By Kevin Smith
Dear Diary,
There's this boy in class that I'm just dreamy over. He's got pretty blue eyes, brown hair, and a huge, monster cock that barely fits up my...
Shit. Wrong Diary. Lemme start over.
*Ahem*
Exclusively for you Poop-Shooters, starting today, I'm going to irregularly (read: the columns are gonna be late, folks; bet on it) chronicle the making of
View Askew's newest flick, JERSEY GIRL. I'm gonna sell you the inside dope in nickel bags and eight balls, and if there's any juicy, Page Six-worthy hot sex
on the set between you know who and you know who else, I'm gonna detail it for you, position by nasty position (naturally, I'm talking about me and my long-time producer, Scott Mosier; everyone wants to know if we're really fucking or not). That's my promise to you, dear reader - an honest, inside look at the spit and glue that makes up this picture. And why am I doing this?
Because I make up for being cursed with a small dick by having a really big
mouth.
So without further ado, let me give you a little skinny on the first few weeks of pre-production.
Week One
Before a flick goes into production, a new company is formed to protect the larger companies financing the picture (in this case, Miramax and View Askew) from lawsuits. In our highly litigious culture, that kind of protection is essential during the run of the show - because you never know when Affleck's
gonna accidentally blow someone's head off while practicing his skeet-shooting between takes.
CLERKS had no production company title other than View Askew, because a) we didn't know any better, and b) Affleck wasn't in that flick. But since other people have been giving us money, the formation of a new production company for every flick has been a standard ritual. For MALLRATS, it was Unstable Molecules; for CHASING AMY, it was Too Askew; for DOGMA, it was Plenary Indulgence; for
CLERKS: THE CARTOON, it was Toon Askew; and for JAY AND SILENT BOB, it was Askews Me.
This time around, we've dubbed the production company New Askew - a not-so-clever reference to the fact that JERSEY GIRL will be the first flick we make that's completely unrelated to the other flicks we've made prior to this one. That means no Julie Dwyer references, no Rick Derris references, no STAR WARS references, no JAWS references (okay - there is a JAWS reference in the new flick), and most of all, no Jay and Silent Bob. For some, that notion inspires collective cries of outrage; for others, collective sighs of relief. I, for the record, can be found somewhere between the two. It's tough to give up the ghost, especially when you love those characters as much as I do. But all good (or highly derivative) things must come to an end, so Jay and Bob go bye-bye, and New Askew steps up to the plate.
New Askew has set up shop in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia (the irony of a movie entitled JERSEY GIRL being based in Pennsylvania is not lost on us), and boy, does this town live up to the moniker. I've never encountered a nicer bunch of folks populating a major metropolitan area. Fuck, these Philadelphians make the legendarily polite Canadians look like Angelenos by comparison. While only here a few weeks, we all feel so welcome that the lone way we could feel any moreso would be if the city took down that old Rocky statue and put up a Jay and Silent Bob bronze monument in it's place.
Is that too much to ask, really? I mean, Rocky is so played-out at this point. Then again, so are Jay and Silent Bob.
However, lack of statue notwithstanding, we like Philly and her peeps thus far.
Shit, we'd better like it; because it wasn't easy getting to Philly. Miramax wanted us to shoot the new flick in Toronto, initially. And while Toronto is a lovely city, there's just nothing up there that remotely resembles the world we're trying to recreate, unless the world we were trying to recreate has a Tim Horton's Doughnuts on every corner, and a little Maple Leaf in all the logos on the 7-11 signs.
Oddly enough, Jersey itself wasn't really an option, based on how cost-prohibitive it would've been to shoot in Highlands (the shore town our new flick is largely set in). Highlands, unfortunately, falls outside the sixty mile radius of the "Zone" - a nebulous union parameter outside of which the show is forced to put up and pay per diem to every crew member who has to travel to set.
Ultimately, this adds to the budget, and we can't afford to spend the money there, as whatever green isn't being spent on the de riguer coke and whores has to be allocated for making Philly and the surrounding areas look more like New
Jersey.
By basing the production in Philly, we can take advantage of the wonderful crew base that's been growing here, courtesy of M. Night Multi-Syllabic-Last-Name (the SIXTH SENSE guy), who, apparently, refuses to shoot anywhere but the
Philadelphia area, and has made the Powers That Be enough bank to stand by the courage of his convictions. When a brother's never made a flick that's broken the thirty-million dollar glass ceiling, he doesn't get to stomp his feet and say "We're shooting the whole fucking movie in the real Highlands." Well, he can, but he'll wind up basing out of Philly anyway. Money talks, and motherfuckin' Silent Bob walks.
Another beneficial aspect of Philly over Toronto is that we can simply cross the
Ben Franklin bridge and actually shoot in the damn state the flick's named for. The nearby town of Paulsboro will be playing the role of Highlands for most of the show, when Highlands isn't able to play itself. For the purists (namely me), however, we've scheduled a few days of shooting in the real Highlands, as well as a few days in Manhattan - the city that also plays a crucial role in the flick.
But I'm not gonna lie: the biggest advantage to shooting in Philly is the Cheese Steaks. The whole fucking flick can go straight-to-video for all I care, so long as I get to chow down on Cheese Steaks for the next few months.
Speaking of straight-to-video, for those of you wondering "When the fuck are they gonna stop giving this Cheese Steak-eating motherfucker money to make his dopey stoner-flicks, when they can be giving me all that cash to cinematically realize some of my awesome BABYLON 5 fan-fic?", I'd like to lay out some box scores, so you can handicap the likelihood of JG ever being a good picture, a successful picture, both, or neither.
- Our start date (at press time) is August 19th.
- Our wrap date is slated to be November 1st.
- JERSEY GIRL is our sixth flick.
- It's our fourth flick with Laura Greenlee, our intrepid line producer (the real brains behind the operation).
- It's our fourth flick under the aegis of Miramax (CLERKS doesn't count, because - while they distributed it - we made that on our own steam).
- Unless we somehow piss of the Catholic League again, it'll be the fourth flick we've made that Miramax distributes (Miramax sold off theatrical distribution rights on DOGMA to Lion's Gate, and the now-defunct Gramercy put out MALLRATS).
- It's our fifth flick with Ben-wa Affleck.
- It's our third flick with George Carlin.
- It's our first with Jennifer Lopez, Liv Tyler, and Raquel Castro (the tyke who plays the Jersey girl in question).
- It's the first in which I won't be acting (if it can, indeed, be said that
I've ever really "acted", outside of making wide-eyes and shrugging on cue).
- And, it's our third flick with a new Director of Photography.
That last point bears some explaining. Since Miramax is ever on a quest to improve the look of my flicks, we've, yet again, been asked to secure a different D.P. I keep telling Miramax Big Kahuna Harvey Weinstein "It's not the shooters, man; it's the director. You want better looking flicks than what I've been giving you, you should hire a different director, not a different D.P.", but, alas, it's an argument that falls on deaf ears.
This pattern of the 'Max dictating our D.P.'s started back when we were told that the gent who shot our first three flicks, our boy-wonder D.P. Dave Klein, was not going to be allowed to shoot DOGMA. The bigger cast, Miramax argued, called for a bigger D.P. That time out, we landed Bob Yeoman, shooter of such flicks as DRUGSTORE COWBOY and RUSHMORE. When JAY AND SILENT BOB rolled around,
Miramax once again asked us to switch D.P.'s, which led us to Jamie Anderson
(THE GIFT, SMALL SOLDIERS), who most agree shot our best-looking movie. That's why it was kind of shocking (and stressing) when Miramax again told us to get a new D.P. for JG. We kicked and screamed for two months, but when you don't hold the purse, you don't hold all the cards.
To be fair (and to avoid the inevitable phone call from Harvey in which he says
"I'm pulling the plug on your bullshit movie, you gossipy fuck..."), lest they come off more poorly than they did when they opted to make KATE AND LEOPOLD (I think I hear the phone ringing now), Miramax has always done right by us, and this flick is no exception. They've given us Philly over Toronto (which cost them a couple bucks). They've ponied up for Affleck, Lopez, and Tyler (which cost them alot more bucks). They're staking our largest budget to date (bucks upon bucks). The fact that they wouldn't bend on the shooter, while frustrating, wasn't something we could really hold against them; they just wanted what they felt was best for the flick.
So after two months of arguing for Jamie, we had to cave and look for another D.P. The upshot to all this, however, is that when one door closed, another one opened. The D.P. we found is something of a legend, not to mention an Academy Award-winner. He's made a flick or two you might have heard of...
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"Academy Award Winning Cinematographer
Vilmos Zsigmond and
Visually-Challenged Director Kevin Smith." |
DELIVERANCE.
HEAVEN'S GATE.
MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER.
WITCHES OF EASTWICK.
BLOW OUT.
THE ROSE.
THE DEER HUNTER.
THE LAST WALTZ.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND.
His name is Zsigmond. Vilmos Zsigmond.
So one of the world's greatest D.P.'s is shooting one of the world's
least-visually-inclined director's new flick.
And thus begins the story of JERSEY GIRL.
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