My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (48 page)

Back at Graphitti, Chappy meets with Jerrod and his art team to talk about the shirts we’re gonna do. When they go, Chappy and his son Kevin start laying out the 750 Boston variants of the Kevin Smith InAction figure that we’re selling at the WizardCon in Boston, and I sign ’em all. Even if I can’t be there myself (due to the heavy pre-production build-up), we figured it’d be good to offer the Boston variant signed for any VA fans showing up to the Con. While I’m signing, Chappy shows me the
Mallrats Companion
script book, which blows the original
Rats
script book out of the water (John Roshell — the guy who designed the View Askew Almanac Calendar we did two years back, as well as some of our posters — is a genius).

I head home around midnight, get into my woobs, crawl into bed beside Jen, and go to sleep to TiVo’ed
Simpsons
.

Thursday 15 September 2005 @ 11:14 a.m.

Wake up, shower, and head to the office to do an early a.m. interview for an IFC doc on censorship. After we’re done, I ask them if they can shoot a five-minute intro for me, for my induction into the Henry Hudson Hall of Fame. Apparently, my high school alma mater is officially recognizing that I’ve done something with my life, which is rather bittersweet. Sadly, with
Clerks 2
looming, I won’t be able to attend the presentation, so I’m sending this PG-13 rated video intro instead.

After that, I head back up to the house to shot-list the opening scenes of the flick with Dave, Scott and Tony. We’re done by three, at which point I chill out downstairs, answering email before the 7 p.m. meeting with Laura, Scott and a guy we want for a key crew position.

Post meeting, I climb into the woobs and hit the board for a bit before climbing into bed and watching TiVo with Jen ‘til we fall asleep.

Friday 16 September 2005 @ 11:15 a.m.

Wake up early to let the dogs out, then drop Harley off at school, come home, check email and post a bunch of pictures up on My Boring-Ass Life.

I get showered and dressed and head over to the
Clerks
production office to say hi to Derek Raser, our transpo guy from
Strike Back
who’s doing the new flick too. After that, I meet with Gary Jenson, who’s on board as our stunt coordinator again, then head out to scout another location with Laura, Scott, Dave, Rat, Tony and James.

From there, Scott, Dave, Tony and I head back to the main location to finish shot-listing. We’re done by 5:30, but with traffic, it takes us about an hour to get home.

Back in the house, I check email as well as the finals on the View Askew Katrina Auction, posting the results on the board.

With Harley gone for the weekend, up in Big Bear with Byron and Gail, Jen and I are alone in the house. We seize the opportunity and make with the hour-long fuck session, and then kick back to watch the new
Cheers
box set.

Mewes comes home from his three days in Utah where he was shooting at a prison on an indie flick. He’s severely under the weather, sporting a mouthful of cold sores. Chay comes over to take care of him, and Jen and I fall asleep around ten.

Saturday 17 September 2005 @ 11:16 a.m.

I wake up around six, let the dogs out, then head to the office to check email and the board. Jen gets up and starts rushing me and Mewes out of the house, so she can prepare for her big girl’s night sleepover party (no boys allowed). I wake up Mewes and tell him to get showered, while I shower, get dressed, and pack for the night, throwing 250
Rats X
covers into my bag to sign if I wind up donking out early at the Casino that night.

I kiss Jen g’bye, then Mewes and I jump on the 10, bound for the Casino Morongo, in Cabazon, out near Palm Springs.

We bullshit the whole way down, listening to Metallica, with Mewes dozing off sometimes, as he’s not feeling that great — a condition that immediately changes once we hit the casino.

We check in, at which point the guy at the front desk upgrades us to suites, as he’s a fan. We dump our shit in the rooms, then head straight down to the poker room, where we get onto separate (then the same) $5/$10 tables. We play poker from three ‘til midnight, stopping only to eat (in Mewes’s case) or grab some air and play blackjack (in my case). When we’re done, I hit the $100 blackjack table to win back some poker losses, then head up to the rooms, roughly even from where I started.

Mewes suggests we watch a flick, so we rent
Kingdom of Heaven
while Mewes eats room service and I sign the 250
Rats
DVD covers I brought with me. I talk to Jen and say g’night around two in the morning. Post-
Kingdom
, around three in the morning, Mewes and I head back downstairs to the casino where I donk out at the poker table after a few hours. I head back to blackjack to win my losses back, only to lose even more cash at blackjack this time around. I go back to the poker room, but the only seat open is at a $1/$3 table. I lose about a hundred bucks as I start falling asleep at the table, and opt to hit the hay instead, at nine in the morning, Sunday.

Sunday 18 September 2005 @ 11:20 a.m.

The wake-up call at eleven makes me drag my ass out of bed. I pack up, bang on Mewes’s door and tell him we’re leaving, check out, and get on the road around 11:45. Malcolm calls in from Toronto while we’re driving and we talk to him for a bit, getting an update on his dad’s health.

Since there’s no traffic, Mewes and I get home an hour and five minutes later, at which point Mewes heads out to play the
Lord of the Rings
game, and I head upstairs to kiss Jen and say hi to Lisa Roumaine and Lisa Weitz, the only two chicks left from the sleepover rager. I’m sent to Baja Fresh and Coffee Bean to pick up snacks for the girls, and then I retire to my room, where I watch
25th Hour
and sign another 250
Rats
DVD covers, to send out to Don in the morning so he can start filling online Stash pre-orders.

The girls leave, and Jen joins me on the bed. We cuddle and chit-chat for a bit before we hear Harley coming home from Big Bear with Byron and Gail. She joins us in the room, and the three of us sit around, catching up, before Jen heads downstairs with Harley, and I finish signing the covers and watching
25th Hour
.

The two of us put Harley to bed, then head upstairs and kick back with some
Cheers
episodes from the new box set. I play more of the
Spider-Man
DS game, until I get too frustrated, unable to beat the Doc Ock final boss and shut the game down for the night, going to sleep to
Cheers
.

Monday 19 September 2005 @ 11:21 a.m.

Wake up at 5:45 to do phoner with Mancow radio show out in Chicago, then check email and the board taking Harley to school. I come home and print up a bunch of scripts the office needs, then wire the intro for Bry and Walt’s
Karney
trade paperback. Afterwards, I play the
Spider-Man
DS game for a bit before showering and heading to office to rehearse with Jeff and Trevor.

Jeff’s electric. He’s got the whole script memorized, and every piece of his delivery is gold. After working at it for an hour, we finally find Trevor’s voice for Elias, the character he plays, and the scenes begin to really sing, cracking me up (a good sign, as I believed I was already too familiar with the material to find it laugh-out-loud funny anymore). After four hours of rehearsal, going over all their shared scenes, we call it a day, and I head back to the house.

I check email while the family’s upstairs eating, then play a few games with Harley and Jen (Disney Yahtzee and Uno), before kissing Quinnster g’night and heading back to my room.

Jen and I watch a few episodes from the new
Cheers
box set while I continue answering email, then call it a night, falling asleep around 9:30.

Tuesday 20 September 2005 @ 11:22 a.m.

Wake up at 5:45 for
Mallrats
DVD radio tour, which wraps up around 8:30. Afterwards, I go through email and hit a few posts on the board before rehearsing with Jen in our room for an hour and getting showered and dressed.

On the ride to the production office, I get a call from a comedienne I went after for a
Clerks
cameo who confirms that she’s in, which makes me pretty happy.

I pick up Scott, Dave, and Tony and we follow Derek, Laura, and James and meet Ratface for a location scout. The place checks out really nicely, so we lock it up for the flick.

From there, I head over to the Weight Control Center to weigh in and pick up new shakes. I’ve lost another five pounds and change, bringing my total weight loss up to forty-five pounds in a month and a half.

I rocket over to Laser Blazer and pick up $400 worth of new DVDs, including Criterion’s
Naked
and
Over the Edge
— one of my favorite flicks from the early days of cable. After that, I hit the Stash where I sign a bunch of
Rats X
DVDs and chat up Xtian and Dave for a bit before heading home.

On the drive back, I get the call that my new shooters are done, so I grab a check from the house, load the dogs into the car, and cruise back across town to pick ’em up. I stop at McDonald’s for the dogs (you can’t beat $1.00 double
cheeseburgers), then get back to the house, where I chit-chat with Jen and fill her in on the day’s activities before shooting back out to Harley’s school for a back-to-school night function.

We come home and I set-up TiVo for an
Earl
season pass, then check email and chill with Jen, watching
Thirteen Days
. When it ends, we pop on some TiVo’ed
Simpsons
and go to sleep.

Wednesday 21 September 2005 @ 11:24 a.m.

Wake up and check email and the board while watching a pretty low-rent shark attack flick called
Blue Demon
. Order up some smokes from Yummy and watch the Sandler
Longest Yard
flick, then do an interview with
Maclean’s
(the Canadian mag) and print up some more scripts.

I shower and head down to the office, where Mos, Dave and I watch a chunk of
25th Hour
, a film whose look I like quite a bit for
Clerks
2. The
C
2 brain-trust then goes over the options for a digital intermediate — a process in which you shoot on film, then transfer the footage into a digital format, where you have unprecedented color correction control, and spit the results back out onto a digital master from which all the film prints are made. The process is probably most easily recognizable in the Coen Brothers’ flick
O Brother, Where Art Thou
— where colors were deeply saturated to give whole sections of the flick a golden hue.

We’re going the opposite way. Amongst other things, our plans are to de-saturate the colors of all the scenes that take place at work, to give Dante and Randal’s jobs a bland, hell-ish feel. The idea is the culmination of months of back-and-forth about whether or not to hone close to the low-rent look of the first
Clerks
. At the end of the day, we figured shooting on 16mm or shooting the flick as flatly and
mise-en-scène
as
Clerks
would be disingenuous and feel like we were trying too hard to catch lightning in a bottle twice. The look of
Clerks
— long held to be a big part of the flick’s charm — was born out of a lack of budget and a trio of amateurs’ eyes. This time around, we’ve got a budget and a decade of experience on our side; making the flick look bad on purpose would make us feel like we were posers. However, it doesn’t mean we can’t fuck around and try something creative with the look to invoke the first
Clerks
, while still applying everything we’ve learned since ‘93.

We wrap up at the office and I head back up to the house, take a dump, and then meet Jeff downstairs. We make the drive out to the location, where Trevor joins us. Tony, the 1st A.D. arrives, and based on the shot-list notes he took all last week, we do a blocking rehearsal of all the Randal and Elias scenes.

Trevor is slipping into a deeper comfort level with his Elias delivery, and in the process, finding funnier and funnier bits of business. Jeff is just on fire, having honed Randal to a finely tuned instrument of pitch-perfect delivery. It’s a thing of joy listening to them together.

We wrap the rehearsal around seven and Jeff and I head back to Hollywood, chatting the whole drive home about how the rehearsals are going, as well as folks we went to high school with.

We get back to the house, and Jeff heads home. I join Schwalbach upstairs and we chit-chat a bit, before she hits the hay, tuckered out from a day of yoga and abs classes. I finally pick the Gameboy
Batman Begins
game back up and figure out how to beat the Ducard/Ra’s Al Ghul final boss. Not wanting to wake up Jen, I retire to my office, where I watch the late-seventies classic
Over the Edge
, while checking email. When the flick’s done, I crack open my Jen nudie pics, tug one out, and go to sleep around two in the morning.

Thursday 22 September 2005 @ 11:25 a.m.

I wake up, check email and the board, and some Canadian interviews for the
Rats X
DVD release while Jen hits yoga. Afterwards, I bury myself in the
Spider-Man
Nintendo DS game, finally bringing down the final Doc Ock boss and completing the game. I take a shower then head upstairs.

Zack and Joey show up around two, and we record the intros to the online video journal we’re gonna be doing throughout the production of
Clerks 2
. At the tail end of that shoot, Jeff arrives, and the two of us then load into the car, pick up Brian at his hotel, and head down to the location for rehearsal.

The drive is spent, naturally, catching up with Brian, who’s not only been through a cancer scare with his girlfriend Diana over the last few months, but also had gall bladder surgery himself. We get to the location just as I’m finishing up my story about the Phil Incident, and I tour Bri around the set a bit. Tony arrives, and since Brian’s still on book, we settle into a read-thru with some minor blocking.