From Box Office Bomb to Cult Classic

Clerk

by Alex Kelly

For someone so universally hailed as the center of nerd culture, it was only inevitable that Kevin Smith would be the subject of an eventual documentary. That inevitability was realized in the form of Malcolm Ingrams, who is a friend of Smith’s, documentary Clerk, which premiered at the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.

 With a career that spans almost 30 years now, there is a lot of room to cover when talking about the work of Smith. Yet, Clerk methodically works through each line of Smith’s IMDb page, meticulously chronicling how each of his films came to be. This is an important part to tell, especially in the case of a film like Mallrats, which has gone on to find cult classic fame, despite the fact that it was an absolute commercial bomb when it premiered in 1995.

 This is where Ingram’s friendship with Smith comes in handy. He can extract stories and interviews from a wide array of people around the director to give a full picture of what it was like in those early years. The level of detail is sure to please any number of Smith fans who wanted more information about how their favorite film came about, from Clerks to Dogma to even Zack and Miri Make a Porno.

 One of the most heart-wrenching people to appear in the movie must be the scenes with Stan Lee. Lee, who passed away in 2018, made his first-ever cameo appearance in Mallrats, giving dating advice to Jason Lee’s character. While Lee mostly talks about the joy of working with Smith and not much else, it is the mere appearance of a man beloved by the comic book community that makes it one of the more special moments in the documentary.

 The person who comes out of this documentary with much more notoriety has to be Scott Mosier. Mosier was the longtime collaborator and producer of Smith’s, who he met while they were both attending the Vancouver Film School. As they go through the history of each of Smith’s 90’s movies, it is beyond clear that Mosier was integral in the production of each movie, not only creatively but day to day making sure everything was running smoothly.

 This focus on Mosier brings up an unintended conundrum in the documentary. While everyone associates Jason Mewes as the righthand man of Smith’s solely because of their characters Jay and Silent Bob, it is really Mosier who should be given credit for helping Smith along to create what has become an ever-popular filmography. That is why it’s confusing that Smith says it was Mewes who helped him to get to where he was around the time that they got their stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

 The level of detail works well for the film overall and shows the eventual decline of the work that Smith and Mosier were doing, eventually leading Mosier to stop working with Smith all together, and eventually becoming a co-director of 2018’s animated The Grinch, a fact that will inevitably come as a surprise to some View Askew fans.

 Around the time that Mosier left to go work on his own projects is around the time that Smith started to use marijuana almost daily, a fact the documentary uses to point out a shift in the work that he was doing. It is Smith himself who questions if it was the weed that made his films lose their quality and leads the viewer to inevitable questions about where his career would be if he didn’t smoke.

 However, that is the beauty of Smith. One of the core tenets of his entire life was to do things in his life on his own terms, and not care at all what others around him think. That ethos emanates multiple times throughout the film that is hard to capture without unyielding participation from the subject, which this has in spades.

 The one aspect of Smith’s that is surprisingly not covered as extensively as one would expect is his heart attack in February of 2018. The event is detailed, and the crew even goes with Smith to the theater where the fateful night occurred, the scenes come toward the very end with footage that had been plastered all over social media when it occurred. This might be a decision by Ingram to focus on the body of work instead of one single event but still felt like not enough information was gleaned from what was obviously a very traumatic event.

 The greatest stories were by far the tales of Smith’s adventures to the movies with his father. With the movie theater business in serious trouble, it is uplifting to see how those experiences can shape a person. That is the true legacy of this entire film, that through the love of cinema, anyone can chase and achieve their own crazy, wild dreams.

 Alex Kelly is the Co-host of Furloughed Film Podcast and a contributor at Culturess. You can follow him @alexfkelly