NBC surprised everyone when it canceled “Earl.” How did you feel about it?

I definitely miss Earl and working on the show. It was a shame the way they canceled it. We didn’t get to finish the series. I was devastated; we were all confused. But I guess life goes on and now here I am working on something entirely different.

Do you guys still get to see each other every once in a while?

Yeah, I see Ethan [Suplee] quite a bit. He was a friend of mind sort of from “Mall Rats” basically. And so we got to work on “Earl”–came full circle, just about 15 years later.

Well its good to have you back.

Oh, thank you, thank you.

And “Memphis” couldn’t be more different really.

No, I mean, as an actor you look forward to that, I guess. It’s like you don’t always expect what’s coming and interesting things really come your way and kind of surprise you.

It’s a fascinating read, which not only includes links to all of the work, but some inside details and memories from the projects that we’d never heard before. Here’s a sample:

…Mr. Smith had seen this and asked if we could make a version for Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez as a wrap party present for the film Jersey Girl. We wrote a proposal, which Kevin then took and added a bunch of gags and inside jokes and developed the script. We also sent ideas for a Dogma game and a game based off of the Clerks animated series. We had 8 weeks till the wrap of the film, where Kevin wanted to give the arcade machine to them.

We worked most of the hours of those 8 weeks. We were still programming the game when we drove it straight from Austin to New York City in a U-haul attached to Brad’s jeep. We took turns working, sleeping, and driving in shifts. We presented the arcade machine on the last night of shooting, with paparazzi everywhere ruining multiple takes of the final scene. We installed the machine in the couples’ apartment. That part is pretty hazy, I personally only remember that the refrigerator was 100% full of diet-caffeine-free cokes, and showing a bodyguard how to play Frogger on the machine.

Kevin Smith: (laughs) Roger Ebert is in rare form with how he keeps re-tweeting his Cop Out review. I was thinking if Roger was trying to send me a message. But he’s liked enough of my stuff in the past. He liked Jersey Girl, but I know he didn’t like Mallrats and Clerks II. He also said something great about Chasing Amy saying how he regretted not putting it in his top ten. Roger has always been so fucking fair. Even though people kept pointing out he keeps re-tweeting that Cop Out review and saying, “isn’t that suspicious?” Obviously I’m not retarded, it’s very suspicious. But he’s a guy who’s been nice to me throughout my career in particular when I really needed it. I wasn’t going to start yelling, “he did what? I fucking guested on his show!” I mean I’ve been saying a lot lately and it’s dawning on me, but I’m almost 40. Getting mad at Roger Ebert is just not in the cards for me. He’s an icon and I like the dude. He didn’t like it? That’s fine, he liked something else I did. It’s not like I don’t get it. I used to be very contentious… Shit, used to be? A few weeks ago I took on a huge corporation (laughs). That was a real thing, but getting mad about an opinion isn’t my thing. Maybe they’ll like the next one. For Cop Out, it’s a different world. A bad review for Cop Out isn’t going to fucking kill the movie. Most people going in are thinking, “we know it’s stupid, who cares?”

Read it all over at DVD Talk.

We’re talking about Dogma, the 1999 comedy in which Smith pits a pair of exiled angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) against a ragtag group that includes a Greek muse turned stripper (Salma Hayek), the heretofore unknown 13th apostle (Chris Rock), Jesus Christ’s last surviving relative (Linda Fiorentino), and a pair of unwitting prophets (Jason Mewes and Smith as, of course, Jay and Silent Bob) — all while God (played by Alanis Morissette, natch) lies trapped in the comatose body of a homeless man (s)He was using to play skee ball. Not for the easily offended, obviously — but despite what Dogma’s detractors may have thought, Smith didn’t go for cheap gags, instead using humor to leaven a thoughtful look at what we believe, and why. “Make no mistake,” cautioned TV Guide’s Maitland McDonagh, “Kevin Smith’s talky, farcical comedy of cosmic errors is clever. But it’s clever in a deeply juvenile way.”

#16: Clerks (1994)

The ’90s Film: At the time, Kevin Smith’s comedy was a defining document of no-budget slacker filmmaking, with its slapshod camerawork, shaggy-dog dialogue and on-the-pulse video store setting.

Nowadays, apart from still being hilarious, it’s a period piece. The technical ability bar has been raised for budding auteurs, and – as Clerks 2 confirmed – nobody rents anymore.

If They Have To Remake It: It should be topical. Let’s set it in the vast warehouses of Lovefilm.com, with Dante and Randall bitching and moaning all day long as they traipse to the stockroom to post yet another boxset of The Hills.

In some ways “Mae Day” is a sort of proto-Lost in La Mancha. Incidental footage and anything else available is used to create a film that would have at least some sort of measured success. “Mae Day” does a decent enough job at this, though its 10-minute length means that there isn’t much depth given and, well, student films fall through all the time. That part of the story isn’t particularly interesting, and it seems like the original idea would’ve been a much better way of using everyone’s time. In this way it’s a decent bailout video for the students’ grades, but not much more.


Now, what I really like about the short is that while half of it is about this failed documentary, half of it is Smith and Mosier making fun of their classmates, the school’s faculty and documentary form in general. The pair finds what they’re putting together utterly ridiculous and they’re not afraid to say this, albeit in a highly ironic fashion. Keeping themselves in silhouette as if they’re informants is done to parody bad TV documentaries of the time, as are their overly dramatic pronouncements about what they’d done. Smith in fact wrote all of their interview dialogue beforehand in order to maximize the film’s ridiculousness.

One episode down, Smith developed an unnatural emotional connection to Snooki, who on her first night in the house stripped down to her bra and thong, got in the hot tub with all four male housemates and tried to make out with each of them. Smith figured that he would have hooked up with Snooki and then tried to save her. “I’d date Snooki, and she’d cheat on me repeatedly. ‘Snooki, I’m trying to help.’ ‘I don’t need your help, you fat canker-blossom!’ ” I have no doubt that by now Smith has called his agent about meeting Snooki.

Time’s got the full article. — Be sure to click over.

Cop Out (Feb. 26) Kevin Smith directs Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan as the po-po, in what we’re hoping will be the funniest cop film since Bad Boys (the original, not Bad Boys 2). Our prediction: When it comes to buddy cops, Tracy Morgan is the next Eddie Murphy and/or Will Smith!

The Director: Kevin Smith
Age: 22
How Did They Get Their Break
Smith?s first film, Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary, was shot with co-director Scott Mosier while the pair were at the Vancouver Film School.

The latter dubbed it ?the greatest documentary that never was?. It followed the duo?s failed attempt to made a documentary about the titular Mae Day, who was going through a sex change.

Just two years later, Smith made Clerks.

Via @wadew22 “Who plays the villian in COP OUT?” A guy I’ve wanted to work with for a long time now: http://tinyurl.com/iloveguillermodiaz

Via @JeepersMedia “Is there ANY Old Movie that you could Remake Better?” DOGMA. I’d make minor cast changes and move the camera a lot more.

Via @codyunderblood “Austin Q&A: Still a chance we’ll get live SMOD to close the show?” If it sells out, yes: http://tinyurl.com/kevaustin

Via @thebdizzle “widening gyre kicking ass.” Thanks! I love it, too. Ish 4 ships this week (or next) & Walt’s almost half done w/ ish 5 art.

Via @TJdaSportsGuy “Ever consider getting a show on XM/Sirius?” If they can set it up so I can do it all from my office every morning? In.

As always, hit up the Twitter feed directly for all the lurid details, but strap in — And hide the kiddies!

“December right now is wide open, and that’s when I’m going to sit down and start writing and I’ve got pages and pages of notes, I already wrote the last 10 pages of the script which is weird, I went to the end and started, but it’s ready … it’s just fucking poised to go,” Smith told us in September.

Smith was upfront with the financial uncertainty that would come with bringing “The Hockey Song” to the big screen.

“I don’t know if anybody’s going to want to do the hockey movie, because name one hockey movie that people made money off of in its theatrical release; it’s tough,” he said. “Look, the sport doesn’t have a massive following, how the fuck is a film about the sport also going to have a massive following? So, you go in with tailored expectations, you know you’re kind of dealing to a very specific audience, dealing with a specific audience, so you know, we’ll probably make it on the inexpensive side, I can’t imagine spending more than $25 million on a movie like that.”

However, Smith is convinced of the power of his project. “When all is said and done, when that movie’s done, I guarantee you it’s gonna impact, it’s gonna hit people, even if you don’t like hockey it’s gonna hit you in a very personal place,” he said. “The movie I see in my head, and more than that the movie I feel in my heart, oh God, it’s gonna be good.”

We’re betting Kevin’s going to be surprised to find cast lining up for “Hit Somebody” — Going out on a limb here to predict the biggest and best ensemble yet.

“I don’t know if there’ll be any more movies. I did two with Kevin Smith, Dogma in ‘99 and Jersey Girl in ‘04, where he wrote me a great part as Ben Affleck’s dad. I like working with Kevin: there’s alot of great counterpunching and the catholic thing is a strong bond. Acting is fun to do, a worthy fraternity and a great tradition to have had a tiny speck of a part of.”

Very brief, but you definitely get the impression that Carlin enjoyed his time in front of the camera while working with Kevin. Great book also, well worth checking out if you’d like some new winter reading material.

“…After Zack & Miri I was like ‘oh my god, Zack & Miri didn’t do well’. And then I thought it was a mid-life crisis. But then a mid-life crisis is generally for people who have not achieved their hopes and dreams.

I was so young and my life was in front of me and what am I doing wasting my time. I had goal and I achieved it when I was like 23. And all of a sudden people were like okay, in order to keep yourself entertained, create new fucking goals, dude! And I didn’t create big ones for myself. I know me, I create little challenges! I want to step over things, I don’t want to climb mountains!

So I set myself little challenges, and I accomplished them, and felt very accomplished and whatnot. But then you get to that point, man, where it’s just like I’ve been doing it a bunch, it’s now what I do for a living, so I can’t just walk away from it. Particularly because I enjoy it. I enjoy doing it for a living and the lifestyle it affords. I like that my job is to make pretend, and somebody pays me. And I’m like I can’t give that up, that’s awesome.

But the mid-life thing for me, it was like everything I ever wanted came true. So I feel like it wasn’t mid-life, maybe it is what Stephen Fry is talking about, where it’s like wow, it’s been 15-16 years straight of a really successful run. And I’m not ambitious enough. It’s not like I’ve done it all. I’m not Alexander, and I’ve reached the end of the world and there’s nothing left to conquer. But, I mean, for me, I’m just I can’t retread the same territory anymore, because number one, I can’t do it, and number two, it’s just like leave it alone, it speaks for itself.

So I reach a point now where it’s like well, now I’ve got to find a different thing that fuels me as an artist, or something I want to express without expressing it the way I’ve expressed it through my characters for all these years.

Thing was with Clerks, that was a way in, that was a way to start a conversation with the world at large. It wasn’t so much a film as an ice breaker. It was like ‘hi, I’m Kevin Smith and I would like to talk to you for the next 30 years, 40 years. However long you want to speak to me’ or something like that.

Now with the SModcast, with the Q&As, with Twitter, any number of other things, I could exercise and I can reach out and touch and get instant gratification. I can throw out something funny, ‘hey, that’s funny’, ‘thank you very much’. Everything really kind of on a much quicker basis. Compact. You don’t have to spend a year and a half of your life building it and constructing it.

Because that’s what the movies are. You get an idea and then it takes a year and a half to hear a response when all’s said and done. With SModcast, we put it up that night, we hear from people that’s funny, thumbs up, and there it is. So I can do those things or talk about weird things that I would use to fuse into the flicks in any of those formats, and I’m like ‘alright, let me figure out what I want to do with film for the next few years’.

I know it ain’t going to be what I do for the rest of my life, because apparently View Askew wasn’t what I was going to do for the rest of my life. So I figure if that’s one chapter, maybe this is chapter two, or maybe it’s the end of the book. Who knows what’s in the cards?

But I feel like I’m closing View Askew for the time being, and now I’m opening a new book and I’ll see for a while if I can be this filmmaker where I don’t write everything that I direct, or create everything that I direct.

Like in the case of the hockey movie [that Smith is currently working on], Hit Somebody. It’s based on a Warren Zevon song that Mitch Albom wrote the lyrics for. So in that instance, that’s almost in my world that Story By credit goes to somebody else, and I would get Screenplay credit. That’s where the passion is. The story or that character is something I identity with, and I can infuse it with my own experience. It’s not strictly my story. But essentially it is. “

If you haven’t kept up with Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier’s podcast (or SModcast as they call it) you either have weeks worth of audio to catch up with on iTunes or you need to pick up the above book: Shootin’ the Shit With Kevin Smith: The Best of SModcast. Love him or hate him, the dude is a funny motherfucker when talking off the cuff.

Pick up signed copies of the book through the Stash — Might we suggest taking advantage of today’s newly announced coupons to make the deal even better?