If you couldn’t tell before, I used to be a huge Kevin Smith fan. I saw Clerks when I was a Freshman in high school, and from that point on I knew I wanted to make movies.
Then I found out I couldn’t make movies.
Actually, that’s not very fair. I wrote a script, took me about five years to finish it, and I bandied my friends together and got a digital video camera, held auditions, and procured a location where the bulk of the movie would be set. I took a month off from college and shot the whole thing in four weeks, followed by a little over a year in editing. I knew nothing but what movies I liked, and what my limitations were when I was shooting. Then I got into the editing room and, similarly, had no idea what I was doing. What I did know, however, was that I really needed a DP (director of photography) and a better quality camera.
The movie was bigger than I planned. Even though I toned it down and took out all the expensive stuff, it still wound up being bigger than my scope allowed. I finished editing and showcased it at a local theater, inviting everyone involved. The turnout was embarrassingly high.
Some moments really killed, I’m proud to say. People legitimately enjoyed a lot of what was on screen. But I don’t think anyone, for a minute, thought that this movie would put me out there on the map. Even if it was shot brilliantly with a 20 thousand dollar camera, the story was just not fresh enough. It seemed somehow familiar.
It was a love-letter to the filmmakers who made me want to get into the business. It was a huge homage to two filmmakers in particular: Quentin Tarantino (in one small way), but mostly to Kevin Smith, in a big bad way. It wasn’t a rip-off in the purest sense– it just felt like a little Kevin Smith movie that he might have made before Clerks.
Cut to my senior year of college, when I was trying to find a way around a project in my Apocalypse religion class, Horsemen was almost immediately born. I took an old idea I wrote that centered around my high school buddies, and threw in a flair of religion and demonic transubstantiation, and I had a story.
Got an A in the project (and the class, thank you), and was immediately fired up to make Horsemen a reality. This time, I wanted to make it a cartoon show. Sam and I wrote episodes, and after reading and re-reading them, they too felt somehow familiar. They felt like lost episodes from the Clerks cartoon show (if you don’t remember it, don’t be surprised — it lasted two episodes).
They were distinctly ours, with our characters, but there was this undertone about disenchanted twenty-somethings in there, which is a connection to Smith flicks (set in the Askewniverse) that I don’t think can be ignored. So I worked on them and re-worked them, and set out to do something newer, more personal.
As you might be able to tell, that didn’t work out either. I have a few fun stories about pitching Horsemen the Animated Series to MTV, The Howard Stern Production Company, Comedy Central, and Cartoon Network (Adult Swim, of course). Maybe I’ll tell those stories a little later on. But the point is, Horsemen was set at a crossroad again. We could either drop it and try something new, or we could move in another direction with the concept.
Unlike my movie (titled Diner Coffee, by the way), I noticed early on that I wanted this to be mine, and I took paints to set it apart from high conversation and low budget and thought big. Little characters, big universe. I’m not saying it worked and yielded me fame and fortune, but it did give me something I feel satisfied by.
I really like telling these stories. I really like these characters. And I feel like they’re my characters — not clones of Dante Hicks or Brodie Bruce.
So you can imagine how it feels when someone refers to me as obsessed with Kevin Smith. It makes me second guess my motivations, and my characters. But I look at what I’m writing, and I see the stories I have for them (and the directions I want to take them, and the message I want to get out), and I know deep down that only I can tell these stories.
I was spurned to make a post when I read further confirmation that Smith won’t be returning to his Askewniverse. He’s grown beyond that world, and I can’t say I blame him. Those are stories about guys struggling to be men. New Jersey is a distinct part of their identities. They are not financially well off, and they don’t necessarily have marketable talents. They’re wonderfully flawed characters that Smith (and this is just an assumption, mind you) can’t connect with anymore.
Just that fact — Kevin Smith doesn’t connect with the characters he created, those very characters that pulled me into the Arts. It is really cool that he’s starting something new with his career, and that doesn’t invalidate the effect his works had on me.
Truth be told, I don’t know what it means to me, but it means something and I felt compelled to write something.
