My Boring-Ass Life (Revised Edition): The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith (57 page)

2) Janet Maslin, the former lead critic of the
NY Times
(the woman who wrote a great review of
Clerks
twelve years ago) shot me this email when I got home...

So where/how/when can I talk to you? Either phone or I.M.? I don’t want to type out a whole long screed this way. But I will give the highlights:

1) It’s beyond funny. A great job, and a fantastically good time. This is fact, not opinion.

2) You barely have to sell it. It’ll sell itself.

3) The zigging and zagging you mentioned: that’s what makes it work. The audience goes up and down and all over the map, but they never get a chance to figure out where it’s going. And you never have to stop to explain anything. Whatever longer version you had, you haven’t lost anything: short works great.

4) And it is so good-hearted. So cheery, in its crazy way. It’s such a moving experience in spite of all the funny stuff. I think for that reason it can cross over to people who know about the first one but never saw it. Especially if you tone down a little of the mildly freaky stuff (this thought brought to you courtesy of the person who bitched about the Poop Monster). By freaky I don’t mean the
SPOILER DELETED.
The
SPOILER DELETED
is a delight.

5) You have defanged any possible criticism. Nobody can say these guys are too old for this: you’ve made that part of the joke. Nobody can say it’s sophomoric because it’s so clever. Nobody can say it’s trivial because you’ve elevated all this to the level of homage to your own earlier work and who knows what else. The French will see this as a witty critique of American popular culture. Which in fact it is.

6) You can’t wait until August. You just can’t. Your audience is as web-savvy as an audience can be. And it is simply human nature to go home and say hey — I just saw a movie with a
SPOILER DELETED
and a
SPOILER DELETED
and a
SPOILER DELETED
and a
SPOILER DELETED
and a
SPOILER DELETED
and a 30-second
SPOILER DELETED
. Nobody will keep quiet about this. Every story out of Cannes will be a spoiler.

So: can’t you get it out there ASAP? Is it being shown in competition? If not, can’t it open here just before it gets there? I know there’s the worry of too many big summer things but this doesn’t have to open on a huge scale. It can be in fewer theaters and just stay and stay and stay. You will get repeat business and a terrific grapevine thing. People will find it for themselves. It’s barely going to have to be marketed.

Congratulations in a big, big way. I hope this is helpful. And thanks for a gut-busting good time.

I mean, Janet’s
Times
review practically made my career twelve years ago, as it gave a lot of folks the impression I was legit. To have her dig on
Clerks II
as well brought my career full circle.

Amy Taubin, the first person to ever write about
Clerks
(waaaaaay back in ‘93, in her IFFM wrap-up piece in the
Village Voice
) was also in the house (I didn’t get to speak to her after the screening, but Mos did, and reported that she loved the flick). Mark Tusk, the man responsible for bringing
Clerks
to Miramax, was on hand, too, and dug it. Harvey Weinstein, naturally, was there and still digs it (might even dig it a little more, after watching it with an audience and hearing the response). And many folks who post on the message board over at
ViewAskew.com
(some of who’ve been around since we first opened the site back in ‘95/’96) filled out the screening room and also seemed to be into the flick. All in all, it was one of the ten best screenings of one of our flicks I’ve ever attended.

Post-screening, me, Mos, Harvey, and Weinstein Co.’s Michael Cole, Carla Gardini, and Kelly Carmichael huddled in a corner of the bar attached to the IFC Center theater (where we screened the flick) and talked about what’s left to do (lock up the music rights, screen for the Cannes programmers). I saw a couple poster concepts, and one really leapt out at me; hopefully, it’ll be what eventually hits the theaters.

We’re now pretty much locked-and-loaded for 18 August — a date that can’t come soon enough...

Thursday 2 March 2006 @ 4:26 p.m.

I wake up early and take Harley to school, then grab coffee for Jen on the way home.

Get up, check email, shower, and head over to Sony lot to do one line of ADR for
Catch & Release
. I talk to Susannah for a bit, then head back to the house.

I get a little writing done and iChat with a bunch of folks about business stuff before picking Harley up from school and hitting Marix for an impromptu daddy/daughter date.

Back home, I crash on the bed for a while, checking email and watching TiVo while Jen hangs with Harley. The rest of the day is spent lounging with Jen, during which we manage to squeeze in some fucking and watch copious amounts of TiVo. That evening, Schwalbach and I engage in yet another late-night eating extravaganza, downing Pinto bean-covered nachos and other gastric delights, all the while swearing I’m gonna get back on my diet. I’ve now gained back twenty of the seventy pounds I took off while on Optifast, so it’s time to get back into a program of sorts and take another vacation from food.

B-Star G

Friday 3 March 2006 @ 4:36 p.m.

Tonight, I do something I haven’t done in a while, if ever: I get my geek on by attending a panel I’m not a part of, as an audience member.

At this point in my life, there’s only one show in the world that’d make me leave the Elysium comforts of my bedroom and venture out into the world.

That show is the ever-genius new version of
Battlestar Galactica
.

The Museum of Television and Radio holds the William S. Paley TV Festival every year, in which well-regarded shows have screenings of unaired episodes, then assemble the cast and crew for moderated chats before opening up the floor to questions. Since the MTR is in Beverly Hills, Jen and I head over earlier than the scheduled start of the panel so we can kill two birds with one stone and pop into Tiffany to grab some gifts for Gail and a few other folks while we’re in the neighborhood. With time to spare, we shoot over to the MTR only to discover that this year, the Paley fest is being held at the cushy DGA Theater, in their building on Sunset (next door to the Griddle), very close to our home.

We race back to Hollywood and get into the theater with two minutes to spare. The crowd in attendance looks like the same folks who show up for my Q&As at colleges and ComiCons, which results in much “Hey, Kevin Smith” and “Can’t wait for
Clerks II
”.type shout-outs. My cell phone vibrates and I see Dave Mandel’s name show up. I answer it, looking around the room, immediately asking, “Don’t tell me you’re here too.” Dave tells me to look to my left, and I spot him across the theater, smiling and waving. I tell him we have no life, then settle in for the start of the program.

This v.2 of
Battlestar Galactica
is so insanely amazing, I’m sometimes flummoxed watching it. When I started seeing billboards around town advertising the show when it débuted, I remember thinking “Wow. Why?” The OG
B-Star G
(as we’ve taken to calling it around the house) was a fun piece of disposable youth cheese that, even as a seventies pre-teen, was easy to recognize for what it was: a
Star Wars
rip-off. Granted, I had a Colonial Viper and a Cylon Raider as a kid; but my mother bought them for me from the sale rack at the now-defunct Two Guys store, where each set her back less than a buck. Compared to the hundreds (maybe thousands) she and my father spent on Kenner’s
Star Wars
line of action figures and accessories for me over the years, the two bits she dropped on
Galactica
crap probably made her wish I was a bigger fan of Starbuck than Han Solo.

The notion of an updated
Galactica
was about as far off my radar as an Amanda Bynes picture (which, in name-checking, I realize reveals an actual near-proximity of said flick to my radar; damn you, Harley). And the fact that none of the advertising I’d seen depicted any Cylons (always the most interesting part of the show, if for no other reasons than their pong-like red “eyes” and their “Funky Town” voice patterns) didn’t help matters much.

It wasn’t until we were in pre-production on
Clerks II
, and Tony, our A.D., started waxing rhapsodically about the show during a location scout that I even remembered it existed. Based on his fervent recommendation, I picked up the season one box set when it came out, during a later visit to Laser Blazer. But even when season two made its DVD appearance, neither box set had emerged from their wrappers until two days after Christmas, when the cold-turkeying Schwalbach, detoxing from a suddenly abandoned three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, was sacked-out in bed, barely able to move, asking what we were gonna watch next.

We’d gone through all our Academy screeners, and — surrounded by a banquet of nicotine-replacing junk food — my miserable-from-missing-smokes wife was looking for something to take her mind off lighting up.

“I just read in
Time
magazine’s year-end issue that the new
Battlestar Galactica
was their favorite show,” I offered.

Weakly, she countered “There was an old
Battle
-thing whatever?”

After a brief explanation of
Battlestar
classic, Jen’s already withering glares — those glares that come from someone who’s forsaking the only true indulgence they feel makes them whole — morphed into that old favorite blank expression of mine; the one that I’ve been at the receiving end of many times throughout our marriage, when my wife, with a look, communicates utter disbelief and near disgust as I reveal a familiarity with something far more geeky than I should know/enjoy. I call it the “I Can’t Believe I Let Someone Like You Stick His Cock In Me” look.

Still, in her weakened, non-nicotine fueled state, she was in no condition to offer alternative suggestions on what to view. She moaned “Let’s try it.”

The V. 2
Battlestar Galactica
kicks off with a killer mini-series event that sees the civilizations of the Colonies all-but completely annihilated by a new breed of Cylons — Cylons that, instead of clunky, faux-metal fourth-rate Stormtrooper proxies, are now human in appearance (and some even super-human, if you count Six — the Cylon babe who wouldn’t look out of place at the Playboy grotto).

Adama, keeper of the about-to-be-mothballed Galactica looks less like the dude from
Bonanza
and more like the dude from
American Me
. Starbuck has joined the distaff and is now a chick (depicted as a dickless dude). Boomer went from being a black dude to an Asian woman. The evil Baltar is now a somewhat hapless agent in humanity’s destruction who carries on a constant conversation with the Cylon babe in his head. And the leader of the 50,000 remaining humans in the not-so-free world is the only surviving member of the Presidential cabinet — the Secretary of Education who was something like twentieth in the line of succession.

Without changing much of the original
Galactica
premise, the creators and folks involved with the show have done the equivalent of taking a covered wagon and creating a BMW from the design: it still takes you from place to place, but now it does so while keeping you safe from the elements, getting you there quicker, warming your ass with heated, leather seats, and bathing your ears in audio delights from an iPod-friendly sound-system. With the mini-series alone, these people managed to not simply just teach an old dog new tricks; they taught that bitch to speak, travel to alternate dimensions, fold space, and cure cancer.

How was this accomplished? How did the new
B-Star G
peeps spin straw into gold? How did they make the human beings as interesting (if not more so) than the fucking Cylons? Like all great art, they simply held a mirror up to our culture.
Galactica
V.2 is an allegory for 9/11 and the War on Terror viewed from both sides. It offers a far more complex view of two opposite ideologies in juxtaposition to one another, presenting neither side as particularly evil — just terrifying. Extremely well done science fiction has always been most powerfully effective when it lays out humanity naked and shows us ourselves, warts and all. Whether it’s
Planet of the Apes
,
Star Trek
, or almost anything by Philip K. Dick, the best sci-fi isn’t simply laser-beam driven shoot-’em-ups between good guys and bad guys; it’s the abyss we look into and see someone awfully, sometimes painfully familiar looking back from. There will always be a place in science fiction for the Joseph Campbell-described archetypical hero’s journey of the
Star Wars
saga, but what sci-fi does best is allow the author to comment on what it’s like to be a human being — the shame, the miracle, the sacrifice, the desire, the grand heights, and the abject lows. And if an author can accomplish this in stealth mode — be entertaining while not calling attention to his or her loftier goals — so much the better.

And fuck, does
B-Star G
entertain. Jen and I were so gripped, we went through two box sets in two days. Would-be sci-fi (or just excellent television) creators take note: if you want to seduce a female audience (so that bi-mon sci-fi cons aren’t just massive sausage parties), include strong, interesting, and indispensable female characters. I can’t say
B-Star G
made my wife kick the habit, but nestled in the bosom of this wonderful show, my wife forgot about her self-imposed smoking moratorium for a long enough period of time that the initial detoxing transition wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been (ie, she stopped yelling at and cursing me for introducing her to smoking). While the wife may be a massive Starbuck fan, I dare say that President Laura Roslin is the most interesting character in a show that has no weak links. Neither a figure of Clinton-ian valor or GDub-ian misguidance, Laura Roslin is a President we’d all be lucky to elect, and a sad reminder that the best-and-yet-heretofore-dismissed candidate to lead this nation would probably be a person born with the biology to create, carry and nurture life.