Clerks

On his 21st birthday Kevin Smith saw Richard Linklater's Slacker and decided he could make a movie too, in the place he lived. He lasted four months at Vancouver Film School, then quit halfway to save the tuition for a film and went back to his old job at the Quick Stop convenience store in Leonardo, New Jersey. He set the movie there, borrowing the day-in-the-life structure from Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. The budget came from selling most of his comic book collection, $3,000 from his parents, flood insurance money, his paychecks, and a stack of credit cards run to their $2,000 limits: $27,575 in all. Dante was Smith himself, Randal was his friend Bryan Johnson, and Jay was Jason Mewes playing Jason Mewes. Smith wrote Randal for himself, found he could not direct, write, run the store and remember his lines at once, handed the part to Jeff Anderson and took the less demanding role of Silent Bob.

He shot in 16mm black and white over 21 days, and because the store only let him film while it was closed, from 10:30 at night to 5:30 in the morning, the shutters had to stay down. That is why someone jams gum in the padlocks and Dante hangs a bedsheet reading "I ASSURE YOU; WE'RE OPEN!" Smith worked the counter by day and shot by night on about an hour of sleep. His original ending had Dante shot dead by a robber; after the first screening John Pierson talked him into cutting it, and Smith has admitted he simply "didn't know how to end a film."

Clerks played to an empty theater on the closing day of the 1993 Independent Feature Film Market in New York, where producer Bob Hawk found it and steered it to Sundance in January 1994. It shared the Filmmakers Trophy there and Miramax bought it; Harvey Weinstein invited Smith to his table at a restaurant after the screening. The MPAA then rated it NC-17 purely for its dialogue, a commercial death sentence, so Miramax hired Alan Dershowitz for the appeal, though a studio lawyer ended up arguing it, and the board relented with an R and no cuts. It opened in October 1994 and grossed more than $3 million in the United States without ever playing wide, $4.4 million worldwide. Miramax spent $230,000 more on music licensing and editing than Smith had spent on the whole film.

It made Jay and Silent Bob a franchise and launched the View Askewniverse of Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma. The tenth-anniversary Clerks X set in 2004 restored the lost ending and animated the never-filmed wake scene; the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2019; and Dante and Randal came back in Clerks II (2006) and Clerks III (2022).