21. CLERKS

With its cruddy lensing and sound, Kevin Smith’s way-low-budget debut feels like a bootleg copy of an adolescent mind.

AVC: You were in Zack And Miri Do A Porno with Seth Rogen. You’ve both worked extensively with Judd Apatow, who is famous for encouraging improvisation, where Kevin Smith is known for discouraging ad-libbing. Did Smith allow improvisation on Zack?

CR: Definitely. This was supposed to be the first movie he did that on. He just told us to go for it, to do our thing. I wouldn’t have guessed that he’d ever discouraged improvisation, but I guess he’s just used to doing scenes down to the letter. He was very encouraging about doing improv at this particular time.

AVC: Were there any particular improvisations you were especially proud of?

CR: There were a couple of things. Tisha Campbell came out with both guns blazing. She was going off. She was totally off-book, so I just had to catch up with her and go with her toe-to-toe. Kevin’s direction was that at first I was kind of stunned, but then I think, “Are you going to take that?” So I’m like, “Oh yeah, here we go.” Then the titty auditions, that was all improv. Kevin just told us to start here, then end up somewhere else.

Read the whole thing at AV Club.

7. “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”


Writer/director Kevin Smith found his stroke once again with this riotous and surprisingly heartfelt comic yarn about a platonic couple (Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks) who discover they’re in love while making a nudie flick. The movie encapsulates Smith’s heedless joy of filmmaking.

“Jersey Girl” (2004)

Continuing his streak of playing #2s, Damon reunited with his “Dogma” director Kevin Smith for a bit of déjà vu. Shortly before he became a household name with “Good Will Hunting,” Damon took a minor role in “Chasing Amy” as “Shawn Oran – Executive #2,” an MTV producer who tries to lure Holden and Banky (Ben Affleck and Jason Lee) to adapt their comic book for TV. In “Jersey Girl,” Lee and Damon sit across from Affleck’s Ollie Trinke as PR execs #1 and #2, respectively, who interview Trinke for a job. Smith laments on the DVD commentary, “You don’t know how disheartening it is to be at a test screening and get cards back where like ‘scene liked most: Jason Lee and Matt Damon’ because you’re like dude, they were in the movie for a minute.”

The “Clerks: The Animated Series” scenario

This is by far the most depressing of the three scenarios. The network might initially give support to the show in the conceptual phase even though they’re not entirely sold on it. Once the show has got a few episodes in the can, the network executives will balk at the prospect of giving it even the tiniest bit of support.

This has happened many times before with other shows, I’m certain, but there is one particularly ugly example that comes to mind for me. I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with movie writer/director Kevin Smith. Back in the early part of the decade he was approached by ABC to have his very first film, “Clerks”, translated into an animated series. Even though Kevin’s involvement with the project was minimal compared to that of his films the project looked good on paper. It had Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson & Jason Mewes reprising their roles as Dante, Randal & Jay, so what could go wrong? Everything!

First of all, the often vulgar “Clerks” was a concept that was not at all compatible with ABC, which is owned by Disney. If it had been optioned by a cable network like Comedy Central or Cartoon Network there was a chance it would have translated quite well to the small screen. Even the Fox network could have made it work, given their success with shows like “The Simpsons” & “Family Guy”. But because ABC took it on the show’s producers attempted to transform “Clerks” into something it definitely wasn’t: a normal animated sitcom. It ended up being such a watered-down version of the source material that it turned off a lot of Kevin Smith’s normally loyal and forgiving fanbase (myself included) and viewers unfamiliar with Smith’s other work just didn’t connect with it.

It doesn’t help that ABC seemed to revel in making a bad situation worse. It delayed the premiere of the series from early Spring to Summer, then it made the decision to air the fourth episode of the series as the pilot episode. The network then aired the second episode, which was a “flashback” episode with the flashback sequences referring almost solely to what was intended to be the first episode. With seemingly the entire deck stacked against it, “Clerks: The Animated Series” was cancelled after merely two out of the six completed episodes having aired.

“This job would be great if it wasn’t for the fucking customers.”

Randal Graves

Played By: Jeff Anderson

Film: Clerks

Why He’s On The List: Randal is the voice of countless generations – anyone who’s had a shitty customer service job in their early twenties will understand his attitude, wishing they could have articulated their frustration with his artful profanity and supreme disregard for, well, anything. But the key to Randal is that he doesn’t necessarily hate his job, it’s just that he remembers not to care.

Finest Hour: Randal ignores a customer and her small child while he phone-orders a long list of sordidly titled porn films from a distributor. When he reaches the end of the lengthy spiel, he dismissively asks “Oh, and what was the one you wanted again?”

“Shaun of the Dead” fans rejoice! Finally another brilliant horror comedy to win over your undead hearts. The Ronalds Brothers NETHERBEAST INCORPORATED is an offbeat hilarious comedy with a quirky twist on the vampire tale set in modern day corporate America. Employees of Berm-Tech Industries, Inc. have kept the family secret for a long time. For years it has been business as usual, until the top vampire in charge (Darrell Hammond Saturday Night Live) contracts a dreaded disease, becomes senile forgetting that he s a vampire and starts killing off other vampire colleagues. A human efficiency expert (Judd Nelson Breakfast Club) and “Dead Mike’s” replacement (Amy Davidson TV s 8 Simple Rules) are invited to work at Berm-Tech but soon they discover that some of their associates (Dave Foley TV s Kids in the Hall, Newsradio, Jason Mewes Clerks 1 & 2, Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Steve Burns TV s Blue s Clues) are not what they appear to be.

This is one of those flicks that we didn’t have a chance to see in this part of the country, so we’re looking forward to catching the DVD. Stay tuned as we’re hoping to have some copies to award to lucky News Askew fans, as well. Enjoy the weekend, folks, we’ll see ya back here soon.

And just in case ya missed it, here’s Matt Damon giving his very candid thoughts on ex-VP candidate Sarah Palin.

16. ELIZABETH BANKS

Over a few weeks this fall, Elizabeth Banks babysat Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott in Role Models; evinced Laura Bush’s quiet devotion to her hubby in Oliver Stone’s W.; and tackled her first title role, as an amateur porn star, in Zack and Miri Make a Porno — all with enviable ease. After years of thankless roles as The Girlfriend (to Ryan Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg, even a robot Eddie Murphy), the 34-year-old actress is finally Having Her Moment, even if she can’t quite make the poster for Zack and Miri. ”It’s a f—ing drawing of a girl,” Banks says with a full-bodied laugh. ”I can’t even get myself on the f—ing poster. What moment am I having?” We have a feeling, with her wide range and genuine charm, she’s going to be having plenty more chances to be front and center.

Clerks

Kevin Smith isn’t really a director you’d associate with sequels, and thus eyebrows were raised when he announced he was revisiting his debut film, Clerks, to find out what had happened to Randal and Dante since we met them last. Leaving a 12 year gap between the films, this gave Smith the space to build some genuine evolution into his characters, and he gladly took the chance to do so. And while the worldwide box office take of $26m may not raise eyebrows, set against the sizeable business it’s done on DVD and the low production budget, it’s proven to be a very profitable enterprise. More than that, though, Clerks II was a terrific sequel, and one that makes the rumours of a third movie later down the line very interesting indeed…

CLERKS

Budget: $27,000 (before additional post production work)

A god amongst film geeks, beloved filmmaker and comic book writer Kevin Smith has amassed an arsenal of 6 movies to fit into his View Askewniverse, and that world begins and ends with Clerks. Though many people have an almost instinctive adverse reaction to black-and-white cinema nowadays, Clerks proves that when it comes to comedy, a strong focus on dialogue is almost always the primary route to success. And with the film taking place almost entirely within a convenience store where Kevin Smith worked at the time, the concentration staying on dialogue above anything else allowed for the young filmmaker to keep the budget as minimal as possible. That’s not to say paying for the movie was an easy task. According to Wikipedia, in order to acquire the funds for the film, Smith sold a large proportion of his extensive comic book collection, maxed out eight to ten credit cards with $2000 limits, dipped into a portion of funds set aside for his college education and spent insurance money awarded for a car he and Jason Mewes lost in a flood.

Since the film had to be shot at night when the store was closed, Smith needed to come up with a way to explain why the steel shutters were closed, and in turn led to a great scene in the film where Dante discovers somebody put gum in the locks and has to put up a big sign written in shoe polish that says, “I Assure You, We’re Open.” Situations like these just go to show how being forced to think outside the box can actually lead to much more rewarding outcomes.

The entire list is made up of what we’d call pretty much must-see movies, so we highly recommend you check it out and pick up some of the titles as your schedule allows. Our kudos to the authors of this piece for a fantastic list.

The site uses “Clerks” as an example and takes a color square to represent a characters speaking part, and symbols to indicate profane dialogue. We’re not sure we get the experiment, either, but it’s definitely the first time we’ve seen anything like it.

August 2, 1991. The day of my 21st birthday. Most folks elect to cut loose and enjoy the freedom that turning 21 affords. I, however — being a total loser — opted, instead, to take the 50-mile drive up the Jersey Turnpike with my friend Vincent Pereira so we could peep a film reviewed, quite favorably, by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice. It was unheard of in my neck of the woods to drive that far to see a movie (let alone a movie with zero movie stars in it), but the promise of a scene centered on a Madonna pap smear of questionable authenticity was bait enough to lure us from the Jersey ‘burbs into the wilds of Manhattan-after-dark.

After overpaying for both parking and popcorn, we settled into what seats we could find together in the packed theater of a midnight screening. And once the trailer for Hal Hartley’s Trust concluded, the Orion Classics logo lit up the screen and introduced me to my future. For the next 100 minutes or so, I was agog. My jaw literally hung open as this shaggy paean to those who follow the road not taken unspooled, offering me a glimpse into a free-associative world of ideas instead of plot, people instead of characters, and Nowheresville, Texas, instead of the usual California or New York settings most movies elected to feature (that “Nowheresville” was really Austin speaks volumes on how culturally bereft I was at the time). That night, director Richard Linklater and his film not only captured my imagination, he (and it) captured my heart — not to mention kick-started my ambition. On the hour-long drive home from the theater that night, I realized what I wanted to do with my life: I wanted to be a filmmaker. That’s the power of Slacker: if you let it, it’ll change your life. It certainly changed mine.

So if you hate me and my films, blame Richard Linklater’s Slacker. And if you love me and my films, thank Richard Linklater for Slacker. Either way, do yourself a favor and watch Richard Linklater’s Slacker here on Hulu. Right now.

Check it out, and then, if you’re in a Hulu-approved region, check out the movie for free, right now. Long live Hulu!

If you wanna take your mind off it, “Quarantine” may be a good bet in theaters this weekend — If the film is anywhere near as scary as the Spanish original it’s based on (“[Rec]”, which we checked out and dug a couple months ago), it’ll be a creepy time in the dark while you wait just three shorts weeks for Zack And Miri!

13. CLERKS (1994)

Kevin Smith’s debut, about a day in the life of two service-industry suburbanites, was made for $27,575. It’s hard to tell where all that money went, but the cruddy lensing and muddy sound actually enhance the experience. This spitball of nonstop scatology and pop-cult obsessiveness — what are the ethical implications of killing independent contractors aboard the Death Star? — feels like a bootleg copy of an adolescent mind. SIGNATURE LINE ”I’m not even supposed to be here today.”

Release Date: October 31
Featured Apatow acolytes: Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson.
Apatovian plot: Rogen and Banks star as lifelong friends down on their luck. After a fifteen-year high-school reunion underscores their lack of accomplishment, they decide to start their own amateur porn company. Then, inexplicably, they fall in love.
How Judd Apatow would’ve made it funnier: Jay Baruchel as a high-maintenance mustached porn actor with performance anxiety.

1. Clerks, film, available on DVD. Perhaps the most eloquent Star Wars geek on record, director Kevin Smith crafted dialogue about the issue of contract labor on the second Death Star in Star Wars: Episode VI–Return of the Jedi. Collateral damage or deserving collaborators? The debate rages on.