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Clerks II
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 Clerks II Production NotesTagline: With no power comes no responsibility.
The sequel to writer/director Kevin Smith's 1994 Sundance favorite, "Clerks II" continues the intersecting stories of laterally mobile Dante (Brian O'Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) and their career slacker shadows Jay At the age of 33, New Jersey mini-mart clerks and best friends Dante Hicks (Brian O Halloran) and Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson) have it made they work with each other, slack off all day.
But when the local Quick Stop that has been their entire life and livelihood suffers a cataclysm, Dante and Randal have to do the unthinkable: find new minimum-wage jobs. Now, they re bringing their rapid-fire one-liners, bad attitudes and unbridled love of fun at the customer s expense to Mooby s burger joint, where the only other employees are an uber-nerd (Trevor Ferhman) and an entirely too sexy manager (Rosario Dawson). But when Dante announces that he's going to leave Jersey forever and marry Emma Bunting (Jennifer Schwalbach Smith), his co-workers plan one last send-off that quickly goes awry.
As unbridled debates rage over such burning matters as Return of the King v. Return of the Jedi; George Lucas v. Peter Jackson v. Jesus; and how far is too far in every area from teenage sex to "customer relations," Dante has to figure out an even bigger riddle: just how friendship, love, work and having a great time every single day can all come together in one humble adult existence.
About the Flick
In 1994, two “counter” culture heroes were born: the New Jersey masters of the minimum-wage lifestyle – minimart Clerks Dante Hicks and Randal Graves. Their raucous retail adventures, caustic camaraderie and sardonically skewed view of the modern world led to writer-director Kevin Smith’s first comedy hit, “Clerks,” and made a mark on pop culture. But, nothing stays the same, not even among those who never want to grow up. Now, a decade later, Kevin Smith forges an entirely new and different chapter in Dante and Randal’s lives as he takes another hilarious, irreverent and authentic journey into their farce-fueled friendship –– and, their sudden brush with big changes -- in “Clerks II.”
For years, Smith debated in his own mind whether or not to revisit the characters he set loose upon the world in “Clerks.” The original film was a raunchy, razor-sharp, black-and-white comedy that Smith wrote in his parents’ house and made for little more than an annual clerk’s salary. Following just one profanely funny day in the life of Quick Stop employee Dante Hicks, the film spawned an animated television series, a comic book series, devoted fans and a slew of imitators. With his own View Askew production company, Smith went on to forge an entire “View Askewniverse” and direct such films as “Mallrats,” Chasing Amy,” “Dogma,” “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” and “Jersey Girl,” while “Clerks” quietly became a Gen-X classic.
But a second installment? Smith worried that tampering with characters so many people had come to love could be a risky, even foolhardy, business. And yet . . . he just couldn’t escape thinking about what had become of Dante and Randal – especially as he himself hit his 30s and watched his world start to shift. He began to see a fresh stand-alone storyline for Dante and Randal – as two thirtysomething slackers who have figured out how to mix very little work with a whole lot of pleasure but are suddenly confronted with the one thing they never saw coming: adulthood.
“’Clerks’ is a movie I wrote about what it’s like being in your 20s, and now I felt like I had something to say about being in your 30s,” says Smith. “So ‘Clerks II’ checks back in with Dante and Randal ten years down the road at age 33. The underlying question the film asks is if you can you still be a kind of lackadaisical, cynical, wise-ass in your 30s or if you have to in some way grow up, and, how you do that while still being who you are.”
Whatever trepidation Smith had about the pitfalls of sequels vanished as soon as he started writing. Instantly, he found Dante and Randal’s fast-and-furious dialogue flowing abundantly again – crazy debates, zingy one-liners and lingering anxiety about the madness of the modern world all intact. “All the fear about besmirching the original went out the door the minute I was finished with the script,” recalls Smith, “because I really felt like it was something fresh and could very much stand up as its own film, while bringing something new to fans of the first one.”
Despite big changes in his own life over the last decade, Smith had no problem honing right back into Dante and Randal’s headspace. “Even though the trappings of my life aren’t the same, I think my mindset is,” says Smith. “I’ve certainly grown as a filmmaker but I haven’t deviated that much from the person I was – and, there’s a part of me that is still very much like Dante and Randal -- resistant to change -- who watches the world outside my window and is completely befuddled.”
Befuddled though they might be, time catches up with Dante and Randal in “Clerks II” – bringing Smith’s culturedriven, edge-pushing humor into an intriguing collision with such adult issues as marriage and maintaining friendships through major life changes. As he was writing, Smith decided to bring a new female duo into Dante’s always complicated love life – including the fiancée who forces Randal to face up to the fact that his best buddy might be moving beyond the special joys of the service-job life without him.
“When I thought about my own life, I realized I’m not dating women I dated twelve years ago, so that opened things up to create two new female characters: Emma, Dante’s fiancée and Becky, the manager at Mooby’s,” explains Smith “The women in this flick play a much bigger role than the girls in “Clerks” did. Emma is kind of the lynchpin of the movie. She’s pretty, she digs Dante and she could be his golden ticket, but she’s not necessarily the best person for him. And, then there’s Becky, who’s really Dante’s best friend, which I believe is the jumping off point for any great relationship. But, of course, the primary relationship is always between Dante and Randal, who have their own kind of love story, in a totally heterosexual way.”
To complement the constant, cutting banter between Dante and Randal, Smith forged another fresh character: their muddled Mooby’s co-worker Elias, a Hobbit-loving, Transformer-collecting churchgoer who never met a french-fry he didn’t scorch. “What’s great about Elias is that he is to Randal what Randal is to Dante,”
Smith explains “He’s this kind of sheltered kid, this battered puppy, who worships Randal. I think he’s a welcome addition to the ‘Clerks’ world.” Throughout, Smith had a blast with his proudly unhinged, nothing’s-sacred form of comic wit, never pulling back for the sake of propriety – proving that even though everyone grows older, some senses of humor just keep getting more bold. “I think this story pushes the edge even further than ‘Clerks’ but, it’s not because I want to be the guy that always pushes further and further,” he notes. “The humor just reflects the characters and the way I speak with my friends and what not. The point isn’t to offend – instead, it’s to portray people as they really are while being very funny in the process.”
Smith’s excitement about the project continued to grow as he realized it was also a chance to return to the way he used to make movies before he was bitten by Hollywood success – driven less by big budgets and more by good friends, good times and tons of passion. “After ‘Jersey Girl,’ I really wanted to make a movie with people who weren’t on the cover of US Magazine every week,” he comments. “For the first time in awhile, I felt I had the freedom to tell whatever story I wanted, to be as raucous as I wanted, and, to be as sentimental and as poignant as I wanted to be.”
One person who was taken aback by the script for “Clerks II” was Scott Mosier, Smith’s long-time producing partner. “I thought it was hysterical,” he says, “and I was surprised by how it really upped the ante from the first one. What’s great, is that it’s not a carbon copy of ‘Clerks’ – it’s a unique movie unto itself. But, it’s also filled with all kinds of outrageous moments that I don’t think anyone will be expecting.”
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Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith reprise their roles as Jay and Silent Bob in Smith's Clerks II.
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