– the show was, well, good. Kev was great, and had to work his ass off to save the thing. Why? Quite simply, there were a lot of people there just wanted to hear their own voice

– near the end, Kevin was desperately searching for a good question to end the night, and he gets “what do you think of my beard”, “will you watch my movie”, and “if you like canada, why were those Canadian guys dumb in Clerks TAS”. Horrible – just horrible!

– please tell people not to try and have Kevin re-tell funny stories from the DVD (like Tim Burton), ask if they can work with him becuase they are “indy-directors”, ask him to sign stuff 15 minutes into the show, and for the love of God, stop just yelling out random things during the show. This isn’t the grammys

– now after that, i want to reiterate my first point – Kev was great. I laughed till I had tears in my eyes at a few points. I just hope he doesn’t think Canadians as a whole are as stupid as some of the people who got the mic.

– and yes, I know that this is the risk you take with an question and answer forum…. but lay that podium down.

Among the nuggets revealed by Smith were the original casting choices for some of his films. According to him, the original cast suggested for Chasing Amy by the studio was not the eventual trio of Ben Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams and Jason Lee, but rather David Schwimmer of Friends, Drew Barrymore, and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. Unable to settle on this, Smith took a budget cut, making the film for $250,000 instead of the original deal of $3 million.

The most poignant part of the evening came right at the start when Smith lamented on the drug addiction that gripped his best friend and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back co-star Jason Mewes. “It went from cute to the dude falling asleep while you were talking to him,” said Smith, noting that Mewes’ heroin addiction would cause him to nod off during the filming of Dogma with Chris Rock.

Smith also mused on the fate of his new film, Jersey Girl, which opens next week. The film has garnered a lot of negative press due to the match-up of Gigli guilty parties Affleck and then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, who Smith is quick to point out is only in the first 12 minutes of the film. Despite the now-necessary p.r. campaign, Smith said he was glad to have J.Lo in the film, as Affleck didn’t really need to pretend to be in love with Lopez, because he already was at the time. “The less you need Affleck to act, the better,” joked Smith.

Where were you in 1994?

We’ve been asked by the crack production team behind the ‘Clerks 10th Anniversary’ DVD to see if any of you out there might have any vintage ‘Clerks’ materials dating back to 1994 an onward. We are hoping that someone out there might have attended a film festival or early screenings of ‘Clerks’ and may have kept unique items around. Things we are looking for include:

* Most Important! – Video footage from 1994 of Kevin – perhaps from a film fest or Sundance 1994

* Photos or newspaper ads or articles circa 1994/1995 about ‘Clerks’ or Kevin

* Materials from other countries such as ads or flyers from the time ‘Clerks’ was released theatrically.

If you might have something that could help out, please (please!) shoot an e-mail to: clerksdvd@viewaskew.com

Ah, the much anticipated first non-ViewAskewniverse Kevin Smith flick. This one has been shit on a lot by folks I know that saw it before the SXSW screening last weekend. After seeing the movie, I have to wonder what movie they were watching… They knew that this wasn’t a snoochie-boochies Smith flick, right? They weren’t surprised when Jay and Silent Bob didn’t show up, were they? It seems like they were.

JERSEY GIRL is a sweet movie with some smart as hell writing. It is a PG-13 romantic comedy, so I don’t know where all this surprised hatred is coming from. Affleck does a good job… I didn’t have any trouble believing his love of Jennifer Lopez at the beginning of the film or his affection for his daughter later on. George Carlin is given a juicy role as Affleck’s father and grandfather to Gertie. I’ve always loved Carlin and he steps up to the plate in this film. Liv Tyler is drool-worthy here. She glows and makes it easy to fall for her free spirit and kind heart.

The movie is sticky sweet in spots, so if you’re the kind of super-macho geek that can’t be troubled with such gooey things as the love between a man and a woman or father and son or father and daughter, then I guess Smith didn’t make this one for you. For the rest of us, he made a great mainstream romantic comedy.

The film is well written, well performed and has that trademark Smith freshness to it. The characters jump, the situations are at times hilarious (the SWEENY TODD sequence in particular) and he found an adorable child actor, Raquel Castro. In the scheme of things, I think JERSEY GIRL will be a modest success, but will be lost in the shuffle of time. Smith will always be known for his Jay and Silent Bob stuff and this film is a little too mainstream to be remembered by the masses for very long, even if it is well done.

I’m glad to see Smith stretch outside of the ViewAskewniverse, though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it. But it’s always good to change things up a bit. I can’t wait to see him test himself on GREEN HORNET. I expect nothing but greatness!

At the screening Smith confirmed that after GREEN HORNET and FLETCH, he may be returning to Jay and Silent Bob’s world. He originally stopped those films for two reasons: One, he was enabling Jason Mewes’ out of control drug abuse and Two, he wanted to try something else. Mewes has been on the wagon for a full year now and if he stays that way, then Smith will certainly bring about the triumphant return of Jay and Silent Bob!

Was Green Hornet a comic book you had a particular affinity for?

I did collect it back when I was a hardcore collector in the late ’80s, early ’90s. And I was a big fan of the show when I was a kid because they would sometimes run it back to back with Batman which I always watched when I was a kid. But they didn’t have a lot of episodes. They only had one year worth of episodes, where Batman I think had two and a half years. So you didn’t see a lot of Green Hornet. You didn’t see as much Green Hornet as you did Batman. But yeah, I always kind of dug him. I remember liking it so much more as a kid. I re-watched all those shows recently and with the exception of those guys in the mask and Bruce Lee kicking ass, the rest of it is kind of boring. It’s always them after mobsters and racketeers. They didn’t have very colorful villains like the Batman stable. But I was always kind of a fan.

What villain would be more interesting in the film?

I’ve got to create one for him. I’ve got to give him a villain, at least in this one, because having him go after gyp artists doesn’t really make for a big action movie. If you listen to the old radio shows, that’s what he’s always doing is going after mobsters, racketeers and gyp artists. There was one radio show I listened to where he’s going after an insurance scam racket, and it’s like why do you have to put on a mask to do that?

Are there no comic book villain you want to bring back?

Well, there’s nothing really from the run of the comics that I read that I was real fond of. It’s just something I’ve got to create, come up with for the purpose of the movie.

How are you preparing for big action scenes?

I will definitely have to do storyboards. It just requires more diligence than I’m used to putting in when I’m actually working on a flick because generally I’m just totally shooting dialogue, right? And it’s usually two people talking, so you don’t have to be that visually interesting. This time around, in Jersey Girl, thanks to Vilmos Zsimond, we’ve got a good looking movie about people talking to one another. But with Green Hornet, you’ve got to build in whole action sequences where it has nothing to do with dialogue, it’s all about eye candy. So for me, even on the few action sequences we’ve had in, say, Dogma or Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back are always the most painful for me to shoot because it’s boring. It’s really boring. You work your whole day and get two seconds of usable film, two seconds of actual movie time. I’m used to getting like seven pages of dialogue done in a day. So it’s just a matter of rewiring the brain and just being like all right, we’ll work many long hours to get a few seconds of film, but we’ll make it a really interesting, really fun looking film.

Was Jason Mewes supposed to have a role in the film?

Jason Mewes, when I started writing it, I wanted Jason to play Jason Biggs’ role. And then Mewes got knee deep in the heroin and that wasn’t going to be happening. So I scaled it back and then I wanted Mewes to play the guy who delivers the diapers who Matt Mayer played. And then Mewes couldn’t do it because he couldn’t come shoot in Jersey because there was a bench warrant out for his arrest. So Mewes wound up missing the boat this time.

How does Ben cry on cue?

Very well and it’s kind of a weird process that you feel bad for him afterwards, because he goes someplace really dark. I’m not quite sure where it is, but he is able to do it, to summon it up and be authentic. I think that’s one of the toughest things in the world for an actor to do. I don’t think it’s that easy to sit there and call up real emotional sh*t. Like when Silent Bob had to cry in “Dogma” they just blew this menthol sh*t into my eyes that makes your eyes water. He doesn’t do it. He just goes to that place and f*cking gets emotional. So big props to him for being able to do that. I’m sure he probably thinks about all the terrible press he received this year. Now he’ll be able to do it much more easily than he did in the past.

Were the scenes of Ollie and Gertrude romancing each other cut into a montage from longer, full length scenes?

Some of them. Some of them were longer than they were [in the current cut]. Some of them are exactly the same length they are in the montage. But with the exception of lifting out the wedding scene itself, or the wedding shot, it’s only 12 seconds, nothing was cut because of that. It was just cut because the movie was chunky and it took a while to ramp up and get going. So, when you edit a movie, you just pull sh*t out. There’s as much stuff from Liv and Raquel and George as there is from Ben and Jen.

For the DVD?

All there. At least a half an hour of cut stuff on the DVD.

THE ‘JERSEY’ GUY

March 18, 2004 — TO tell the truth, this movie inspires me to be a father as much as ‘Armageddon’ inspired me to become an oil-rigger / astronaut! It’s a great role, but it’s just a role.” So says Ben Affleck in response to the unimaginative question, does his role as a doting dad in his new film “Jersey Girl” lead him to thoughts of diapers and domesticity?

Affleck, disarmingly candid, says that “Jersey Girl,” made with his friend and frequent director Kevin Smith, is an “actor’s movie. It’s performance-driven, as opposed to movies in which the actor is . . . incidental.”

This tale of a p.r. man who makes the fatal mistake of dissing his client – Will Smith! – publicly, gives Affleck the opportunity to emote. He is not a stock, stoic, heroic figure. Ben, at his best on-screen, is kind of a mess. The closer his characters are to an emotional crisis, the better he is. Here he performs colorfully with young Raquel Castro as his daughter, and Liv Tyler, extraordinarily appealing, as the woman who wants to bring a little oomph back in his life. Also excellent is George Carlin as his dad.

“Jersey Girl” is a leap for indie god Smith, who has guided Ben through “Chasing Amy” and “Dogma.” The director has attempted to keep his cutting edge, while confronting sentimental issues – precocious children, aging parents, dying spouses – all in the context of a more mainstream Hollywood-type film. Affleck says, “This certainly reflects Kevin’s change of life. We met when we were both about 23, before ‘Chasing Amy.’ A lot of what was on our mind was sex – getting it, the history of it, figuring it out. ‘Jersey Girl’ represents his maturing.” And Ben’s maturing? A hearty laugh – “Well, maybe I’m not as evolved yet!” Maybe not, but he did give us a fascinating analysis of recent events, insights he hasn’t offered elsewhere.

“Jersey Girl” features 12 minutes of Jennifer Lopez. Then she’s gone. This is not “Gigli,” of which Ben says today, “Well, there you had a film that was affected by, and informed by, the off-screen lives of its participants. The original film was dark and weird and kind of surreal. Then, as Jennifer and I became closer, and the publicity got out of hand, the studio decided it wanted a ‘Ben ‘n’ Jen’ comedy – as if there had been a precedent for such a thing to begin with! So, we had to go back for reshoots, to conform to an image we barely knew we had.

“But that was all part of the absurdity of the thing. And as bad as it got, I did appreciate being in the eye of the hurricane, a first-person perspective on a pop-culture phenomenon, which is a ridiculous way to refer to a personal relationship that mattered. And I thought I’d seen the worst of that when I broke up with Gwyneth [Paltrow]! But Jennifer and I sort of fit into the zeitgeist of the moment. They had to, metaphorically, ‘build new sets’ for our affair. I felt like I wore a hair shirt for a while, but we both got out alive.”

And what’s next for Ben? “As soon as this ‘Jersey Girl” junketing is over, I’m taking off. Four months. I’m going to travel and clear my head. There’s some tentative plan to to do a movie called ‘Glory Road,’ but I don’t want to think about work right now. I don’t want to, nor do I have to, worry my career into the ground – when’s the next job?”

No more matinee-idol, pop-culture sizzle? “No, please!” Ben says. “The lucky thing is, the press and the public have such short attention spans. One minute it’s me and Jen, the next, Janet Jackson’s breast . . . ”

Smith fears controversy will also hurt his latest flick, the romantic comedy Jersey Girl, which reunites Ben Affleck and ex-love Jennifer Lopez for the first time since Gigli crashed and burned. “I have to accept the fact that [Jersey Girl] will never be a No. 1 film because people are predisposed to think it is a Ben and Jen [vehicle],” he laments. “They are just not going to turn out because they all hated Gigli so much, even though nobody saw it.

“I have the benefit of knowing that the movie is not about those two,” adds Smith, referring to the fact that Jersey Girl really focuses on the relationship between Affleck and his on-screen daughter, played by Raquel Castro. “Now if Ben and the kid break up, I’ve got problems. But then again, if he and the kid date, I’ve got bigger problems.”

JERSEY GIRL- New Yorker Ollie Trinke’s (Ben Affleck) life goes into the toilet when he finds himself a single father, out of work, and living back at home with his dad (George Carlin) in a small town in New Jersey. As years pass and he settles into the routines of manual labor and evenings spent watching cartoons with his daughter, he finds himself yearning for a chance to return to the hustle of his former life. Kevin Smith’s newest film (and undoubtedly his best looking yet) is something of a departure as it leaves the slapstick behind. It feels almost like Woody Allen lite–although at times a little sappy– as a dramatic comedy about real people. Some of his hardcore fans will be upset by the stylistic change, but Smith has created a likeable paean to parenting and children, and to accepting the life you have instead of always chasing after the past. And the characters, Liv Tyler’s notwithstanding, are familiar, three-dimensional people… like your friends and neighbors. And it still has plenty of laughs. No, it’s not perfect– a little cheesy, even saccharine perhaps. But it’s still a fine movie from a director who, after five movies, has finally grown up. (B ) –Ben Beard