First day of rehearsals was yesterday. Just Rogen and Banks. It was pretty tremendous. This afternoon, we add the rest of the gang into the mix.

Principal photography starts shooting a week from today.

More on the excitement straight ahead, via Kevin’s recent blog posts. News Askew will of course be your complete one stop coverage stop for everything that breaks about the flick.

The blog entires, in full, will be available exclusively at Kevin’s blog sites: Silent Bob Speaks and Myspace. If you haven’t already done so, bookmark ’em up right now.

As always, we’ll alert you of new entires here, and run a couple interesting snippets to whet the appetite and break any big news from within. Let’s take a look:

Tuesday was day one of rehearsals, and lemme tell ya’: it was pretty awesome, hearing Zack and Miri come to life for the first time. Rogen and Banks are genius together (and apart – which, in the flick, is extremely rare): hilarious and rather sweet and touching when called for. The roles fit them like gloves. Shit, better than gloves: the roles fit them like condoms. Like custom-made condoms, even.

…

I’ve got a guy whose inflections I wrote for/to reading the scenes and sounding like he’s not acting at all, as much as being the character. I’ve got a chick who could read the Bible aloud and make it seem charming. They’re naturals. They’re excellent.

…

We start shooting our eighth film on Wednesday.

It’s nice to see Kevin going back to the roots with reports on this one, and staying relatively cold on the stars and the plot. We’re hoping for continued reports like this, which delve into the background process yet still leave a bunch of surprises to be had in the theater.

Read the entire “Making Porno, Part 1”, which reveals (for the first time in detail) Kevin’s rehearsal schedules for every film he’s made before, at his blog site.

Kevin Smith sent his excitable fan base into a tizzy last April when he promised on his blog that his tenth movie would be “something special.” That movie is almost certainly going to be “Ranger Danger and the Danger Rangers,” the director revealed to MTV News, “depending on what happens with the next two [”Zack and Miri Make a Porno” and “Red State”]. They might try to stick me in movie jail,” Smith laughed. “But I’ve f-ed up way worse in the past. If they didn’t do it after ‘Jersey Girl’ I think I’m ok.”

“I think it would be kinda cool to go larger budget and shoot some effects on that one,” he enthused.

Movie jail aside (and there’s zero chance Smith could ever get put there – “Jersey Girl” or not), the biggest hurdle to bringing “Ranger Danger” to the big-screen hasn’t been a skeptical studio – but, by the director’s own admission, Smith himself. Call it being “totally gun shy,” by the enormity of the endeavor, he conceded, on a project he once told “Variety” was his “stab at a comicbook/sci-fi movie in the vein of ‘Flash Gordon.’”

But that’s all changed for Smith coming off of the television pilot he directed for the CW series “Reaper,” he boasted.

“‘Reaper’ made me feel a bit more confident when it comes to effect shoots – not like I’m going out and seeking them, but when it comes to one like ‘Ranger Danger’ I [used to think] ‘maybe when I’m fifty I’ll be ready for it,’” Smith confessed. “But now I feel like, it’s easier to work through things.

“I maybe kind of feel like I maybe can approach ‘Ranger Danger’, and not f— it up completely,” he continued, chuckling.

Having done this job for a while, we’ll try and not get TOO excited about a film that’s 2 movies away (a lot can change by then). Still, if this comes to pass, we can say for certain that the big Ranger Danger film sure would be something special, as promised — And finally give meaning to Randal’s famous “Clerks II” tee.