His office is in Philadelphia and his stars are strictly Hollywood. But Kevin Smith’s new “Jersey Girl” comes straight fromt the heart.

By Carrie Rickey
Inquirer Movie Critic

With “Jersey Girl,” director Kevin Smith returns to his roots.

Kevin Smith, the bawdy barrel of a bard behind Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma, hasn’t been a Jersey boy officially since he moved to Los Angeles “with the wife and kid” two years back. But he’s returned to his native state to mine its ore and its Shore for Jersey Girl, which begins its 10-week shoot in the Philadelphia area tomorrow.

With the $35 million Miramax production, a dramatic comedy starring real-life paramours Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez as newlyweds with a newborn, Smith returns to the relationship terrain of Chasing Amy (1997). That one established Affleck as a Gen X leading man and Smith as one of its defining directors.

About a guy who grows to love his daughter as much as he loves his wife, Jersey Girl came out of Smith’s experiences as husband (of Jennifer Schwalbach Smith) and father (of Harley Quinn, age 3) and is set in Highlands, the coastal clamming town where the filmmaker was raised.

Paulsboro, N.J., just across the Delaware River, will double for Highlands, while the interiors of Manhattan offices and Highlands homes will be found on area locations or built on Philadelphia soundstages. The production will film a few days each in Manhattan and the real Highlands, too.

“The irony of a movie entitled Jersey Girl being based in Philadelphia is not entirely lost on us,” says the jovial writer/director, 32, from his Delaware Avenue production office with its view of the Ben Franklin Bridge. As it happens, he couldn’t get any closer to Joisey unless he pitched his tent on the span itself.

But on the whole, he’d rather be in Philadelphia. “I am so not blowing smoke,” says the filmmaker, between drags on a Marlboro Light, “You have insanely nice people here.”

Wrote Smith in his “Jersey Girl Diary” (www.moviepoopshoot.com): “I’ve never encountered a nicer bunch of folks populating a major metropolitan area… . These Philadelphians make the legendarily polite Canadians look like Angelenos by comparison.”

In large part, Jersey Girl came about because Smith and his bud Ben, friends since filmmaker cast actor in Mallrats (1995), were at similar impasses, if at opposite ends of the Hollywood food chain. Having helped make each other’s careers, Smith and Affleck looked to each other to remake them.

During their collaboration on Chasing Amy, Smith passed Affleck’s and his pal Matt Damon’s script Good Will Hunting on to Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein. Smith declined to direct the movie, but did executive-produce the blockbuster hit that won an Oscar for its novice screenwriters.

Affleck’s star soared, landing him one-dimensional roles in such megabudget films as Pearl Harbor and The Sum of All Fears, while Smith remained grounded in modestly budgeted repartee comedies such as Dogma and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, both of which feature Affleck in self-mocking cameos.

“So last July Fourth I went to a party at Affleck’s house,” Smith recalls. “He was fried. He was coming off Pearl Harbor and The Sum of All Fears – he called them ‘machines’ – and said he wanted to do a movie more about performance than machinery.” (The following month Affleck voluntarily enrolled in a program for alcohol abuse; he has been sober for a year.)

Smith, awaiting the August release of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the slacker odyssey starring Jason Mewes and himself, felt that maybe he had played out the self-referential comedies he was known for. Maybe it was time to put away the juvenilia and do something that combined repartee with reflection.

So when the actor said he wanted to do something in the Chasing Amy vein, it hit Smith smack in the solar plexus. He went home and started developing “this vague idea I had while directing J and SB.”

“I sent Ben the pages. And then he called back and said, ‘Finish it, dude.’ ”

The collaborations between director and leading man have worked for both. Smith’s stories give Affleck depth; his presence gives Smith glam.

“But there’s also simple mutual affection,” Smith says. “I dig the guy. I think he’s a phenomenal actor. And he must like me, because Lord knows he could get paid a lot more doing other movies.”

Smith greets this sultry August afternoon bearded, bespectacled and bemused that all these big names are hitching themselves to his little project. “I thought it would be $5 to $10 million,” he says incredulously.

“Generally we’ve had bargain-basement budgets and haven’t paid people what they’re worth,” says Smith. He has to be pleased that to work with him his stars have agreed to salaries below their usual rates.

“The accident of Jersey Girl is that it ended up being as accessible as it is,” he reflects. Much to the shock of the guy whose feature debut was so profanity-saturated that Miramax had to challenge the MPAA to win it an R rating, “There is no reason that this one can’t get a PG-13. It has about two swear words.”

“I mean, Miramax said they saw it as a Julia Roberts picture. I couldn’t make a Julia Roberts picture.”

“I didn’t screen-test Jennifer,” he says of his leading lady – now an item with Affleck, a liaison not yet public, perhaps not yet happening, when the casting decision was made.

Affleck and Lopez met earlier in the year while making the comedy Gigli in Manhattan. “I took Ben’s word on Jennifer,” Smith says. He’d rather not dwell on the star-power thing. “Hype kills, man.”

Asked if the relationship with Lopez has changed his friend, Smith blushes deep persimmon. “He’s very sweet on her.” Subject closed.

There are other big names to deal with. And not just those of Liv Tyler and George Carlin, who have supporting roles.

Miramax insisted that Smith hire a cinematographer to give his movie as much pictorial panache as it had dialogue distinction. To his surprise, Academy Award winner Vilmos Zsigmond – the legendary lensman of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Deliverance – accepted.

Smith still can’t get his head around the apparent contradiction that “one of the world’s greatest cinematographers is shooting the world’s least visually inclined director’s new flick.”

Jersey Girl is the story of a guy named Ollie “who madly loves his wife and has totally bought into the marriage thing” but who is initially brought up short by the father thing.

“The people who say ‘Oh, your movies will be less racy now that you have a kid,’ well, they missed the target but hit the tree,” Smith says. “My movies won’t be less racy, but they will reflect my new consciousness that family is more important than film.”

This one will be the first of his movies in which Smith will not be acting, “if indeed it can be said that I’ve ever really ‘acted.’ ” And he’s happy. “It will be a relief to worry about everybody else’s performances.” (Those who can’t get enough of Smith, the personality, will be able to see his running monthly feature on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. He will shoot September and October segments while in Philadelphia.)

If Dogma was cerebral and Jay and Silent Bob came from the funnybone, “Then this was torn from the heart and gut – like Chasing Amy.”

“You know,” he says, “I always thought of myself as a yin/yang kinda guy, thought of myself as having the feminine perspective. But not until I had a wife and daughter did I get disabused of that.”

It’s been a Jersey kind of year. The rising of Bruce Springsteen. The return of The Sopranos. The resurgence of Jersey Trilogy director Kevin Smith.

Yet ask the filmmaker what Jersey packs that other states lack and he’s stumped. “But if I had one word to describe a Jersey girl I would say, ‘earthy.’ ”

With both a smile and a sigh he adds, “The more I’ve traveled, the more I’ve found that chicks are the same everywhere.”

PAULSBORO – Our story opens with a kiss in the rain.

In the mid-1990s, Hill Studio on Paulsboro’s Broad Street used its film-production equipment to produce a rain shower of critical importance. Hill’s huge pipes pumped out the water that set the scene for a kicker of a kiss in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy, an indie film that became a sleeper hit.

In the next several weeks, Smith will bring members of his crew and cast, which includes Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Liv Tyler and George Carlin, to Paulsboro for his newest project, Jersey Girl.

Just which cast members will make it to filming locations in South Jersey, which also include the Berlin Diner and an undisclosed cemetery, has yet to be released. Filming in Philadelphia is set to begin Aug. 26.

Paulsboro might never have been considered for any of Smith’s films had it not been for Robert “Ratface” Holtzman, a production designer who has worked with Smith and Paulsboro Mayor John Burzichelli. Burzichelli is also an assemblyman – and owner of Hill Studio.

Holtzman has worked on commercials at Hill, and has been the production designer for Chasing Amy and now Jersey Girl, Burzichelli said. As for Smith, the native of Monmouth County started his movie career with 1994’s low-budget Clerks.

Jersey Girl is about a man, played by Affleck, and the effects a new wife, Lopez, and 6-year-old daughter have on his life. Tyler plays a video store clerk who has a significant impact on Affleck’s character. Carlin plays his father.

About a month ago, scouts for Jersey Girl explored Paulsboro. They snapped photos of Paulsboro High School’s Red Raiders-theme auditorium and Loudenslager Elementary School, District Superintendent Frank Scambia said.

Renovations the last few years have spiffed up Loudenslager’s front; the original front steps and 1920s door, now at the back of the school, were part of the scouts’ tour.

Burzichelli and Scambia said they were unsure whether the filmmakers would provide compensation for use of the schools.

“We would think there would be some kind of donation, and we would probably push that to the Boys and Girls Club,” Burzichelli said.

Donation or not, production dollars are sure to trickle throughout Paulsboro, one of the poorest municipalities in Gloucester County.

“There’s always going to be a certain amount of commerce coming into town that without the film might not have been there,” said Sharon Pinkenson, executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office.

It could be “anywhere from a few thousand to many thousands” of dollars, she said.

In Philadelphia, the economic impact of Jersey Girl is more likely to be $10 million to $20 million.

Typically, filming a movie requires production companies to rent private homes in an area, pay for municipal services, or hire off-duty police for security, Pinkenson said.

Stores often reap the benefits of last-minute needs for props and wardrobe.

“Invariably, they need something that they don’t have,” Pinkenson said.

Big-screen name recognition is another benefit for local establishments.

“I want to point out how great it was when Striped Bass was used in a movie,” Pinkenson said, referring to the Philadelphia restaurant used in M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 hit, The Sixth Sense.

As for using the Berlin Diner, “even if it’s just one key scene, it could be great” for the restaurant, she said.

Paulsboro residents also may get a piece of the action. A casting agency in Philadelphia is accepting applications for extras. And “the movies always look for fresh faces,” Burzichelli said.

A starstruck small town this isn’t. Burzichelli’s studio has, over the years, brought in Bruce Willis, Phil Collins and Patti LaBelle for films and videos.

But even Burzichelli acknowledges that the stars of Jersey Girl may outrank past visitors.

“There have been a few independent projects, but when you have Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez and a director like Kevin Smith, I don’t know that it gets any bigger,” he said.

Nino Gervasi has a message for J. Lo:

Whenever she gets tired of the food carts usually laden with goodies for the celebs, piles of pasta and fresh fish will await her at his Italian eatery, Gervasi’s Restaurant.

“I hope she’s going to come in here for lunch,” he said.

“The town is going to be nuts.”