Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (4 page)

Controlling your own little universe is key. Before I made
Clerks
, I was in my early twenties, and the universe I lived in was run by my parents. Since I lived rent-free under their roof, I had to abide by their rules—which included mandatory trips to relatives’ houses every weekend. I wanted to find a way to be able to say, “I’m not going” for which I wouldn’t catch shit. Being a filmmaker seemed like an excellent excuse to not go to relatives’ houses.

So I got into filmmaking, and one day, I was able to say to my parents, “I can’t go to Aunt Virginia’s this weekend; I’m making
Mallrats
.” My parents couldn’t give me shit for not going to visit relatives with them because I was balancing multimillion-dollar budgets for movies about boys giving stink palms. But more than that? They were just happy I had a job.

And how’d
that
happen? How’d a guy like me, with zero connections or talent,
get
a job in the movie business in the first place?

It started with a movie called
Clerks
, a day-in-the-life
comedy filled with rooftop hockey games and necrophilia. It’s a look at love and longing amid the potato-chips-and-cigarettes-selling counterculture that’s become a true piece of Jersey history—a cinematic Stone Pony, if you will. It started life as scribbles in a marble composition notebook under the way-too-obvious title
In-Convenience
—a title my cohort Vincent felt was too precious and on the nose. One night, Vincent razzed me about going even
more
literal, eventually handing me a list of tongue-in-cheek titles that screamed the
exact
content of the script. At the bottom of his list was
Rude Clerks.
It was meant as a goof, but when you lopped off the adjective, the simplicity of
Clerks
seemed the most appropriate title for such a simple, bare-bones, no-frills flick.

Clerks
was a creaky, spit-and-glue screenplay that somehow held together thanks to the casting of the two leads. We found Brian O’Halloran during a small round of auditions at a local community theater. He rocked a monologue from
Wait Until Dark
—which was about as far as you could get from the character he’d become best known as, Dante Hicks, the schlubby, Charlie Brown–ish register jockey at a suburban New Jersey convenience store who yearns for a bigger life, yet somehow still gets pussy.

If Dante’s who I was, Randal was who I most wanted to be. I’d written the role for myself—which is why Randal has all the best lines. The character was meant to be part John Winger from
Stripes
and part Bugs Bunny, but really, it was just a fictionalized version of my friend Bryan Johnson—which essentially meant that Bryan Johnson was the guy I most wanted to be: the free guy who didn’t give a fuck about what anybody else thought. The genius, Thelonious Monk
said, is the one who is most like himself—and Bryan Johnson was unlike anybody else.

But the closer we got to production, the more I came to grips with the fact that I wouldn’t be able to pull off playing Randal. The sheer volume of dialogue that needed memorizing was beyond my capabilities, so one night I asked Jeff Anderson—an old friend from high school who’d never acted before—to read the script aloud with me. By the end of that read, it was clear
he
was Randal.

But the stew needed one more special ingredient to give it a little kick.

Jason Mewes was a force of nature in those days, unlike anything you’d ever seen in real life or on TV or in movies. He was so weird and next-gen, you just knew something special was going to happen if you could focus people’s attention on him. “Someone should put you in a movie someday,” I’d often muse to Mewes as we bummed around New Jersey. Someone eventually did: me. I also cast myself beside him, taking on the role of Silent Bob—Jay’s nearly mute muscle. If I was gonna go into heavy debt for the rest of my life to make a film, I at least wanted to be in the fucking thing; that way, years later, if I ever got the urge to do something stupid like finance my own flick again, I could pop in
Clerks
and see what I looked like when I made the worst decision of my life.

We shot the flick over the course of twenty-one nights, with a few day shots peppered throughout. The final cost was $27,575 and the film was selected for the Sundance Film Festival competition category in 1994. There, Miramax Films purchased the flick for $227,000. When I left Quick Stop to attend the ’Dance, I had a job. When I returned after the festival,
I had a career. A clerk went up that hill, and when he came down, he was suddenly a professional filmmaker. I named my production company View Askew Productions.

This led to
Mallrats
, my then-notorious 1995 sophomore film. Pitched as “
Clerks
in a mall,” ’
Rats
was a look at love and longing amid the twentysomething comics-craving suburban slackers of the consumer culture. With its sex and superhero obsessions, it was about fifteen years too early for any audience to give a shit. We were asking for a budget of three million, but the brass at Universal Studios insisted no movie could cost less than six million. When we pointed out that we’d spent far less than that on our first flick, we were told, point-blank, “Well that’s not a real movie, now, is it?” The flick went on to gross only $2.1 million and represented the first of my efforts that critics would roundly dismiss, shitting in its foul little mouth.

Before
Mallrats
came out and died at the box office, I was already working on
Chasing Amy.
Our “comeback” picture was really just a very expensive therapy session to help me get over my sexual insecurities: A guy falls in love with a lesbian but can’t get over her
heterosexual
past. I wanted to make it for three million, but Miramax balked at my dream cast of Ben Affleck, Joey Lauren Adams, and Jason Lee. But in 1996, Affleck’s most well-known role was in
Dazed and Confused
, as the asshole senior with the paddle. Joey was another
Dazed
vet but best known as the girl who took Bud Bundy’s virginity on
Married … with Children.
Jason Lee was most well-known for
Mallrats
—but since nobody had really seen it, he was most well-known for being confused with the star of
Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
—Jason
Scott
Lee.

I’d written
Amy
for my three friends to play the leads, but Miramax had one of those stunningly original ideas:
bigger
names. David Schwimmer, Jon Stewart, and Drew Barrymore were three actors with whom Miramax had struck overall deals in the mid-′90s. Coincidentally, they were also the three actors I was being asked to cast in
Amy
. During the fight for Ben, Joey, and Jason, I was told by our exec, “This is a business. It’s not about making movies with your friends …” That was a notion I decided to spend the better part of my career trying to disprove, starting with
Amy
. Instead of three million, I asked Harvey Weinstein to let us make the movie for two hundred grand with
my
cast. If he liked it, the flick was his. If he didn’t, we’d be allowed to take it out and sell it to another distributor. It was the first of many times I’d sacrifice a paycheck or budget to get the cast I wanted or to make the film the way I knew it needed to be made. The gamble easily paid off: Harvey loved
Amy
and released it under the Miramax banner, Joey Adams received a Golden Globe nomination, and Jason Lee and I won Independent Spirit Awards. Folks who shit on ’
Rats
praised
Chasing Amy,
and based on the maturity of the material, everyone generally agreed I’d grown up—a ridiculous assumption I’d also spend the rest of my career trying to disprove.

My fourth flick,
Dogma
, was pretty ambitious for its budget, but miraculously (pun intended), we pulled it off for ten million bucks. The story of two fallen angels and the Catholic misfits out to stop them from destroying existence boasted an all-star cast: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Chris Rock, Salma Hayek, Jason Lee, Alan Rickman, and Linda Fiorentino. But what I saw as a tongue-in-cheek-yet-still-reverent
expression of the faith I was raised in was seen as the work of the Antichrist by the same religious groups who powered Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ
to historic box office numbers. We received countless pieces of hate mail, three of which were death threats. The flick screened at Cannes and the New York Film Festival, garnering enthusiastic and supportive reviews, but when Miramax’s parent corporation, Disney, started fielding complaints from church groups, Disney ordered Harvey to dump it. Harvey and his brother Bob bought the movie back themselves, releasing it through Lionsgate.
Dogma
became our highest-grossing film to date, and two years after its release, Norman Lear’s People for the American Way gave me the Defender of Democracy Award for making the flick.

Jason Mewes had stolen
Dogma
right out from under the likes of Affleck, Damon, Rock, and everyone else, so it was clear he deserved his own movie. Following the Sturm und Drang of all those screaming charlatans pissed about my fourth flick, I wanted to make a fifth flick that wouldn’t offend anybody except those with intelligence and taste.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
was a valentine to the fans who put Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the front and center of their own road movie. It was a fun shoot but a hellish pre-production, since Jason Mewes was still fighting his drug monkey—which in print sounds exciting, with the strong potential for bloodshed as man and simian fight for dominance of the planet!

In reality, Jay’s drug monkey wasn’t a
Planet of the Apes
refugee at all; it was a heroin and OxyContin addiction, which would plague him on and off from
Chasing Amy
forward. Multiple times over the next decade-plus, Mewes
would spin through the revolving door of the finest rehabilitation centers California and New Jersey have to offer, fighting a genetic predisposition to addiction thanks to a mother who shot up while she was pregnant with him.

But even though Jay had his temperance problems like everyone else (mine was food, his was drugs), he was still a hysterically funny, crudely benign, true American cinematic original. Sure, there’d been buddy teams in movies since the invention of the medium: Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Cheech and Chong, Bob and Doug, Bill and Ted. But thanks to Mewes’s uncanny ability to say the most offensive or outrageous things and still retain audience affection, two stoners stationed in front of a New Jersey convenience store entered that pantheon as well.

Presented with the opportunity to tread the boards, Mewes took to it like masturbation. Acting was something he’d been unwittingly doing his whole life, enough to be naturally good at it. But while legions of actors in the business would sing the praises of Jay’s raw, undeniable talent (indeed, Matt Damon was the first person to suggest Jay and Silent Bob get their own flick), other thesps with more traditional performance training on screen or stage resented Jason’s outsider status. In an interview to support the second
Harold and Kumar
flick (not the first, mind you, the fucking
second
), Neil Patrick Harris took a wild, prejudiced stab at my boy.

“They were smart for actually hiring two actors that were actual actors playing parts, instead of hiring two sort of dudes that were those guys,” the former Doogie Howser said in an Ain’t It Cool News interview, overusing
actually
and its root. “They didn’t hire like Jason Mewes and the
other dude … Silent Bob … What is that movie
Jay and Silent Bob
, like what’s Jay’s name? He was this drugged out mess of a guy that was his friend and so he just cast him in the movie and filmed him doing crazy shit.”

What an
asshole
. The guy who once played the genius child surgeon on television must’ve forgotten that was a
role
and apparently started believing he was hyper-smart for his years in real life, too. Shit, can you believe the arrogance in that comment, not to mention the hostility toward a fellow actor he’s never met and apparently knows jack shit about? I called him out on it once, on Twitter, and to his credit the guy tweeted the following:

“Didn’t realize the upset my words caused. Looked back at what you said and I concur. Ignorance on my part. Apologies.”

Regardless, Neil Patrick Harris must’ve loved
Jersey Girl
: It was my first Mewes-less movie. It was also the second flick I’d have to bend over and take it for from the critics. Ben gave the best performance of his career, George Carlin got a bunch of screen time, and little newcomer Raquel Castro broke hearts—but nothing could save my first non-Askewniverse flick from the backlash beast that was Bennifer.

T
hankfully, we followed
Jersey
Girl
with
Clerks II
—my favorite of the bunch. Made for five million (a nearly five-million-dollar increase from the budget of
Clerks
),
Clerks II
was more than just a reunion flick or a trip back to the well, as I called it: It was the last good time. After that, filmmaking would change for me. After that, I’d realize my time
as a cinematic storyteller was coming to a close. Because the tough shit is, sometimes you can start out doing what you love, and then doing what you love starts to become work.

Twenty years is a long time to do anything, let alone make movies. I’ve gone further than I ever dreamed. The plan back in 1991 had been to make
Clerks
on credit cards, hoping someone with money would see that we knew how to make a film and in turn reward us with a budget to do a next one. That was
it.
Imagine your plan was to walk down to the convenience store to get some chocolate milk, and while there, you were gifted with an entire milk production facility to run, complete with chocolatizer for all the milk. “
You want chocolate milk? You
got
chocolate milk, kid!
” And from that moment forward, for twenty years, chocolate milk became your life: the making of, sampling of, bottling of, vending of, marketing of, balance sheets of …