Clerks III and the Modesty of Kevin Smith

Welcome back to a self-made American artist.

Earlier this week, Lionsgate released a short trailer for Clerks III, the third movie in self-made franchise started in 1994. Clerks defined Kevin Smith’s “View Askewniverse” of modestly budgeted slacker comedies with great casts, whacky premises and unfiltered humor. In Clerks, famously financed by Smith’s credit card, we got the story of two young men who worked in a convenience store and neighboring video store dealing with the “buncha savages” who comprised their Red Bank, New Jersey customers.

From there, the story expanded into the studio financed Mall Rats and then the independent 1997’s Chasing Amy and two years later, Dogma. Along the way, Smith bounced into and out of big studio projects. Rumored Smith-directed superhero movies never materialized, though Smith has directed episodes of D.C. superhero series like The Flash. Smith’s long friendship with comic icon Stan Lee, who appeared in many View Askew productions, paid off with an acknowledgement of Smith in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which means Smith exists alongside Black Widow, Thor and Iron Man. Not bad for a kid from New Jersey who financed his own first film with consumer credit.

Back in the 90s, the success of Clerks propelled Smith into the big leagues of indie filmmakers. He’s alongside Richard Linklater among the slackers in the classic survey of 80s and 90s independent cinema, Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes

Distribution to movie theaters was always the holy grail for an independent film director or producer. You bypass the studios for production cash but then find a distributor who still shows up for sales and marketing. The dream was to show up at a film festival like Sundance and to be discovered and then sold to the rest of the country, if not the world. But this arrangement has broken down, to the detriment of independent film.

Streaming emerged as a new competitor for both the video store and the physical cinema, particularly art house movie theaters. While this would theoretically make more films from outside of Hollywood available to more viewers, it also changes the way people find movies to watch by changing the methods of curation. Every college town and big city had that special video store, like Kim’s in New York, staffed by film nerds with opinions, agendas and, most importantly, an interest in getting you to watch, like and cheer for the movies they watch, like and cheer for. Programmers at art houses chose what to show based on a mix of what they think people would want and what they think people should want.

In streaming, these decisions are made by algorithms that don’t have any sort of creative agenda behind them. The algorithm tries to figure out how to serve you what you already want and then how to serve you more of that. It does not want to serve you a difficult movie without a studio behind it that might drive you away from your screen while you process what you saw.

Netflix might well partner with Spike Lee for Da 5 Bloods, a fascinating re-imagining of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but that’s the Spike Lee of the 2020s – a known quantity and award winner, not the Spike Lee of the 1980s – an unknown filmmaker with a social agenda and a touch of Bertolt Brecht in his approach. Netflix is not taking the kinds of chances that distributors were back in the halcyon Sundance years.

Smith reacted to this evolution of the business and in a creative and interesting way. He got into reality television, through his comic book shop in Red Bank, was early into podcasting and has written some entertaining books. He started making movies outside of the ViewAskewniverse, like the interesting but disturbing Red State, the weird and loopy Yoga Hosers and some body horror that’s just not my cuppa. In each case, he went the route of direct distribution and limited theatrical releases often tied to live appearances and to his podcast network. Rather than shoot for massive distribution, Smith went for bespoke events and happenings. By keeping his budgets low, he was able to find artistic freedom.

This is the path forged by Woody Allen since the 1970s. If you want to make quirky movies that defy convention, it helps to finance them from either personal coffers or through a network of investors from outside of the entertainment industry who have put up reasonable sums based on their net worth (i.e., have only invested what they can afford to lose). If you’re making a Marvel movie where hundreds of millions owned by stockholders will be invested with the goal of returning billions, of course the director will answer to a committee. Allen’s movie, to film this year, may be his last. It’s reportedly a suspense story, along the lines of Match Point and will have a French cast, acting in French. The Middlebrow assumes the film will have English subtitles, much like the Italian scene in Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask). Hopefully, Europe still has a robust enough cinema and human-curation culture to support what might be the auteur’s final film.

The Middlebrow was surprised to see such a mixed reaction to Smith’s trailer release on social media. Some culture writers proclaimed themselves too cool for Smith movies, which were derided as amateur or bad. It doesn’t shock that “snowballing” gags and references like “ass to mouth,” don’t play as well in these sensitive times, but the negative reactions don’t seem entirely about crass dialogue. It might be that the modern cultural consumer, served the easy stuff by algo, no longer have a taste for deviance.

Fortunately, there have been many more positive reactions, particularly from artists inspired to create their own works by Smith’s example. The premise of Clerks III is that Randall, the former video store clerk, survives a heart attack and is inspired to stop talking about movies and to make his own (which turns out to be a version of the original Clerks). Smith has famously survived a heart attack and Smith’s father did not. When Smith’s father died, his brother who witnessed the event told him, “he did not go peacefully.” So this most recent Clerks, all jokes aside, seems like a deeply personal project. The kind that can only be made and seen in 2022, if the creator sticks to modest aims and budgets.

Is this really progress? Probably not. But the self-made artists strive onward.