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KEVIN SMITH TELLS IT LIKE IT F***ING IS by Tom McCurrie
Those who don't like foul language, stop reading. Those who don't like raunchy sex jokes, stop reading. But most especially, those who don't like asterisks, stop reading, since I've used a mess of ?em to cover all the foul language and raunchy sex jokes in Kevin Smith's Q & A at the latest edition of the Writers on Writing series, sponsored by the Writers Guild Foundation. But for those who like all of the above, get ready for a good time, since the writer-director of "Clerks" and "Chasing Amy" has a lot to say about writing, Hollywood and his ex-girlfriend's mother that is as provocative as it is hilarious.
And I quote: "Kevin Smith will never be a famous writer because he lacks drive. But I wish him well anyway." This was in a letter written to Smith by his ex-girlfriend's mother, a woman who, according to Smith, was "very involved in our relationship". Good ol' Mom also said, "If I'm wrong, find me and I'll eat this [letter]." Smith stuck the letter in a frame and put it on his desk as a motivator. And after he achieved big-time success with "Clerks" (1994), Mom sent him an E-mail: "I'm glad you didn't find me and make me eat it." Smith's response? "I was like, I think your daughter ate enough."
Now Jersey native Smith was writing long before "Clerks", knocking off "Saturday Night Live"-style sketches for his high-school talent show. And as Smith explains, "Later on in life, I wanted to write for SNL very badly. That was my big goal." His plan was to "go to 30 Rock [Rockefeller Center] where they shot the show and sit downstairs in the lobby waiting to be discovered". He'd just sit and sit and sit "until like f***ing Lorne Michaels walks past and goes ?the fat kid sobbing...I think he's got a good head for sketches'". Smith admits this "was not a very thought-out plan" and led absolutely nowhere except back to Jersey working at a convenience store.
While at the store, Smith bonded with a film buff co-worker and got a taste for seeing arthouse flicks at venues like Manhattan's Angelika Theatre. One of these flicks was Richard Linklater's "Slacker" (1991). This movie was a revelation to Smith, generating a mixture of "awe and arrogance". Awe because the movie "was nothing [he] had ever seen before", with its one-protagonist-leading-to-another-structure. And arrogance because after watching an audience literally slap their knees with laughter, Smith figured, "J***s C***st, if they think this is funny, I could make a funny film. I could write funnier than this." From that moment on, Smith had one thought: "I wanna write and direct a flick."
Smith's desire to be a filmmaker was also motivated by a desire to cheese off another girlfriend. A major in literary criticism, she told him "anything written can be criticized. It can be taken apart, analyzed and criticized. Everything has meaning. And anything that has meaning can be criticized." Smith shot back, "F**k you, I'm gonna write a movie that has no meaning whatsoever," something that's "stream-of-consciousness, free association and no real plot, s**t happens and that's the end of it". This led to Smith's breakthrough combination of no-budget style and hilariously raunchy dialogue, the convenience store opus "Clerks". (Of course, Smith admits his movie was criticized in film reviews anyway, so his girlfriend got the last laugh.)
Surprisingly, Smith doesn't tape record real conversations to get his spot-on dialogue, relying on his imagination instead. To Smith, "The writer always writes the idealized world, the way they would like to hear things." So "the conversations I wish I heard in real life are the conversations that I kind of throw into [scripts]". This is especially true of Smith's long monologues, which to him are how "a perfect conversation works. Like you trade back and forth, and then one guy goes on for ten minutes, presumably so the other guy can go off and get a smoke or something like that." This has nothing to do with real life, where Smith's conversations with friends are "very monosyllabic" and filled with "grunts" instead of words. An example: "?What'd you do last night?' ?Got laid. What'd you do?' ?Me, too.' ?Wanna go to the mall?' ?Alright.'" (Speaking as a fellow Jersey native, Smith couldn't be more dead-on!)
Thematically, Smith gravitates towards male-male relationships like the one seen in "Chasing Amy": "To me, the male relationships, man on man relationships that don't involve deep d**k are always quite interesting, because that's what I've been involved in most of my life." Smith continues: "The dichotomy between guys I always thought was really interesting, you know, and like how it is one step short of a marriage. You know, you're really like one bottle of booze away from a c**k in the mouth most times...but guys never talk about it." So Smith does it for them.
Smith is more demure when he describes his writing process as "kind of like sculpture", with the first draft "usually very chunky, very thick". "Clerks" was originally 135 Pages before being trimmed to 93. And Smith's adaptation of the yet-to-be-filmed "Fletch Won" was 178 Pages, even though the book was only 212 Pages long! Smith: "I just want to get everything in there and then...whittle it down. Generally, that's what I do. I write very large first drafts, and then I just kind of take it down, take it down, take it down, kind of shave it to roughly two hours." To squeeze more pages into his scripts, Smith says he used to "shrink [the Microsoft Word] document down to 80 percent so that [he] could fit more content on the page. Because otherwise it looked like a children's book to [him], like three letters per page." Unfortunately, with the one-page-per-minute-of-screen-time equation, "[his] version of a 120 Page script was really [a] 140, 145 Page script, so they could never get an accurate page count. So that draft of ?Fletch Won' at 178 Pages was really upwards of 200 Pages. So [Smith tends] to write very, very large and it's much longer than it appears to even be on the page."
When it comes to revision time, Smith says he hands the script off to his producer/editor Scott Mosier, who gives him suggestions (i.e., don't repeat the same joke, set a scene somewhere more visually appealing). Smith explains, "Then I go back and chop s**t out, and then anything that needs to be bridged, I bridge, but...essentially I only write the script once, and then it just gets whittled down." It's "like stream of consciousness, dump it all out there the first time, this is the movie, and somewhere here we'll carve it out and find it". (And Smith repeats the process of whittling when he makes his movies, editing them down from a rough cut.) Smith: "So really my revision process is more just chopping s**t out of the script than it is rewriting."
Smith doesn't care for outlines, either. "I just bang it out; I'm no good at the outline. I tried writing the outline a few times, twice, once when I was working on the ill-fated ?Superman' movie, and once recently when I was working on ?Green Hornet'." For the latter, Miramax wanted a two-page outline, but when Smith started writing it, "suddenly it became dialogue, and suddenly it became scenes, and suddenly [he] had twenty pages", so he had to abandon it. Smith thinks outlines are useless: "[They're] a waste of time, because I don't think I can communicate what I want to accomplish in two pages or even ten pages unless I got a lot of dialogue going and scenes and then I just get to this point where I'm like, f**k it, just do the script."
But not all of Smith's writing flows so easily, especially when it comes to writing comic-book movies: "I'm in the middle of trying to write ?Green Hornet' and it's so daunting." This is a surprise since Smith is a well-known comic-book writer in his own right. But when Smith writes his comic books, he's writing for a pretty small audience, about 100,000 readers at most. And because comic books are relatively cheap to produce (as opposed to big-budget comic-book movies), he doesn't have to fret about changing his quirky vision to make his money back. Smith: "So you don't have to worry about getting notes like, this has to be more appealing to the mainstream, this has to crossover and s**t like that. So it's easy to write a comic book, especially if you're a comic-book fan. Because you're kind of right there. The next logical progression from reading [comic] books your whole life is like, well I can write one of these stories."
On the other hand, "writing a comic-book movie is constantly second-guessing yourself". It all comes down to finances. Even if the entire comic-book audience went to see your movie, 100,000 times $10 bucks is a million dollars, and "that ain't a great opening weekend". This is especially true if the flick costs $100 million. Smith: "So you suddenly have to make the title crossover, and more appealing to far more than just the comic-book audience I'm used to writing for." And it's very difficult to hook a mainstream audience while still pleasing the original comic's fans. Smith: "At least with ?Green Hornet', you're hard pressed to find people who even know what the Green Hornet is, or remember it. There's not a lot of mythology you're kind of dealing with, so you don't have to worry about an audience. You have to worry about finding a f***ing audience let alone appeasing the audience that exists."
Though Smith writes-for-hire, he'd rather not direct unless he gets to pen the script as well. He was offered the chance to direct "Good Will Hunting" but turned it down because he didn't write the script, and he wasn't sure his vision would mesh with the writers'. Smith: "Essentially, I would prefer to write [the movie] all the time. I understand that not every writer wants to be a director, but for me, it makes no sense why most writers don't direct their [own scripts], unless you're writing s**t that's really expensive." Smith goes on: "When you're writing character stuff, why not direct it? Cause you can see how it's supposed to play in your head. As you're writing it the movie is playing out in your mind, so you might as well direct it."
This leads to Smith's final advice to all you writers out there: "Don't write what everyone says you should write, write what you want to write. Particularly if you're going to direct it. My best advice is always like, look, don't write s**t set in space [and try to] direct it yourself. Because, chances are, if it's set in space, then somebody else has to direct it. Write something that you can direct [i.e., low-budget], because now with digital video it's even easier to shoot a movie." So as Kevin Smith would say, go out and make your f***ing flick!
Responses, comments and general two-cents worth can be E-mailed to gillis662000@yahoo.com.
(Note: For all those who missed my past reviews/articles, they're now archived on Hollywoodlitsales.com. Just click the link on the main page and it'll take you to the Inner Sanctum. Love them or Hate them at your leisure!)
A graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television, Tom McCurrie has worked as a development executive and a story analyst. He is currently a screenwriter living in Los Angeles.
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