Clerks turns 30

It wasn't just Pulp Fiction that arrived in the fall of 1994 that re-wired the way I looked at movies.

There was also, crucially, Clerks, the debut from Kevin Smith. And this one may have proved more personally influential. 

The story behind the making of this film is well known. Smith scraped together roughly 30k to make Clerks, shot almost entirely at the little convenience store that he himself worked at. He took it to festivals, and through one of those lucky breaks got it seen by, uh, Harvey Weinsten(😬) who picked it up for Miramax.

The movie did get released in theaters, albeit a tiny release that never made it to the multiplexes that were my sole moviegoing destinations at the time. I knew it existed, but it wasn't really on my radar that much. I actually knew about Mallrats coming out before I ever saw Clerks.

I looked it up, and Clerks actually hit video right at the end of my sophomore year of high school. So that is roughly when I saw it for the first time. And probably the 2nd and 3rd times, cause in that era when I rented something and really liked it, I would watch it multiple times in a row.

I think this was the best way to be introduced to Clerks. This ultra cheap, black and white movie would have felt weird to watch on a big screen. But to watch on VHS on a small TV screen, that's the stuff.

Clerks is perfectly simple, just a day in the life of Dante, a clerk at Quick Stop Groceries, but what a day.

Smith used the monetary limitations to his advantage throughout. He didn't have the money to have anything but dialogue scenes. The movie's biggest action is a rooftop hockey game.

Every single scene in this movie is funny, packed with dialogue that is obviously overwritten, but who needs naturalism?

It's actually kind of hard to write about, cause it would just turn into a list of some of the best lines. But the quotability of this thing is off the charts. This movie was maybe THE #1 sacred text amongst me and my friends in high school. Constant quoting and referencing. To this day, I can't hear the number 37 without doing Randal's "37!" 

The movie elevated another level with me when I started working in retail, and I finally could relate to the movie even more. "This job would be great if it wasn't for the fuckin customers" True. 

There was something so tangible about Clerks and how it got made that really made it one of my central writing inspirations back in the day. I could never think up the stuff Tarantino does, but have a couple guys chatting about mundane stuff in a store? Sure.

The film has never stopped being hilarious. It's one of those rare comedies that seems to be funnier when you know what jokes are coming. And yes, I probably could quote virtually this entire movie word for word. And it is unmistakably a product of the Gen X 90s, which only adds to its charm. It has never worked against the film that it's so cheaply made.

The low budget of course meant Smith had no money for name actors, and I'm not too surprised that nobody went on to reply do anything but other Smith movies. But Jeff Anderson is brilliant in this, and Brian O'Halloran is a textbook everyman. The women, Marilyn Ghigliotti and the late Lisa Spoonauer, give just as good (for being such a dudebro, Smith has always written female characters very well). You never in a million years would have guessed there would be Jay and Silent Bob movies. Much of the rest of the cast is just locals, Smith's family and friends, and various people playing different roles in different outfits.

I might pick Chasing Amy as Smith's best film, but Clerks is at worst #2. It launched one of the filmmakers that defined my 90s and early 2000s.