Kevin Smith got his start as a writer and director by funding his first film Clerks by selling his beloved comic book collection and for what may be his final film he may be self-financing again.

Speaking with USA Today, Smith offered an update on the status of Clerks 3 and reiterated how, if he can’t get the money from his usual patron Harvey Weinstein he will gladly pay for the film himself rather than turn to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter.

What’s the latest on Clerks 3?

Last week I finished the third draft, 120 pages. We’ve put together three different budgets for places to shoot, and we submit our cast list, our shooting schedule, the budgets and the script to Bob Weinstein tomorrow. I like Bob, but if he doesn’t like it and passes, then I get to go someplace else and try to finance it myself. Put my house up or something … not Kickstarter.

Oh, really? Why not?

I understand why Zach Braff and Rob Thomas wanted to do it, but I think I missed the boat on that. I had my moment. I went through the traditional route of old, where Miramax picked up my flick and introduced me to another world. That’s my story. I can’t, like, have this second story where I’m like, “And then, years later I started asking other people for money!”

I’m all for it and understand crowd-sourced financing very well. The audience that’s going to buy this stuff anyway is just there at the origin point. But that being said, when I need the audience’s money is when (the movie) comes out in theaters. If you’re making a movie where it’s like, “Thor’s going to punch The Hulk!” people will line up to throw money at you. But if your movie’s like, “This guy’s gonna talk to this guy about Thor punching the Hulk!” you’re not going to get as many people lining up.

There’s a bunch of cats like me looking to make their first film. You jump in there and soak up all that money as the big fish in that small pond, that’s money that’s not going to go to somebody who really needs it.

When I started, that would’ve been the time (to use Kickstarter). But now I know people with money, I’ve got access to money. And worst-case scenario, I can just put up my house.

While I think that some of Smith’s creative stumbles over the last several years could possibly be attributed to his waning interest in filmmaking, his enthusiasm for Clerks 3, and its implied return to his roots, bodes well for the film. And if he does put up the money for it himself, there may be a return of the first Clerks film’s rough-around-the-edges look and charm. However, I don’t think that it will come to that. Weinstein has always done what he can for Smith and outside of some of the controversy surrounding Dogma has always had the filmmaker’s back. I really don’t see him not wanting to fund Clerks 3 for Smith.

Just two months and a few days ago, Kevin Smith announced that he had started working on a screenplay for Clerks III, and this morning he has confirmed that he has finished work on it. Posting the photo below on Facebook, Smith stated he was excited at the prospect of heading back to New Jersey to shoot the film and that he would fund the production himself and not turn to a crowdsouring website like Kickstarter.

Smith is calling Clerks III “The Empire Strikes Back of what’s now become the Clerks Trilogy,” though I suspect that is more for its 137-page length than because it might end on any cliffhanger. Of course, there could be the revelation that Silent Bob is actually Dante’s father, so who knows?

Kevin Smith is currently deep in the writing the first draft screenplay for Clerks III, but he took a little time out earlier this weeky to do a Reddit AMA to talk about his progress on the project. And in doing so, he let slip a little something interesting that I think points to what the story that he is currently developing may be.

Status of CLERKS III is this…

I’m on page 95. That means there’s about 25 pages left to go. I’m in love with it and don’t want it to end, but the end is near regardless.

Dante. Randal. Jay. Silent Bob. They all return, naturally.

Elias. Becky. They’re back as well.

So is Veronica.

That would be Dante’s ex-girlfriend Veronica, played in the first Clerks film by Marilyn Ghigliotti and not seen since.

I had assumed that the plot of the third movie would pick up from the ending of Clerks II and explore how Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randall (Jeff Anderson)’s friendship is tested by their mutual ownership of the Quick Stop and the fact that Dante is now a father. But the addition of Veronica into the mix raises some interesting plot possibilities. Even at the best of times, Dante is a bit indecisive and tossing an old girlfriend into the mix is certainly not going to be helping things.

Of course, the film is far from being a fait accompli. Obviously the participation of stars O’Halloran and Anderson are key, and Smith stated that “both have said ‘Hit me with a script and we’ll see…’.” And I am sure that once he finishes the script and fire it off to them, he’ll be the first to tell us.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the first day of shooting of Kevin Smith’s classic slacker comedy Clerks. It is probably no coincidence that early this morning the writer/director posted the following picture to his Facebook page -

Clerks III is a project that Smith had been talking about for some time, mentioning that he thought it might be a limited run Broadway play, a serialized novel or some form of web series. I wouldn’t be surprised if his previous comments had been a way to sound out fan reaction to each various idea.

But it looks as if it is back to being a film, based on his comment -

Hollywood is littered with stories about film projects that fell apart before they could come to fruition.

Today on his Facebook page, Kevin Smith tells us of how his planned relaunch of the Fletch franchise, based on the comic mystery novels of Gregory McDonald, which he hoped to feature his Mallrats and Chasing Amy star Jason Lee in the lead role of investigative newspaper reporter Irwin M. Fletcher, fell apart through various Hollywood factors beyond his control.

I’d adapted an insanely-faithful-to-the-book FLETCH WON script (which tells the story of a young Fletch’s first big story at the newspaper), and I wanted to make the flick with Lee as the lead, but Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein didn’t get Jason Lee at all. I’d say “Jason Lee IS Fletch!” and he’d say “Jason Lee doesn’t have an audience.” Even when he was headlining MY NAME IS EARL, Harvey maintained Jason Lee was never big enough to play the lead in FLETCH WON.

And it all came to a head in 2003, while I was in post-production on JERSEY GIRL – when Ben Affleck had been offered the lead in a movie at Disney. (This is in the days before Ben had ever realized his true, Oscar-caliber calling, mind you.) Ben asked if I wanna direct this movie in which he’s gonna be the lead. Exciting: I’d never directed someone else’s feature script before. I read the script and it was fun – but making it with my friend would make it even more so, I figured. So with Ben’s encouragement, I say “Okay.”

Now, this is back when Harvey was running Miramax, which was then owned by Disney. So I figured it’d be no big deal: s’all in the family anyway. But this was also when the split between Harvey and Disney was brewing – which would come to a head with Fahrenheit 911 a few years later.
So when I tell Harvey “I’m gonna direct a movie that Ben’s in over at Disney” it went over pretty poorly.

I had an overall deal with Miramax in which they got a first look/crack at anything I wrote and directed. This new Ben gig was a directing-only opportunity, so no prob: I’m well-within my overall deal rights to do so. But I guess the thought of a pair of Miramaxkateers working for Michael Eisner didn’t rest well with Harvey. I was told to sit tight while the Brothers Weinstein talked to the Mouse.

Harvey told Disney their proposed Ben-starring/Kevin-directed movie would now be a co-prod, based on my Miramax overall deal. Disney declined the “offer”, so I was then instructed by both Harvey and Bob to turn the gig down. I pointed out that my deal allowed me to direct for somebody else, but there were a metric shit-ton of guilt-ridden “family” and “us” and “them” terms thrown at me.
And that’s all it took: because as much as I loved Ben, I was 100%-Miramax in those days. I was in the coolest gang in town and I’d die for my colors.

But I wasn’t LEAVING the family; just working with Ben – who was also family. We were just gonna do it elsewhere for a minute. So while I’m trying to point out that my deal allowed for me to direct for others, Harvey hits me with a verbal right hook out of nowhere.

“Fine,” Harvey said. “Drop that Disney movie and I’ll let you make your FLETCH movie…” I was ready to hug him when he added “With BEN as Fletch.”

“What about Jason Lee?” I asked. Harvey said that was never going to happen. If I wanted to make FLETCH WON, I had to get Ben to be Fletch. I argued that Ben was still gonna wanna do the flick at Disney, so I was told to convey a message to him: Miramax would match Ben’s Disney offer.

So for about two weeks in 2003, we almost rushed my FLETCH WON flick into production with bloated, studio-like salaries – all to beat Disney. Harvey’s play was kinda brilliant: he knew the only thing that’d give me pause about working elsewhere was working with a friend back home.
Ben read and dug the script and the money was as big as what he was gonna get for the Disney movie. So suddenly, FLETCH WON was possible. An office was opened. Preliminary scouting began. And when shit needs to suddenly happen fast in the movie biz, that costs MONEY, son! Lots!

But mercifully, before the proposed $50 million version of FLETCH WON could happen (their budget, not mine), Ben mercifully passed. He said he didn’t feel right about flat-leaving Disney and was gonna stick around to make that flick. I didn’t go with Ben to Disney. Ben was cool about it: he said he’d never understand my loyalty-thing to Harvey but he still respected it.

See, Harvey knew he had me regardless. Being Miramax MEANT something to me – a code I lived by. We were a gang of NY. It was Us vs All Them.

But ironically, I’d never make another movie for Miramax: Harvey & Bob split from Disney a few years later, creating The Weinstein Company. The next flick I made was CLERKS II. And while I love that film, it never felt right having a Weinstein Company logo at the head of it instead of the NY skyline of the Miramax logo.

See, that’s why it’s easy for me to leave the movie biz now: When that era of Miramax died, a big piece of my passion for film died with it…

So now I’m mostly a podcaster.

Ben went on to win an Oscar for Best Picture this year.

And Harvey won the rest of the awards with SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK and DJANGO UNCHAINED.

FLETCH wound up at Warner Brothers years later. My only regret is a flick never got made before Fletch creator Greg McDonald passed away.

That Disney movie – the one that caused so much contention and friction? The studio pulled the plug on it mere weeks away from production because it didn’t believe in a $60million dollar budgeted Ben Affleck movie (ironic, considering that’s kinda what ARGO cost).

So Ben didn’t wind up doing the movie anyway – which was called GHOSTS OF GIRLFRIENDS PAST.

It was made years later… starring Jen Garner.

Only in Hollywood…

Kevin Smith’s two Clerks films are his most personal works, expressions of his own feelings about the direction of his own life at the time he made them. It is only natural, I supppose, that as he is looking to give up directing feature films he is also looking at possible alternate means of continuing the story of counter jockeys Dante and Randall outside of feature films.

Previously, Smith had said that he was toying with the idea of presenting Clerks 3 as a limited-run Broadway play, but he now states that he has abandoned that idea for either a movel that would be be published online chapter-by-chapter to allow for changes based on reader feedback or possibly as some form of web series. Smith does admit that a feature film is still where the real moneyy is at even though that would also come with creative restrictions.

Smith talked about the future of the proposed Clerks threequel Friday night when appearing on the What’s Trending? online show, sponsored by NewTek, the software firm behind the high-end Lightwave 3D animation software.

Smith’s comments on the possible future of Clerks 3 starts around the eleven-minute mark. I’ve transcribed them out after the video.

Back when I was trying to figure out how to do Clerks 3 to make it interesting for me, because that’s the thing, it ain’t gonna be interesting for anybody else unless I’m like “Oh my god, this is the thing I’m most in love with right now,” I was trying to figure out ways to recreate it and make it interesting rather than just simply doing a movie and stuff.

At one point I was thinking of it doing it on Broadway. I was like “You can do it as a limited run, man, six months” and somebody was like “If you do a six month Broadway run you will never make money, In fact, you’ll lose people money.” I was like “I didn’t know that,” so that went away.

One of the things I talked about was doing it episodically online which would be kind of fun for me, it would be a way of getting away from doing it with a studio. And then I thought about doing it that way but marrying it with something else… I want to do Clerks 3 as a book first. I want to do episodic chapters so that as I release it people can read the whole thing, see what would it look like. I get to go inside the character’s heads, I get to tell ‘Year One’ origin stories. The first chapter is Dante and Randall meeting in kindergarten and stuff like that. All the stuff that I can’t do in a movie.

I’m a stoner so I want to investigate the inner life of every character and I can’t do that in ninety minutes where people are like “You make some fucking Star Wars jokes, some dick jokes and then move the fuck on.” So in a book I can get in there and really be artistic with it and have fun with it and stuff.

And if I’m doing it in pieces, man, as opposed to just writing one big fat book, I’ll be honest with you, the audience is gonna influence it… I know a lot of people will be like “That’s ridiculous, it should be your artistic statement” but my whole thing, my leitmotif, my entire career has been about audience interactivity. Without the audience none of the Clerks stuff that leads to me sitting here with you ever happens.

So for me to kind of write it episodically and to let people read it chapter by chapter and then pipe in and say “Oh man, I can’t believe it’s this” it could actually allow me to change direction.

I know there’s a lot of people saying “Why would you want to, you’re an artist”, well now I’m a new media artist and a new media artist involves the audience. And that’s something that I’ve built for nearly 20 years at this point anyway.

It feels like I’m going to work on something that’s not a film, a film would be the ultimate expression of what Clerks 3 is meant to be, but if I’m working on this kind of book version of it, the inner life of the mind of the characters and what not, I think it will be fun to be influenced by the audience every step of the way.

First I thought about doing it as YouTube, then I thought about doing it as a book… the money will always be in doing it as a feature. If I want to get real creative, yeah, I’ll break it down and do it online, and yeah, I think it would catch on.

If I was doing it with myself and puppets it’d be one thing but I’ve got to do it with Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Jason Mewes… so everyone gets a say and a lot of them, I’m sure would be like “Let’s do it where the money is, man” which would be doing it as a movie.

It is pretty obvious that Quentin Tarantino is somewhat of a comic book fan. There have been references to comic books in many of his films–a Silver Surfer poster on a wall in Reservoir Dogs, the lead in his script for True Romance working in a comic book store, the secret identity riff in Kill Bill: Vol 2. But Tarantino has been reticent to follow fellow comic book fan filmmakers such as Kevin Smith and Joss Whedon to write comics.

That is, until now. Maybe.

Quentin Tarantino, in typical Tarantino fashion, left the panel promoting his latest film, Django Unchained and made a beeline to the DC Comics panel promoting their Before Watchmen line, bursting in to announce that a five-issue  Django Unchained miniseries featuring writing by Tarantino will appear from DC’s Vertigo imprint before the film hits theaters.

What form this writing will take is still up to debate. Steve Morris over at The Beat says that Tarantino will be writing the miniseries himself (but he also states that the film stars Jamie Fox and Christophe Waltz, not Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz, so, there you go) while Bleeding Cool‘s Brendon Connelly states it will only be Tarantino’s script for the film that will be adapted. If this is true, it might follow a format like how Dynamite Entertainment handled Kevin Smith’s unproduced scripts for his Green Hornet and Bionic Man films–they had other writers convert the scripts into comic book form.

I’m sure we’ll find out more as the hours go on.

Friends who know that I am a Kevin Smith fan as well as a bit of a comic book collector inundated me last fall for my opinion of the writer/director’s reality series Comic Book Men on AMC. I had to admit that I was disappointed to find the show a bit of a mess. Some parts were entertaining, like when the show turned into a riff of Antiques Roadshow with collectors bringing in to Smith’s New Jersey comic book shop items that they hoped to sell. But segments where the store employees had to go off and do some sort of almost game show-like task were just painful to watch.

Thankfully Spoilers, Kevin Smith’s second stab at a reality-based television series, is markedly better than Comic Book Men, though it is not without a few problems.

On Spoilers, whose first episode premiered on streaming service Hulu yesterday, Smith and his 50 member studio audience watch a newly released film and then they chat about it for half the shows 24-minute run time. The balance of the show is filled out with a celebrity interview, in the premier show’s case it was Carrie Fisher, and a “cartoon” which is actually just an animated segment from one of the podcasts on Smith’s self-built network.

It’s hard not to view this show with it’s animated opening touting that “Just like normal people we all bought tickets to see the show,” and not see Smith’s intolerance for film critics permeating the concept. It is obvious that he is putting his money where his mouth is and backing up his claim that anyone can be a critic that he started to espouse after the scathing reviews he received for Cop Out.

But you know what? Giving the idea of movie reviewing over to the vox populi works on a certain level. Filmed in Los Angeles, it is obvious that some of the members who offer their comments in this week’s film, Snow White And The Huntsman, are more than a little movie savvy. (Witness the one guy who refers to the film’s three-act structure.) And Smith’s interaction with the audience members is relaxed and breezy, a by-product perhaps of his now many years of touring the country and doing personal appearances.

But despite Smith’s declaration that the show will be a “no holds-barred gabfest,” it is fairly easy to see where there was some editing o shorten down various audience members remarks. And while some participants do have some insights to offer, there are a few who don’t contribute much in the way of substance. (Though I do admit to laughing at the guy who said he counted the number of times that normally mouth-agape Snow White star Kristen Stewart actually had her mouth closed. By the way, he said it was only two times.)

I do have to dig the feel that Smith seems to be going for though. The show has an almost Playboy After Dark for nerds vibe to it between him moving through his audience chatting and the celebrity interview. These are really the two sections that he should be concentrating on and expanding as the show goes forward. While amusing, the animated podcast segment does not really add anything to the proceedings and could be jettisoned fairly easily.

As he has been doing the interview rounds for his new book Tough Sh*t: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good, Kevin Smith has been talking about his plans to retire from filmmaking once he completes in his planned hockey picture Hit Somebody. And for long time fans of the director that pronouncement has left them wondering about the Smith’s previously announced possibility of doing a third Clerks movie. Thanks to an enterprising fan who asked him exactly that question at a book signing, and then forwarded the video to Slash Film, we know what his intentions are – a stage play.

Smith launched his career in 1994 with the low-budget indie Clerks, in which two convenience store counter jockeys pass their workday dealing with surly customers and discussing pop culture. Part of the film’s success was Smith drawing on his own experiences working in the exact store that the film was shot. And while a majority of films were all set within the same “universe” as Clerks, he didn’t devote an another entire film to Dante and Randall until 2006′s Clerks 2. At the time and since then, he has stated that he always felt a kinship towards the characters and wanted to check in with them every so many years whenever he felt he had something personal to say about his own life.

Honestly, putting a third Clerks installment up on stage, as crazy as it sounds, does make a certain amount of sense. One of the criticisms Smith acknowledges that has been leveled at Clerks and to a lesser extent most of Smith’s films, is that the heavy amount of dialogue and little action made the film seem more stage-bound then cinematic. I’ve had discussions with friends who do regional theater about what it would take to mount a stage production of the first film. And it would make a rather interesting twist on the usual film-to-stage translations we have been seeing over the last several years.

Additionally, as Smith points out, Clerks star Brian O’Halloran has plied most of his acting career on the stage, so he would definitely be able to handle the differences between this and film work. Jeff Anderson and Jason Mewes might be more questionable as to how they would take to the repetition of a long stage run, and I imagine that their participation would be contingent to making this happen.

Ever since the mishandling of the Clerks cartoon series by ABC, Kevin Smith has talked about ta feature length version of the show that would possibly be released direct-to-video. In 2003 he even had animation studio Powerhouse do a short test to see if the film, titled Clerks: Sell Out, could be reasonably done in Flash, the computer format used for online animation and video. You can see their test clip, which uses some familiar material, below.

Unfortunately, when the animated series executive producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein split from Disney, who own the rights to the show, to form the Weinstein Company, there was little love lost between the two entities and so the future of any kind of animated Clerks project was put in question. Smith stayed optimistic, though, and as recently as 2007 had stated that there would definitely be some sort of cartoon featuring characters from his movie at some point.

But perhaps because it is one of those things that has always been talked about but nothing concrete ever happens, everyone just glossed over a small part of the announcement of Smith’s Smodcast Pictures teaming with distributor Phase 4 that stated-

A division of SModCo, SModcast Pictures covers the visual spectrum of S.I.R. and SModcast.com. Their forthcoming releases include the unscripted series Comic Book Men for AMC, and Jay And Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie, a blend of live action footage and R-rated animation.

Smith elaborated on that tidbit on Thursday during his theatrical simulcast Kevin Smith: Live From Behind. When asked about the cartoon film Smith stated that he is hoping to have the film ready to part of the Midnight Madness programming track at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival this September.

Of late, Smith’s career has been a bit all over the map. He has the financial security of a loyal fanbase to experiment with things outside of the traditional Hollywood structure as his distribution of his last film Red State and the creation of his podcast network. So that kind of maverick attitude leads me to wonder if  Jay And Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie might not be a straightforward adventure featuring Smith and Jason Mewes’s loveable stoner characters but may be some sort of anthology featuring short films by a number of different animators with the characters of Jay and Silent Bob hosting. Think of it as a variant on the old Spike & Mike or Tournament Of Animation programs that toured college campuses in the 1980s and 1990s.  Just speculating here, but a move like this wouldn’t surprise me. But what ever shape Jay And Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie does take, I will be different from whatever Smith had in mind originally for Clerks: Sell Out.

Source SlashFilm.