When Kevin Smith shopped Clerks at the Sundance Film Festival, he didn’t anticipate that the comedy would ignite his career at age 23.
The budding director was a film school dropout and had penned the screenplay while working at a New Jersey convenience store called the Quick Stop. Clerks focuses on Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson), two employees at a mini-mart who chat about movies and life while making small talk with customers. Smith initially envisioned himself playing Randal, and gave the character some of his favorite lines before opting for the smaller role of Silent Bob.
“If I’m going to make this movie on my credit cards, I at least want to be in it,” Smith quips to The Hollywood Reporter. “That way, years from now I could look at it and be like, ‘Oh, there I was when I made the fucking biggest mistake of my life. That’s what I looked like.’”
With a meager budget of $27,000, Clerks filmed at Smith’s place of employment, as Quick Stop ownership agreed to let him shoot at night while the store was closed. Smith recalls some confused customers approaching the shoot after seeing lights on in the store through the steel shutters: “They’re like, ‘Can I get cigarettes?’ And we’re like, ‘No, we’re making a movie.’ [They’re like,] ‘Like porno?’ We’re like, ‘No, it’s not porno. It’s an independent film.’ That corner of the world hadn’t heard about independent film in 1993, so we had a lot of ‘No, it’s not a porno’ to explain to them.”
Clerks debuted at the Independent Feature Film Market in New York in late 1993 to a nearly empty theater and featured a dark ending in which Dante is shot and killed. Despite this rocky start, it was selected soon after for Sundance. Smith, who produced the film with Scott Mosier, eliminated Dante’s death ahead of the fest, where Clerks was a buzzy hit in January 1994, winning the Filmmakers Trophy. THR’s review called the movie “a wonderfully screwy send-up of down-low Americana.”
Miramax scooped up the film and released Clerks in October — after an appeal downgraded its initial NC-17 rating to R — and it collected $3.2 million en route to becoming a Gen X touchstone. In addition to Clerks spawning two sequels and a pair of TV series, Smith has continued helming features throughout the past three decades, along with landing gigs as a TV director and podcast host and becoming a Sundance regular.
“For the last 30 years, probably not a day has gone by where I haven’t uttered the magic word ‘clerks,’ ” Smith says. “It remains the single weirdest, most wonderful thing that ever happened to me, that this goofy little movie became the takeoff point for an actual career.”
A version of this story first appeared in the Jan. 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
