Inspired by Richard Linklater‘s Slacker, Kevin Smith — a heretofore failed aspiring filmmaker who dropped out of both Vancouver Film School and a creative writing program at NYC’s New School — set out to make a semi-autobiographical movie about twentysomething slackers in a Jersey strip mall. Several maxed-out credit cards later, Smith emerged with the $27,000 Clerks (1994) and established himself as a strong new exponent of the potty-mouthed zeitgeist embodied in Beavis and Butt-head and South Park. Claims to the influence of Spike Lee, Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch notwithstanding, Smith admits, “I’m a very flat, simple filmmaker, with zero visual style. Helen Keller could probably fashion more visually interesting films than me.”

Smith’s dialogue-driven films, peppered with zingy pop-culture references, are more likely to quote Star Wars than any arcane auteur. After the serious sophomore slump of his studio-financed Mallrats, Smith concluded his “New Jersey trilogy” on a felicitous note. The $250,000 boy-meets-lesbian romantic comedy Chasing Amy, which hinted at a breadth of emotional and thematic range previously hidden beneath a sea of penis jokes, redeemed Smith with critics and found a larger audience than the previous two films combined. Smith’s upcoming Dogma, a star-studded comedic fantasy about angels, seems destined to be the indie equivalent of an event picture. — Sandra Contreras