt that read “Jennifer’s Bitch” (those fond of Smith may assume it’s a jokey reference to his wife; others may interpret it as a J-Lo reference).
The filmmaker has created a cottage industry on the side (his ViewAskew.com web site sells memorabilia, comics, action figures and much more) with the informal, self-deprecating appearances that endear him to fans and the media alike, and on this night he was working with the comedic timing of a Jerry Seinfeld and the shock factor of an Andy Kaufman.
“That’s essentially a f**king fourteen-part question,” he teased one long-winded journalist, then went on to answer all the big questions his die-hard fans are always asking. Will Jay and Silent Bob return to the big screen? “Well, nothing else I try works, so yeah, I assume sooner or later yeah. Jay and Silent Bob Try to Pay Their Mortgage will be what the next one’s called.”
And what does he see as the problem with the upcoming Warner Brothers version of Superman, which he once tried to help bring to the screen? “One dude didn’t want to get on a plane (recently dismissed director McG), then my dude was Tim Burton, who f**ked me over,” he replied.
“He just didn’t see my take on Superman as being the take on Superman; he saw him dressed in black with scissors for hands.”
Does Smith still love Jersey Girl? “It’s a film I was very, very fond of until it underperformed – and now I hate it,” he admitted. “It never really got a chance, because we had a great big albatross hanging around our necks, I’ll say it – George Carlin.”
The refreshing thing about hearing Smith speak is that he’ll say exactly what everyone in the room is thinking, usually before anyone else gets a chance to verbalize it. Maybe he’s trying to preempt the inevitable questions, or maybe he really is as nonchalant about it all as he’d like us to believe.
Either way, we all know that Jersey Girl was doomed to fail because of the overexposed relationship of stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, and Smith is the first one to point that out. When asked about the bonus features on the disc, he replies: “On Jersey Girl there’s the movie, some behind-the-scenes featurettes and there’s five of these roadside attraction segments I did for The Tonight Show.”
“One takes place on the Jersey Girl set, and the other four have nothing to do with the film, but they were like, ‘This sh*t didn’t work in theatres, so we have to put something on the DVD.’ Then there’s a Kevin and Ben interview, where we sit there and interview each other about what went wrong in our respective careers.”
“I’m kind of a big whore for this market,” Smith continued with regards to his DVDs. “I’ve never really had a movie that grossed more than thirty million bucks, so essentially I’m nothing more than a glorified straight-to-video filmmaker who gets a little bit of a theatrical window, and that kind of ranks me right up there with Shannon Tweed.”
“We worked really hard on the tenth anniversary of Clerks (titled Clerks X) – we didn’t work very hard on Jersey Girl. Maybe that was part of the problem. And for those people out there who are like, ‘So what, are you going to do a twelfth anniversary too? Won’t you let this Clerks sh*t die?’ Well, no.”
“This will probably be the last edition until they come up with a new technology that will just beam us directly into your home and for $75 you get me and [co-star Jason] Mewes dancing and saying ‘Snootch to the Bootch!’” he added. “And you can probably do that with Ben Affleck too, star of Jersey Girl, if sh*t doesn’t turn around soon.”
In a forum where the normal protocol dictates generic questions and non-responsive answers, the evening got even more surreal when a handful of journalists seemed to tire of Smith’s act. Most of the crowd was practically rolling in the aisles, which is certainly not the response you normally see when a director speaks, but as the microphones were passed around among the gathered assemblage, some began to try to trip up Smith.
“Is it fair to say that the year you spent at film school, smoking BC Bud, is what screwed you up?” asked a particularly flaky-looking reporter in the front row, referring to Smith’s days as a student at Vancouver Film School in British Columbia.
“The year I spent smoking BC Bud?” Smith answered. “I’m not a big smoking guy. Are you familiar with BC Bud? Is that how you get through an evening like this?”
“That was during my period where I just didn’t smoke weed, which lasted about thirty-four years, until Jersey Girl didn’t work, and then I was like…” he finished, making a big sucking sound, to applause from the audience.
Then another journalist in the back of the room directs a question at someone else on the stage, saying he was questioning her, “since you don’t swear, and I’m a little bit more at ease with that.”
The next time Smith speaks, it was in response to a question about his involvement in a big-screen adaptation of The Green Hornet for Miramax. As is his modus operandi, he pokes fun at everyone around him while getting a few jabs in at himself as well.
“I’m writing it now, but I don’t know if I’m going to direct it,” he confessed. “I was asked to write and direct it, but after Jersey Girl came out, I just kind of got cold feet about making a big budget movie like that. That was the biggest-budgeted movie I’d ever made, it was like $35 million, which isn’t big for the studios, but it’s big for me.”
“When it didn’t pan out, the notion to go and make something even more expensive and that people hope will be a franchise and that I could really f*ck up on, that was too much pressure,” he continued. “I don’t have nearly enough BC Bud to go through that.”
Smith said he called up Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein and told him that while he appreciated the opportunity, he didn’t think he was up for it. “I said I’d rather go back to small, talking movies where people just talk about sex,” Smith recalled. “Harvey said that was fair, that I should finish writing the script and then see how I felt after that, and that should I still decide I don’t want to direct it, that’s fine, but to leave open that possibility.”
“Then Harvey said, whatever you do, the most important thing, when you get up on stage, don’t curse in front of certain members of the press who aren’t at ease with vulgarity.”
With that, the evening came to an end and Smith thanked the journalists for their patronage: “Thanks for coming out, and go pimp my sh*t – please.” Then he walked off stage to applause – even from those who smoked BC Bud or were shocked to hear the “F” word muttered by a man who once created a monster made out of feces.
Not every Kevin Smith film is a masterpiece, and he’ll be the first to admit it. But at least the man speaks his mind, and in Hollywood that is a rare quality indeed.
