Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
MYSTERIO dropped by the Labs yesterday to threaten me with this massive Kevin Smith interview and to pistolwhip a JAY & SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK review out of me. I promise... I'm working my way through my back articles, and the review is one of them that's in the portable computer right now. It will get here pre-ComiCon this weekend. For now, there's enough Jersey goodness to choke even Trish The Dish. Enjoy part one of three, as Mysterio finally sits down with Silent Bob hisself...
The KEVIN SMITH SESSIONS: PART I of III
What’s to follow will hopefully be a three-part series with writer/director Kevin Smith.
Beginning first with getting your questions answered, followed next by a one-on-one interview session where I’ll be talking with Kevin about his early days and previous films, which lead up to the third and final session in discussing the making of the final “ViewAskewniverse” film, ‘JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK’. This will hopefully include touching upon such things ranging from initial story concepts and scripting, budgeting, casting, post-production, acting and directing on-set, editing, the test screening process, working with visual effects to selecting the music and marketing and distribution of the film - the whole enchilada. (Now who wants to transcribe all this? Any takers? Bueller? Bueller?)
It’s a lot of ground to cover, and in cornering Kevin in his office last week to get your questions answered, we discussed what we could do that hasn’t already been done, as you’ll certainly be reading up on slew of interviews with Kevin elsewhere as he’s already literally done hundreds. Most will cover and the same tired territory that most fans already know.
So I suggested that it would be great to get both he and producer, Scott Mosier together, and sit down and discuss the flick between the three of us. Kev seemed to love the idea and thinks the last time he and Scott actually did an interview together was back in the day when they did CLERKS.
So we talked with Scott about it, and he too seemed excited by the idea as well. So hopefully the trio of us can find the time in our schedules and I can bring you all what should promise to be one of the more intensive, behind the scenes interviews that I think you’re likely to read about this film. So fingers crossed, this’ll happen.
But enough of what’s to come, let’s focus now on what’s here – the answers to your questions that some of you submitted back to me in February while the film was being shot. Yeah, it took a while to get them answered, but as promised, here they are.
Beginning with the first installment today, followed by the second tomorrow.
YOU’VE GOT QUESTIONS? KEVIN SMITH HAS ANSWERS… AND MYSTERIO DELIVERS THE GOODS!
TUESDAY - JULY 10, 2001 – 4:47pm
On this very day, I arrived at the offices to find Kevin running behind doing yet another interview. The man’s been flogged to death with press lately, all the while desperately trying to edit the final music into the film. Thank god for producer Scott Mosier who valiantly takes the reigns at times like these to see that things get done.
Fifteen minutes later Kev opens the door to his office, and sees the reporter out. I haven’t seen Kev in about 3-4 weeks, so we’ve been playing a bit of a game of tag lately. He greets me with a “Hey! Would you look at this cat!” and then leads excitedly leads me to the editing room where he shows me the finalized end credits for the film, followed by revealing the 1-sheet art to me as well. All pretty sweet stuff as you can imagine. He then mentions to me that they’re doing the scoring session this week with the film’s composer, Jim Veneble, and urges me to join them because as Mosier puts it, “It’s pretty amazing stuff.” He tells me that it’s a 3-day session involving an 83-piece orchestra one day, followed by a lesser 55-piece set the next two days. Needless to say, I’ll be there, and hopefully be able to toss up a report before heading up to the San Diego Comic-Con on Thursday.
It’s now crunch time, and everyone’s feeling a bit tired and over-worked, but at the same time it’s an exhilarating feeling knowing just how close the film is to getting in theatres. As a matter of fact, the film has just been pushed up from Friday, August 24th to Wednesday the 22nd, opening on about 2,500 screens nationwide. The largest release ever, for a View Askew film to date.
Not much else to tell you, except that we spent a couple of hours going through your questions and there’s some pretty damn surprising stuff covered and talked about within his answers. I tried to stay out of the conversation and allow Kev to just step up to the mic and go. And for anybody who’s ever been to a Q & A session with Kev knows – he goes and goes and goes.
Now yes, the film is discussed within the context of your questions, so there may be some spoiler information contained herein. But it’s more like what’s NOT in the movie then what is. And there’s also some new information and revelations revealed here for the first time, that I’m sure will have some of you fans will be jonsing for the next installment. So, sit back, relax and let’s roll with the new!
“Where do you get most of your ideas for your films from?” – Tom
KEVIN SMITH: I don’t know. I mean CLERKS obviously kind of came from real life. That came from reading a Robert Rodriguez quote where he says, “Make a movie about what you know and with materials you have.” And Robert talked about like, “I had a bus, a turtle, a guitar and a guitar case,” which just all went into EL MARIACHI. So I said “I got a convenience store and a video store, so maybe that’s what it should be about.” MALLRATS was the idea to do a movie like I grew up watching. CHASING AMY came from my relationship with Joey; that was definitely the genesis of that picture. DOGMA, which would have come first, if I thought that I could have handled it, came from growing up Catholic and having tons of thoughts about religion and faith that I was raised in and reading a lot of comic books. And JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK came from everything that’s happened from the last seven years.
If you look at that movie, it pretty much touches on everything that I’ve done cinematically, and not necessarily cinematically for the last seven years. It’s kind of a real wrap up, not just of the movies we’ve made, but GOOD WILL HUNTING gets in there, the internet culture gets in there, there’s a little bit of the seven years of my life all over that movie. Shit, my wife and kid are in it. It’s a real tie-up picture.
“How do you teach yourself to write such structured dialogue? And what writing advice do you have for one to better themselves in that particular area of writing?” – Mr. Elliotto
KS: I mean the best advice is just to write everyday, often and much, even if it’s dog shit. Just write. Some of us can write everyday, even if it’s dog shit, and make a living off of it. That aside, you should just constantly be writing, any chance you get, throw it down there. Ya know, because practice kind of makes perfect. How I got to the dialogue that I eventually wound up writing had a lot to do with Gregory McDonald’s ‘FLETCH’ series of books. If you read those books, they’re very dialogue heavy, there’s very little expository passages, very little prose, its pretty much all dialogue. They read like screenplays to some degree and his dialogue is very snappy. The ‘FLETCH’ series of books and also Hal Hartley’s dialogue was a big influence on me; early Hal Hartley films.
Mysterio: Actually I think at one point you said it best by simply saying, “Write what you want to write, write what you have to write – just write.” I think that pretty much sums it all up.
KS: Absolutely, very true.
“I’ve read that the only reason you actually played Silent Bob in CLERKS was because you had to; necessity meant that you were that character instead of Randal. Are you glad you made that decision?” – James Smythe
KS: First to clear it up, it wasn’t a necessity. I did originally write the role of Randal to play myself, which is why Randal has all the best jokes. But as we got close to production, I realized, or remembered, that I’m not an actor by any stretch of the imagination and that means that I’m horrible at memorizing dialogue let alone… remove the performance question – I’m terrible at memorizing dialogue and Randal had a lot of lines in CLERKS. So I said, “there’s no way I can memorize all this, I’m gonna give this to Jeff (Anderson).
Jeff had come in and auditioned for the Jay part. He auditioned with the Jay part – he didn’t necessarily want to be Jay but he used the script and auditioned as Jay. But I’ve known Jeff in high school - he’s never acted, but he’s really great in his audition. He had a real natural presence going, a natural delivery and demeanor. So I said, “You know what? He should be Randal.” But I at least wanted to be in the movie. Having given up that role I felt that if this was the only movie that I was going to make, I at least wanted to be in it so that in years down the line I could pop in the flick on my VHS copy and see myself in the worst mistake I’ve ever made in my life, the movie that put me into debt.
So I said, “what’s left?” and I looked at the script and Silent Bob was a character I’d written for this friend of mine from high school, Mike to play. And I never told him about it, I figured Mike would look good standing next to Jay because he was kind of a bigger guy. And I said, “Ya know what? What Mike doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” And I took Silent Bob because I said, “I would look good standing next to Jay because Jay’s very thin and I’m not. And Jay is constantly moving and I’ll just stand there smoking the whole movie – because I just got into smoking at that period, and I won’t be saying anything, so I won’t have to act, hence I won’t have to memorize dialogue.
So it wasn’t a necessity to play Silent Bob, it was a choice but it wasn’t a choice along the lines of “this will be one-half of a very popular comedy duo in years to come.” You know, I didn’t think anyone would even notice Jay and Silent Bob. I was curious to see what the reactions to Jay would be like, that was just part of the reason I put him in the movie because I always thought Jay was funny, particularly when he was younger and the “Jay” character is based more on Jason Mewes when he was fourteen/fifteen. It’s kind of a romanticized version of him. But I said, “I’d really want to see if people find them funny.” But you know they’re not a big part of the movie and I didn’t intend at that point to be like, “alright they’ll show up in every movie I do.” So when I was done with CLERKS, I liked Jay’s stuff so much, that even though he’s not an actor, he came off pretty well, and he’s my friend and I wanted to keep using him, so I kept bringing him back and bringing him back. So by virtue of the fact that I kept bringing him back, I could not go back myself as Silent Bob. It would’ve seemed weird. So I kept coming back as well. And the weird progression of the movies led us up to the flick where we actually take the leap. And there are many times making this movie, where him and I would just chuckle to ourselves because we are the stars of the movie – you know, the 20 million dollar movie.
Mysterio: In fact, you’re still chuckling.
KS: Yeah! It’s just so weird. It’s like a dude whose never had any interest in acting and a dude who is not aesthetically pleasing in the least – does not look like a movie star and doesn’t really say anything, just bugs his eyes out the whole movie. Like what a great country! So do I regret it? No. Am I happy that I did it? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean I get to have a lightsaber fight ya know, in a movie. That’s pretty sweet.
Mysterio: Yeah it doesn’t get much better than that does it?
KS: No, no. It’s too sweet.
“I was watching Marx Brothers films the other day and noticed striking similarities between ‘Harpo Marx’ and ‘Silent Bob’.”
KS: Yeah, yeah. They pull shit out of their jacket.
“So I was wondering if ‘Silent Bob’ has shades of ‘Harpo Marx’ in him?” – Welch Canavan
KS: Absolutely. The jacket, the pulling things out of a jacket was a real nod to Harpo Marx. And also Harpo Marx never says anything; he’s almost the mute in the bunch. But yeah, it was only in MALLRATS that kind of started happening. I had the coat and there was an opportunity to do some gags, pulling stuff out from the coat, so yeah, it was definitely a nod to that.
“Where do you base your character of Silent Bob from?” – Andrew Waibel
KS: It’s not really based on anyone, but like my performance of Silent Bob from MALLRATS onwards, is very much based on (John) Belushi’s “Bluto” in ANIMAL HOUSE. In CLERKS, it’s very much a non-performance, like I just pretty much stand there. I don’t even give him a sidelong glance, really. I barely look at Jay and when I do I’m not making goofy faces and whatnot.
Mysterio: And in CLERKS, as opposed to the following films, it seems that the characters of ‘Jay and Silent Bob’ also seemed to have a harder edge to them.
KS: I think it’s a harder edge because I’m not speaking or reacting. And he’s not playing off me as much. I mean he’ll say my name and whatnot, but he’s not really playing off me or to me, or anything like that. As when you get to MALLRATS, it just felt like, well we’re going play second bananas in a more traditional, comedic setting and the characters should be a bit more arched. And that’s where I started reacting to the things he said, reacting to other people and started acting with a bit more input, but like the character more toward “Bluto”. Then every movie following, with the exception of CHASING AMY, you start to see it really come true. So that’s what I was going for. I mean you look at Silent Bob hopefully you think of “Bluto”.
Mysterio: But actually more folks seem to compare ‘Jay and Silent Bob’ to that of C-3PO and R2-D2 from the STAR WARS films.
KS: You know most people seem to draw the R2-D2/C-3PO correlation but like, what? I’m going to base my performance on R2-D2 - a series of beeps and whistles? I mean yes, I may be kind of be short and dumpy compared to Jay’s tall and always chattering C-3PO, but that’s about where the comparison ends. But the performance, if you can call it that, is more based on Belushi’s “Bluto”.
“How come ‘Silent Bob’ is always so… silent?” – Russell & Kathy
KS: Um, I don’t know. I mean if you were hanging out with Jay most of the time, you can’t get a word in edgewise, so there’s just no point. I always like to think of it, if I ever think of it, in the beginning maybe Bob talked, but after hanging out with Jay for as long as he did and Jay just never stops talking, he’s just a motor mouth, Silent Bob couldn’t get a word in edgewise. He just eventually gave up.
“You know Dante Hicks is 37 with Veronica. What number is Willam Black and are there different numbers for each Willam Black played by both Scott Mosier (in CLERKS) and Ethan Suplee (in MALLRATS)?” – SupernekkidBob
KS: I don’t know. I mean we never did get to resolve the whole “Willam of two worlds” theories, so I don’t know if Willam (Ethan) and Willam (Scott) are the same character or not. That being said, what number would they be? I would probably place the Willam from CLERKS in the late twenties, where at maybe at worst thirty. So it seemed like there was some time, which she referred to it as happening a little while ago.
“What is the reason for the different ‘Willams’ in CLERKS and MALLRATS?” – Lewis Bazley
KS: Originally Scott (Mosier), who played Willam in CLERKS, was going to play him in MALLRATS but then Ethan Suplee came in and wanted to audition only for that role. He didn’t want to audition for anything else. He was just like, “I want to play that guy.” And he auditioned, and he was really very funny and then Mosier was there and I said, “So what do you think? Since this is your role.” And he was just like, “He’s good. Give it to him, I’ll do something else.” So we wound up going with Ethan.
“Since Ethan Suplee was not going to be able to make the filming (of JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK), is it possible for you to explain how you were going to script both he and Mosier as Willam Black?”- Name withheld
KS: They were initially supposed to come out of the theatre together. Now at the end of the movie, Willam is standing there, as Dante and Randal come out of the theatre, looking up at the (ceiling) lights and saying, “That’s beautiful man.” Originally Willam and Willam were going to come out of the theatre together and they had a few lines back and forth and that was it. No biggie. We toyed with the notion of like, “They come out, say their lines to each other back and forth, and look at each other, then fuckin’ explode.” Because you know your doppleganger can’t exist in the same space and time. We just never even had the opportunity to do it because Ethan couldn’t make it. Ethan was busy on EVOLUTION.
“How are the pre-release ‘BLUNTMAN & CRONIC’ comics tying into the flick, and to what extent will you have a hand in scripting the books that come out after the films are wrapped up?”- Name withheld
KS: The comic book, which is now a graphic novel, it supposed to be the three issues of the comic that Holden and Banky did. How it ties into the movie is that the movie, at the end of our movie, the “Bluntman and Cronic” movie, is based on the comic book. So the scene with Cock-Knocker comes right out of the last “issue” of that book. In terms of who’ll be writing the books after the movie comes out, nobody’s gonna write those books but me. I would never hand over the View Askew characters to anybody else.
Mysterio: And when can we expect to see those books hit shelves Kevin?
KS: “Bluntman and Cronic” comes out first week in August I think or second week in August – just in time for the movie. And then the books that I’d like to do beyond that are still the “Bartleby and Loki” 1-shot I’d like to do. And then it would be nice if I could kind of get a schedule down and so a monthly “Askewniverse”, like “Tales Gone Askew” book where it just focuses on different characters from the movies. Like we can do “The Julie Dwyer” book, not necessarily her dying in the pool but just a story about a character you’ve never seen. You do all “Steve-Dave and Walt” book or a fat “Jay and Bob” book and then mix it up and do like a backstory of Missy, Sissy, Chrissy and Justice, the girl gang in this movie.
Mysterio: So you literally could continue and keeping going with it…
KS: Exactly. And you won’t be doing it in the movies, but you can keep going, telling story after story.
“Why wasn’t Bryan Johnson (aka, ‘Steve-Dave’) in CLERKS?” – Sandy
KS: That’s a very good question! Did Bryan Johnson submit that question?
Mysterio: Not unless he’s going the dude magnet handle of “Sandy”.
KS: Bryan Johnson wasn’t in CLERKS because Bryan and I had a large falling out earlier that year over a girl that I had dated, rather I had one with, I didn’t really date, that he had later went on to date. So we had a falling out over a girl. He got into… it’s a very weird, long story. I was supposed to work on a Sunday morning (at the Quick Stop), but I had to go to a family function so I asked Bryan to cover for me and Bryan said, “I’m supposed to go on a picnic with this girl Laura and I need to get out of here at 1:00.” And I said, “I will absolutely be back at 1:00.” As it turns out, I didn’t get back ‘til 2:00. When I got to the store, there’s a sign on the door that says, “Store closed due to bubonic plague.” So I got inside, opened the store and took the sign down. I was in the store five minutes, and a Middletown cop showed up and looked around the store and was looking at me very oddly and he was just like, “What’s going on here?” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said somebody called in to report that we hung a sign saying that the store is diseased or something. And I said, “Oh, that was my friend. He was just playing a joke.” And he said, “Well that’s not really fucking funny.” And he left.
I called Johnson and was like, “What the fuck did you do that for? Now I got the cops coming down here and shit and you know they’re gonna tell our boss Topper.” I said, “You know they’re gonna tell him and we’re going to get in a ton of trouble!” And he was like, “Ah, I was just foolin’ around man. But you should’ve been there at 1:00.” And I said, “I was going to try man, why didn’t you just wait? I was here like half an hour after 1:00 or something.” I didn’t get there until 1:30. And we were getting up in each other grill over the phone about it. And then we hung up, a little pissed off, and then he was let go. Quick Stop let him go. Mr. Topper said, “That’s it. He’s fired.” The one thing they do is protect their business at Quick Stop.
So I was kind of pissed at the whole thing because I thought it was kind of stupid and didn’t want him to get fired, because I like working with him, over something dumb like hanging a note in the window. It just kind of blew up and we just, like I’d say “I’m not gonna call him until he calls me.” And he’d say the same thing I guess, and almost a year went by and I didn’t speak to him. And in the course of that year, we made CLERKS. It was right after we finished CLERKS that I finally started talking to him again when we were editing the movie and whatnot. So up until to that point I hadn’t really spoken to him that whole year that we were making the movie.
“What got you interested in hockey? Do you play the game and if so, which hockey players, if any, have influenced your love for the game?” – Cris Schultz
KS: Walter Flanangan got me into hockey. Walt Flanangan, of ‘Walt Flanangan’s Dog’ fame. When I made friends with Walter, it was in late ’88, early ’89. It was after I’d gotten out of high school and I’d been dating this girl for most of high school and we broke up. And then the friend that I had in high school, I didn’t really spend much time with anymore because I’d been spending all my time with the girl and also they were also into partying and going to keggers and I wasn’t really into drinking and all. So when I broke up with the girl, suddenly I was at ground zero with no friends.
Walter was a guy who I worked with at the recreation center in Highlands. It was a yearlong latchkey kid program where kids from school would go to the rec center and then at 6:00 their parents, when they get off work, come pick them up.
I was hired for a year (program was a year long) and worked beside him for eight months and we’d never spoke. Just never spoke. And then about eight months in somehow we struck up a conversation, I think about comics because Walter loves his comics and I saw him with a bag of comics one day, and I hadn’t read comics since I was a kid. So I said, “Do you read a lot of comics?” And it just kind of started a very long discussion and Walter gave me a copy of ‘DARK KNIGHT RETURNS’ and that got me back into comics and then I started hanging out with Walter fairly regularly. So Walter was my first, kind of real friend after high school. And he had gone to the same high school as me he was just in two grades above me.
So I started hanging out with Walter, and a lot of the things you see in the movies are very influenced by my friendship with Walter – comics, hockey. Walter introduced me to hockey. He’s is, and still is to this day, a New Jersey Devils fan. We’d go to games, and then he actually got me into playing hockey, street hockey. So the stuff like on the roof of Quick Stop, well we never played on the roof of Quick Stop but we’d always play down at the tennis courts and at this enclosed hockey rink that was a few towns away. But all that stuff is very Walter influenced. Without Walter there’s no comics, there’s no hockey - I don’t follow professional hockey, Walter does religiously.
Like I had season tickets to the Devil’s last year but I didn’t go because we were out here shooting the movie, but he got to use my tickets more often than not. My passion for hockey is only because of Walter and my passion for it kind of waned when we stopped playing. Because we played pretty hardcore for like four years, outside, you know, all the time. Never played ice because ice is too expensive to play and requires more expensive equipment than shoe hockey. When CLERKS took off, the games got less and less because we we’re traveling the festival circuit and then after CLERKS, before MALLRATS came out, I came home and we got people together again and I would get this indoor roller rink in Eaton town for a night and we would all play there. Walter busted up his leg at one point so he can’t really skate anymore. So it was kind of heartbreaking.
Mysterio: So then how come we’ve never seen Silent Bob on skates?
KS: Because I was a goalie so I was never really on skates. Walter was an ace roller-blader, and Bryan Johnson too. And Mewes is a fantastic roller-blader. I guess that’s never been shown in the movies either, but he’s really excellent in roller-blading and really great at ice too.
Mysterio: So how are you at being a goalie?
KS: I was a really good goalie. As long as I didn’t have to wear roller blades I was great, but on roller blades I sucked. I just couldn’t maintain balance, and to be a goalie, and your always moving and whatnot on those blades, back and forth. On the street I just played in my sneakers, everyone else was in roller blades, two goalies in sneakers.
“What are the many aspects that connect the New Jersey Quadrilogy?” – Aaron Fisher
KS: “The New Jersey Chronicles?” What are the aspects?
Mysterio: Yeah, I think that’s what’s he’s referring to.
KS: There’s the obvious stuff. Like there’s usually hockey references, JAWS references, STAR WARS references, dick and fart jokes. Primarily dick jokes, there’s not a lot of fart jokes in the movie. I think there’s two in this movie.
Mysterio: And one big one with Jay in the beginning.
KS: Yeah, yeah. The less obvious, in which isn’t to say it’s hidden, but they’re relationship pictures - all of them. You know CLERKS is about the relationships between guys. MALLRATS is more about the relationships between men and women. CHASING AMY is about that bizarre relationship between two best friends and a girl. DOGMA is about the relationship between man and God. They’re kind of unseen relationship. And JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK is about the relationship of two idiots; you know, two innocents or corrupt innocents who are kind profane innocents in a world that doesn’t seem to quite understand them and also about the relationship between the audience and Hollywood. If you want to go for something deep on JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK, don’t bring your “hip boots” ‘cause there’s not much depth in there, but if you want to look deep for it and try and write a paper on it, it is kind of about the relationship between filmmaker and studio, between audience and studio, between audience and film. You know, because it’s about how we relate to movies. I mean the movie is kind of a big valentine to movies, but really it’s more of a big valentine to the people that supported our movies.
“Will Randal be doing his famous “Wrangler” dance in the new film?” – Jason
KS: No, you know he didn’t. I wish we had thought of that. Where was that question when I needed it.
Mysterio: Didn’t you have a bit of a problem with using “The Wrangler” dance before?
KS: We called it “The Wrangler” but it’s never called that in the movie. In the movie we had to dub Brian O’Halloran. Brian O’Halloran initially sang the “The Wrangler” jingle when we shot the movie, which was: “Here comes Wrangler… He’s one tough customer… He knows what he likes when he sees it… Ohhh, Wrangler.” So it was the only ADR (looping) on CLERKS we did. That was the only company that we couldn’t reference to. You would imagine Pringles would’ve said, “No, you can’t show a man with his hand caught in a can of Pringles.” They didn’t care. Wrangler said, “We don’t want our jingle showing up in your movie.” Which is very weird because I thought “You guys could certainly use the advertising, like who’s wearing Wranglers anymore?” But they didn’t let us do it, so we had to loop what Brian’s saying and thankfully his face is pointed the other direction. So instead he’s saying, “Here’s comes Randal… he’s a berserker…” I mean we still would call it “The Wrangler”, we still do when we refer to it; it’s just very seldom. But, no we didn’t do it in the movie. I wish I thought of that in advance. I wish that question had been asked before we shot the movie because I would’ve worked it in somewhere.
Mysterio: Ummm… My bad.
KS: What?
Mysterio: I actually got these questions in February and had I had more time, would’ve nailed you with them earlier during the shoot.
KS: Did you?
Mysterio: Yeah, but not for nothing, at least you got the Jason Lee’s Reynolds reference in there, which was one of the first things I told you was missing after I read the script.
KS: Yeah, we did get the Reynolds reference in there.
“Will there be an animated CLERKS movie?” – Bluntman Biggs
KS: Uh-huh. There will. Harvey Weinstein asked us if we wanted to do a CLERKS cartoon theatrical feature, to which I said, “Wait a second. Don’t you remember the cartoon that got shit canned off television?” And he said, “Yeah, but we can make it inexpensively. We can do it for seven/eight million bucks. And probably make our money back and turn a little profit. Like if we went theatrical – you’ve got enough of a fan base that they would probably go out and see it if you made one.”
Mysterio: Like with ‘SOUTH PARK’.
KS: Yeah. Like with ‘South Park’. “And you could curse in it, and you could put in all sorts of guest voices and shit.” So I said, “If you’re willing to put up the cash, absolutely, I’d love to.” So there was an initial outline for the movie that I turned in that they loved, which wound up having a lot of the stuff cribbed from it for ‘JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK’, because I wrote the outline for the cartoon movie before I even wrote ‘JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK’. So I cribbed some of things from the outline and used it; like the lightsaber fight was initially in the cartoon movie and then we wound up doing it in the feature. So there’s a bit of refiguring to do with the outline, with me and Dave Mandel, I guess are going to start writing that any minute now. And it’s pretty much the story of… nah, I’m not gonna say.
But he’ll be saying more, much more, in tomorrow’s installment as he reveals more about what happened with Holden and Alyssa post ‘AMY’, and are Jay and Rick Derris in fact cousins? Was he and still today, considered a hometown hero? And just how does he REALLY feel about “Mallrats”, “Magnolia” and fellow director, PT Anderson.
