Screenwriting Quote of the Day #63 (Kevin Smith part 2)

Boy, I should have mentioned Kevin Smith before yesterday as that post brought the second highest number of views since I started this blog. I’m glad I didn’t say anything negative about 21-year olds living in the basement of their parent’s homes surrounded by comic books and possessing a burning desire to make a film.

Which somewhat describes Smith when he took the first steps toward making a feature film. Armed with one acting class at a community college, four months of films school before he dropped out, and inspired by seeing Richard Linkletter’s Slacker, Smith set out to write a script that took place in one location.

“My example was Robert Rodriguez. In an interview he’d said, ‘Take stock of what you have and work with that. I had a bus and I had a turtle, so I worked them both into the script!’ I thought, I can get my hands on a convenience store…So I went home, and got my job back at the convenience store, fully intending to shoot the flick there. And I started writing like mad. I guess the first draft of it was about 164 pages, pretty long, so I handed it over to my friend Vincent. I was like, ‘What do you think?’ And he was like, ‘It’s really good. I think you should do it.’”
                                              Kevin Smith
                                              My First Movie
                                              Edited by Stephen Lowenstein
                                              page 76-77

And that was the beginning of Clerks. Smith didn’t have rich parents. He didn’t live in L.A. and he didn’t have New York City film connections. He didn’t have a master’s degree in film (or a BA or, I don’t think, even an AA degree), but what he did have was a 164 page script that he had written where most of the action happened behind a counter at a convenience store.

A couple years later he was showing that film at Sundance. But it started with “writing like mad.”

 

Scott W. Smith