Kevin Smith flushed the potty jokes for his new movie “Jersey Girl,” which hits theaters Friday. But it wasn’t easy.
As Smith typed his sentimental tale of a widower caught in the tug of war between ambition and his young daughter, the 33-year-old writer-director found himself reaching again where plumbers fear to go.
Smith had promised that his last movie, “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” (2001), with him and the motormouthed Jason Mewes as nitwits in a scatological world, would be the last featuring the duo.
“It was tough not to write them, but it was tremendously easier because Mewes was so knee-deep in heroin at the time that I don’t know if he could have pulled it off,” Smith said in a recent interview.
Smith kept to the high road. He’s also happy to report that Mewes is living with him and his family and has been sober for a year after court-mandated rehab.
With Jay and Silent Bob in their resting place, Smith is free to create grown-ups again. He calls “Jersey Girl” his closest work to “Chasing Amy” (1997), a boy-meets-lesbian character study that received the most critical praise of his career. That followed “Clerks” (1994), the $27,000 tribute to convenience-store loitering that launched his career–and that of his doofus alter-egos.
“I knew the moment I tapped the key on the computer to write ‘Jersey Girl’ that 13- and 14-year-olds who love Jay and Silent Bob aren’t gonna find anybody in this movie to identify with,” he says.
Smith, thinner thanks to Dr. Atkins, sprinkles enough salty talk in a conversation at a Manhattan hotel to make a rapper blush. It’s as natural to him as smoking. Only this time, it does not manifest itself on the screen.
“Jersey Girl” takes place in Highlands, N.J., but Jersey is no longer home in real life. Smith and his family live in Hollywood.
Before he headed west, Smith had a revelation as he watched his wife, Jennifer, put their daughter, Harley Quinn, now 4, to bed one night.
“I used to think the best thing to ever happen to me was that I had a career,” he says. “I got to make movies. But the real miracle is the kid, and that’s the ongoing project, except when she’s acting like a little [bleep].”
“Jersey Girl” star Ben Affleck, in the middle of shooting yet another action movie, read the first 50 pages of Smith’s script and urged him to finish it.
“I had the feeling that we could both use the change,” said Affleck, a regular in Smith’s movies, including “Chasing Amy” and “Dogma” (1999).
“Jersey Girl” got oodles of free publicity because the romance between Affleck and supporting co-star Jennifer Lopez was in full bloom on the set. The film received another boost because of the soaring visibility of Liv Tyler (thanks to her role as Arwen in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy), who plays Affleck’s girlfriend after Lopez’s character dies early in the film.
Smith thought he had a picture that could open at No. 1. But Bennifer’s breakup and the critical roasting of “”gigli”” has Smith hoping for word-of-mouth to jump-start the box office.
“Jersey Girl,” Smith admits freely, is not his most clever or acerbic work. The one-time Sundance darling took stock of his life and discovered that, jeez, he was an adult with a wife, a child and a mortgage.
“Maybe when she’s a teenager … that’s when I’m gonna lose it and make another movie [about] how it sucks to be a parent,” says Smith, who will again tap his inner adolescent with “The Green Hornet,” the comic-book project he is developing next under Miramax.
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Seen on screen
Kevin Smith’s films, from the gross to the great:
“Clerks” (1994)
– Notable casting: Smith himself as the beyond-laconic, soon-iconic Silent Bob.
– Production budget/U.S. gross: $27,000/$3.1 million.
“Mallrats” (1995)
– Notable casting: “90210” shrew Shannen Doherty as an impatient girlfriend.
– Budget/gross: $6.1 million/$2.1 million.
– “Chasing Amy” (1997)
– Notable casting: Star Ben Affleck’s buddy Matt Damon as a comic-book executive.
– Budget/gross: $250,000/$12 million.
“Dogma” (1999)
– Notable casting: Alanis Morissette as God. (Unlike the Canadian singer, the Almighty presumably knows the meaning of “ironic.”)
– Budget/gross: $10 million/$30.6 million
“Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” (2001)
– Notable casting: Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, of Smith’s beloved “Star Wars”; and Smith’s wife, Jennifer, and baby daughter, Harley Quinn, all in small roles.
– Budget/gross: $22 million/$30.1 million.
“Jersey Girl” (2004)
– Notable casting: One very fun cameo (and it isn’t Damon or Jason Lee, who also appear).
– Budget/gross: $35 million/It can’t do worse than “Gigli”– can it?–tribune newspapers
Sources: Imdb.com, rottentomatoes.com, boxofficemojo.com
