Fans line up to get star’s autograph

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 11/21/05

BY ALEX BIESE
AND DAN KAPLAN
STAFF WRITERS
RED BANK — Joe McLane began waiting in line at 5:15 a.m Sunday for a chance to meet one of Monmouth County’s biggest celebrities who doesn’t play the guitar.

The Hazlet resident was the first of an estimated 500 people who lined up to meet filmmaker and Highlands native Kevin Smith. He was in Red Bank Sunday to sign copies of a new DVD featuring appearances by him and comedic sidekick and actor Jason Mewes in three episodes of the critically acclaimed Canadian dramatic teen series “Degrassi: The Next Generation.”

Judging from the line that extended from Smith’s Broad Street store — Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash — and wrapped north around Mechanic Street, rocker Bruce Springsteen may have some competition for the Shore’s biggest draw. By 4:30 p.m., the line still was going strong.

“I think that Kevin Smith is a genius,” said Angela Kemper, 20, who drove five hours from the Boston suburb of Weymouth, Mass., to attend the autograph signing. “It’s kind of pathetic, but he’s my idol. I started writing because of him.”

Even Smith couldn’t explain his and his movies’ popularity.

“I don’t know what it is, man,” Smith said. “Since it’s all based locally, I guess that’s a big factor when you’re here, because you get a lot of Monmouth County folks showing up. But I don’t know, I guess it connects with them on some level, thank God.”

Not everyone was there to see Smith, though. He was joined at a table in the back of the store by Mewes and “Degrassi” stars Jake Epstein and Stacey Farber, both 18 of Toronto. The cable series, based at a high school, deals with important teen issues, such as pregnancy and AIDS, and has generated a loyal fan base in America.

“It’s different than other shows,” Mallory Szymczak, 16, of Toms River said. “It deals with real issues.”

Mewes and Smith’s DVD titled “Jay and Silent Bob Do Degrassi: The Next Generation” is a recording of their three-episode guest appearance on the show.

Smith admitted he was taken aback by having “Degrassi” fans in his comic book store.

“There’s mostly 16-year-old girls in the store,” said Smith, who is used to seeing young male adults at his appearances. “That’s not normal at all.”

Smith, whose last Red Bank autograph signing session lasted until 5 a.m. following an appearance at the Count Basie Theatre last April, said it is a thrill getting to meet the fans.

“It’s always nice,” Smith said. “It’s always a pleasure, but it’s kind of nerve-racking because we’re like, “God, I hope we get to everybody.’ But still it feels fantastic.”

Despite his massive popularity, Smith said he has never encountered a negative kind of fanaticism, thanks at least in part to the large amount of time he spends with fans.

“I don’t really have crazy fans,” Smith said. “I think a lot of that has to do with accessibility. We do things like this all the time, always hanging out on our Web site, posting and stuff like that.”

Smith has been in the area filming the sequel to his low-budget — it cost $28,000 to make — but wildly popular 1994 cult classic independent film “Clerks.” The sequel tentatively is being called “The Passion of the Clerks.”

Katie Martinez, 15, of Holmdel, who was in Red Bank with friends waiting in line for more than four hours, said Smith’s movies “are so funny. They’re the movies you never get sick of.”

Elliot Berard left his Rhode Island home with his friends around midnight, and arrived in Red Bank just before 6 a.m.

“This is the first time that I’ve ever been to a signing, and we just figured the line was going to be wicked long, so we left around midnight, wound up getting lost a couple of times, arrived here, and we ended up beating the crowd by a lot more than I thought we would,” Berard said.

Chuck Ruggiero of Middletown summed up the appeal of Smith’s films: “They’re just really funny. I don’t want to say they’re an escape necessarily, but it’s just a good time. All his movies are really good.”

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Director Kevin Smith (Clerks; Mallrats; Chasing Amy; Dogma; Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back; Jersey Girl) speaks in one-liners, which is a great attribute for an entertainer who will be “a fat man sweating on a stage for four or five hours” in front of 1,000 Vancouverites Saturday night (July 9). For those who can’t afford the $50 admission to the Vogue, the former Vancouver Film School student poured his heart out via cellphone to the Straight:

The Straight question: What do you wish you knew in film school that you know now?

The one-liner: “The more you eat, the less you exercise and the wider your waist gets. If I knew I’d end up looking like my dad, I’d probably choose to eat differently.”

The real deal: “I wish I’d paid more attention in film school [he dropped out four months into his eight-month program]. If I had, I might have made better-looking films. I was never interested in cinematic things; I was interested in character and dialogue.”

The question: Your films aren’t polished. Why do you think they’re successful in spite of that?

The one-liner: “I sold my soul to Satan in ’92. Then I sold it to Jesus right after. I figure they can fight it out and I’ll have a successful film career in the meantime.”

The real deal: “I think they speak to a distinct pocket of youth….I make films for myself; apparently, a lot of people also identify with not getting laid.” (Smith is married and his wife has even appeared in Playboy, but he told the Straight that doesn’t mean he’s getting laid.)

The question: Film schools in Vancouver are booming; hundreds of kids go into the industry each year. So, is there a future in filmmaking?

The one-liner: “Christ, I hope so. I’m banking on it. I’ve had an 11-year run and I don’t know how to do anything else.”

The real deal: “The current crop of directors will die out or become terrible at what they do. So we need new blood and stories to keep cinema interesting.”

The question: Anything else?

The one-liner: “Please come to the show! It’s so much more fun when there’s more people there. Don’t go to the Alanis Morissette show down the street; buy her CD and see my show. I’m missing out on the Alanis Morissette concert, which is pissing me off. I’ll be at the Vogue sweating on-stage. The question and answers go on for a very long time. I’m not high on quality, but I am high on quantity. Plus, they sell booze there.”

The real deal: Uh, that was it. As of press time, a few hundred tickets to the show were still available. Buy them on-line at kevinthevan.com for $50.

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Clerks director will answer your questions, maybe even about Ben and Jen

On stage
An Evening With Kevin Smith
Where: The Vogue Theatre, 918 Granville St.
When: Saturday at 7 p.m.
Tickets: $50, at kevinthevan.com or at the door

Kevin Smith is grousing on his blog about Vancouver weather. He’s also not happy with the Sutton Place Hotel, a few restaurants around town and a snippy desk clerk in Squamish. But, after some great sex with his wife, Jen, and a TiVo’d episode of The Simpsons, all is well.

Smith tells everybody everything. We know he gets up in the morning and, in his words, “takes a dump,” then takes advantage of the down time to check his mail. He’s gained 30 pounds in the last year, quit smoking, and apparently isn’t too happy with buddy Ben Affleck right now — but so far, we don’t know why.

But you can ask him in person on Saturday, and he’ll probably tell you.

The verbose Smith, the infamous director, actor and oh-so-prolific blogger is staging a live question and answer session Saturday at the Vogue, an “audience as straight man” format that proved itself wildly successful a few years ago with the DVD release of An Evening With Kevin Smith.

Smith is in town acting in Susannah Grant’s Catch and Release, but he’s primarily a director himself. The 1994 cult classic Clerks is thought to be his first film, but fanatics and some Vancouverites know that honour belongs to Mae, I (a.k.a. Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary), his Vancouver Film School effort — or lack thereof.

“I was here circa 1992,” Smith tells The Province. “I did four months of the eight-month program.”

It was worth it, he says, because that’s where he met Lower Mainland native Scott Mosier, who remains his production partner. They first teamed to pitch a 10-minute short subject documentary for a VFS major class project.

“I used to walk to the film school at eight o’clock every morning, and man, it was hooker central,” he says. Through that scene, Smith met Emelda Mae, a pre-op transsexual who sang in a club and decided to chronicle her plight in a sensitive character study.

“We had a reputation of being jokers in class, but we made a real serious pitch. We were going to treat it maturely and sensitively. And they bought it.”

Twelve films were pitched, but only four were chosen, with the unsuccessful bidders relegated to crew positions.

Their elation soon turned to dismay.

“We’re like, ‘Oh my god, we’ve succeeded, this is awesome!’” says Smith, “and then we were faced with the task of actually making the documentary. And it was like, ‘I didn’t know we were actually going to have to do it, I just wanted to be one of the ones that were picked!’”

There was little in the way of organization or progress, and Mae eventually dropped out. (”I think she went to have her sex change operation in the Philippines,” recalls Smith). The filmmakers were left with a short clip of a Mae performance at the West End restaurant Doll and Penny’s, and no interviews.

The crew, faced with the same failing grade as the slackers, was livid.

“They kind of turned on us, so I said, ‘Hey let’s do a documentary about how our documentary fell apart.’ So Mae I turned into Mae Day.”

In spite of this measured success, Smith had had enough of film school.

“I don’t think you need to go to film school to direct,” contends Smith. “It’s like writing. You either can or you can’t.”

Smith’s former VFS instructor agrees.

“He didn’t need it,” says Jon Stoddart. “He enjoyed not doing the project the way it was designed, and thinking around the rules. Film school is about structure.”

Smith got half of his tuition back — $4,500 — and threw it into Clerks.

Says Smith: “Ultimately I think I made the right decision, although there are a bunch of film critics out there who felt I should have done at least 10 more years of film school.”

Clerks won accolades from Cannes to Sundance, and Smith went on to make Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (the two characters played by Smith and Jason Mewes in almost every film), and Jersey Girl.

Mewes, says Smith, will definitely be in attendance at the Q&A, but he’s not sure about Affleck, the star of a number of Smith flicks and now the husband of Smith’s Catch and Release co-star Jennifer Garner.

“Yeah, what better wedding present to give your new bride than to take her to see your friend who she sees every day at work anyway,” cracks Smith.

“He might go to make sure that I’m not slagging off on him. This would be the one Q&A where I could be telling an Affleck story and he could stand up and say, ‘That’s bullshit!’

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Kevin Smith is making a film with tears as well as laughs. Will his cult following approve?

By Bob Baker, Times Staff Writer

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 gray socks, the baggy below-the-knees jean shorts, the Marlboro Ultra Lights, the cans of Diet Dr. Pepper, 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-wisenheimer 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 the Roman Catholic Church — is making a movie with as many tears as laughs and a couple of moments that feel almost Capra-esque.

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 fiancée, 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 reacts to Zsigmond’s presence by posting a shot of them together on his Web site that refers to “Visually Challenged Director Kevin Smith,” his cult understands he is mocking his penchant for telling a story through conversation rather than action. 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 tonight, the 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 neighborhood 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 on the Lot off Santa Monica Boulevard. 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 Web site, http://www.viewaskew.com. “A good number of the folks who’ve loved our previous flicks will probably abandon us after seeing ‘Jersey Girl,’ ” he typed in mid-December. “I’ll save you the time of having to post this on our Web-board and let you know that I understand you feel I’m a … ’sell-out,’ I’ve ‘lost it’ (whatever ‘it’ was).”

Emotional bond to the film

What the cult can’t see is a director who, at 32 with a 3½-year-old daughter and a three-story house in the Hollywood Hills, is finding himself emotionally drawn to a movie in ways he never felt before. No matter how many times he edits this one, he says, he winds up rooting for Affleck’s character, a self-centered public relations executive overwhelmed by fatherhood. “I’ve become one of these dudes who talks back to the screen,” he says with amusement. “I’m saying, ‘I hope the dude makes the right choice.’ ”

There’s one scene in which father and daughter exchange a certain, knowing look while dad is addressing that town meeting. Something about it, said Smith, brought him to tears during one all-night editing session. A lot of artists could tell you that. 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.”

Hollywood can be tough on directors who are suspected of trying to break out of their mold. Smith already suffered this once, when his second film, “Mallrats” (1995), a more conventional albeit sex-obsessed comedy about youths in a mall during a weekend, flopped at the box office, earning back a fraction of its $5.8-million budget. (The film’s only “name” actress, TV star Shannen Doherty, struggled with Smith’s high-velocity patter.) When it came time to make his next film, “Chasing Amy,” Smith fended off Miramax’s offer to spend more on well-known actors, instead casting Affleck and several other pals on a $250,000 budget. (”They said, ‘Kevin, it’s not about making a movie with your friends,’ ” he told a college audience. “I said, ‘Really? Because that’s been the whole point of my career.’ “) Today the stakes are far higher: Miramax is spending $35 million to make “Jersey Girl,” $10 million alone for Affleck’s salary.

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 to be shot in early January. 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 6½-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” and “I think you’re gonna be an excellent father” and “I can’t do it all myself; there’re gonna be days when you have to take her to work….”

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 a scene for “Clerks” in which a young woman matter-of-factly told her boyfriend she had previously performed oral sex on 37 men, now worrying about the female demographic.

He and Mosier devised a rationalization to offer Miramax in defense of a longer-than-expected two-hour, 15-minute film: “‘Jerry Maguire’ was two hours and 18 minutes.” Smith had gone through this before with Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, who is notorious for finding trims where his directors can’t or won’t. Smith knew he’d have problems selling two hours and 15 minutes. There were montages that could be sliced, but that would make his already talky style seem verbose. “This will be the hardest movie we’ve ever had to cut,” he said. “It’s easy on a comedy. You just cut what’s not funny. That’s the big difference.” He worked through the holidays, spending several days on each scene, and by last week he’d whittled the movie down to about two hours and 10 minutes.

Interview changes everything

If the cult is looking to blame someone for these predicaments, it could start with another Jennifer: Jennifer Schwalbach. She was a 27-year-old USA Today reporter assigned to interview Smith in 1998 as he was beginning to film “Dogma,” his effort to come to grips with eight years of Catholic school and the contradictions of his faith. (Plot: Two fallen angels, played by Affleck and Matt Damon, try to return to heaven through a scheme that would inadvertently destroy the universe. Pitted against them is a linear descendant of Jesus, played by Linda Fiorentino.) Within a year they were married, and two months later Harley Quinn was born. A few months after that, Smith had an idle fantasy that occurs to most every new dad (to reveal it would spoil the story) and began writing the script that became “Jersey Girl.”

Within the next year, Affleck, coming off the cartoonish “Pearl Harbor,” told Smith he craved something more human in the mold of “Chasing Amy,” in which he’d played a comic-book writer who fell for a lesbian (Smith’s then-girlfriend, Joey Lauren Adams). Smith showed him 40 pages. Affleck signed on and eventually suggested Lopez, someone he’d met while shooting the yet-to-be-released mob comedy “Gigli,” to play his wife.

Smith wanted to make “Jersey Girl” in 1999 right after “Dogma,” but there was the Jay and Silent Bob problem. The duo — neighborhood friend Jason Mewes as foulmouthed, id-dominated 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” (2001), 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, N.J., 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 honor someone who doesn’t deserve it”) yet saw deeper possibilities (”If I could collect Boardwalk and Park Place, then I could have a monopoly”).

The cult was able to keep close watch on all this because Smith recorded a diary on his Web site. It ranged from prideful gushing about the film (”Outside of marrying Schwalbach and being too lazy to rip open a prophylactic that apparently had Harley’s name written all over it, though not necessarily in that order, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done”) to observations of craft (”If you’re ever shooting a movie about two people falling in love, I can’t urge you strongly enough to cast a pair of people who are actually falling in love”).

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 program 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 for Miramax. 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 ABC animated series. For the last year, Smith has been a fixture on “The Tonight Show,” taping and narrating “Roadside Attractions,” quirky Americana features.

“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.”

John Pierson, a longtime booster of independent filmmakers who helped get “Clerks” sold, says fans nervous about the mainstream trappings of “Jersey Girl” shouldn’t worry about Smith too literally integrating his wife-and-kid experiences. “His magical gift, ever since and even in ‘Clerks,’ is to live it, observe it and then transform and transcend the actual experience,” Pierson said. “Scatology aside, he started out with tremendous emotional maturity, yet it has continued to grow exponentially …. From ‘Jersey Girl’ forward, he will understand that he doesn’t owe his fans anything except deeper, richer films — that are still funny as hell.”

No shortage of plans

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.”

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By MARK VOGER

No, you won’t find Jay and Silent Bob in Kevin Smith’s forthcoming romantic comedy “Jersey Girl” starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Liv Tyler and George Carlin. The writer-director has sworn up and down that he’s set aside the characters he and Jason Mewes played in six films.

But Jeff Anderson — who starred as wisecracking Randal in Smith’s 1994 debut, “Clerks” — has his doubts. (Anderson recently became a writer-director himself, with “Now You Know.”)

“I know Kevin has always said that his Jay and Silent Bob characters — that he’s moving on from the ‘View Askewniverse,’ ” Anderson says, using Smith’s nickname for the fictional realm in which the characters exist.

“But I’ll tell you, when we get together with Kevin and we sort of talk about it — I still think it’s going to come out of him again.

“Somewhere down the road, we’re going to see all of these characters back, because they’re characters he knows so well and we just personally have fun with.”

In an online posting on his Web site (www.viewaskew.com), Smith seems to verify Anderson’s sentiments.

While warning “Clerks” fanatics that “Jersey Girl” will be different from his five previous films, Smith confirms that there is “Clerks” activity on the horizon.

Writes Smith: “Anybody who incorporates ‘Snootchie Bootchies!’ into their Internet postings or daily conversations might wanna wait for the ‘Clerks’ cartoon (which — take this as a promise or a threat — is next for us) and skip this one.”

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Filmmaker on his Way with key to Paulsboro
By STEVE LEVINE
Courier-Post Staff
PAULSBORO

He doesn’t have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but the Jersey Girl director may not need one. He’s got Kevin Smith Way.

Smith, who’s been in this waterfront borough on and off for nearly two months filming his next Garden State-themed motion picture, was honored Tuesday with a street bearing his name.

Jersey Girl - starring Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, Liv Tyler and George Carlin - is set in the Central Jersey shore town of Highlands. Paulsboro was cast, primarily for financial reasons, to play its part.

“Had I known they would have named a street after me it probably would have been set here,” mused Smith, casually dressed in calf-length denim jeans and an oversize blue hockey shirt.

The renamed thoroughfare, about 1 1/2 blocks near Paulsboro High School, intersects North Delaware Street and Greenwich Avenue.

It had been named Tyler Street - after the country’s 10th president, not one of the upcoming film’s stars.

During filming here, which began Aug. 23, the main actors have largely been out of public view. On Tuesday, however, Tyler and Raquel Castro, who plays the film’s title character, were on hand for the unveiling of the new Kevin Smith Way street sign.

Smith, who’s fast becoming one of Hollywood’s A-list directors, arrived for the brief midafternoon ceremony in a very un-Hollywood way - driving himself, his wife and 3- year-old daughter, Harley, in a late-model, but not new, Jeep Grand Cherokee.

A bona fide Jersey boy from Red Bank, Monmouth County, Smith thanked Paulsboro Mayor John Burzichelli. The mayor also presented him with a key to the borough and a proclamation naming Oct. 22, 2002, as Kevin Smith Day in Paulsboro.

“Thanks for the key to the city,” Smith said. “But lock the door because I will use the key. Hopefully nothing nefarious will happen on Kevin Smith Way but, if it does, call my lawyers.”

Smith said filming is expected to wrap up here later this month. Jersey Girl is tentatively scheduled for release in October 2003, with a premiere in Paulsboro, he announced.

Questioned about how it feels to have a street named after him while still alive, Smith said it’s a little weird.

“I expect to drop any second,” he quipped.

Burzichelli, a co-owner of Hill Studio on Broad Street who worked with Smith on Chasing Amy, an earlier film, said he wanted to honor the moviemaker because he helped elevate Paulsboro’s profile by shooting here.

After the ceremony the mayor interviewed Smith for Eye on Paulsboro, a local access cable program he hosts.

During the interview, Smith said Miramax, which is financing the film, wanted Jersey Girl shot in Toronto because Canada is a much cheaper location than the United States.

He said Paulsboro, which resembles Highlands in age and architecture, enabled the film to be shot here at a cost Miramax could live with.

“Paulsboro allowed us to shoot a movie called Jersey Girl in New Jersey,” he said.

Afterward, Burzichelli said interviewing a Hollywood hotshot isn’t really all that different from interviewing his regular guests about town.

“It’s just another day in Paulsboro,” he said. “Another day in Paulsboro.”

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Kevin Smith to get his ‘Way’ in Paulsboro
By Brian Arrington

PAULSBORO — Though it may be a while until “Jersey Girl” director Kevin Smith wins an Academy Award, it looks like the bearded movie maker is going to have a street named after him.

Mayor John Burzichelli confirmed rumors Wednesday that plans are in the works to honor Smith with his own street, turning Tyler Street into Kevin Smith Way.

Burzichelli said since filming of the Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck flick “Jersey Girl” began in several locales in the riverfront borough last month, the profile of the working-class community has increased and naming a street after Smith was a fitting way to honor him.

“He has brought a level of excitement and has exposed the neighborhood and residents in the neighborhoods to something different,” Burzichelli said. “People have enjoyed it and we just want to commemorate his contribution.”

Tyler Street was tapped to be Smith’s street because it leads to the entrance of Paulsboro High School — the location of several scenes shot in the community — and will be seen by many residents who attend sporting events there.

It also could be because no one calls the two-block street home.

Linda Martin has lived on the corner of Tyler and North Delaware streets for four years and said the change won’t affect her in any way.

“I don’t know who Tyler was and I don’t know who Kevin Smith is,” she said. “It wouldn’t make a difference to me.”

Mike McMahon, a 14-year-old whose brother was in a baseball scene, was skateboarding down Tyler Street Wednesday when he was told about the plan.

“That’s that ‘Silent Bob’ guy, right?” McMahon asked, referring to Smith’s recurring, mostly mute character.

Burzichelli said details about renaming the street have yet to be finalized but could be by early next week.

Representatives at Smith’s production company, View Askew, declined to comment.

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