All may not be lost, though. The scabrous, particularly observed critique of film world ways that marked such smart, astringent comedies of the 1990s as “The Player,” “Swimming With Sharks,” “… And God Spoke” and “Living in Oblivion” returns alive, well and brimming with independent attitude next month in “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” Kevin Smith’s (”Clerks,” “Dogma”) affectionate but merciless response to every stupidity he’s observed in seven years of making movies.

No marketing maven vetted this script, which includes Smith pals Ben Affleck and Matt Damon dissing each other’s career choices and sets a record for swipes at an actual distributor — in this case the one that’s releasing “Jay and Bob,” Miramax.

The short, thick, bearded Mr. Smith is familiar to moviegoers for the small parts he plays in his own films. (In his latest one, he is the wordless Silent Bob to his co-star Jason Mewes’s motormouth Jay.) And as he moved through the suite of offices and into the editing room to watch “A Man for All Seasons,” he looked very much like Silent Bob, right down to the doleful eyes and the backward baseball cap. Once in the editing room, the door closed and the DVD slid into the bank of technical gizmos, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes and began to snap it loudly on his forearm.

“Why this movie?” he asked as he watched the credits roll. “It’s been a favorite of mine since I was a kid. The first time I saw it was when I was about 13. It would have been 1983. I watched it because I was going to a Catholic school in Jersey at the time, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I had this teacher, Sister Theresa, who was great, and Thomas More was her favorite saint and she loved this movie. For our eighth- grade production one year, she did an adaptation of Bolt’s stage play for us to perform. She chopped out a lot, but we still put it on. I played Cromwell. She picked a guy in the class to play Henry VIII because he had red hair. She was kind of fanatical about the details.”

Sister Theresa encouraged her class to watch the film when it was broadcast on a local television station, to introduce them to the story and prepare for the class production. “I watched it and I just fell in love with it in general,” Mr. Smith said. “Even though it was on television and interrupted by commercials, it knocked me out. I don’t know why Sister Theresa loved it so much. I think it had something to do with the integrity of More. He wasn’t one of these fanatical kind of martyrs who wanted to die on the sword. He was a lawyer and tried like mad to get out of dying but in the end found no way that didn’t involve violating his faith. But for me, I loved it just because it was so well-spoken and yet incredibly spiritual at the same time. Here’s a dude who held one of the highest offices in England at the time but was still able to maintain his faith.”

Mr. Smith said his family had just bought its first videocassette recorder, and he made a copy of “A Man for All Seasons” and watched it at least 10 more times in the next weeks. “It got to the point where my parents were, like, ‘C’mon, move on, watch something else,’ ” Mr. Smith said. “But I didn’t want to. It was the language. It was the story. It was being 13 years old and admiring somebody who was able to go down for God. Maybe I even felt I could identify with Thomas More a bit. I can appreciate the way More’s mind worked, how he was able to juggle the two worlds of the spiritual and the everyday. I mean, it’s easy to say we don’t want to sin, but it’s very hard not to sin. Here’s a dude who found a way to do it, to walk the line.”

Happy Birthday

As pointed out by someone earlier in the week (yes, I may not be posting much lately, but I’m watching; Mother-Sister ALWAYS watches), mid-July marks the fifth year this site’s been in existence. With all that’s been going on with ‘Jay and Silent Bob’, we never got to officially recognize this or make a big deal out of it, which is kind of a shame, as it’s probably the most important aspect of View Askew, outside of the movies themselves. Perhaps if we make it another five years with the site, I’ll do what I’ve threatened to do in the past: throw a party at my house for anyone still interested. But for this first milestone anniversary, all I can do is say “Happy Birthday, www.viewaskew.com.”

We’re in the studio at this moment, recording the score for the flick. Jim’s done a phenomenal job, working first with an 83 piece orchestra on Monday, and now a smaller 53 piece orchestra yesterday and today. Later tonight, we record the choir.

Yes – it’s a BIG score. Big and funky.

Some folks have been speculating about the move from the 24th to the 22nd. This, I’m told, is a vote of confidence. Bob figures the movie to be a word-of-mouth flick, so the Wednesday bow is meant to jump-start the weekend as folks (like yourselves) who go on Wed/Thurs spread the word to those looking for something to see on Friday and Saturday. We’ll see if it pans out, but I tend to trust Bob. He knows what he’s doing.

Tomorrow, we record the last pieces of ADR on the movie, with Mewes, Eliza, and Diedrich, then it’s off to San Diego. The panel’s on Friday, from 2:00 to 5:00p.m. I believe. I’ll be showing a rather large clip from the flick, amongst other goodies. And for a lucky two hundred and fifty attendees, there’s going to be something extra special…

Remember: get to the panel early, and come prepared to ask really good questions. Excellent queries may be rewarded.

JM: Why did you have this insanely large cast with all these guys doing one- and two-day parts?

KS: It was the nature of the story. People like Jay and Bob a lot, and they’d always say, “C’mon, make a Jay and Silent Bob movie, just them. It’d be cool.” And I’d always say, “Why?” I mean, one character doesn’t even talk. It’s tough to put those guys in the spotlight. It’s tough to say, “You love them in small spots, now love them for 90 to 100 minutes.” You run the risk of having the audience go, “F— this. I did like them in small doses, but not feature-length.”

So the idea was to spread them out, mix them up with other people. They get a scene or two to themselves, then they meet somebody, and that person gets the focus for a little while. Structurally, it helps break up seeing two guys the entire time.

Gough [co-creator of The WB’s upcoming Superman series, Smallville] is evenopen to inviting hopeful Superman Reborn writer Kevin Smith to participatein the show, but doubts Smith will be available. “He’s got like 50 millionfeature projects, but it would be great to talk to him about it.””

I’d be hard-pressed to think of ourselves as a big studio company, but we haven’t been an independent film company since we weren’t a company. Like we made CLERKS and we called ourselves “View Askew” but we were not incorporated or anything like that. And that was the only movie we ever truly, independently made. MALLRATS had Universal money behind it, CHASING AMY had Miramax money behind it, DOGMA had Miramax money on it and JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK has Dimension money behind it. I mean, I haven’t made, in the strictest definition of the term, I haven’t made an independent film since CLERKS.

Now if you broaden your definition of independent films to mean “any movie that could not be made through the studio system,” then yeah, we’ve definitely made movies that I would consider to be independent. CHASING AMY was an independent movie. If we made that for a studio, those guys would’ve wound up together by the end of the flick. DOGMA was a movie that could never be made through a studio system and as was proven later on almost didn’t work, although it did get made with studio money, but the studio didn’t want it. JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK couldn’t be made through a studio system unless that studio was Miramax/Dimension. There’s so much Miramax/Dimension family in it.

There’s so many references to movies we’ve done with them. We take MAJOR potshots at Miramax in the movie and Miramax takes it on the chin, you know, they never said “remove it.” If we had made that movie elsewhere we probably couldn’t take the potshots at Miramax because the lawyers wouldn’t let us and no other studio would let us take potshots at them. You think Universal would’ve let us make the jokes at their expense that we make with Miramax’s expense in this movie? Heavens no. The studios are very protective of their image. Miramax thought it was funny, so they didn’t care.

Antony: So you’re working on a [Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back] documentary for Kevin right now?

Malcolm: Yes, with Kevin’s wife Jennifer.

Antony: Is this for web content eventually?

Malcolm: It will be for the DVD. I think Kevin’s really great about putting out these big huge editions of his films. He just saw the opportunity to have someone there the whole time to document all the way from [the project’s] inception, all the way to the end. It’s probably going to end up being more of ‘a year in the life’ because it’s turning out to be a very interesting year. So it’s not just dealing with Jay and Silent Bob, it’s going back and interviewing the old cast, a lot of people we’ve worked with, kind of all the peripheral people.

[Antony’s Note: Malcolm’s partner in filming the documentary footage of Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, has indicated that the footage is being prepared as a two hour documentary for the festival circuit.]