My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (50 page)

Saturday 24 September 2005 @ 12:04 p.m.

Wake up to let the dogs out at 6 a.m., then take a leak, head to my office to check email and board, then get to work updating the online journal.

Jen gets up and gives me shit about not also feeding the dogs. She’s in a snippy mood, so I hang low in my office for a while, staying out of the crosshairs, ‘til Nicole Venables shows up. I take a shower, then head upstairs, where Nicole cuts my hair, and we chat about the flick (on which she’s splitting the hair department with Janine Thompson — who was on
Strike Back
and
Jersey Girl
doing Ben’s hair). Nicole leaves, and I head back to my office to hide out from the snippy Schwalbach, until she appears in my office door as the sexy Schwalbach, inquiring as to whether or not I’d like to massage her in the boudoir.

I give Jen a thirty-minute massage that leads into some sweet (rather uncharacteristic) love-making, and the two of us feel worlds better. Having been inundated with working out (for her) and rehearsing (for me) all week, it’s been eight days since we last fucked, and man, was it just what the doctor ordered — especially in advance of the long day ahead.

I get dressed and head over to Westwood, where the line for the
Mallrats
10th Anniversary DVD signing is already wrapped around the block. I tell Chappy to cap it, and hang out in the back alley, smoking and talking to Scott, Renee, Jay, and the Universal and PR guys, as we wait for Ethan Suplee. Ethan arrives, we all chit-chat a bit, then head in to take pics, do some press, and start the signing, a half-hour or so late.

Unlike the signing event we had for the grand opening of the west coast Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash last year (the
Clerks X
and
Jersey Girl
DVD signing event), the signing goes smoothly this time around, and doesn’t nearly kill us all. Last year, when we opened the west coast Stash on September 7th, the signing started at 6 p.m. and went ‘til 6 a.m. the next morning. It was not intentional — we just had thousands show up, and never capped the line ‘til midnight. Thankfully, by staying ‘til 6 a.m., everybody who made it into the line before it got capped was taken care of.

However, this time around, while capping the line early indeed, helped, the big credit goes to Gail, who played line cop, dealing with each customer as they
approached the signing tables, having them get their three items ready, and feeding them to us in an orderly fashion — all while doing it with a smile. Thanks to Gail, the signing didn’t turn into another all-night affair.

Big ups to Christian, as well. More than a few people who came through the line effusively praised him, unsolicited, as a great manager. A rapier wit and ever-helpful attitude will flood many a set of drawers (that the drawers in question belong to a bunch of guys is beside the point).

At 6 p.m., Mos and Renee had to bolt, so we used the opportunity to take a break and let Jim Mahfood and Dave Crossland set up for the live art jam. To celebrate the store’s one-year anniversary, Chappy and I decided to commission Jim and Dave to do a mural on the back wall, that featured a slew of Askewniverse characters. They brought in the Root Down Sound System DJs, who spun records, mixed and scratched, and turned the place into SoHo, while Jay, Ethan, Brian O’Halloran and I continued with the signing, off to the side.

Around seven, the man of the hour, Jason Lee, showed up, looking bushwhacked after a week of non-stop travel for
My Name is Earl
press, and a full Saturday of shooting the pilot for his MTV variety show. As exhausted as he was, like a champ, he still showed up. We fed him pizza, bullshitted for a bit, then sat him in front of nearly two hundred people who had made it in to the Lee-only line.

By nine, Lee had gotten to everybody who wanted a signature, and headed off for home to sleep. Ethan and Mewes cut out as well, and the signing proper was pretty much done. Jen, Chay, Harley, Trish and I hung out with Ain’t It Cool Mike (aka Mysterio Mike) and Silverlurker Will, chatting and watching some of the mural going up. The mural was so fantastic, it had me smiling ear-to-ear... until I realized that if we shuttered the store one day, it couldn’t go with us.

By ten o’clock, I pick up two Jim Mahfood pieces he’d brought along to sell, and then Jen, Bri and I cut out of the store, after a very successful signing event. We sold a shitload of the
Mallrats
X DVD, naturally, as well as a slew of the
Mallrats Companion
screenplay book. Chappy and I both agreed it was the model against which all future Stash events would be measured.

We drop Brian off at his hotel and head home, where we climb into bed. Jen immediately falls asleep, and I do the same after posting a signing post-mortem on the board.

Sunday 25 September 2005 @ 12:05 p.m.

I wake up around nine to see Jen already up, riding her couch, checking the board, re: last night’s signing. I head to the office to check email and see if any pics of the finished Stash mural have been posted, then look up what time
Corpse Bride
is playing.

I shower, get dressed, and Harley and I are off to the Chinese Theater to check out Tim Burton’s latest (which I really love, despite the songs). We head home, and when I get to my room, I discover Schwalbach’s already set the place up for our afternoon rehearsal. I collect my iPod and slug in the microphone adapter, so that I can record the sessions and cut together a file of her best readings, so she can listen to it while she hikes Runyon or runs on the treadmill.

Rehearsal goes great. Jen takes another huge jump — so much so that I decide to wrap it up an hour and change later, so I can cut together her rehearsal MP3. A half hour into the cutting, Gail reminds me that I’ve got an interview with FanBoy Radio (out of Dallas/Ft. Worth), so I take an hour off to chit-chat comics and stuff with the hosts and callers, before getting back to the MP3 edit. Then, Jen heads off to yoga, and Harley and I kick back and watch
Shark Boy and Lava Girl
(a pretty sweet flick) before I put her to bed.

I spend the rest of the night cutting the MP3 together, then crash beside the already-sleeping Schwalbach around 11:30, falling asleep to a TiVo’ed
Simpsons
.

Wednesday 28 September 2005 @ 9:58 a.m.

Hit TriStar Medical to discover I’ve only lost three pounds. Kinda bummed. Still, losing three is better than gaining three, so I stop at the Fox Hills Mall and pick up a bunch of new jeans shorts, in sizes I haven’t seen in quite some time.

Afterwards, I head over to Sony to do some looping for
Catch & Release
. Susannah’s having a screening for some friends, so she wants to fill in some dialogue holes or make a few muddled lines more clear.

While there, I finally get to see a bunch of
Catch
footage. I enjoy the hell out of it. Sam Jaeger (who also shows up to do some ADR) and I are pretty funny together, and the flick looks great. Can’t wait to see it all put together.

I chit-chat with Suz, Sam, sound man Mike, and later, Anne Coates, who drops by while we’re looping. Anne, who’s used to seeing me everyday in the footage she’s cutting, is taken aback at the slimmer-looking me in real life. I hip her to Optifast, then Sam and I head out. I drop Sam off at his car in another lot and boogie home for some rehearsal action on my own flick, up at the house.

Thursday 29 September 2005 @ 12:05 p.m.

We take the Train Wreck: The Making of The Passion of the Clerks site live, jump-starting what we hope will be a year-long interactive experience between filmmakers and audience.

Unlike the first
Clerks
, during the production of which nobody really knew we were making an honest-to-goodness film behind Quick Stop’s closed steel shutters at night, word’s out what we’re up to this time around. There are expectations — shit that I’ve spent my career trying to avoid, because expectations are hard to live up to. So rather than ostrich-it and pretend like we’re eight kids making a movie after hours at work, we’ve opted to go another way, and pull the curtain way-the-fuck back for anyone remotely interested to take a look at our goings-on. Good idea or not, we’re committed at this point.

Zak Knutson and Joey Figueroa, long-time co-conspirators of ours (Zak we met on
Strike Back
and Joey, his friend, joined us in post on
Jersey Girl
), got a budget approved by the Weinstein Company for a behind-the-scenes project that’s made up of two parts: weekly production pieces for the
www.clerks2.com
site, and a massive making-of documentary for the eventual DVD. Having worked closely with Phil Benson on the Snowball Effect doc on the
Clerks X
DVD, these guys know what they’re doing. Together with Webmaster Ming Chen and trailer maven Matt Potter, they’ll be providing the curious with a relatively spoiler-free, inside look at what goes into making
Clerks 2
.

Initial response to the shorts seems to be good, so we’re off and running.

Saturday 1 October 2005 @ 12:05 p.m.

The day is spent laying around the room with Jen and watching a lot of the
Desperate Housewives
DVD box set, a show I kinda dig on. While checking email, someone directs me to the Ain’t It Cool News forums, where some jag-off is spreading misinformation about my Vancouver Q&A from a few months back.

Now, normally, I avoid the AICN talk-backs like they’re KKK rallies. I get a lot of trashing thrown my way from the talk-backers, but I figure there’s little point in getting into a flame war with someone over their opinion. Movie-loving is a subjective thing: either someone does or doesn’t like what I make, and telling ’em how wrong I feel they are for not digging on what I do is never gonna change their minds. About as far as I used to go at the AICN talk-backs (as I’d never joined, hence couldn’t post) would be to email posters directly if they put up factually
inaccurate info about me.

The day I stopped reading the talk-backs altogether was when I’d emailed a guy who was maintaining I’d done something I hadn’t, re:
Dogma
. I started off with “Look, I can’t help it if you don’t like what I do or the movies I make, but I feel the need to correct you on this issue of” whatever it was “because it’s factually inaccurate”. And the response I got back was pretty much this: “I don’t particularly like or dislike you or your movies. But you’re one of those people that talk-backers will attack and defend with equal vehemence, so I just jumped into your thread to stir up some shit and get into fights with other posters. It’s cheap, good fun to read how worked up these people get.”

Paraphrased, natch, but that was pretty much the sentiment. And once I’d read that, I realized that even looking at the titles of the AICN talk-backs was probably a dumb move on my part.

However, with the
Clerks 2
site going live earlier that week, there was a story and link up at AICN, and the requisite love-fest/bash-fest had begun. And based on this tipster email, I found myself doing something I hadn’t in almost six years: actually reading an AICN talk-back thread about me.

Now, I’ve got a pretty thick skin: saying my movies suck, I’m a hack, or I’m fat doesn’t really rile me. However, when fuckers are low enough to go after my wife... well, that’s when shit’s on. So I decide to finally join AICN so I can respond in the talk-backs thread... only to discover registration is temporarily down. Rather than let it go, I copy and paste all the questions to a Word document and spend a half hour answering them all, then posting the entire thread up at
viewaskew.com
. I drop Harry Knowles a line about putting up a link to it, and we’re off to the races.

So, for the curious, my fireside chat with the AICN talk-backers is at:

http://viewaskew.com/theboard/viewtopic.php?p=1192656#1192656

Sunday 2 October 2005 @ 12:06 p.m.

Wake up, shit and check email. I cruise the board and discover an enormous views count on my AICN topic, which means that Harry’s already put the link to my
viewaskew.com
thread up at Ain’t It Cool News. In addition, he opened up registration and gave me an account name and password, so I can head back to his site and respond to the talk-backers responses to my responses to their responses to the opening of the
Clerks 2
site.

An incredible waste of time for a guy who’s about to start shooting a flick in a week? Maybe. But I still indulge in it for two hours, before logging off, taking a shower, playing some more of the Nintendo DS new
Spider-Man
game, while Jen and Harley eat lunch at The Grove. Then, I join them at The Grove, pick up Harley, and head out to Speed Zone, the go-kart fun park in City of Industry. Quinnster and I ride the go-karts, then play games of chance for two hours, winning a bunch of useless crap. Then, we head to Toys “R” Us to pick up some board games.

On the drive home, I’m feeling unwell, so I have to cancel out on Lee’s variety show shoot. Jen goes food shopping, and I play more
Spider-Man
‘til I fall asleep rather early.

Monday 3 October 2005 @ 12:07 p.m.

Get up, shower, and head out to the location for a meeting with the crew and Michael Rooney. Later in the day, we have the production meeting — this conference in which all the department keys go through the entire schedule, scene-by-scene and trouble-shoot or raise questions about what’s needed or left open for that shoot day. However, I’ve got about three hours before that kicks off back at the production office, so I hit the Bicycle Casino for a couple hours of poker.

I head to the studio, two hundred bucks poorer, and do my bit at the production meeting, seeing a lot of familiar faces of folks who’ve worked on a bunch of our other flicks, as well as some new cats.

When the meeting’s finished, I talk to Carla Gardini (our Weinstein Company exec) for a while, and then check out some new production artwork with Rat and Scott Purcell before shooting home for an evening rehearsal at the house.