February 2, 2003

The bearded, heavyset guy who walks into a darkened editing studio and starts shoving the two big couches back into alignment looks like Kevin Smith, the writer-actor-director-cult hero beloved for his vulgar, cockeyed yet sweetly human dissections of life through the eyes of the young and disaffected. There’s the oversized Brooklyn baseball jersey he wears over a long-sleeved sweatshirt, the sneakers with grey socks, the baggy below-the-knees jean shorts, even the new make-it-yourself snack discovery he offers you, frozen peanut M&Ms.

But then Smith starts watching the assembled scenes from his new movie, Jersey Girl, which wrapped shooting in New Jersey, Philly and Manhattan in November, and something seems weird. Amid his trademark rapid-fire dialogue are scenes of pregnancy, childbirth, stinky diapers, school plays and harsh words between a father (Ben Affleck) and his 7-year-old daughter.

Smith, the creator of low-budget, high-wit films including Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma — ribald, outrageous comedies that probed the underside of dead-end work, gender wars and faith — is making a movie with as many tears as laughs.

The film has its offbeat twists and wry air. (Only in a Kevin Smith script would somebody at a small-town meeting protest a public works project by warning, “If you tear up the street, Bay Avenue’s gonna look like Bei-rut!”) But what’s unmistakable is that the same Central-Jersey suburban guy who may have inserted a certain four-syllable profanity into his work more than any other filmmaker in history has fallen in love, gotten married, had a baby, turned 30 and is making a comedic drama inspired by it.

Affleck, Smith’s old pal who has appeared in the last five of Smith’s six pictures, is paired with his real-life fiancee, Jennifer Lopez. If that’s not glossy enough, Miramax Films, which is bankrolling the picture, insisted on a more polished look than Smith’s previous films and hired Oscar-winning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.

When Smith, during one of his periodic campus Q-and-A sessions, volunteers to telephone the boss of a student who got fired from his pizza-delivery job for coming that night, his cult understands he is not show-boating. It knows that Smith, a self-described prisoner of Catholic guilt, will whip out his cell phone and follow through in his customary deadpan delivery. The cult loves him because he is the fat kid from the neighbourhood of Nowhere who made it on straight-up talent without compromising, who’ll never sell out.

And yet, as he edits Jersey Girl for release this summer or fall, Smith is conscious that his evolution as a filmmaker and a man is certain to alienate some cult members who revel in the perpetual adolescence his films have often celebrated.

“Every day I work on this, the more I encourage myself to get ready for the backlash,” he says during a break in editing. He knows some fans regard the presence of J-Lo as a perverse celebrity invasion; he’s already bade them goodbye on his voluminous, good-natured website.

What the cult can’t see is a director who, at 32 with a 3 1/2-year-old daughter and a three-storey house in the Hollywood Hills, is finding himself emotionally drawn to a movie in ways he never felt before.

There’s one scene in which father and daughter exchange a certain, knowing look while dad is addressing a town meeting. Something about it, said Smith, brought him to tears during one all-night editing session. But what friends love about Smith, and what the cult has always sensed, is a self-deprecating genuineness that compels him to add a few minutes later to a reporter he barely knows: “The bitch about this film is that you’re making a movie about being the perfect father, and you’re doing this all night and not spending any time with the kid.”

One afternoon in December, Smith was writhing over the first measured length of Jersey Girl: two hours, 32 minutes, not counting another four-minute scene still to be shot. During shooting, he’d figured it would come in at two hours and 20 minutes and that he and his longtime producer Scott Mosier, a friend since film school, would trim it to two hours.

He had one target for cutting in mind: an easily dispensable 6 1/2-minute bedroom scene between Affleck and Lopez during her character’s pregnancy, in which she keeps waking him up to murmur sweet nothings like, “This baby is the only way I can express how much I love you.”

But there was a problem. The day before, he’d shown the film to a couple of his wife’s girlfriends, and they loved that scene — just the things a woman would say near childbirth and that a husband would slumber through, they said.

Imagine: Kevin Smith, who once wrote the raunchy Clerks, now worrying about the female demographic.

Smith wanted to make Jersey Girl in 1999 right after Dogma, but there was the Jay and Silent Bob problem. The duo — neighbourhood friend Jason Mewes as the foulmouthed Jay and Smith as the taciturn Bob — had been effective slacker characters in each of his movies. There was no room for them in Jersey Girl, which, as Smith says, “stopped being ‘a Kevin Smith movie’ and became a ‘Jen and Ben movie,’ or a ‘Bennifer movie,’ as we call it now.” Still, Smith wanted a sense of closure — a way to acknowledge to the cult that without Jay and Silent Bob’s presence in his earlier films, Jersey Girl never could have happened. So he made Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, in which the two losers head from New Jersey to Hollywood to prevent a studio from corrupting a comic book based on their lives.

With that, Smith, wife and toddler headed East last August to shoot Jersey Girl, using the Philadelphia suburb of Paulsboro, NJ, as a stand-in for Highlands, the town where Smith was raised as the middle-class son of a postal worker. By October, Paulsboro, a depressed riverfront hamlet, renamed a street Kevin Smith Way and presented him the key to the city. At the ceremony he was humble (“I’m glad the town felt the need to honour someone who doesn’t deserve it”).

One of the things new parents notice is how time speeds. “Between 16 and 28, I never noticed any difference in myself,” Smith says, sprawled on a couch in his editing room. “I never thought about crossing 30 or crossing 40. And then here I was, on the threshold of 30, with a child. It’s like having a clock in front of you, reminding you, and I never noticed until there was someone growing up in front of me.”

It was barely a decade ago that Smith, who had dropped out of both a college creative writing programme and film school, saw Richard Linklater’s Slacker and thought: I could do that. He maxed out his credit cards and sold his comic-book collection, and three years later Clerks, made in black-and-white for $27,000 in 21 nights at the Quick Stop where Smith clerked by day, was the hit of the Sundance Film Festival.

Three years after that, Chasing Amy won the Independent Spirit Award for best screenplay and grossed nearly 50 times its quarter-million-dollar budget. That same year, Smith used his relationship with Miramax to get the Affleck-Damon script Good Will Hunting read and produced and used the then-unknown pair of actors in Dogma, a film he’d written years before. Clerks was reborn as a comic-book series and short-lived animated series. For the last year, Smith has been a fixture on The Tonight Show, taping and narrating “Roadside Attractions.”

“It works because he looks like what regular guys look like,” says Jay Leno. “I find the most successful people in this business are people who make show-business money but live a normal life.”

Until now, there wasn’t a moment during the making of one movie that Smith didn’t have the next one planned. “It was an insurance policy, in case the movie we were doing then totally pooched.” Finally, he’s ready to take a deep breath. He might adapt Gregory McDonald’s Fletch Won, a prequel to the Fletch films that starred Chevy Chase. It would be a tribute to an author whose gift for dialogue and disdain for descriptive passages shaped Smith’s writing style. (Best guess on the lead: Jason Lee, another Smith pal.) He’s talking about a sci-fi project. He’s talking about a couple of comic-book flicks. He’s even talking about a vacation. After all, he just bought his first new car since the mid-90s, a (cult members, don’t read the rest of this sentence) Ford Expedition.

Some fans may cringe when Smith uses the word “heartfelt” to describe the kinds of movies he wants to make and watch. (Jerry Maguire, One True Thing, Bridget Jones’s Diary — I totally connected with those characters.”) It’s not that he hasn’t made heartfelt films before. Chasing Amy and Dogma were praised by critics for reaching into deep-seated hopes and fears; they just operated on absurdist planes outside day-to-day life. Fatherhood has pulled Smith closer to the real world, where people do more than laugh.

“I’m in this place where a zillion movies have made me laugh,” he says. “Now I want a movie to make me laugh and cry.” —Dawn/The LAT/WP News Service.

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