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When Kevin Smith
throws a party at Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, his comic book
shop in Red Bank, it’s not the intimate affair you might expect. For
last fall’s Stash Bash 2, the creator of cult classics like
Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Dogma invited fans to submit
an essay explaining why they deserved an invitation. More than
10,000 people from around the world responded. The host winnowed the
guest list for the weekend-long celebration to 600. “It’s hard to
say what the criterion is,” Smith says. “You just feel it when you
read it.” No matter what the qualifications were, the result was a
weekend of photo opportunities, bowling, and chatting with Smith and
some of his co-stars. Guests also got to see trailers for Smith’s
recently released Jersey Girl long before they were available to the
public.
Although he moved to
Los Angeles with his wife, Jennifer, and their 4-year-old daughter
two years ago, the 33-year-old director, screenwriter, and longtime
Highlands resident maintains an office in Red Bank along with the
Stash. And he returns to the Garden State to make movies, including
Jersey Girl, which stars Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, and
Liv Tyler. “I work in New Jersey because it’s a place I know very
well,” says Smith. “I have spent most of my life in New Jersey, so
it makes sense to film there. I love New Jersey. As a kid, it was my
world, and in some ways it still is my barometer. I judge other
places by New Jersey.”
Smith is hoping that the new movie, his sixth, doesn’t follow in the
footsteps of another recent flick with the same star power, 2003’s
Gigli, directed by Martin Brest. “I thought that its
[rejection] was due to a backlash against Ben and Jennifer, and
that’s unfortunate,” Smith says. “Gigli took the bullet. If
we have come up with a movie which is better than Gigli,
we’ll look like geniuses.”
Jersey Girl is described as a touching, amusing film.
“It’s a wonderful
movie,” says George Carlin, who plays Affleck’s father. “In
Hollywood I’m usually asked to play the ex-hippie college professor
who is liberal with a conservative daughter. How unimaginative.
Fortunately, Kevin does what he wants to do, and he gave me this
great opportunity to play Ben’s dad.” Affleck, who has performed in
five Smith films, plays a slick music promoter who falls for and
briefly marries Lopez. Although the real-life couple’s on-again,
off-again romance has finally come to an end, “watching Ben and
Jennifer play two people who fall in love, when they were at the
beginning of their relationship, was just amazing,” says Smith.
“Their chemistry translates insanely on the screen. You can see a
lot of love there.”
You can also see the love New Jersey has for Smith. The town of
Pauls- boro, where much of the film was shot, renamed one of its
streets Kevin Smith Way. “I’m incredibly honored,” Smith says. “It’s
amazing that someone would name a street after me just because I
make movies.”
While coming of age in Highlands, Smith, the youngest of three
children, never dreamed of becoming a filmmaker. His father, Donald,
who died in 2003, was a postal worker, and his mother, Grace, was a
homemaker. Growing up, Smith consumed a steady diet of sitcoms.
“With Jersey weather, you only get three or four good months of
weather a year, so I bowed to the great god of television,” Smith
says. In 1982, Highlands was cable-ready, and he became a hardcore
fan of The Movie Channel.
As a senior at Henry Hudson Regional High School, Smith was the
official videographer for the basketball team. “The cool thing was
that I could go to the away games and shoot, but at that point in my
life I wasn’t really interested in filmmaking,” he says. Even after
graduating in 1988, Smith still hadn’t figured on a film career. But
on his 21st birthday, he had an epiphany: “I went to see Richard
Linklater’s Slackers, and people were cracking up over it,”
he recalls. “I thought, If this counts as a movie, I can make a
movie.”
Smith shot Clerks at the convenience store in Leonardo
where he toiled daily after graduation. When his shift ended after
the store closed each night at 10:30, his real work would begin. “I
would focus on the movie until six in the morning when the place
opened,” says Smith. Now there’s a little plaque in the store, and,
he says, “I’m told that at least five people a day come in and take
a picture.”
His next project, Fletch Won, an adaptation of the story by
Gregory McDonald that spawned two films in the 1980s starring Chevy
Chase, will be shot in Los Angeles. But Smith projects that his
subsequent feature, Ranger Danger, will come to life in the Garden
State. After all, no matter where he lives, he’s a Jersey boy at
heart.
Ed Condran lives in Jenkintown, Pa.
online source: http://www.njmonthly.com/issues/Apr04/skewed.html |
