Kevin Smith Vows ‘Clerks 2′ Language, Content Ups The Ante Of The Original ‘A Hundredfold’

No nudity, no graphic violence and ‘no way it gets an R’ the director says of the sequel to his indie classic.

PARK CITY, UTAH — Loyalists swear by the movement he spearheaded with the help of his foot soldiers; others wonder why he still has a job. His common-man persona and disarming grin might be masking a brilliant mind, or he might be as simplistic as his detractors insist. Now, he has returned for a second term that’s shaping up as even more controversial than the first.

No, Kevin Smith isn’t the president — although the polarizing figures have more in common than one might think. As the famously indie writer/director made the rounds at the Sundance Film Festival to support “Small Town Gay Bar,” a documentary he executive produced, Smith admitted with some trepidation that his next mission could go disastrously wrong if he’s rushing into a battle that can’t be won.

Still, in the form of the upcoming sequel to his breakthrough 1994 comedy he claimed to have substantial weapons of crass production at his disposal.

” ‘Clerks 2′ came out phenomenally, and I couldn’t be happier with it,” the bearded, not-so-silent Bob said. “We were really hoping to come to Sundance with it this year, which would have been great because it’s the 25th anniversary of Sundance, and it would have been the only sequel to a Sundance film to ever play at Sundance. Then Harvey Weinstein — the chairman of The Weinstein Company, who we produced the movie with — said, ‘No, we want to go to Cannes instead.’ ”

“The movie itself is kind of a look at what happens when the angry young man enters his thirties. The movie is primarily set in a fast-food joint, but it has so little to do with working in a fast-food joint.”

“Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson, who played Dante and Randall in ‘Clerks,’ are back and Jason Mewes and I play Jay and Silent Bob,” Smith continued. “Ben Affleck showed up for a day. Jason Lee came in for a day. Wanda Sykes came in for a day. There’s a guy named Earthquake, this really funny comedian, and Kevin Wiseman, who plays Marshall on ‘Alias,’ he came in.”

“There’s this kid in the movie, Trevor Fehrman, who’s really funny,” Smith said. “I think he’s gonna pop in a really big way off this film. Rosario Dawson’s in the movie; she’s one of the main characters. My wife, Jennifer Schwalbach, is in the movie,” he laughed. “So for a movie that’s about two dudes, it’s got a really well-rounded cast.”

Although some vocal fans and film purists have expressed their displeasure with the revisiting of, arguably, a classic, Smith insists that by moving Dante and Randal to the fast-food industry, he simultaneously moved his own game to the next level.

“It’s my favorite of all the movies I’ve ever done,” Smith said of the sequel. “It used to be that ‘Chasing Amy’ was my favorite, but this has supplanted ‘Chasing Amy.’ ‘Clerks’ was what it felt like to be in my twenties, but ‘Clerks 2′ is what it feels like to be in my thirties. A portrait of that. It’s about how people have to struggle to grow out of a role that they’ve filled for the better part of their adult life. It’s really poignant, but it’s insanely funny.”

As with previous flicks, such as “Clerks,” “Dogma” and “Amy,” the New Jersey auteur intends to balance the aforementioned seriousness with his bread-and-butter: “di– and fart jokes.”

“We’re not even going to rate it — we’re going to go out unrated,” Smith declared defiantly. “If we put it in front of the ratings board they’d be like, ‘You’re insane. We have to create a new rating for that.’ ”

Even more noteworthy, however, is that the boundary-busting film is devoid of the nudity or graphic violence that typically pushes the NC-17 envelope. Instead, when these clerks say “I assure you, we’re open” this summer, the phrase will likely be peppered with even more four-letter words than the original.

“I’ve never been a nudity dude,” Smith insisted. “We did nudity once, in ‘Mallrats,’ and it was just such an uncomfortable thing to shoot. Anybody can get somebody to take their clothes off. ‘Clerks’ was a movie that the MPAA gave an NC-17 for language and content alone. This movie ups the ante by a hundred-fold, and there’s just no way it gets an R.”

As for everybody’s favorite drug-selling, adventure-seeking, bootchie-snoochin’ duo, Smith says that they’ve grown up — so much so, in fact, that they’ve gone from grade-school humor to something closer to junior high.

“Jay and Silent Bob in ‘Clerks 2′ have about as much, if not less, screen time than they had in ‘Clerks,” Smith revealed, “but it’s a different Jay and Silent Bob, a slightly more mature Jay and Silent Bob.”

“Slightly,” he laughed, after a moment. “Ever so slightly.”

No need for euphemisms—I’m blown away by Small Town Gay Bar. Maybe I was expecting something sort of whimsical or “inspiring,” but Ingram has crafted an ode to what we really mean when we call ourselves a “gay community.” Looking at two bars in Mississippi—one that’s about to be sold and one that’s about to reopen—the film shows us how, for people who live in rural areas, the local gay bar is the only place where people can go to be themselves and find other people with whom they have any kind of kinship.

And in addition to introducing us to the drag queens and butch dykes you might expect to see in a documentary with this title, Ingram takes his camera into the belly of the beast, interviewing religious hatemongers Fred Phelps (who gets just enough screen time to become wholly ridiculous, not that he wasn’t already) and Tim Wildmon. In perhaps the film’s funniest sequence, Wildmon—whose father Donald founded the American Family Association, where Wildmon fils also toils—professes a live-and-let-live philosophy about gays while the film’s queer interviewees remember how Donald Wildmon and other AFA members would write down license plate numbers of cars that visited gay bars, then would read those numbers on the radio the next day. Ultimately, Small Town Gay Bar is a powerful portrait of gay men and lesbians who refuse to decamp for gay meccas like New York, San Francisco, or even Dallas: They choose to stay and fight—to lead the lives they want to lead in the place they’ve always known as home.

Like the character he plays on My Name Is Earl, Jason Lee seems to be suffering from a case of bad karma.

How else to explain his diagnosis of adult-onset chicken pox, just as NBC announced that it was renewing his series for a second season?

Production on the comedy was shut down over the weekend after Lee was diagnosed with the virus.

Fortunately for the rest of the cast, no one else was infected with the itchy ailment; unfortunately for Lee, he was judged highly contagious and will have to remain in quarantine for several weeks.

“Jason Lee, if you haven’t heard, has the chicken pox,” Kevin Reilly, president of NBC Entertainment, announced Sunday at the Television Critics Association meeting in Pasadena. “Jason is actually quite sick and is going to be out of the show for about two or three weeks.”

“Well, I mean, first of all, we think it’s chicken pox,” deadpanned show creator Greg Garcia. “I saw him shake Charlie Sheen’s hand at the Golden Globes, and the next morning he woke up with bumps all over him, so it could be anything.”

Reilly, meanwhile, also announced the good news for Earl, revealing that NBC had ordered an additional 24 episodes for next year.

In its first season, Earl has been racking up impressive ratings for the network with an average of 12 million viewers each week, revitalizing NBC’s post-Friends Thursday-night lineup.

The comedy was nominated for two Golden Globes, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, one Directors Guild of America Award and three Writers Guild of America Awards and won the People’s Choice award for Favorite New Television Comedy.

The show centers on Lee’s titular character, Earl, who buys a winning lottery ticket, only to lose it after he is hit by a car.

While recovering in the hospital, Earl has an epiphany that his rotten luck is the result of poor karma and subsequently decides to go back and right past wrongs in an effort to reverse his fortune.

His list of actions for which he wants to make amends includes faking his own death to get out of a relationship, blowing his father’s campaign for mayor and ruining his ex-wife’s wedding to her new husband. However, as he goes about trying to fix his mistakes, he inevitably ends up digging himself into an even deeper mess. (But he does find the lottery ticket.)

Earl is backed up on his quest by a gaggle of dimwitted friends, played by supporting castmembers Jaime Pressly, Ethan Suplee and Eddie Steeples, among others.

Because of Lee’s central role, the show simply can not go on without him, Garcia told reporters.

“He’ll be in all the episodes,” Garcia said. “We’re just shut down until he is feeling better and is presentable to put on TV again. So, yeah, we are not doing episodes without him.”

Prior to landing Earl, Lee starred in such movies as Almost Famous and several Kevin Smith films, including Chasing Amy. He broke into show biz with Smith’s 1995 comedy Mallrats.

Come Early Morning – ****

The most shocking thing about this movie is that it is written and directed by Joey Lauren Adams who you have seen in most of Kevin Smith’s films. While she might always play a dumb blonde in most of her roles, this film is brilliant and insightful. The acting by Ashley Judd is top notch and I loved her character. This is a great and powerful film about women that all women (and men) should see. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.