Clerks.
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Template:Infobox Movie Clerks. is a 1994 film written and directed by Kevin Smith and starring Brian O'Halloran as Dante Hicks and Jeff Anderson as Randal Graves. It presents a day in the lives of two shop clerks and their acquaintances.
Clerks. was Smith's first film, and introduces several characters, notably Jay and Silent Bob, who reappear in his later films. The film is in black-and-white and roughly edited due to a budget of less than $30,000; it became a surprising success after it was taken by Miramax Films and polished with additions to the soundtrack.
The MPAA originally gave Clerks an NC-17 rating, based purely on the film's explicit dialogue — it contains no real violence, and no clearly depicted nudity. This was a financial death sentence, as very few cinemas in the United States will screen NC-17 movies. Miramax hired civil-liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz to appeal the decision; the MPAA relented and re-rated the film with the more commercial 'R' rating, without altering any frame or word.
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Related projects
There was also a short-lived six-episode animated series of the same name, featuring the same characters and actors. The series introduced a new villain, Leonardo Leonardo, named after Leonardo, New Jersey, the town in which the movie and show take place. Leonardo was voiced by Alec Baldwin.
The show differed from the movie in many ways, due to the additional freedom animation provides contrasted with the language and content restrictions that broadcast TV demands. For example, the characters of Jay and Silent Bob were changed from drug dealers to firecracker dealers. Only two episodes were aired on ABC before the series was cancelled. Several factors contributed to the cancellation, including low ratings, the show's not fitting in with ABC's other programming, and ABC's decision to air the shows out of order (airing the second episode first, despite the fact that the second episode is the 'flashback' episode, and derives much of its humor from the fact that it flashes back almost exclusively to the first, unaired episode). In fact, the second episode aired without the scene from "Flintstone's List", the fictional RST Video rental that spoofed Schindler's List. All six episodes were later released on DVD, marking one of the first occasions in which a short-lived TV series found success in this format; since the release of the Clerks series, a number of limited-run series, such as The Tick, Freaks and Geeks, and My Big Fat Greek Life have been released to DVD. The full series also aired on Comedy Central.
The film has also been the basis for several graphic novels written by Kevin Smith.
Sequel
Smith has announced that a sequel to Clerks will be filmed and released in 2005. Although the credits for Dogma stated "Jay and Silent Bob will return in Clerks 2: Hardly Clerkin'", the sequel's working title is Clerks 2: The Passion of the Clerks. It will be set ten years after the story of the first film and will show how the characters are still stuck in the same rut, though now wanting to move on.
The sequel is in addition to a planned Clerks animated film.
The characters of Dante and Randal also appeared in a 2001 short film written and directed by Smith entitled "The Flying Car" which was produced for The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno, which can be found on the 10th Anniversary Clerks. X DVD.
Trivia
The videocassette version of this movie holds the distinction of being the most stolen from American rental shops.
The original ending for the film can be found on the DVD release. This ending continues from the original where Randal throws Dante's jacket to him. After Randal leaves, Dante proceeds to lock up the store. He notices that someone else has entered. This person then proceeds to shoot Dante, killing him, and stealing the money from the cash register. The sequence ends with Dante's dead face facing the camera.
External links
- 1998 Interview with O'Halloran (http://www.viewaskew.com/interviews/briano.html)
- Thoughts on "C2" (the sequel) from Kevin Smith (http://viewaskew.com/theboard/viewtopic.php?t=14125)
- Production company's Clerks website (http://www.viewaskew.com/clerks/index.html)
- CNN article about sequel (http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movies/08/30/clerks.sequel.ap/index.html)
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