"An Evening With Kevin Smith"

I gave "An Evening With Kevin Smith" a second chance, and what a difference an evening makes. I must have have misplaced a corn cob on Tuesday night. On Thursday evening, I saw Disc One: I saw Disc Two on Sunday night.

Unlike Kyle, and the younger generation, I am unfamiliar with Smith's movies, and so I look at them with kind of a jaundiced perspective. (Although now I want to see "Mall Rats" - I've often thought of the shopping mall as a special world altogether on its own, and it would be fun to see Smith's take on that hothouse environment.)

I have an initial strong, negative reaction to Kevin Smith, and I think a lot of that is class-driven. Kevin Smith looks like, and indeed apparently was just like, one of the suburban army of aimless, low-achieving slacker dudes whose milieu he portrays so well. It doesn't help that, at the start of Disc One, Smith himself is slightly-defensive in front of the audience, and acts to alienate himself from the adoring crowd with somewhat complacent, even snobbish insults. I've largely tried to separate myself from that milieu all my life (with exceptions, like the first half of 2005, when I spent so much time hanging around the AM/PM at 21st & Broadway that my nickname there became "The Perv With The Dog").

But then, as the evening progresses, a second Kevin Smith emerges, the engaged, absorbing storyteller, and the stories he tells are hysterical. Like how he ended up on the evening news, protesting the screening of his own movie, "Dogma."

Plus, one meets interesting people moviemaking in Hollywood. Regarding Director Tim Burton's reaction to Smith's suggestion that Burton stole a scene for "Planet of the Apes" from one of Smith's own comics, Smith describes Burton's reaction as related in a newspaper article:

He said "Anybody who knows me knows I would never read a comic book." Which to me, explains Batman. (much knowing laughter) "And I certainly would never read anything written by Kevin Smith." Whoa! The... the claws came out. The... the fucking scissorhands came out!

Then, Smith somehow got the job to write the screenplay for a Superman remake:

Back in '96 and '97, when I was commissioned by Warner Brothers to write a script for a new Superman movie. And how it came about *I* think was that somewhat saw Mallrats and watched Brodie and T.S. talking about the Kryptonite condom and someone thought 'This guy seems to know a lot about Superman.'

And his meetings with Producer Jon Peters, and how Peters had referred to himself and Smith as having much in common, because they were both "from the streets" - a claim that Smith knew was patently absurd all the way around. And how Peters, who was thinking about casting Sean Penn in the part, had just three requirements for Superman:

• he had to lose the red-and-blue uniform;
• he had to stop flying around; and,
• he had to fight a giant spider (plus polar bears at the Fortress of Solitude).

Smith thought Peters' absorption with aggressive animals showed that he had way too much access to the Discovery Channel. Very funny stories! And a stark illustration why producers have to kept away from screenwriting: their vanity and misplaced priorities ruin perfectly-good stories (and like Kyle says, explains why so much trash comes out of Hollywood).

Disc 2 is notable mostly for the tale Smith tells of spending a week filming an album-launch festival-of-sorts with Prince, the singer. Prince is both very religious, and quite eccentric, and no one is better than Smith describing the culture-shock between an everyman, and the man who was described as having lived "in Prince-world for quite some time now." Prince apparently is prone to launching into hours-long, upbeat, evangelical speeches that left Smith "gobsmacked," as the British would say. Nevertheless, as interesting as the week was for Prince fan Smith, Smith was never paid, or even thanked, for his efforts, so the whole episode was just another illustration of what power and fame can do to people.

(P.S.: Regarding "Clerks II", there was one part of the execrable donkey scene that made me giggle uncontrollably, and that was contemplating the absurd mobile-disco setup: the lights, the music, the fog, and the ridiculous mylar strips of the curtain, all solely dedicated to the purpose of creating a sense of fun and mystery......)