‘Clerks’ premiered 30 years ago – The Hollywood Reporter

When Kevin Smith shopped Clerks At the Sundance Film Festival, he did not expect that comedy would ignite his career at the age of 23.

The budding director was a film school dropout who wrote the script while working at a convenience store in New Jersey called Quick Stop. Clerks It focuses on Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randall (Jeff Anderson), two convenience store employees who talk about movies and life while making small talk with customers. Smith initially envisioned himself playing Randall, and gave the character some of his favorite lines before choosing the smaller role of Silent Bob.

“If I’m going to make this movie with my credit cards, I at least want to be in it,” Smith joked. Hollywood Reporter. “This way, years from now, I can look back and say, ‘Oh, I was there when I made the biggest mistake of my life.’ “This is what I looked like.”

With a meager budget of $27,000. Clerks It was filmed at Smith’s workplace, where Quick Stop ownership agreed to let him film at night while the store was closed. Smith recalls some confused customers who approached the shoot after seeing lights on in the store through the steel shutters: “They’d say, ‘Can I have cigarettes?’ And we’d say, ‘No, we’re making a movie.’ (They’re like,) ‘Like porn “We said, ‘No, this isn’t porn. It’s an independent film. That corner of the world had never heard of independent films in 1993, so we had a lot of ‘No, this isn’t porn’ to explain to them.”

Clerks The film debuted at the New York Independent Feature Film Market in late 1993 to a nearly empty theater, and featured a dark ending in which Dante is shot and killed. Despite this difficult start, it was soon after selected for Sundance. Smith, who produced the film with Scott Mosier, teased Dante’s death before the festival, where… Clerks It was a hit in January 1994, winning the Filmmakers Award. THRA review called the film “a gorgeous, cryptic sendup of low-key Americana.”

Miramax picked up the film and released it Clerks In October — after an appeal lowered its initial NC-17 rating to R — it raised $3.2 million on its way to becoming a touchstone for Generation Clerks Producing two series and a pair of television miniseries, Smith has continued to helm features over the past three decades, along with landing gigs as a television director and podcast host and becoming a Sundance regular.

“Over the past 30 years, perhaps not a day has gone by that I haven’t uttered the magic word ‘clerks,'” says Smith. “The weirdest, most amazing thing that ever happened to me is that this goofy little movie became the launching pad for a real career.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Jan. 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.