Actors - Kevin Smith

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	Actors - Kevin Smith

Kevin Patrick Smith (born August 2, 1970) is an American screenwriter, film director, and the creator of View Askew Productions. He is also known as a comic book writer and actor.

Smith's films are often set in his home state of New Jersey and are filled with pop culture references, particularly to comic books and the Star Wars movies. Many of Kevin's films take place in the "View Askewniverse" and feature appearances from small-time play-marijuana-dealers Jay and Silent Bob, the latter portrayed by Smith himself.

His films are known for their distinctive vision and dialogue, but are sometimes criticized for crude humor and technical amateurishness.

Biography and film career

Kevin Smith grew up in Highlands, New Jersey. After graduating from Henry Hudson Regional School, Smith enrolled at the New School for Social Research to study creative writing, but dropped out before completing the program. He then shifted west, enrolling at the Vancouver Film School, but soon found himself disillusioned, again dropping out and heading home.

After returning to New Jersey, Smith returned to his job as a clerk at a Quick Stop convenience store, which would eventually inspire the script to his first film Clerks.
Cobbling together $27,000 from his partial tuition refund, parents, credit cards, loans, the insurance money from two cars of his (wrecked from a flood during the filming of Clerks), and the sale of his comic book collection, Smith and Scott Mosier, a friend from Smith's days at the Vancouver Film School, began production on the black-and-white film. To cut costs, Smith employed friends and local actors to play the roles, and filmed at night in the same convenience store where he worked during the day.

Clerks debuted at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival where it saw almost no audience during the first few days. More people started seeing the movie as days went on and it eventually got the attention of executives at Miramax. Initially, the film was given an NC-17 rating, based exclusively on its profanity, the first film to garner that rating for that reason. Because the NC-17 rating is thought to be hurtful to a movie's box office performance, Miramax and Smith entered into a court battle with the Motion Picture Association of America, and eventually succeeded in getting the film's rating lowered to an R. The film became a success on the growing independent film circuit, was shown during non-concert hours at Woodstock 1994, and eventually earned a limited national release near the end of 1994. In ensuing years, it became a far-reaching inspiration for budding directors, proving that it was possible to make a movie for $27,000 and have it see wide successful release.

In 1995, Smith wrote and directed Mallrats
, the second film in the so-called "Jersey Trilogy". Mallrats
chronicles the romantic difficulties of two slackers (played by Jason Lee and Jeremy London) who spend their days hanging around a shopping mall. The film also featured a post-Beverly Hills 90210 Shannen Doherty and a pre-fame Ben Affleck. A more typical Hollywood comedy than Clerks, Mallrats
was a failure with critics as well as at the box office, and Smith later found himself haunted by a tongue-in-cheek apology he made at the 1995 Independent Spirit Awards. Universal had said that they wanted it to be a "smart Porky's". Smith later remarked in his question and answer session, "An Evening with Kevin Smith", that Universal executives pressured him to cut scenes, including especially a section where Silent Bob (Smith himself) masturbates over Gwen (played by Joey Lauren Adams) while she changes clothes, and he ejaculates over the partition into her hair. According to the scene, her hair would be altered as a result (as famously seen two years later in There's Something About Mary
), but the executives claimed that the gross-out factor was too disgusting to be comedic.

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Actors - Kevin Smith

Biography and film career

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