A big thanks to Britt for getting us the text of all the View Askew & Kevin Smith related items in last week’s way cool 10th anniversary issue of Entertainment Weekly. Not only was it a really fun and well-assembled issue, but there was a ton of stuff we wanted to post here, as well. Here’s a page by page breakdown:

• Sound Bites – 1997 (pg. 15): “He’s a consummate actor… His hairline can be fixed.” Director Kevin Smith, on the befuddling proposition to cast Nicolas Cage as Superman 5/16
• Sound Bites – 1999 (pg. 16): “White meat. The breast. Though actually, I’m more of an a–man, so I should propbably like dark meat better.” Ben Affleck, on his Thanksgiving preferences. 11/26
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (pg. 26): It was 1991, and things were looking grim. Kevin Smith, not yet the Slurpee auteur behind Clerks and Chasing Amy, was 20 years old, living in New Jersey, and weighing the prospect of a long and dutiful career in the American service sector. “I assumed that maybe one day I would buy into a deli or a convenience store, and I’d run that,” he remembers. “Because that was about the only thing I knew how to do.”
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (pg. 27): On his 21st birthday, Smith drove into Manhattan to check out an odd, rambling little film called Slacker – and had an epiphany. “Oh, I would like to do this. If this counts as filmmaking, I want to be a filmmaker too. I can do this,” he thought. “This was the first true independent film I’d ever seen.”
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (same page): ……Within months, Smith was starting work on a raunchy $28,000 comedy called Clerks,…
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (pg. 34): … Kevin Smith remembers the time he and his partner, producer Scott Mosier, needed film stock to shoot Clerks. They could buy a reel at a 15 percent discount as long as they flashed a student ID. Slight hitch: Neither guy was a student. So Smith headed over to the New School for Social Research in New York City. “I looked through the catalog to find a one-day course,” he remembers. “There were two. One was Understanding Your Homosexuality. The other was Roasting Suckling Pig. I understood my homosexuality just great, so I quickly signed up for Roasting Suckling Pig. I got my student ID and I went back uptown to Kodak.” The store sold him the celluloid. “Then I quickly went back downtown and dropped the course and got my $45 back,” he says.
• Theme No. 1: Rebellion (same page): …Smith still laughs when he looks back to a panicky early screening of Clerks in 1993. “I remember sitting there in the theater and being blown away by how filthy the f—in’ movie was,” he says. “Just sitting there in public watching the characters constantly saying ‘f— f— f—’ and talkin’ about sex. And I remember goin’, ‘Oh God, what have I done? This is a joke that went too far. I can’t believe I spent 28 grand on this filthy f—in’ movie. I’m in debt! This was stupid! Nobody’s going to watch this!’ ” He was wrong. Now, Smith says, “people go, ‘Hey, man, Clerks was the movie that made me want to be a filmmaker.’ Somewhere down the road, one of those people that saw Clerks, they’re going to make The Great American Film.”
• Top 5 triumphs for New Jersey (pg. 66): #2 Kevin Smith’s Garden State-based Clerks released (1994)
• Theme No. 3: Sincerity vs. Irony (pg. 78): …Kevin Smith’s 1999 flick Dogma (in which Linda Fiorentino takes a leave of absence from an abortion clinic to battle satanic poo monsters for Jesus) incited full-fledged picketing.
• Theme No. 4: Break Throughs (pg. 84): Chris Rock is given a short bio and props from Nelson George, author of Hip Hop america (great book)
• Theme No. 5: Cults (pg. 105): Ben Affleck’s film bio is given in 4 segments: Humble Origins…(Became a Kevin Smith regular with Mallrats, chasing Amy, and Dogma), Crossed Over..(..with his Oscar-winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting,…), Arrived…, True to His Roots..
• Theme No. 6: Size (pg. 112): Short article on Bob and Harvey Weinstein sale of Miramax Films to Disney for an estimated $60 million in April 1993.
• The EW index (pgs. 172-174): Tally of people on EW covers: Matt Damon (12 times), Ben Affleck (6 times), Chris Rock (5 times), Salma Hayek (one time), Alan Rickman (one time), and alas, Kevin Smith (zero times, but there’s still time!).

• Kevin and Ben’s kiss was featured on the show MTV Movie Awards Uncensored this past weekend. One of the producers told the story of how Ben and Kevin didn’t even want to look at the copy the MTV producers had scripted for them and assured them they had something that MTV would be happy with, and the producer goes on to say that “Ben plants one on Kevin” and the crowd goes wild. And while she says this, they show the actual act, and then cut to a reaction shot of Heather Graham and Edward Burns of all people. His reaction was a pained smile.
• Online animation magazine Animation Blast have received all the Clerks TCS episodes on tape, and reviewed them all. They loved the show, and had nothing but good things to say. We’re also anticipating the arrival of the episodes ourselves, and hope to have our own reviews of each show up soon for you as well (spoiler protected, of course).
• In more Clerks:TCS news, the “Mutant Reviewers From Hell” have set up their own website dedicated to the show, which you can see HERE. They plan to review each show as it airs.
• In today’s final Clerks TCS bit, TV show ZDTV mentioned the official Clerks: The Cartoon website and added it to their big list on a recent episode. The host then went on to badmouth the show a bit, we hear, but we’re willing to bet he’d yet to even see an episode.
• Kevin’s the subject of the comic book parody column “You’ll All Be Sorry” over at the Comic Book Resources website today, him supposedly writing a fictitious letter into the column with their own “Miss Manners” responding rather scathingly.
• Finally today, it appears that God herself, Alanis Morissette, has another acting gig…And this time she gets to do a lip-lock with Sarah Jessica-Parker on HBO’s “Sex & The City”. Yowza.

See ya next time, folks.

Well hello there! Thanks for stopping in today. Well, we’ve actually got some cool stuff to talk about today! How ’bout that? There’s the whole takeoff of the eJay site (and more news on that), a post from Kev, new multimedia surrounding the Clerks cartoon online, and lots more. So, all in all, you couldn’t have picked a better time to stop by News Askew today.

The weekend movie was “Road Trip”…We couldn’t resist checking it out after reading a lot of positive stuff about it. Well, as a whole, the movie’s a letdown. Watch “American Pie” at home again before seeing this one, especially if you’ve seen the extended trailer which basically gives up every funny joke in the flick. Sure, there’s a few funny moments, but as a whole the entire thing just sorta falls flat and feels awfully forced. Good performances, just not that good of a movie. Of course, it’d be worth sitting through it 100 more times rather than “Battlefield Earth” again. Next week comes the highly anticipated “Mission Impossible II”. Gotta love John Woo. Question is, will it be more impressive than “Gladiator”?

Well it looks like ‘ol Fox Mulder will be back for another (half) season of the X-Files next year, but we’re willing to gather that’ll be just about it. The show’s had a good run but it’s time for something new, that’s for sure. Hopefully the networks can come up with some decent shows since it seems like the really good stuff is starting to show up on HBO before anywhere else. Sure, there’s a few exceptions, but for the most part, not a ton of spectacular TV going on right now.

Alright, well, it’s raining here in Central PA today, so it’s the perfect time to catch up on everything Askew. Next weekend we’ll both be out of town, myself and the usual gang will be heading down to the beaches & bars of Ocean City, MD to kick it old school and teach that town a lesson for Memorial Day, and Chris is gonna be vacationing that same weekend as well. So there’s gonna be a few day dry spell here on the horizon. We’ll remind you again before things close up for the weekend, and will do our best to keep everything current right up ’til then.

Okay, on with the show!

It’s great to see Kevin regularly back in cyberspace again. This update from him gives us his initial amazed thoughts reagarding the prices that the first eJay items are fetching, as well as clues us in on what we’d hoped would come next – Actual film props! Your chance to own a legit one of a kind piece of View Askew history. Hmmm…I wonder what would look good on my game room wall down here to go along with the View Askew posters???

In addition to that, Kev alludes to some chances to catch ABC‘s spots for the Clerks cartoon (yes, they’re actually going to ADVERTISE it!) and we’ve got the full schedule below. Here’s Kevin:

The pics of Kevin & Jennifer’s adorable daughter can be found HERE.

Here’s the programs that you can catch ads for the Clerks cartoon series next week, on ABC. It’s got some great exposure during Millionare…And man oh man, we can hear the Con Air jokes coming in talkbacks already:

Many of you were astute enough to notice that the show was nowhere to be found in next year’s ABC lineup. Even if the show did take off like a freight train, most of you can tell that from Kevin’s opinion, the next appearance of the cartoon gang would be in film format, and not on ABC. Just so ya know…

An unexpected, but WAY WAY cool surprise today was a TON of original multimedia popping up over at the official Clerks Cartoon website. Some of the cool stuff you’ll find: The call waking Dante up from each of the six episodes, the famous cut “Flintstones List” sequence, sound clips, and even full show scenes (accessible through the production sketches page). Surf over and start soaking up that bandwidth, ‘cuz you’re gonna have a ton of stuff to watch, folks. Remember, the show premieres on ABC at 9:30 on Wednesday, May 31st, but this is your first look at a ton of footage. Enjoy!

• Big news today is Entertainment Weekly‘s coverage of Kevin & View Askew in their big 10th Anniversary Issue. The mag’s got a couple pics and a nice bit of text of how he got into filmmaking and “Clerks”. There’s also a funny bit about how he and Mosier trying to buy film reels, and his hopes that Clerks will inspire a new generation of filmmakers as “Slacker” had inspired him. We’ll post the full story as soon as we get the scan and the text (if someone has it before we get to it, feel free to send it along, thanks).

• Finally today, some fun news from the UK: Seems that a product called Kraft DairyLea (processed cheese, which we’re sure would induce excessive drooling out of Homer Simpson) has coincidentally adopted a cute little cow character called “Moobie” as their mascot. Sure, there’s some slight similarities, but we’re sure the Golden Calf could kick his ass.

Have a great weekend, and we’ll see ya next time!

In a surprise move, it was announced today that View Askew has just opened a new internet “wing” of the Stash, that’s selling rare items that you can’t get anywhere else, on an auction-like basis such as eBay. Thus, the site’s name, eJay.

So far, they’ve got the hard to find Mallrats book, rare signed Mallrats posters (Lee & Affleck autographs, anyone?), the German Chasing Amy poster, and a very rare Chasing Amy “Vogue” poster. Lots more items are sure to come, maybe even some props from the flicks. Ya never know. Here’s the word from the official site:

So what are you waiting for? Surf over to eJay and place your bids!

• Wizard World 2000 in Chicago has announced that Kevin Smith is on their guestlist for this year. We’ve yet to confirm this, but the con itself runs August 4th through the 6th. We’re not sure exactly which days Kevin’s expected to be there, just one or all of them, but we’ll see what else we can dig up in the meantime. Those of you in the Chicago area may wanna mark your calendars, though.

• Sounds like things are slowly coming together for the jam-packed A BETTER PLACE DVD that Vincent’s throwing together. The Synapse website recently posted an update on the disc’s progress with this amazing list of features. Check it out:

What does this mean for the disc’s current July 22nd debut? Probably that we won’t see it by then. If this list is correct, it sounds like a lot needs to be done before the disc can be mastered. Still, we’re sure it’ll be worth the wait, it just takes time to put these special editions together. We’ll keep you posted, and we’re sure that Vincent will, too.

• Well, after many of you speculated, the IMDB has now confirmed it: The “undefeated champion of Rome” that Maximus goes up against in the currently playing (and kicking ass) “Gladiator” is none other than actor/stuntman Sven-Ole Thorsen, best known by most of us as LaFours from Mallrats! A nifty connection, indeed. Thanks to all who wrote in about it.
• A new story from inside.com talks about Miramax’s latest TV projects, and mentions the Clerks series quite a bit. Here’s a snippet:

Hey folks! Well, things have once again gotten very quiet, though we at least expect some reviews, comments, and rumblings from the premiere of the Clerks series in a couple of weeks (2 weeks from tomorrow, as a matter of fact). So today, we’ve just got the beginnings of a post from Kevin, and a few VERY minor newsbites (But hey, it didn’t make sense to do just one story).

Problems with the countdowns in java have of course been corrected. We’ll be adding a link to the upcoming events banner hopefully this weekend that will allow those of you that want to see all the dates/events at once that functionality. It should also fix the problems for those of you using browsers that have trouble with java such as WebTV and the “alternate” operating systems. Stay tuned for that.

Also, we’ve added a TON of Elston Gunn’s fantastic interview right into The Summaries. Those of you that read it will recall that he went down pretty much every rumored project EVER in Kevin’s career, and Kevin gave straight answers on everything. So, if you EVER have a question (or see someone else asking) about any flick Kevin is or was rumored to be involved in, the summaries are now an even better place to go.

Alright, here’s what we could throw together for ya! Thanks for stopping in.