In the summer of 1995, a few days before his 25th birthday, the filmmaker Kevin Smith attended his first San Diego Comic-Con. “It was like a circus,” he wrote years later, “wrapped up in a treasury edition-sized comic book, stuffed inside a month of Saturday morning cartoons, served with cheese sauce.” Smith was at Comic-Con for an early screening of Mallrats, his second movie with film school pal Scott Mosier under the duo’s View Askew Productions banner.
A goofy caper about lovelorn loitering and retail therapy, Mallrats drew inspiration from comic books, John Hughes movies, Harpo Marx bits, Porky’s, and View Askew’s own award-winning 1994 indie debut, Clerks. The film also starred Shannen Doherty, featured a cameo from nerdlord Stan Lee, and began with the line One time my cousin Walter got a cat stuck up his ass. It was, in other words, particularly well suited for the Comic-Con crowd. “It played like a rock show,” Smith’s friend, colleague, and documentarian Malcolm Ingram recalls about the Mallrats screening. “It was magic.” Afterward, Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, who had been on hand to assess the vibe, offered the highest possible praise: that the movie’s reception reminded him of how test audiences once reacted to Animal House.
“He’s like, This is gonna make a hundred million dollars,” Smith, now 55, tells me in late October. We are sitting at a big desk in his home in Los Angeles, a late-afternoon tea of pre-rolls and Celsius laid out before us. Smith is wearing a Snoopy shirt and his trademark backward cap; radiant Rocky and Bullwinkle art decorates the wall behind him. “He was off by 98 million,” Smith quips.
You know, Jesus fuckin’ died to save all of us, according to the Bible. But Mallrats died so that I could fuckin’ have a career for the rest of my life that was guaranteed to be more interesting than it would have been.Kevin Smith
Thirty years ago, Smith and Mosier were newly minted indie darlings on the doorstep of mainstream success. And then Mallrats flopped. It made back only about a third of its $6 million budget. It was yanked from theaters in weeks. But hey, at least the critics hated it, too! “Crude, Lewd Mallrats Has Little to Redeem It,” read a typical headline. One Associated Press writer asked: “How can a reviewer write about a movie that makes Dumb and Dumber seem like a Merchant-Ivory production?”
Plainly and profanely, Smith describes how it felt to be him 30 years ago as he ascended into misfortune—just a kid on the escalator, so to speak.
“Think about it, man,” he says. “One year prior, we won the lottery [with Clerks], and all of our dreams came true and I was hailed as like, fuckin’ the future of cinema and all this fuckin’ shit that in a million years I’d never thought about or planned for. And then one year after that, they were like: This is what happens when you give those Sundance kids money. Fuckin’ idiots.”
All of this is true—yet somehow, the story of Mallrats didn’t end there. After bombing theatrically, Mallrats went on to find a far more enthusiastic, even rabid home audience on VHS (it’s me, hi!) and DVD. And the film’s third act is still being written now, three decades later. Once a box office humiliation, Mallrats wound up becoming something more like an embarrassment of riches. “I was raised Catholic, and so it’s all about redemption,” Smith tells me. “Mallrats is, like, one of my favorite redemption stories of all time. You know, Jesus fuckin’ died to save all of us, according to the Bible. But Mallrats died so that I could fuckin’ have a career for the rest of my life that was guaranteed to be more interesting than it would have been.”
To explain Mallrats, you have to go back to the birth of Clerks, Smith and Mosier’s shoestring black-and-white indie debut about a dude who gets called into work on his day off. The two young cinephiles first met at Vancouver Film School in 1992, shortly before Smith dropped out, and their early aspirations for Clerks were modest and hopeful, based on what they’d seen from other independent filmmakers they admired. “Sam Raimi got money from dentists to make Evil Dead,” Mosier remembers in a Zoom conversation this fall. “So, in our limited knowledge, it was like, ‘Oh, then we’ll find a dentist later, and then our careers will be great!’”
What happened next was something else entirely, the kind of rise that reset everyone’s future expectations. Clerks catapulted straight onto the industry scene and even into cinephile esteem, skipping the dentist drill down in favor of screenings from New York to Cannes. It won the Filmmakers Trophy at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival and was quickly snapped up by Miramax. Also at Sundance, Smith was introduced to a Universal producer named Jim Jacks.
“He was the guy that discovered the Coen brothers,” says Smith of the late Jacks, who had also produced Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. “He found Blood Simple at the [American Film Market] years before.” Smith says that when they got to talking at Sundance, “Jim’s like, ‘I really wanted to buy Clerks, but Miramax beat me to it.’” On the spot, Smith cooked up a concept to pitch the exec: a movie similar to Clerks … but set in a mall! Jacks loved the idea. “He wanted to make a ‘smart Porky’s,’” Smith says. “He missed the ‘teen titty film.’”
Brighter and bawdier than its predecessor, Mallrats—a story of two just-dumped buddies trying to win back their fed-up girls and outwit mall security—appeared to have all the elements of a mainstream middlebrow hit. Whereas Clerks cost about $27,000 and was shot by a handful of guys at a Quick Stop mini-mart in Leonardo, New Jersey, Mallrats had more like $6 million in studio funding, a crew of 50 to 60, and an entire Minnesota mall as its playground. Doherty, a real-deal starlet fresh outta Beverly Hills, 90210 (and the pages of Playboy!), was on board for the film, as was Don Phillips, the casting director behind Dazed and Confused, whom Smith calls “Magellan, the great discoverer.”
Sam Raimi got money from dentists to make Evil Dead. So, in our limited knowledge, it was like, “Oh, then we’ll find a dentist later, and then our careers will be great!”Scott Mosier
Many up-and-comers from across young Hollywood—Amanda Peet, Breckin Meyer, Reese Witherspoon, Seth Green—had shown up to auditions. None of them made the cut, but other intriguing talents did, like the newly retired pro skateboarder Jason Lee, who hard launched his acting career by outshining his more seasoned Mallrats scene partner, Jeremy London. Or like the oafish menace Ben Affleck, who occasionally had to leave the Mallrats set during production to take meetings regarding a little script he and a pal were developing called Good Will Hunting.
Renowned artist Drew Struzan created a Mallrats poster that looked like a cross between his famous Indiana Jones and Star Wars designs and the cover of an actual comic. The movie’s soundtrack featured Bush, Weezer, and Sublime. Mallrats even had catnip for Clerks heads: chiefly, the return of screwball stoner bros Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith himself). And for everyone else, there was Michael Rooker’s bare ass and recurring Magic Eye jokes. What more could a moviegoer want?!
On the eve of Mallrats’ October 1995 release, MTV held a splashy premiere party hosted by the veejay Kennedy and featuring live music from Sponge, a sentence so perfectly ’90s that it just Rocked the Vote for Ross Perot. It would be the last time anyone celebrated the film for a long, long while.
Smith and Mosier were in Red Bank, New Jersey, on the Saturday morning of Mallrats’ opening weekend when they heard from Jacks about the early box office returns. Neither young filmmaker knew quite how to interpret the number they were hearing: $400,000, give or take.
“On what screen?” asked Smith.
On all of the screens, Jacks explained.
“I’m like, we still got Saturday and Sunday!” remembers Mosier. “And [Jacks] is like, ‘Yeah, it doesn’t really work that way.’ So it was that feeling of: Ohhh, you're just, you’re—it’s over. You're DOA.”
Mallrats sputtered to barely over a million dollars that first weekend. A scathing review in the Los Angeles Times—one that Smith still quotes to this day!—began: “If the Sundance Institute or the AFI ever offers a course advising directors of successful first films what to avoid the second time around, Mallrats could be at the heart of the curriculum.” That Monday, Smith and Mosier drove up to Boston to fulfill a previously scheduled promise to speak to a media studies class taught by Smith’s ex Kim Loughran. “We’re like, Don’t ever chase your dreams, kids!” recalls Mosier. “The least inspiring lecture of all time,” agrees Smith. “You put me up in front of people, man, and I’ll have people making movies. Not that day.”
Mallrats was still brand-spanking-new, yet already it was old news, just another unwanted garment hanging limp on some dead mall clearance rack.
I was, of course, aware of precisely none of the above as I slouched cross-legged on a sleeping bag in my friend Julia’s basement in Pennington, New Jersey, while someone pushed a rental copy of Mallrats into the VCR.
This was the summer of 1996 and, for us, the interregnum between seventh and eighth grade at Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart. By day, various classmates and I spritzed Sun In on our hair, paged through dELiA*s catalogs, and got dropped off at the mall to see The Craft and sample Gap fragrances. On rowdy nights like this one, we picked up pizza in town before invading the video store, yapping and bopping around like our small lives depended on it because, at that age, they kinda did.
In the same way that the music you “discover” in high school will forever resonate just a little bit differently to your ear, R-rated movies viewed at middle school sleepovers have a way of becoming indelible cinematic experiences. Whether the movies are any good is a separate and irrelevant matter. That Los Angeles Times review that Smith still quotes also described Mallrats as “a numbing and dispiriting experience aimed at the least discriminating parts of the teen-age audience.” Which made it a movie aimed right at me.
Most of the things that bugged critics about Mallrats were aspects I either considered to be features or didn’t notice at all. An adult watching the film might understandably perceive its characters as struggling to mature and failing to thrive, whereas I just felt all grown up by proximity as I watched them bicker about superhero sex logistics, try on undies in public, and bang in an elevator. (When you’re in middle school, “sophomoric” isn’t so much a putdown as an aspiration.) I didn’t quite grasp why everyone kept talking about the back of a Volkswagen, but I was too busy cracking up over dopey, meta delights like Willam (Ethan Suplee) seeing Rene (Doherty) and wondering “Brenda?!” to interrogate anything further. I hadn’t seen Clerks yet, so there was no need to feel let down by the ways Mallrats differed from Smith’s more experimental work.
The girls at our sleepovers chattered about Gwen’s cool vibes, Brandi’s (Claire Forlani’s) odd accent, and how Affleck sure had changed since his wholesome, boyish days as C.T. Granville in the educational Voyage of the Mimi miniseries we’d watched in science class. I couldn’t possibly have had a bigger crush on Lee’s slovenly, magnetic Brodie, even after witnessing him stick his hand down his own ass crack in order to “stink palm” a foe. I recited lines from the movie constantly, hitting every exaggerated cadence. Even now I find it difficult to enter a supermarket without announcing that I love the smell of commerce in the morning or to see a boat, any boat, without chuckling, You … dumb … bastard at the nearest stranger. (Preferably a know-it-all kid.)
My friends and I weren’t alone in our obsession. Back in 2000, Smith told Ain't It Cool News that the Mallrats VHS “was a great sell-through title”—meaning that people didn’t just rent the tape, they bought it for keeps. In 2001, he asserted that Universal’s Gramercy Pictures had “more than made its money back on video” and that “the DVD did phenomenally well and that movie has its hardcore audience.” And Smith himself had helped cultivate that audience, thanks to his early forays on the World Wide Web.
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Not long after Mallrats came out, Smith was brooding over the film’s reception when his ex—the same one who taught that Boston class—told him to cheer up: She’d seen a whole fan site devoted to his work on the internet! “And I was like, What the fuck’s the internet?” Smith says. He wound up at a web café in Red Bank, marveling at the tech and printing out everything he could find. (Mosier remembers him bursting in back home, waving papers around: “He’s like, I uncovered treasure! I found our people!”) Galvanized, Smith sought out and hired the page’s proprietor to build a website for View Askew Productions, complete with a message board where he could directly interact with fans.
“When the site went up, I was able to talk to not just the people who had seen Clerks in the theater and now had it on home video,” Smith says, “but suddenly the kids who were watching Mallrats on home video as well, who were feeling insanely fucking seen.” And those viewers could talk to one another as well, strengthening their newfound community.
For a time, Smith had tended to clown on Mallrats as a way to preempt criticism, denigrating it onstage at the Independent Spirit Awards and online during Q&A live chats. But increasingly, when he did, he got confused looks instead of knowing snickers. “I had to stop making fun of it,” he said during a 25th anniversary retrospective, “because people would be like, That's your best movie, bro!” Smith says now that ultimately, “water finds its level.” It feels right that for me, the perfect level was a subterranean suburban floor.
In late October, Smith hosted a 30th anniversary Mallrats screening at Smodcastle Cinemas, the Jersey Shore venue he purchased in 2022. He paused the movie so frequently to tell stories that the hour-and-a-half running time became “a grueling five-hour experience,” he says with pride. “And everyone stayed, everyone loved it. Like, even in the most uncomfortable chairs.”
Smith says he told the crowd, in appreciation: “I made Mallrats. You remade it.”
Mallrats was a late bloomer that just needed a minute to find its people. But that’s only one part of its legacy. What distinguishes this film’s long arc isn’t who made it or who made it happen. It’s about all the things Mallrats made happen—from Jason Lee’s career to View Askew’s website launch to Smith’s bounce-back success on his follow-up film, Chasing Amy. “It is because of Mallrats that I started selling merch,” Smith says, as another example. “I was gonna die with 200 Mallrats posters.” (That operation evolved into a brick-and-mortar store, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, which itself became the setting for seven seasons of the reality show Comic Book Men on AMC.) It was also because of Mallrats that Smith first met the person who sold him the home we are currently hotboxing. (Smith has owned this place for going on 23 years and still refers to it as the Ben Affleck House, in honor of its previous occupant.)
Above all, Mallrats played an essential role in building out the creative enterprise known as the View Askewniverse—a loosely linked but close-knit realm of Smith’s movies, comics, characters, actors, shows, family members, podcasts, live events, life events, and unmissable opportunities like the upcoming “Jay and Silent Bob Cruise Askew.” I say essential because it was during the development of Mallrats that Smith secured the IP rights to, oh, just the two snoochiest, boochiest characters in Hollywood history.
It was following Sundance in 1994, as legal eagles worked to formalize Miramax’s Clerks purchase, which had initially been scrawled on a yellow legal pad, that “our lawyer carved out Jay and Silent Bob,” Mosier tells me, so that the pair could be reprised in Mallrats over at Universal. “I don’t even think they blinked.” Smith’s memory of the story does involve slightly more blinking (and also kind of makes me want to go to law school). But it ends with lawyers deeming Clerks, per its title, to be “about the guys inside the store, not the guys outside the store”—and therefore agreeing to transfer ownership of the townie-core twosome back to their creators.
“Me and Jason Mewes have owned Jay and Silent Bob ever since,” Smith says. “And we can put them in anything we want and stuff. That is akin to owning C-3PO and R2-D2.” Depending on whether you count Scream 3, the characters have appeared in, like, 10 movies.
In May of 1997, during an AOL Celebrity Circle chat room Q&A, a user complimented Smith on cross-pollinating his movies with characters and bits of trivia from other films. "It's great to be in a movie theatre and hear ten people out of a hundred laughing when they catch an inside reference,” Smith replied, adding:
KvinSmith: It doesn't alienate the other ninety, but it does make the ten feel incredibly inside and clever.
KvinSmith: And if I can send a few cats home feeling just a tad superior to their fellow patrons, I feel I've done my job.
KvinSmith: That, and I love to cross-reference the flicks—keeps them within the same “universe” (sorry—it's a comics thing).
If you know your Bible, when Christ gets arrested, the apostles scatter. And nobody knows anybody. Jesus? Never heard of him! and shit. And then a cock crows three times. Same thing when a movie flops, everyone scatters.Smith
These days, the comics-industrial complex looms so large in the center of pop culture that it’s hard to remember that things weren’t always this way. Mallrats was released in the middling Batman Forever and Batman & Robin era; the X-Men were, at the time, still relegated to Saturday morning cartoons. Marvel Entertainment Group declared bankruptcy at the end of 1996, and it wasn’t until 2008 that the now inescapable words “Marvel Cinematic Universe” began eating the world.
The comic visionary Stan Lee had made only a handful of film cameos before he turned up in Mallrats (thanks to Jacks, who had a personal connection). Lee never forgot the love he received from that appearance, even after racking up some 135 IMDb credits as Marvel made its cultural ascent. And he returned the favor in 2019’s Captain Marvel, which shows Lee as himself, reading the Mallrats script on a train in 1995, running the catchphrase Trust me, true believer. It’s fun to imagine someone firing up Mallrats for the first time after seeing that. You’re never too old to add new lore.
Here in Los Angeles, as I look around at the comics and figurines decorating Smith’s office, he points out the window toward nearby Runyon Canyon and tells me that in January, wildfires started licking in the direction of his house, close enough that he had to evacuate. Smith considers himself “a pack rat and a fuckin’ hoarder,” but on that day, he was holding only two things when he left the house with his wife and their dogs. The first was a small urn containing a portion of his father’s ashes.
“The other,” Smith says, “was my Silent Bob costume. Because I was like, Well, if everything burns down, I'm gonna have to work and shit.”
If Mallrats were in a multiverse, there would be some fascinating parallel worlds. Like the one where the studio got its wish, ousted Mewes, and recast Jay with Seth Green. Or the one where Mallrats really did hit like Animal House. “You gotta understand, like, if things had gone according to plan, I would live in a much bigger house right now,” Smith says. He’s being facetious—the house we’re sitting in, which thankfully remained unscathed during the fires earlier this year, is 8,000-plus square feet and has eight bathrooms and a rooftop pool—but “I would have had this whole different career,” he says. A more commercial career, “where I was more like Judd Apatow.”
But things did not go according to plan. “If you know your Bible,” Smith says, “when Christ gets arrested, the apostles scatter. And nobody knows anybody. Jesus? Never heard of him! and shit. And then a cock crows three times. Same thing when a movie flops, everyone scatters. … Nobody wants to be near a bomb when it happens.”
The sudden quiet after Mallrats did bring some much-needed clarity. “You know, the failure of Mallrats really becomes the birth of the Chasing Amy that comes out,” Mosier says. The third film in Smith’s so-called Jersey Trilogy had initially been a very different project: a PG-13 approach, with Suplee as one of the leads. (As Smith tells it, he and Jacks were out seeing the PG-13 film Clueless when the producer piped up: “Why don't you make that lesbian movie in a high school?”) When Mallrats tanked, though, Smith listened to his gut and changed his approach. “The very next day, I was like, Chasing Amy's gonna be the thing I originally thought it would be,” Smith says. “Fuck kids in high school!”
Smith’s obvious Chasing Amy muse was Joey Lauren Adams, whom he fell for while shooting Mallrats and dated for a time. But she wasn’t his only important infatuation. At one point in our conversation, I mention a priceless interview with Affleck that shows up in a 2005 documentary short called Erection of an Epic: The Making of Mallrats.
“Y’know, it was a stink-palm movie,” Affleck says in the doc, looking slightly pained to be talking about the film. “It was a dirty-pants, hands-down-your-trousers-type picture. But I needed the 6,000 bucks, so I went down to audition for it.”
I ask Smith whether remarks like this had ever hurt his feelings or whether he just thought: That’s my Ben!
“That was my Ben,” Smith says emphatically. “That was the Ben Affleck I fell in love with on the set of Mallrats. Because he was instantly familiar, urbane, witty, charming. He knew the business and shit like that. But he was so—man, he also had some size to him and shit! So when he hugged you, you felt hugged.”
Smith was offered a reported budget of $2 million to make Chasing Amy with the studio’s preferred cast: Drew Barrymore, David Schwimmer, and Jon Stewart. He turned that down to run it back with three lesser-known Mallrats actors, Adams, Affleck, and Lee, for a budget of closer to $250,000. His conviction paid off: Chasing Amy was both a commercial success and a critical one, reviving Smith’s reputation and giving him the confidence and momentum to make his longtime passion project, the gloriously sacrilegious Dogma.
And it all began with Mallrats. A message in the end credits of Chasing Amy read: “To all the critics that didn't like our last flick: All is forgiven.”
Casting Affleck in Mallrats had some other key impacts on both Smith’s life and American cinematic canon. Before Mallrats production, Affleck and Matt Damon had just sold Good Will Hunting to Castle Rock. But when that deal fell through because executives didn’t want to cast Affleck and Damon, Smith helped land the film on the right desk at Miramax—with the actors attached. During Oscar season, when there were catty rumors that perhaps the fellas hadn’t really written their screenplay, Smith agreed to chat with USA Today reporter Jennifer Schwalbach about how hard he’d seen them work. Smith eventually wound up very happily married to that reporter, which all means that, yep, “my daughter exists because I cast Ben Affleck in Mallrats,” Smith says.
Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes pose with Ben Affleck at their hand and footprint ceremony in front of the TCL Chinese Theater on October 14, 2019
In 2019, ahead of the release of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, Smith and Mewes were invited to stick their hands and feet into a historic patch of Los Angeles cement. “Bert and Ernie by way of Cheech and Chong!” said Affleck, who presented the pair at their Hollywood handprint ceremony. “The little one would say kind of nonsensical things like snoogantay poochies,” Affleck said. “The bigger one would say nonsensical things like: Mallrats is gonna make a hundred million dollars!”
As Smith made his imprints, he added an extra one, pressing the patterned edge of his father’s urn into the cement. One of Smith’s formative Hollywood memories, from 40 years earlier, was the time in 1979 when his family took the train across the country to visit L.A. and wound up in front of the Chinese Theater, looking at all the celebrity hands and feet. “All I cared about was the Star Wars footprints,” Smith says. As they were leaving, his dad told him: Maybe you'll be here one day.
“Owing to nothing,” Smith emphasizes. “It wasn't even like I’d been experimenting with a Super 8 camera!” Despite all this downplaying, or maybe because of it, it’s clear that memory means everything to him. “If I was doing a biopic of my life,” Smith says, “it probably ends with the handprints in the cement.”
The urn is back on a shelf in Smith’s office at the Ben Affleck House, surrounded by cartoon flotsam, retro action figures, and comic dork bric-a-brac. All the greats are here: Charlie Brown, Underdog, Jay and Silent Bob, and a lot—like, a lot—of Rocky and Bullwinkle, most of which Smith only recently acquired. “I don't think it takes, you know, Freud to fucking figure it out,” Smith says of his growing collection. “I just want to be young again, and the fire was threatening.”
I’ve done three different drafts of a Mallrats script, three different incarnations. And Universal invariably says, This is neither fast nor furious. And so it goes no-freeway.Smith
Smith is a man of many projects, on-screen and collectible and otherwise, forever returning to the sandbox from which his Smodcastle Cinemas kingdom has been—to use that Mallrats term of abundance—erected. Clerks is now a trilogy. The Jay and Bob franchise has a Strikes Back, a Super Groovy Cartoon Movie!, and a Reboot. “Clearly, I wanna play with my old toys,” Smith told The Script Lab Podcast in 2019 about pitching new versions of his old films. “Clearly, I wanna go back in the past.” Not a year goes by, not a year, that I don’t hear about some new Mallrats sequel in the works. But is there any latest news?
“I've done three different drafts of a Mallrats script, three different incarnations,” says Smith. “And Universal invariably says, This is neither fast nor furious. And so it goes no-freeway. They don't believe in a Mallrats sequel.” At this point, he says, even if one were to ever get made, it would feel bittersweet. Stan Lee passed away in 2018 at the age of 95. Doherty died last year from breast cancer at 53. “Man, we had her, she was here,” says Smith in frustration. “And I'm not like, pointing fingers or being like, Universal sucks, but I wish they had seen the value in that sort of thing. For very little money, they probably could have made some fuckin’ coin.”
Like so many others, I’ve been receiving my own little remittances from Mallrats for going on 30 years now. They come denominated in amounts that range from the shared glow of a well-deployed “Hartford? The Whale?” among friends to that little thrill when the Goops’ cover of “Build Me Up, Buttercup” kicks in and you know exactly what scene is on. They can be redeemed for tiny, bottomless cups of soda, one (1) visit with the Easter Bunny OR introduction to someone’s mother, and a few minutes of sweet half-baked nostalgia for the Julia’s Basement in one’s life.
“I don't know if Universal has ever admitted that Mallrats has made a profit yet,” Smith says. “You know, studios are very good at fuckin’ hiding money and shit. But my God, man, Mallrats has profited me over and over and over and over again, for the little movie that couldn't.” Just like that lovelorn mall clerk overhearing Brodie’s diatribe about the musculoskeletal dangers of spooning, I know exactly how he feels.
