– Turned in the third draft, which came down 16 pages (following the reading). It’s now a lean, funnily mean 103 pages. This will, no doubt, be the shooting draft.

– Looks like our “Clerks 2” deal is about to close, so we may be getting cash-flowed as early as next week. While all fees and back-end deals are normally pre-negotiated in our overall deal, this flick was an exception – based on the low, low budget, and the fact that Scott and I opted against receiving our contractual salaries and instead took a new back-end deal that rewards us if the movie performs well (if it doesn’t, we did the movie, essentially, for nearly-free). Same with Jeff, Brian, and Mewes – while we’re all taking home some cash up front, it’s not nearly what they could’ve commanded to do the sequel to a proven flick. So, like Scott and I, they’re all taking the risk, and sharing equally in any back-end payday.

Yes – I realize how very gay “back-end payday” sounds. That’s why I was smiling when I wrote it.

Five hundred screens can be good if they’re the right five hundred screens (all near college campuses). I don’t think this is the kinda film that ever needs to be in more than 1000 theaters, though.

I guess we’ll find out closer to release.

This goes theatrical before anything else.

I was over-the-moon about what happened with “Diary of a Mad, Black Woman” this weekend. There’s a flick that had a quiet grass roots campaign, that didn’t rely on heavy network ads, and shocked the fuck out of everybody by doing $21million. That’s my model for “Clerks 2”: I’ll be pimping this “C2” goodness in all the right corners of film geekdom for the next eight to twelve months, so that when it’s time to market the flick, the lion’s share of our work will alredy be done.

I mean, at our budget, if we can open as well as “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” did, we’d be sitting oh-so pretty. If we could hit that thirty million dollar gross that flick had? Fucking yowza!