Tough Sh*t: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good E-Book

Kevin Smith

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Profane, honest, and totally real advice from writer and director Kevin Smith! Take one look at Kevin Smith: he's a balding fatty who wears a size XXL hockey jersey, shorts, and slippers year-round. Not a likely source for life advice. But take a second look at Kevin Smith: He changed filmmaking forever when he was twenty-four with the release of Clerks, and since then has gone on to make nine more profitable movies, runs his own production company, wrote bestselling books and graphic novels, and has a beautiful wife and kid. So he must be doing something right. As Kevin's millions of Twitter followers and millions of podcast listeners know, he's the first one to admit his flaws and the last one to care about them. In early 2011, he began using his platform to answer big questions from fans - like "What should I do with my life?"- and he discovered that he had a lot to say. Tough Sh*t distills his four decades of breaking all the rules down to direct and brutally honest advice, including: - Why he has accepted Ferris Bueller as his personal savior, and what the Tenets of Buellerism can teach about hiding in plain sight and lip-syncing in the face of danger - Why it's really fun to eat but not so fun to be fat - What to do about people who don't like your policies ( for starters, tell them to pucker up and smooch your big ol' butt) - What Kevin's idol Wayne Gretzky can teach us about creativity and direction For anyone who's out of a job, out of luck, or just out of sugary snack foods, Tough Sh*t is an unabashedly honest guide to getting the most out of doing the least.

Leseprobe

Tough Sh*t

Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good

KEVIN SMITH

TITAN BOOKS

TOUGH SH*T

ISBN: 9781781161951

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark St.

London

SE1 0UP

First edition: March 2012

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © 2012 by Kevin Smith

Published by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

The Publishers are committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

Like its author, this book is dedicated to Jen Schwalbach—the gorgeous mother of my child, the seductive temptress who keeps me faithful, and the friend I’ve always had the most fun with. My best friend, even.

Also quite like its author, this book is additionally dedicated to Jen Schwalbach’s asshole.

Everything above also applies here, obviously, except the “mother of my child” part: Referencing my kid and my wife’s brown-eye in the same sentiment might come off as crude or something.

(And have a heart: Please don’t go telling my kid you read in her old man’s book that she’s some kinda Butt-Baby. She’s gonna have a hard enough time as it is being Silent Bob’s kid—the daughter of the “Too Fat to Fly” guy.

Also: Please don’t tell my daughter I dedicated the book to her mother’s sphincter. That’d be weird.)

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Let’s Get This Shit Started!

Chapter Two

Pig Newtons and How All This Shit Happened

Chapter Three

The Shit I Made

Chapter Four

Miramaxkateers and Shit

Chapter Five

Losing My Shit

Chapter Six

Whatchoo Talkin’ ’bout, Willis? And Other Shit It Took Me Twenty Years to Figure Out

Chapter Seven

Weed, Gretzky, and Getting My Shit Together

Chapter Eight

When the Shit Hit the Fan: Red State, Part I

Chapter Nine

Holy Shit: Red State, Part II

Chapter Ten

The Glowing Shit That Was in the Briefcase: Red State, Part III

Chapter Eleven

Talking Shit

Chapter Twelve

The Shit That Happened on the Plane

Chapter Thirteen

Funny as Shit

Chapter Fourteen

My Wife Is the Shit

Closing Thoughts

Taking Someone Else’s Shit

One Last Thing

A Little Shit for the Road

Thanks and Shit!

CHAPTER ONE

_________________________

Let’s Get This Shit Started!

I am a product of Don Smith’s balls.

That’s important to establish and acknowledge right off the bat, not only because it makes what I’ve accomplished in life seem even cooler, but also because Dad’s balls have been, to my way of thinking, too rarely celebrated. Unless you count whatever attention Mom threw their way, I don’t feel they’ve gotten their proper due for their part in what became of me. And she’s certainly never hailed his nuts in print, so this right here is a real coup for the Smiths of 21 Jackson Street, Highlands, New Jersey. Though if you could ask my father, he’d likely admit that while having his balls in print is flattering, having his balls in my mother’s mouth was way better.

People need to be regularly reminded that they began as cum. Not to diminish or cut ’em down to size—quite the contrary: I tell people they were cum once as a gesture of my awe at their very existence and to pat ’em on the back. There are no losers in life because every one of us who is born is a huge fucking winner.

Chew on this: When I was in film school, there was this specious statistic floating around stating there were more film school students than law school students. That was one massive pool of wannabes who’d have to bottleneck into a souvenir teacup full of opportunities waiting on the other end of the rainbow. Breaking into the movie business? Don’t worry, Cap’n Solo; even C-3PO can’t calculate those odds. Might as well try to navigate an asteroid field.

And that’s what people congratulate you for: the fact that you—simple, normal you—cracked the code and got into the club. You get to see your name in lights and somehow that’s impressive. I remind these people that my most impressive accomplishment—like theirs (and yours, dear reader)—is that we beat out billions of tough competitors for the job of a lifetime. Motherfuck being the Sundance flavor of the month; being the sole product of that careless cumshot my old man somehow kept in my mom is akin to beating the Kurgan and becoming the Highlander. There can be only one (aside from twins, triplets, quadruplets, and quints—the monsters and freaks of the baby world). Whenever someone tells me I’m fat, I tell ’em I wasn’t always: Apparently, at one point in my life, I was fit enough to out-swim a legion of sperm. And now, like any past-their-prime athlete, I’m enjoying the good life: I hoisted my Cup already, so at this point, fuck off and lemme enjoy bacon and brownies (maybe even together).

You beat sock drawers full of dead cum that didn’t have a chance coming out the gate. The odds that you wound up in an egg instead of a paper towel? Astronomically against you.

Some might have considered Don Smith’s balls mere mute witnesses in my father’s masturbatory war against his dick, but not Grace Schultz. My mom saw the potential in my dad’s balls. She didn’t see her unborn children in his eyes, she saw them outlined in the nooks and crannies of his testicles. And of all the wads my father busted during his too-short stay in this sector of the galaxy, I wound up in the moneyshot. And more than that, I didn’t get burned to virtual death like Anakin Skywalker on the lava shores of Mom’s nethers. I am, you am . . . we all am the best of billions.

Chuckle if you must, but all this jism talk is the important first step on the road to self-actualization. Fuck Tony Robbins; you wanna really inspire people? Remind them they’ve already beaten the odds, so the existence that follows is merely a victory lap to do with as they please. You’re a big, fat bucket of win when you begin this crapshoot life; no need to pressure yourself to do much more than use your time here as the wind-down to the only real contest that’ll ever matter: you vs. a billion other applicants.

Don Smith was a good guy and I owe him and my mom, Grace, everything I have. But I owe Dad maybe a little bit more. My whole life has been a reaction to his life, really—but mercifully not in any textbook manner that ever called for rebellion. For starters, I am literally a reaction (the nut) to his action (sexing Mom). Also: He worked at the U.S. Postal Service and hated it like a jihadist. Most people hate their jobs, true, but my old man despised his in an Ahab-and-Moby (or Eminem-and-Moby) kinda way. He never said, “Go into the entertainment biz, son”—he was just a living example of why it was worth taking a shot going after the stuff of dreams rather than simply getting a job. I saw how much my dad hated working and realized he was right: Working blows. If you hate what you do, it’ll always be work.

But what if you inverted that equation? Dad didn’t have that luxury; he had mouths to feed and bills to pay. But after two decades of seeing how much he hated his job, I realized if you love what you do, it’ll never be work.

So I fell in love with movies.

It wasn’t hard. Dad would take me to see a new movie practically every Wednesday, with matinee prices around $1.75 to $3.50 by the time he stopped paying. We didn’t ever talk much on the way to the theater, and we’d already dispensed with our reviews by the time we got in the car after the flick was over, so there wasn’t a lot of chatter on the way home, either. But that was our thing: going to the movies. I never thought to ask him if it was more for him or more for me—his fat kid who wasn’t good at much of anything except playing with Star Wars figures and memorizing Laverne and Shirley episodes.

It wasn’t just movies with Dad, either. My father fed me comedy albums he’d bring home from a car-trunk record dealer at that job he hated so much: Redd Foxx, Bill Cosby, and most important, George Carlin—the master thinker/speaker/funny fuck. Carlin would not only help bridge the generational gap between me and my father, he’d become a television touchstone for us as well. One of my favorite childhood memories is watching Carlin at Carnegie with Dad the night it first aired on HBO, a thousand years ago.

Dad was always my TV buddy. When I was a youngster, he’d lie on the floor on his back, head turned over his left shoulder to watch this giant twenty-inch console that looked more like a credenza than a television. I’d lean on his belly, propped up on my elbows, wondering if there wasn’t an episode of Batman on instead of Bowling for Dollars. (If you wanna take a “Why didn’t you just suck your dad’s dick while you were at it, you loved him so much . . .” shot, feel free; I’ve heard how hard it can be for the limited to appreciate sentimentality.)

I was afforded one last opportunity to lay my head on Dad’s stomach the day he died. Seeing my father motionless on a Philadelphia hospital gurney had me bawling, but I remember feeling two other things in that moment besides grief: 1) a distinct lack of life in what’d once been a pip of a guy, and 2) regret, knowing Dad was gone for good, and here this was the first time since my childhood that I’d had my head on his stomach and the last time I’d be able to do it forever.

We never like to think about the last time of anything, let alone the Last Time last time. But since I continue to be a reaction to Don Smith’s life, I feel duty-bound to remember the specifics of Don Smith’s death. The facts are these:

May 31, 2003: The Smith nuclear family and their spouses went out to dinner, following my Q & A at the Wizard World comic book convention in Philadelphia. It was a glorious evening, everyone talking, laughing, eating heartily, and enjoying being together. My sister and her husband lived in Japan at the time, my brother and his husband lived in Florida, and Jen and I were out in California, so it was rare that my mom could get all her kids together in one place. But man, could you tell they enjoyed reassembling the Justice League whenever they could. Parents love to view the fruits of their labor, and my old man was no exception. He polished off a filet mignon, three Manhattans, and a big slab of cheesecake while the rest of us jawed, and the more we talked, the more he laughed.

I loved making Dad laugh. He’d get really quiet, his whole body would shake, his face would light up as his eyes glassed over, but he didn’t make a sound. Essentially, Dad laughed the way I cum—which may be weird for Jen or my mom to read, but it’s true. When dinner was over, I packed Mom and Dad into a cab and kissed them both g’night, planting one right on the old man’s forehead, telling him I’d see him in the morning.

That night, my father died screaming.

My brother and my parents were sharing a suite at a Philadelphia hotel when it happened. According to Brother Don, Dad woke my mother tearing off the sheets, screaming he was on fire. It was massive heart failure, and within minutes he was gone.

“What do you mean screaming?” I asked Don after he related the details of Dad’s final minutes.

“He didn’t go quietly,” my brother observed.

And I hated that. Don Smith deserved a quiet, pain-free demise, because my old man did not have an easy life. He was born with a harelip and a cleft palate in an age when there wasn’t much they could do for you. He’d undergone experimental cosmetic surgeries as a child to give him a more normal appearance, with his case even appearing in a medical textbook my mother once showed me. In his tweens, he lost a summer to further corrective surgeries. A childhood spent in bandages made him a painfully shy grown-up, though not too shy; he did pack enough charm to land my mother (who was by no means easy prey or a shrinking violet). He raised three kids on a meager post office salary doing a job he abjectly detested. He took shit from his parents right up ’til their ends. The least the universe could’ve done for this guy was put him to bed quietly.

But instead, my father died screaming. Tough shit.

That’s when I started waking up. The beginning of a better Kevin Smith came with the painful death of his quiet hero—because that’s when I realized that this life is a rigged game that you cannot win. Even good men die screaming.

Now, here’s the important part of all this talk about cum and my dad, and here’s what you need to remember in order to achieve and accomplish your dreams in this life. Please pay attention very carefully, because this is the truest thing a stranger will ever say to you:

In the face of such hopelessness as our eventual, unavoidable death, there is little sense in not at least trying to accomplish all of your wildest dreams in life.

Lemme include a strong exception: If your wildest dreams are to hunt humans or kill children, I’m not talking to you. Please draw no hidden, sociopathic meaning from my words. Life is fragile and painful enough, so don’t hurt people, asshole.

Life is also, as George Carlin taught us, a zero-sum game. We all lose in the end. We all die screaming. If that’s the case, we might as well make for ourselves a paradise in this world. Make yourself happy and comfortable as often as you can, because sooner or later, the infinite hands you a bill for all these goods and services.

What follows is some tough shit. Tough shit to read, tough shit to accept. Granted, I didn’t live through a mass genocide, nor am I a survivor of childhood abuse, so the title of this book may feel like an overstatement. If you want to read about real heroes and true survivors of horrible abuse, pick up Shit Only Really Strong People Can Survive. I assure you, I won’t be the author of that tome. I’m the other guy, the guy who talks about cum a lot.

And the cum’s gonna fly up in here. I talk about real life in these pages, and real life comes from cum. It’s the only natural resource we don’t fight wars over, as well as the one we’re always the most generous in sharing.

It’s advice; don’t fight it. Either make something of the advice or simply discard it, but don’t try to fight it. It’s coming from the laziest fat fuck I’ve ever met, who came from a government-cheese-eating, lower-lower-lower-middle-class home and still somehow bent the universe to complement his will.

So this is the level of discourse you’re committing to, gentle reader. If you have little stomach for this kind of cum-versation, you may not be able to swallow what I’m about to shoot at you. If you’re a spitter, close this book, because from here on in we talk about some tough shit.

CHAPTER TWO

_________________________

Pig Newtons and How All This Shit Happened

It’s very easy to find movie nerds on the Internet now—folks you can banter back and forth with about our nation’s real national pastime. But back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, before the dawn of dial-up, if you weren’t attending a comic convention in a big city, you had to stumble across fellow geeks in real life. And back then, geekdom of any kind, even for movies, was not as commonplace as it is now. Contrary to what Huey Lewis and the News told us, it was most certainly not hip to be square. When you wanted to find like-minded cineasts in the suburbs, it was more akin to cruising public restrooms: lots of sidelong glances at the urinals and foot-tapping under the stalls, hoping someone would get what you were after.

The first true film geek I ever met was Vincent Pereira, and ironically, we’d meet on what would eventually become a movie set: the same Quick Stop convenience store in Leonardo, New Jersey, where we’d one day shoot Clerks. Vinny was a local high school kid the Quick Stop owners paid to stock the milk and mop the floors at night, but he was also waaaaay into film—so much so that he planned on being a filmmaker one day.

But I wouldn’t know any of this for the first few months we’d work together because the guy rarely spoke. That changed the night he came in to stock the milk and found me watching an episode of Twin Peaks I’d taped from ABC the night before.

Normally, when Vincent came in at nine, he’d head right to the cooler, saying very little. That night, he paused briefly near the counter, recognizing the show and smiling slightly. He disappeared into the cooler as usual, but then reemerged and joined me at the register.

“You like David Lynch?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Blue Velvet is one of my favorite films.”

In those days, you couldn’t reference Blue Velvet without launching into a bad impression of Dennis Hopper uttering his immortal line “I’ll fuck anything that mooooves!” (indeed, I had the Jay character bellow it in Clerks). Vincent was polite about how terrible the impression was and immediately launched into a discussion of Ronnie Rocket and One Saliva Bubble—two unproduced Lynch flicks he’d read about in a laser disc zine (if you’re too young to remember either of those media-conveyance devices, laser discs were precursors of DVDs, Blu-rays, and digital, and zines were homemade publications and the precursors to blogs).

Vincent spoke passionately about film—about wanting to be a director. Before meeting him, I’d never heard anyone say they wanted to make movies. Nowadays, you can throw a rock and hit a film school kid. But back then? If they were talking about it anywhere, it wasn’t in the central Jersey burbs. For Vincent, it was religion. I thought I was way into movies, but Vinny was into film and would teach me the subtle distinctions between the two (Vincent was a film snob long before there was an Internet). He’d teach me about aspect ratios, which were a new concept to a fullscreen VHS culture. I used to complain about the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen cutting off half the picture until Vinny explained cropping and scope to me. Every week, we’d pore over the lone copy of The Village Voice Quick Stop carried, marveling at the cool cinematic shit happening merely a bridge or tunnel away.

When you live in the suburbs, the idea of driving more than twenty minutes to a movie theater is ludicrous. In Monmouth County, I had three cinematic options: the Atlantic Highlands Twin Cinemas, the Movies at Middletown, and, later, the Hazlet Multiplex. Each theater showed a steady diet of studio-produced fare—the mainstream blockbusters. In the Middletown theater alone, I saw Return of the Jedi, Back to the Future, Top Gun, and Batman. Whenever Vincent and I would read the Voice, we’d see ads and showtimes for films that were never coming to our local theaters or video stores.

There was a flick called The Dark Backward that caught our attention. It sounded so different and indie, featuring a cast we could trust: Judd Nelson, Bill Paxton, Lara Flynn Boyle—all of whom were going to be at a midnight screening of the flick, along with director Adam Rifkin, in an NYC movie theater called the Angelika, the indie film shrine on Houston and Mercer. For two movie lovers at the ass end of the motion picture universe, even the notion of hearing the director speak and seeing famous people wasn’t enough to inspire action. Drive to Manhattan?! At night, when all the crime happens? To see a movie? We were like rabbits, the species that never travels beyond five miles from the spot it was born.

The Pig Newtons, however, changed all that.

In The Dark Backward, the characters nosh not on Fig Newtons, but instead pound Pig Newtons. And according to the bomb-burst graphic on the full-page ad for that midnight screening, the director and cast were going to distribute an actual prop from the movie to every ticket holder: a free pack of Pig Newtons!

You’ll meet no end of skinny busybodies in your life who’ll tell you that if you wanna improve yourself, you’ll put down the snacks. Ironically, it was the mere promise of a processed nonfood that would change the vector of my eventual fate. In that way, this fat man’s life was shaped by junk food. So was this fat man’s ass. And his gut, too. Also: his child-bearing hips and thunder thighs.

It was Friday night as we both stared at that sirenlike ad, the promise of props and the allure of indie glamour in the temple of film rewiring our programming. We mused about going to the screening as if it were a shuttle to Mars: “Imagine if . . .”

By Saturday night, we’d talked ourselves into it. The store closed at ten thirty; we called for directions, looked at a map, and did something nobody we knew or had even heard about had ever done before: We drove fifty miles into the city to see a film.

To me, the Angelika Film Center is what Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto or the Forum in Montreal were to Canadian hockey fans of old: a magical structure where the impossible happened every night. The indie-est of indie flicks, serious cinema, could be found at the Film Forum, but the Angelika was something new and wonderful: an indie film multiplex, boasting five screens featuring the most high-profile indie flicks of the moment. We boys from the burbs got over the sticker shock of a twenty-dollar parking charge the moment we ascended the steps, proudly purchased our Dark Backward tickets like we were getting away with something, and stepped inside the ground zero of a burgeoning indie resurgence, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since John Cassavetes picked up a camera. They didn’t have a snack bar in the lobby; they had a coffee bar in the café. For the first and only time in my life, I ate a scone at the cinema. I was so drunk with culture that night, I didn’t even care that I don’t like scones.

The theaters at the Angelika are subterranean, so periodically while you’re watching a flick, you hear the subways rumble by beside you somewhere deep in the earth’s guts. It only added to the atmosphere, reminding Vincent and me that we weren’t in Kansas anymore. Shit, we weren’t even in Oz. This was the Village. This was New York City. This was indie film.

And the trailers before the feature were indie as fuck. There was no familiar voice-over—no narration starting with “In a world . . .” Indie trailers were a series of images or dialogue pulls, critical quotes hailing the picture, and huge title cards. The lack of identifiable studios like Warner Bros. or Universal at the heads of the trailers made the movies seem more important somehow—like someone had figured out how to make a movie without the usual suspects and gatekeepers.

The first trailer was for Hal Hartley’s Trust. It was weird and wonderful, and all the characters spoke like they were in a play, not a film. The second trailer was for Richard Linklater’s Slacker—a flick that seemed to not be about anything or anybody in particular. An art film. I nudged Vincent and nodded at the screen to indicate my interest as the Slacker trailer came to a close. I didn’t wanna speak out loud; after all, we were in a church of sorts.

The Dark Backward unspooled, and while I dug it, it would not be the film that made me want to be a filmmaker. For starters, it had famous people in it. I didn’t know any famous people, so I didn’t walk away feeling empowered. I did, however, walk away with Pig Newtons—which were actually just Fig Newtons with a prop sticker on them. But that powerful, faux-snack talisman had worked its magic: Vinny and I had busted our indie film cherries with The Dark Backward.

All week long, I had to explain to my friends and family why I’d gone to New York to see a movie, then argue it clearly was possible to visit the city at night and return un-mugged. When he came in to mop the floors and stock the shelves, Vinny and I would plot our next move. We couldn’t go back to our local multiplexes just yet. Stay down on the farm once we’d seen the Angelika? Impossible. The minute you start getting blow jobs, handys seem kinda dopey. The minute you discover a vibrator, your tolerance for getting clumsily fingered disappears.

So on Friday, August 2, 1991—the evening of my twenty-first birthday—Vincent and I closed up Quick Stop, took the Garden State Parkway North to the New Jersey Turnpike North, got off at the Holland Tunnel exit, went up to Houston and hung a right, and parked the car. One Kevin Smith stepped out of the vehicle and headed into the Angelika Film Center, but two hours later, a very different Kevin Smith would emerge. It was like taking the blue pill in The Matrix.

Richard Linklater’s Slacker was the movie that would change my life. This shaggy paean to those who follow the road not taken offered me a glimpse into a free-associative world of ideas instead of plot, people instead of characters, and Nowheresville, Texas, instead of the usual California or New York settings most movies elected to feature. That Nowheresville was actually Austin speaks volumes on how culturally bereft and state-capital ignorant I was at the time. That night, Richard Linklater and his film not only captured my imagination, they kick-started my ambition. The simplicity of the story and filmmaking, the unpolished cast, the nontraditional storytelling—it was like cumming with someone else for the first time: Suddenly, you never wanted to cum by yourself again; figuratively speaking, this movie was teaching me how to fuck.

By the time we hit the turnpike tollbooth on the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel, I finally said it aloud. “I want to be a filmmaker.” I’d say that for a few weeks until my sister, Virginia, gave me awesome advice.

“Then be a filmmaker.”

“That’s the idea,” I said. “I want to be a filmmaker.”

“You don’t have to want to be a filmmaker, just be a filmmaker,” Virginia said. “Every thought you have, think it as a filmmaker. You’re already a filmmaker; you just haven’t made a film yet.”

It sounded artsy-fartsy as fuck, not to mention easier said than done, but it turned out to be million-dollar advice. A slacker hit the sheets that night, but the Clerks guy got out of bed the following morning, ready to do the impossible. Most of the supposedly challenging stuff in life usually isn’t as difficult to pull off as some folks would have you think. Believing in yourself and becoming a filmmaker is easy; only pull-ups are hard.

There’s a trick to being whatever you want to be in life. It starts with the simple belief that you are what or who you say you are. It starts, like all faiths, with a belief—a belief predicated more on whimsy than reality. And you’ve gotta believe for everybody else, too—until you can show them proof. If you’re lucky, someone starts believing with you—first theoretically, then in practice. And two people believing are the start of a congregation. You build a congregation of believers and eventually set out to craft a cathedral. Sometimes it’s just a church; sometimes it turns out to be a chapel. Folks who don’t build churches will try to tell you how you’re doing it wrong, even as your steeple breaks the clouds. Never listen.

But before all of that, you gotta start with the idea. And I don’t mean the idea for the story/movie/novel/installation/song/podcast/whatever. You gotta start with the idea that you can do this—something that’s not normally done by everybody else. Since it’s not second nature to take leaps of faith, you have to motivate yourself. You’ve gotta embrace a reasonable amount of unreasonability, because what you’re saying is, “I’m gonna try this thing that very few people attempt, let alone succeed in doing.”

But nobody else can believe in you if you don’t believe in what you’re doing. I’ve willed almost all the stuff I’ve done into existence, and if I can do that, anybody can do that. So start your chatter: Talk about what you’re going to do.

Plant the seeds early and take as much time as it requires to will your goals into existence. Don’t wait for God or Zeus to move you around the chessboard. God is busy and Zeus is doing movies now, so take control of the game yourself. Expect moments of discouragement; just don’t wallow in them. When shit gets tough (and it will), simply tell yourself, “If an ass-hat like fat Kev Smith can succeed, then what the fuck is stopping me from doing the same?”

The only guy I ever heard of who got an amazing life literally handed to him was Hal Jordan. Don’t wait for a dying alien to give you a magic ring; just do it yourself, Slappy. We can’t all be Superman, but we sure as shit can train hard, and with loads of practice, we can be Batman.

And who the fuck doesn’t wanna be Batman? Batman has an impeccable moral compass, he’s clever and mysterious, and when fucktards get sassy, he punches them in the face.

CHAPTER THREE

_________________________

The Shit I Made

Science tells us our dreams never last more than a few minutes. No matter how involved the plot may feel, we screen multiple five-minute minimovies in our cranial cinema every night. It’s gotta be the same for the American Dream as well. While it’s always thought to be about working hard, owning a house, getting married, and having kids, I think even that dream is subject to the same laws of nocturnal whimsy: The American Dream changes constantly and varies from person to person.

My American Dream has always been simple, and it’s one I encourage you to adopt as your own: Figure out what you love to do, then figure out how to get paid to do it. Film would become that for me—a passion I got paid to pursue—but the theory can be applied to almost anything: If you like dogs, monetize your canine interest with a dog-walking or washing business. If you like jerking off, sell your sperm or wank for porn.

’Slike folks who start movie Web sites: They just love movies. Not sure what their endgame’s gonna be, but writing about movies and hosting trailers is a start, right? For some, the endgame will be to make a film. For others, just having people read what they have to say about a subject they love is good enough. Regardless, the smart ones will always find a way to earn off it. Because once you’ve got a taste for working for yourself, doing what you love doing? You’ll work ten times harder than any bricklayer or paralegal, but you’ll never feel it and never recognize it.

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.