When he’s not appearing on a multitude of podcasts and crying at everything from Bill & Ted Face the Music to Wonder Woman 1984, Kevin Smith occasionally dabbles in making movies. The 50 year-old has been a lot less prolific than usual behind the camera from a feature film perspective recently, though, having only directed one pic in the last five years after helming eleven in the previous twenty.
The last decade of Smith’s career has taken him on some strange detours, too, beginning with his first and so far only venture into being a hired gun on 2010’s buddy comedy Cop Out, where the most memorable thing about the entire movie was his highly publicized disagreements with star Bruce Willis. He then went on to create a trilogy of bizarre horror comedies in Red State, Tusk and Yoga Hosers, before returning to his beloved View Askewniverse with Jay and Silent Bob Reboot.
Throughout it all, Smith has also been working on Clerks 3, which was already rewritten on multiple occasions and even canceled at one stage. However, the pop culture enthusiast has now revealed that after reworking the concept from scratch once again, the first draft of the screenplay has finally been completed.
“I started writing Clerks 3 on December 28th and just finished the 101-page first draft last night. But the writing doesn’t begin when you start tapping the keys. I’ve been stirring this stew in my brain pan for awhile now. So when I sat down to put years of daydreaming into actual words, the typing part of the writing process was pretty brisk. Fake New Jersey (or what I’ve long called the View Askewniverse) has been so much more preferable to visit than the real world lately but I’ve told the tale I wanted to tell, so it’s time to step back, hand the script off to a trusted few, and then tinker further based on the feedback.”
Smith confirmed that Clerks 3 was one of the many projects he’d been working on during his downtime caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, and it certainly looks as though it could be his next one to get in front of cameras. Each distinct period of his career tends to be marked by a new adventure for Dante and Randall whether it be the 1994 original or the 2006 sequel, and the latest chapter will no doubt ruminate on where the erstwhile Silent Bob finds himself at this stage of his life.
