Movie ‘Clerks’ Moves to TV, but Keeps Its New Jersey Attitude

It’s a rainy day, so Kevin Smith is doing a little decorating at View Askew, his company headquarters. “A little this way. No, maybe that way,” an assistant says to Smith, who is trying to get just the right angle on a huge framed poster for the French version of “Dogma,” his most recent movie.

Smith grunts, and moves it into place.

“Great. Looks great,” says the assistant.

That will make it about the 95th large framed poster covering the walls at View Askew, a warren of cluttered rooms just down the hall from a small brokerage and looming above a mundane parking lot on the second floor of a mini office plaza. The boxy building screams, “central Jersey,” and that’s just how Smith likes it.

“New Jersey is where the movie business started, so I don’t feel like much of a pioneer. Had we been a fair-weather state, it would all still be right here,” says Smith. Then breaking into a chuckle, he adds, “Can you imagine--a vast and empty New Jersey--just like L.A? What a stretch.”

Smith spent a couple of months in California this winter and came back with a vast and empty feeling. ABC had bought his idea for an animated version of his first cult-hit movie, “Clerks.” It seemed a rather daring shot at the time.

“Clerks,” made for some $30,000, was the highest-grossing movie of 1994 on a percentage basis. It was the saga of the travails of a slacker-esque convenience-store worker and his video-store clerk buddy in the working-class Leonardo section of Middletown, a sprawling central Jersey suburb. Its profane and frank dialogue--though it had no nudity or violence--attracted a large following among the young and the hip, but hardly seemed the stuff of network television. All seemed marvelous at first.

Smith says Disney chief executive Michael Eisner himself green-lighted the project. “Clerks” even got a commercial spot on ABC’s Super Bowl--which meant, essentially, that ABC had given up the several-hundred-thousand dollars of ad money it could have sold.

David Mandel, coming off an executive-producing stint on “Seinfeld,” joined the staff.

They made six episodes and waited for their slot. And waited.

“So one day Scott [Mosier, Smith’s longtime film collaborator] calls and says there’s a story in Variety about the ABC spring schedule and we’re not on it,” says Smith, now ensconced in his incredibly cluttered office behind one of the berry-colored iMACs that dot View Askew.

“Mandel went ballistic. ‘Me? I don’t know,’ ” says Smith, shrugging his lumpy shoulders. “I guess I just don’t understand network executives.”

“Clerks” will finally get its run starting Wednesday, at 9:30 p.m. after a “Drew Carey” repeat. The promise is that all six episodes will run consecutively. The reality is that “Clerks” has gone from Super Bowl promo to almost certain death.

“People at ABC said to me, ‘This is May. This is good,’ ” said Mandel by phone during a trip to New York. “But this is really June. May 31st is like saying the thing costs $1.99. It’s really $2 and this is June and this is the summer. I know ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Millionaire’ started in the summer, but that’s a rationalization. Someone changed their minds and I think it’s sad.”

An ABC spokeswoman said merely that the network was promoting “Clerks” and liked the series or it wouldn’t go on the air at all. If there is any solace for Smith and Mandel, it’s that all the other series ABC did start in the spring have died.

Movie’s Irreverence

Heightened for Series

“Clerks,” the animated TV series, is actually a bit more irreverent than the film. Throughout the episodes, there are equal-opportunity put-downs of women, lawyers, uppity black people, low-thinking white people and even George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

There is some sly insertion of the gutter language typical of Smith’s films--one character has “chronic nocturnal emissions” and another reference to “Uranus” is clearly not to the planet.

“But somehow they didn’t let us use ‘bong,’ ” says Smith. “I can’t believe that that hasn’t been mentioned sometime in, say, ‘Dharma & Greg.’ ”

There is also a disclaimer at the beginning of each episode, labeling the work as fiction. “They’re just being careful, I guess,” says Smith, eyebrow raised ever so slightly.

Smith and Mandel, in homage to “The Simpsons,” convinced a slew of celebrities to voice some “Clerks” characters. Gwyneth Paltrow is herself, as are basketball stars Charles Barkley, Grant Hill and Reggie Miller. Judge Reinhold is a judge named Judge Reinhold. Alec Baldwin is a mean rich guy named Leonardo Leonardo (“Our own Mr. Burns,” says Smith, referring to Homer Simpson’s wretched boss).

And the main characters from “Clerks,” the movie, are back as voices in the cartoon. Brian O’Halloran is Dante Hicks, the Quick Stop’s loyal clerk. Jeff Anderson reprises his role as Randal, the noodle-brained clerk at RST Video next door. Periodically coming in are Jay and Silent Bob, played in both the movie and voiced in the cartoon by, respectively, Smith’s good buddy Jason Mewes and Smith himself.

“We’re back, yes, we’re all back,” says Smith, wrapped in a hooded sweatshirt and full beard, as Silent Bob is much of the time. Smith says that all of the original “Clerks” folk are working, to different degrees, in independent film--Anderson on the West Coast and Mewes, O’Halloran and himself back in New Jersey.

He’ll Stay Put

in Jersey, Thank You

New Jersey is where Smith intends to stay too. In downtown Red Bank, about a mile from the office, is his beloved Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, the comic and memorabilia store he owns with Mewes.

There, in the store between Mamma Lucia’s Ristorante and the Duxiana bedding store, you can buy vintage Justice League of America comics, old Batman paraphernalia, a statuette of Underdog or even a $10.95 copy of “Clerks, the Comic Book,” the inspiration for the TV series, written by Smith and illustrated by Jim Mahfood. Smith’s next film, which he is writing now, will be the final one in his current Jersey series, though.

“Clerks,” “Mall Rats” “Chasing Amy” and “Dogma” explore Smith’s New Jersey roots and, to an extent, his existential take on Catholicism too. And New Jersey is a distinct character in the animated “Clerks.” The Quick Stop is in Leonardo, just as in the movie, and there are Jersey-centric references to places like Asbury Park and certain malls and ball teams.

“But, really, it’s just my mind-set, a Jersey mind-set, that pervades the shows,” he says.

Sitting across from Smith’s desk are three outsized plastic chairs that have Mickey Mouse legs and bodies, and in one case mouse ears. He isn’t yet thinking of removing them after his less-than-hoped-for relationship with ABC. “If you are in New Jersey,” says Smith, “you always have to keep your sense of irony.”