My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (76 page)

In essence, we took the
Strike Back
paradigm, plugged in different, lower numbers, and are seeing pretty much the same results. But since
Strike Back
was a pretty profitable endeavor, when all was said and done,
Clerks II
will be even more so (a twenty-million-dollar budget vs. the five-million-dollar budget). Financially, it’ll be a winner for all involved.

But box office is a fleeting, opening weekend concern (which, yes, is easy to say when your box office isn’t big-tittied). What has been the non-financial upside of
Clerks II
?

As per Rotten Tomatoes the flick was pretty well reviewed, holding steady at a sixty-six percent “Fresh” rating. For the first time since
Strike Back
, the
New York Times
gave us a positive shout-out.

I was able to close down the Askewniverse more fittingly than I felt we did with
Strike Back
. It started with
Clerks
and now it ends with
Clerks II
.

Not only did the flick get invited to the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, it got an eight-minute standing ovation. (I know I keep harping on this, but it was one of the ten best moments of my professional career, so let me enjoy it; it’ll never happen again.)

I was able to work side-by-side with lots of friends and family, and added a few new keepers to the mix (Rosario and Trevor) in the process.

We got to document the entire pre-, production, and post experience in the Train Wreck making-of shorts over at
www.clerks2.com
.

I got to make the exact flick I wanted to make, resulting in my fave of the bunch.

Was
Clerks II
worth the effort? Fuck yes. We made a flick that a lot of folks love (myself included) and thanks to our low budget approach, before the year is out, it’ll earn strong profits. So while we can’t boast box office bragging rights this weekend (then again, aside from
Monster House
, what newcomer
can
?), we’re not sitting here with shotguns in our mouths either. And in this wacky business, that’s about the best one can ever hope for, really.

Thanks, all, who checked the flick out already. Thanks to all who may check it out in the future.

FINAL Weekend Box Office Figures (We did better than initially thought) Monday 24 July 2006 @ 5:03 p.m.

According to FINAL weekend box office numbers,
Clerks II
did a little better than the Sunday estimate of $9,625,000 for the weekend. The ACTUAL figure, according to the Weinstein Co. this morning, is $10,061,132.

Still doesn’t move us up the list any (we’re still number six), but we DID hit double digits, and were only a million off from our
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
opening weekend of $11 mil. We spent $15 mil less making
Clerks II
, and we spent way less marketing this movie. Add to that the fact that we were in profit before we opened, thanks to foreign sales, and you have the reason why both Harvey and Bob Weinstein called me this weekend to say: “We’re happy. Now let’s keep moving in the right direction.”

In other news, our exit polls have been strong, and our tracking is still good. We’ll see what the weekday numbers look like, and hopefully, the drop next weekend won’t be too steep.

We officially doubled our budget in the first weekend. That feels good.

Final figures should be up at Box Office Mojo later today.

My New (one day) Job and an invitation to hang out

Tuesday 25 July 2006 @ 2:05 p.m.

Looks like I’ll be sitting in for Roger Ebert next week, as a guest critic on
Ebert and Roeper
. Kind of a cool honor, I feel.

We’ll be checking out
Miami Vice
,
Ant Bully
,
Talladega Nights
,
Barnyard
and maybe (fingers crossed)
World Trade Center
.

We’ll be taping next week, just prior to the Chicago
Wizard
Con. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Also: are you an East Coaster? Ever been to Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash in Red Bank? Heading to Leonardo for the Rolling Roadshow outdoor screening of the original
Clerks
in front of the Quick Stop?

Then drop in on me...

Finke Makes a Stink

Wednesday 26 July 2006 @ 5:57 p.m.

There’s a woman named Nikki Finke who writes for the
LA Weekly
, and she seems to have taken issue with the MySpace credits contest we did for
Clerks II
. “This could very well be the most insulting thing I’ve ever heard,” she writes. “A huge diss, to anyone who’s ever legitimately earned a credit on a film.”

Yes — she’s serious.

Aside from the fact that the Lady Finke’s finger seems to be pretty far from the pulse (this blog entry’s a bit behind the times, considering the contest launched 30 June — nearly a month ago — and was covered by more alert media back then), she’s presupposing an industry outrage and ire that simply doesn’t exist. No guild has said a word about the credits contest. Know why?

Because there’s nothing to be upset about.

What Finke would realize, if she bothered to do her homework (which would require not even a full viewing of the flick, but merely a pop-in during the end credits), is that the MySpace names don’t appear in the credits proper of
Clerks II
. The film’s credits end (with all the proper logos and copyright legalese), the screen goes to black, and then after five to ten seconds, a new crawl (although “crawl” is hardly the term I’d use to describe the speed with which the names zip up the screen) begins.

Why is this an issue for Nikki Finke when nary a guild member nor other film artisan seems to care? It’s so sad. Weinstein Co. finds a fun way to spice up the marketing a bit, and this woman tries to kill-joy the whole endeavor.

In addition, of an earlier promotion the Weinstein Co. did at YouTube for
Lucky Number Slevin
, she also writes: “Yeah, we saw what that promotion did for those movies’ bottom-line: Slevin made a pathetic $22 million, and
Clerks 2
is well on its way to more failure.”

For someone who covers the film biz, I found that statement rather oblivious. Our flick’s budget was five million bucks. We did twice that in the opening weekend. The film’s foreign sales more than covered its negative cost. Our marketing budget was pretty modest — especially for a summer release. Even if, after the box office split the Weinstein Co. will make with the theaters, our theatrical run winds up simply being a wash (meaning all costs are covered), that means everything we made on DVD is pure profit. If
Clerks II
DVD is anything like the DVD on
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
, we’re looking at forty million bucks, easily. Forty million bucks in profit. Where’s the “failure”.

Aside from
Little Miss Sunshine
(which opens this week),
Clerks II
may be the lowest budgeted wide release of the summer. We were modest across the boards, in shooting and opening the flick. We did this because we had a model in the
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
release. That film turned out to be very profitable, so we simply plugged in lower numbers when doing the
Clerks II
budget, to ensure high profitability for the Weinstein Co. Spending seventy-five percent less to make the current flick, spending far less to market the current flick and opening to roughly the same numbers ($11 mil for
Strike Back
, $10 mil for
Clerks II
)? In what world is that a “failure”. It may not be sexy huge like the
Pirates
numbers, but when it comes to the business half of the show business equation, being in the plus column is all that matters (on the show side of the equation? Making the film you want to make).

And since when are the credits sacrosanct anyway? If Finke feels the post-credits addition of ten thousand names is some kind of “huge diss, to anyone who’s ever legitimately earned a credit on a film”, what must she think of my end credits “Thank You” shout-out to God, or to
Jersey Girl
for “taking it so hard in the ass and never once complaining”. When a dog is listed in the credits, is this somehow an affront to the performers in a film with speaking roles? I dedicated
Jersey Girl
to my recently deceased father (a dubious honor, I know) who had nothing whatsoever to do with the making of the picture; should the filmmaking community be livid that such an undeserving cad as my dead Old Man wound up with his name in the credits?

Bottom line? Ms. (or Mrs.) Finke can try to tempest-in-a-douchebag the contest all she wants; it doesn’t change the fact that it was a fun thing to do that all involved seem to enjoy. And if nobody (but Finke) is upset about it, where’s the harm?

Shit — had I known she was gonna react like that, I’d have thrown her name in the credits too, as follows...

Crackpot With Too Much Free Time — Nikki Finke

Editorial Note: When I use the term “Crackpot”, I am in no way, shape or form implying that this old Hollywood warhorse is crazy. I would never say Nikki Finke is crazy. Never.

(
http://gawker.com/news/los-angeles/correction-nikki-finke-is-not-crazy-184254.php
)

The WayBack Machine

Wednesday 2 August 2006 @ 4:57 p.m.

I celebrated my twenty-first birthday unceremoniously by working the two to ten-thirty shift at Quick Stop.

I was single then, having recently severed ties with Kim Loughran, my high school sweetheart. She was home from college for the summer, and I’d spent most of that June trying to get our relationship back on a track I’d felt her tenure at Carnegie Mellon had disrupted. Despite my best efforts to get our on-again/off-again status reassigned to active duty, it had become clear that I’d been reduced in status from love-of-her-life to a mere summertime fling — at which point I’d thrown in the towel.

Who could blame Kim, really, for not seeing a future with me as she once did in eleventh and twelfth grade? She was in her sophomore year in a top-notch college, and I was direction-less and drifting through life back home. It became harder and harder for Kim to see me as husband material after my short-lived college career at the New School for Social Research ended after only a winter semester. And while I’d taken a few for-the-fuck-of-it courses with Bryan Johnson at the local community college, it was clear that I wasn’t going to put said studies to good use (i.e. I was never gonna be a criminologist). As unattractive as I normally was, my complete lack of ambition must’ve made me even less so.

As if a twenty-one year-old with no plan wasn’t sad enough, I was still living at home with my parents — something neither of my elder siblings had done since graduating high school and heading to university years prior. Mom and Dad weren’t kicking me out of the nest, thank God, but they’d been chiding me to find a better job for some time. I knew that the arrival of legal adulthood would only up the ante on their campaign to get me out of the five-buck-an-hour convenience store service industry and into a gig that paid better and might finally deliver me from the realm of the per-hour rate into the promised elysium fields of a grown-up career.

So with no birthday celebration looming, how did I opt to spend my birthday? Behind the register, slinging smokes. My friends stopped by during my shift, but no post-work plans were made. When the steel shutters were closed at the end of the night, it would also signal the close of my first day as a numerical adult.

Around nine at night, my friend and co-worker Vincent Pereira closed up R.S.T. Video for the evening and joined me at Quick Stop, to stock the milk and mop the floors before heading off. We got to talking about movies, as per usual, and I told him about a review I’d read in the Village Voice for a film called
Slacker
that was playing up at the Angelika Film Center, in New York City. This was a film we’d seen a trailer for about a week or so prior, after Vincent and I had read about an Angelika midnight screening of
The Dark Backward
which Judd Nelson and Bill Paxton would be in attendance for and Pig Newtons (a prop food item that featured prominently in the flick) would be distributed at. The
Slacker
review talked about a scene in which Madonna’s pap smear was discussed, and that captured both of our imaginations. Since we two Jersey ‘burb boys had successfully gotten into and out of the city for the
Dark Backward
screening with our virtue intact once before, we decided to tempt fate with a second trip into the city that night, to check out this
Slacker
picture. And so, after closing up Quick Stop at 10:30 p.m., Vincent and I drove from Leonardo, NJ to the Angelika Theater on Houston in New York City to see a little movie from Austin, Texas.

This was the moment that changed my life forever.

Richard Linklater’s
Slacker
, you see, was the film that made me want to be a filmmaker too. As that flick unspooled before the wide eyes of a freshly minted twenty-one year-old version of me, possibility was first introduced into my sphere of influence. This film was at once remarkable and unremarkable, and I viewed it with a mixture of awe and arrogance.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I said to myself, following that thought with, “but if this counts as a movie, then I think I can make a movie too...”

It was during that two-in-the-morning ride home from the Angelika, somewhere between the Holland Tunnel and Exit 14C on the Jersey Turnpike, that I first announced my intentions aloud.

“I think I want to be a filmmaker,” I said to Vincent. “I think I want to write and direct.”

That was fifteen years ago tonight. Since then, I’ve gotten married, had a kid, and made seven movies. And I finally moved out of my parents.

So, after a small poker party to celebrate what an old fart I’ve become, I’ll climb into bed with my wife and fool around a bit. And once she’s fallen asleep, I’ll spend the last two hours of my thirty-sixth birthday in the same way I spent the last few hours of my twenty-first: watching
Slacker
.