"I'm not even supposed to be here today."
"I'm not even supposed to be here today."
Clerks follows a day in the life of two clerks, one in a convince store and one in a video store. The convince story clerk Dante Hicks does not want to be there, has a commitment problem with his girlfriend, and is generally miserable; however he lacks the ambition to do anything to change his station in life. The video store clerk Randel Graves at first comes off as airheaded and rude. As the story progresses we realize that he has the true insight into why there lives are the way that they are.
Clerks was not only Kevin's first shot at directing a feature length motion picture it was also his, and every other cast/crew member's, first shot at ever working on one. It was in all respects a truely independent film. There was $5,000 from his parents, $5,000 from Scott Mosier's parents. Kevin sold his comic book collection, which he bought back after it became a hit, and maxed out all of his credit cards to raise the rest of the $27,000 budget.
Several parts of the film were worked around there extremely low budget. The most obvious one is the fact that it is in black & white, which is much cheaper than color film. Kevin was really working as a clerk at the Quick Stop convenience store. Since he could not close it down to shoot during business hours most of it was shot at night. This is covered up in the script by saying that someone jammed gum in the locks to the steel shutters, preventing them from being opened (more importantly, preventing us from seeing that it is really dark outside).
Even with this limited budget one thing that did not suffer was the acting. Since he could not afford to hire professional actors Kevin auditioned people at a community theater. This gave him access to a great deal of undiscovered talent; most notably Brian "Dante" O'Halloran, Jeff "Randel" Anderson, and Marilyn "Veronica" Ghigliotti (who had previously done theater with O'Halloran). Two of Kevin's good Jason Mewes and Walt Flanagan contribute there acting talents in major roles. Jason Mewes played the irrepressible, drug dealing, motor mouth, Jay (a character who was based on him who was based on himself). Walt Flanagan plays a total of four roles (Woolen Cap Smoker/Egg Man/Offended Customer/Cat Admiring BitterCustomer ). Kevin, of course plays Jay's introspective partner Silent Bob, who was made silent to contrast Jay.
Nearly every crew member, not to mention Kevin's mom (milk maid customer) has some small acting role. Producer Scott Mosier plays Willam the Idiot Manchild aka "snowball" (among others). Director of Photography David Klein plays Hunting Cap Smoking Boy/Low I.Q. Video Customer/Hubcap Searching Customer/Angry Mourner/Angry Crowd at Door . Kevin's girlfriend, Kimberly Loughran, plays Heather (the girl with Rick Deras; and his sister, Virginia Smith, plays the woman who says that her job is to manually masturbate caged animals for artificial insemination.
After filming was completed Kevin, not to mention everyone else, expected it to only play in a few local theaters, pick up a little money, maybe even generate a small buzz. All of that changed with Kevin submitted it to the Cannes (pronounced can) film festival, and to his surprise and delight it was accepted. It's first showing was practically empty, they all thought that was the end of it. But one of there few audience members was a film critic. When his review came out everyone was lining up to see this hilarious, comedic masterpiece. It received stellar reviews and made several year end top tens. Distribution rights were picked up by Miramax films. They put up about $100,000 to spruce up the films picture and sound. It got a small theater run resulting in around 3 million dollars profit. After that it headed off to the video stores and cult status in legions of fans video collections. Not bad for something that only cost $27,000 and a few sleepless nights.