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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When I was a kid, much to my chagrin, my grandmother watched The Young and the Restless every afternoon. This was a problem for me, as the campy, live-action Batman – my prepubescent raison d’etre – aired at the same bat-time on a different bat-channel. And, try as I might, I could never boo-hoo my Grams into switching stations.

The older I got, the more fervently I’d rail against her soap – no so much in an effort to get her to spin the dial to Batman but more to convince her on a critical level how insipid the show was. And Grams, God bless her, would always simply shrug, smile at me knowingly, and go back to enjoying the adventures of Nicky and Victor. Sure, I might’ve had a point in all my caviling, but she liked what she liked, and no amount of belly-aching was going to make her turn her back on what she called “her stories.”

This summer, Episode II: Attack of the Clones was met with a more churlish response from the critical community (both off and online) than Richard Gere’s plea to an audience full of New York cops and fireman for peace and cultural understanding at the Concert for NYC 9/11 benefit. With the exception of Time’s Richard Corliss, most critics sharpened their lightsabres and carved poor George Lucas a new one, as if he were a Taun-Taun and they were trying to save a Wampa-ravaged Luke from the freezing winds of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. To use a less-fanboyish analogy, the Powers That Be beat the shit out of Episode II like the movie had fu**ed with their girl- or boyfriends behind their backs.

What were the all expecting that had them feeling so let down? I’ll allow that in terms of predictability, Episode II (and Episode I) make Titanic seem like a veritable whodunit. We all know the Empire’s going to rise and eventually fall at the hands of Indiana Jones, the dude from Corvette Summer, the chick who wrote Postcards from The Edge, and an army of teddy bears. We all know that the Jedi will be hunted to extinction, with the exception of Alex Guiness. We all know that Yoda lives through the Clone Wars and matures into a Muppet. There’s little-to-no mystery left in the Star Wars prequels, with the exception of seeing exactly how the space-shit winds up hitting the space-fan. And that should be enough to get even the causal fan into the theater.

Taken on those terms, I was enthusiastically not disappointed by Attack of the Clones. Shit, I loved it. Why?

Because I love a car wreck.

That’s what the new Star Wars flicks are to me: stunning, tragic car wrecks. And I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense, like this round of flicks is “sterile” as so many critics seem to feel. You can throw a rock and hit a happy naysayer happy to pontificate about how Lucas has lost his humanity, citing the last two installments of the Star Wars saga as guilty of being more digitally manipulated than a free-spirited eighth-grad girl’s breasts by her over-sexed boyfriend. But I’m not one of those cats. I’m digging the new installments for what they’ve become: the tragedie du Darth – the slow fall of Anakin Skywalker into the greasy clutches of the Sith.

And that little melodrama has never been more on display than in Clones. Here, we’re presented with the adolescent Anakin – the boy who’ll later torture his own daughter (unwittingly, to be fair) and cut his other kid’s hand off (rather wittingly). From the get-go, Lucas captures my limited imagination with one simple proposition. Darth Vader was once a teenager. How pedestrian, yet how profound! Evil’s gotta start somewhere, right? Why not show why Johnny can’t read - or in this case, can’t play well with others, and insists on using the Force to choke underlings who don’t live up to his expectations? From the hit-or-miss origin of Phantom Menace’s take on baby Anakin as the galactic Hitler in short pants, Clones ups the ante by presenting us with the heart of darkness right where everyone’s always known it lies: in the passions of a volatile high schooler.

Right off the bat, Anakin is portrayed as a kid who thinks he knows more than he does, and insists on proving to everybody that he’s as good as them, if not better. I went to high school with his guy. Granted, he didn’t grow up to carbon-freeze anybody (in truth, I believe he works at a Shell station now), but had he been given a lightsaber and taught how to pull the Jedi Mind Trick on folks, he might’ve.

In Clones, Anakin is a twelfth grader with a license and parents who want him home by eight: he’s a disaster waiting to happen. Who else but a tortured teen leaps out of a sky-speeder to capture a bounty hunter who’s talked smack about his girl (or, in the case of Clones, set loose killer centipedes in her bedroom)? With little-to-no concern for his own well-being, based largely on his assumption that he’s immortal (that worst of teenage attributes), young Skywalker forces Zam Wessel’s craft (how sad is it that I’m 31 and I know the name of a character who’s never really identified and appears only fleetingly in the film?) to crash-land in a densely populated city, and then pursues her (it) into a bar only to watch his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, make the final collar. And how does the Force-ful whelp wrap it all up with the wide-eyed cantina bystanders? He tosses them a condescending “This is Jedi business.” The balls on this kid!

Fatherless, this rebel without a cause (or Imperial without a cause, technically) is shown to trust in the quietly power-mad Palpatine – the Dad he never had, who fills his head with notions such as “I see you becoming the greatest of all the Jedi.” I knew guys in high school whose fathers would fill their heads full of this kind of bullshit, too, along the lines of “If someone gives you lip, you kick their ass.” It’s easy enough to take an impressionable youngster and turn him into a school bully, but the relationship of the would-be Emperor and his protégé is even more perverse, considering this is a kid who can telekinetically spin fruit in mid-air and Mind Trick a rampaging intergalactic rhino into playing Trigger to his Roy Rogers. Beating up freshman for looking at you is funny in the hallways is one thing; destroying a planet because you’re looking for the stolen Death Star plans is something else.

And never mind the whacked-out paternal issues. Anakin’s relationship with his mother makes Oedipus’s seem healthy by comparison. And like the lunchroom loudmouth who makes one mother joke too many, the Tusken Raiders reap what they sow when Anakin unleashes hell on a whole tribe of them for battering Shmi. What teenage boy wouldn’t slaughter the men, women and baby Sand People if he found his mother dead in one of their huts? That’s the origin of Darth Vader right there: the guy who went ape-shit when he lost his mom. Never mind that he’d been too busy galaxy-trotting for nine years to even so much as send her a Hallmark on Midi-chlorian-Mother’s Day: that’s his mom they fucked with, and they’re all going to pay. There’s something bittersweet about the fall of Darth Vader now, that hadn’t existed before Clones: had his mother simply died of old age, the guy might never have developed that extreme case of asthma he seems to suffer from in Star Wars, Empire, and Return of the Jedi.

Which leads to the most haunting moment of Clones for me: when Anakin breaks down to his puppy love, Amidala, and confesses that he butchered that no-good bunch of sand-eating bandage wearers with his hi-tech Zippo. This scene really resonated with me, because Amidala wears this expression that very quietly says “Holy Christ I’m in love with a human time-bomb.” The sad, hopeless look on her face upon learning of his murder spree brought to mind that moment in Jedi when Luke asked Leia if she remembered what her (and his) mother was like. Leia (in what may be Carrie Fisher’s finest hour in the original trilogy) reminisced that her mother always seemed sad. Here, nearly 20 years later, we get to see what Leia was talking about.

And that’s what worked best for me about the Anakin arc in Clones: the doomed love affair of Anakin and Amidala. Most of the critics dismissed this as the flick’s most ham-fistedly handled aspect, but I thought it played out tragically and beautifully. High marks to both Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman, because I completely bought their relationship. He wants her desperately without really even knowing why, as do all teenage boys when they find who they assume is their one-true in high school. And even though she knows this guy is poison, she can’t help but fall for him - the little slave-boy that grew up to be a conflicted, impetuous hat tank who insists everyone’s giving him a raw deal. In high school, the really hot chicks always went for the massive ****-ups, and eventually wound up married to them. But this marriage doesn’t end in small town affairs and divorce; this marriage ends with the girl scattering her kids across the galaxy to save them from their father, who by that point is more machine than man.

The only thing that could’ve made Clones more enjoyable for me would’ve been if I was actually in it. (C’mon, Obi-George – isn’t there room in the next and final Star Wars flick for a portly Storm Trooper who smokes too much?) And as I sat there watching this beautiful fucking car wreck, fully aware of the attacks Attack was suffering at the hands of the critical Empire outside that darkened theater, I finally knew how my Grams felt when I’d slam The Young and the Restless. Now I’m the one offering up the knowing smile – because I love that Lucas is still dicking around in a galaxy far, far away, and I never want it to end. The Star Wars saga is my soaps, and no amount of bi-otching disguised as film dissertation is going to get me to turn my back on “my stories.”

Unless, of course, there’s a new Batman flick out at the same time.

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I figured I’d address this here before it’s made public next week.

‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back’ is being taken to task (wrongly, I believe) by GLAAD - the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (for those unfamiliar with the acronym). Below is the letter, verbatim, that I received from Scott Seomin, GLAAD’s Entertainment Media Director.

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Dear Kevin:

Two colleagues of mine from GLAAD joined me last evening at a screening of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. We were overwhelmed by the potential negative impact for the film with what we would assume is a large share of its target audience: teen and young adult males. We will be public and aggressive in our condemnation and will provide substantiation for our opinions.

Here are the points to which we will object and our reasons for doing so:

- As one of the principal characters states, the film is a “big gay joke”, but the joke is at the expense of the stereotyped category of people;
- All references to gay men reinforce them as objects of acceptable ridicule and dehumanization;
- Specific epithets for gay men include not only traditional slurs but also have the potential to introduce an expanded vocabulary of defamatory words and phrases;
- When sympathetic characters substitute the word “gay” for something that is wrong or stupid, it validates a common slur used by school-age youth to mean anything unacceptable.

We, or course, are familiar with your work as a writer and director and understand that satire is a large part and object of you expression. The intentional excesses of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and over-the-top characterizations and situations are fundamental to its nature. However, we believe that satirical sophistication is not a fundamental expectation of an audience bombarded by fag jokes and gags revolving around genitals and simulated sex acts.

Also, the inclusion of various other potentially offensive material (e.g. the bits about the acronym CLIT, racism, child abuse) for laughs does not excuse or dilute the omnipresent backdrop of the “big gay joke”. While I will not fall as far back as the Hays Code, at no time is there any retribution or remorse for gay-bashing “humor”. Again, to write off the behavior of the lead characters, especially Jay, with a what-do-you-expect-from-someone-so-dumb shrug truly trivializes the impact.

I wanted to state our position strongly here before I request a meeting with you to discuss this. I will be in New York from August 2nd to 6th and either can come to New Jersey or arrange a time at your convenience if you are in the city. Because I realize there are no changes you could make to this film to satisfy our concerns, I still believe we could discuss how you will be interviewed (for) this film and how GLAAD moves forward with its concerns.

Please let me know as soon as possible of your interest and availability.

Sincerely,

Scott Seomin
Entertainment Media Director

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Needless to say, I was crestfallen.

You all know me. You all know how big a fan I am of the gay community. You all know the respect and fascination I have for gay culture and practices. I’ve said in many an interview, from ‘Chasing Amy’ onward, that the only reason I never dabbled in homosexuality when I was younger was because I wouldn’t know what to say to a guy after he blew a load in my mouth - a sentiment that says more about my social awkwardness than any socially awkward stereotypes that’ve been unfairly hung on the gay community.

Gay or straight has never been a big issue with me. Sex is sex, as far as I’m concerned. Some cats dig on the opposite gender, and some cats dig on their own. Sexual identity will always be as mystifying as why ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ was once the number one television show in our country: there’s no point in getting bent out of shape about it; it just IS. Some cats will always gravitate toward Daisy Duke, and some will always pine over Boss Hogg.

I’ve been knee-deep in gayness for the better part of my twenties and up (I just know THAT’S going to be printed out of context somewhere: SMITH SAYS HE’S “KNEE-DEEP IN GAYNESS”). For those who’ll recall, we made a movie called ‘Chasing Amy’. Bob Hawk (he who was most responsible for exposing the world to ‘Clerks’) is about as gay as they come (no pun intended), and he lived with me for three years. My brother’s gay. There are prominent members of this board community who are gay. The list goes on and on.

Now lest you all think I’m pandering, I’m not trying to save face with the View Askew Gay All-Stars list above; I’m just trying to give some context as to why I was so crushed to receive Scott Seomin’s GLAAD missive. So as soon as I read it, I called Scott Seomin (who joked about how hard it was to grow up gay with a last name like Seomin) to address his concerns. He was a sweet guy who, after talking to him for an hour, admitted that in his heart, he knew I was not a homophobe. But he couldn’t cotton to the disparity between who I am and some of the humor in the flick.

I pointed out that the jokes in the movie, while funny at face value, do far more than evoke chuckles at the expense of the gay community. I believe that they teach tolerance to the same audience that Scott feels won’t get the humor. When you have two main characters who’ve both - at one point or another - hinted at or flat-out copped to homo-erotic escapades, how on earth can that be considered “gay-bashing”. It’s more than you get in most “buddy” flicks. Did Murtaugh and Riggs ever cop to getting dreamy over the male anatomy? I think not.

But this is nothing new for us. Recall, if you will, the scene in ‘Dogma’, when Jay asks Rufus to tell him something about himself (Jay) that nobody knows. Rufus points out that when Jay masturbates, he thinks about guys. When that movie came out, the board got flooded with angry posts, demanding “How can you make Jay gay like that?!” I would answer “Why on earth would that bother you?”, pointing out that Jay’s sexual proclivity should never effect how the viewer accepts the character, and that if it did, then perhaps some soul-searching was due on the objecting viewer’s part. If you liked Jay before that scene, why the hell wouldn’t you like him afterwards? The long and short of it: that scene sparked healthy discussion about tolerance and acceptance - as well as made a lot of people laugh.

If you believe Scott’s stated position that the target audience for our flicks is “teen and young adult males”, then you have to allow that some of these impressionable youngsters will have to come to grips with the fact that the character they hold very dearly as one of “their’s” has, in fact, expressed homosexual tendencies. And either those folks stop being fans at that moment, or accept that a character they identify with engages in behavior they may not approve of (if you work under the assumption, of course, that ALL “teen and young adult males” are terrified of the gay community). If they can accept that in a fictional character, some - not all, mind you, but some - will carry this newfound tolerance into their daily lives. Suddenly, I can do more than just entertain with even a flick that purports to have nothing on its mind apart from making you laugh; I can also educate in some weird way. That’s the heart of “satire”.

However, as Scott points out in his letter, sometimes, satire may fall on deaf ears.

During the ’70’s, Norman Lear created ‘All in the Family’, a show with a protagonist who was, essentially, a bigot. Some people understood this and enjoyed the show because of its well-observed satirical content. Some people misconstrued it and enjoyed the show because Archie Bunker didn’t like black people… just like them. Did that make Norman Lear a hate-monger? Nope. Norman Lear wasn’t responsible for how white America dealt with race issues. Norman Lear just showed us how stupid white America can be when it came to race issues. He held up a mirror to our culture. In essence, he was just the messenger.

But then, we all know what happens to the messenger…

The gay jokes in ‘Jay and Silent Bob’ satirize a young male culture terrified of any cock that isn’t their own. I accept the fact that some folks seeing the flick may not get the joke behind the joke, and just walk away thinking “Jay and Silent Bob don’t wanna be gay, man! Just like me!” However, I also KNOW - based on posts I’ve read on this board, following the release of ‘Chasing Amy’ and ‘Dogma’ - that some folks in that same demographic will walk away from this movie a little more tolerant toward the gay community. But just because there’s a threat that the message of tolerance-through-humor falls on some deaf ears, should I not endeavor to reach ANYONE? No can do. Because if even one person is made more tolerant of that-which-isn’t-him-or-her by watching a film I’ve made, then that means more to me than whatever the box office may wind up being - or whatever any protest group hypothesizes about my motivations.

That being said, I can’t claim complete altruism in making the jokes we make in the flick. Gay sex is funny… just like STRAIGHT sex is funny. Just like making fun of racism is funny (I assume Scott’sreferring to Chris Rock’s white-hating director character when he mentions racism in his GLAAD letter). Just like making fun of bad parenting is funny (a young Jay and Bob are left outside the stores by clearly bad mothers early on in the flick; I’m assuming that’s the “child abuse” Scott was talking about in his letter). Just like the homophobic mind-set, while frightening, is also fodder for ridicule (indeed, we make fun of the exact thing we’re being accused of in the Biggs and Van Der Beek scene in ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back’). Just like Miramax making ‘She’s All That’ is funny. Just like all the things we make fun of in the movie are funny. I mean, this is a movie that mocks ITSELF as it goes along, for crying out loud. No one escapes unscathed.

Anyway, I told Scott all of this during the course of our conversation, and asked what we could do to allay his (and GLAAD’s) fears. He said he’d be asking Miramax to make a substantial donation to the Matthew Shepherd Foundation (Matthew Shepherd is the Wyoming student who was beaten to death for being gay in one of the worst hate crimes in recent memory; the Foundation’s aim is to educate the public on the dangers of homophobia). I said I’d be happy to make a donation as well, as it’s a great cause, and one I believe in strongly. He asked how much I’d like to donate. I queried how much he intended to seek from Miramax. He said two hundred grand. I admitted I don’t have pockets as deep as Miramax. He suggested I donate ten grand, and I said “Done.”

We spoke further about how important a film he thought ‘Chasing Amy’ was, and he informed me that if he’d been at GLAAD at the time the film came out, he would’ve given it a GLAAD award. It was nice to hear, as I was always kind of bugged that we didn’t receive much GLAAD attention on ‘Amy’, considering how pro-gay the flick was. He said he wanted to meet me in person to shake my hand, and I invited him to the office on Tuesday to do so, as well as pick up his check. I bid him adieu, and thus ended a very friendly conversation that resulted in a couple of guys enlightened as to one another’s feelings about some potentially thorny issues, as well as the Matthew Shepherd Foundation being ten g’s richer.

Then, yesterday afternoon, I fielded a phone call from Rebecca Ascher-Walsh of ‘Entertainment Weekly’, asking me to comment on how GLAAD (in the person of Scott Seomin) was “horrified” by the homophobia on parade in ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back’. I was taken aback, as Scott never once expressed being “horrified” by the jokes in the flick we’d discussed at great lengths on the phone Friday. He said he was merely concerned.

Suddenly, I was being painted as homophobic by GLAAD.

This I can’t quietly sit by and let happen.

Neither ‘Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back’ nor myself are homophobic. Fuck, if anything, we’re overtly gay-friendly.

In regards to the film, the openly gay journalists who saw it during the junket didn’t express one iota of a reservation in regards to the content of the flick. In fact, two of them thought it was pretty daring of me to have Silent Bob admitting that he’d have gone down on Jay (see the flick). The even better barometer for me was Bob Hawk - a man whose opinion I trust more than almost anyone on the planet. Bob watched the flick and never flinched, aside from laughing very, very heartily. And believe me - if anyone was going to call me on the gay jokes in the flick, it was the producer of ‘Trick’ himself. But he didn’t, and I can’t believe it’s because he’s self-loathing or afraid for his job (as Scott suggested the journalists at the junket must have been in order to not be insulted by the movie).

But most importantly, *I* don’t feel the film’s homophobic. I would never (nor could never) make a homophobic film. I’m not that guy, and here’s why: I grew up fat. Even though I’m a white male, being fat my whole life still puts me in a minority category as well, and has made me the butt of jokes my entire life. Trust me - I know how hurtful or damaging it can be to be called a name or two. The last thing I’d ever want to do would be to mock others for who they ARE (except Ben Affleck; I can mock him incessantly and never feel guilty about it, because a) he’s my boy and it’s done with affection, and b) he’s Affleck, for God’s sake).

What really burns me about all this, though, is that now my donation to the Matthew Shepherd Foundation is going to be sullied in the process. Based on what Rebecca Ascher-Walsh told me, my donation is now being portrayed as an admission of some sort of culpability; that by giving ten thousand dollars to this worthy cause, I’m essentially saying “I’m sorry I made some gay jokes.”

And that’s horse-shit.

I’m not sorry - because I didn’t make jokes at the expense of the gay community. I made jokes at the expense of two characters who neither I nor the audience have ever held up to be paragons of intellect. They’re idiots. Funny idiots, yes, but idiots all the same. And by making them and other mental midgets in the film so leery of homosexuality, I’m making fun of a mind-set that exists in our culture - a mind-set, mind you, that I didn’t create nor condone. And making fun of said mind-set doesn’t legitimize it, in my opinion; it de-fangs it.

I swear, I caught it from the right wing on ‘Dogma’, and now I’m catching it from the left wing on this flick. Which am I, people: a bleeding heart liberal or a Bible-thumping conservative? And when the hell do I get to make a movie in which I don’t have to explain myself afterwards? When the hell do I get to make a movie that some special interest group won’t demonize? I sweat - it’s like all that’s left is to walk that thin, boring line down the middle that makes for really bland cinema. Because no matter what you do and say, no matter how good your intentions are, sooner or later, you’re going to offend SOMEBODY.

So I could use a few good character witnesses. If you folks wouldn’t mind, can you drop GLAAD a CIVIL line and let them now that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a homophobe? Please - no immature comments for these folks, alright? I’ve got enough troubles without anyone reinforcing the worst suspicions Scott Seomin and GLAAD has about our fans. They can be reached at glaad@glaad.org.

In closing, I’d like to leave you with an excerpt from the Jay and Silent mini-series that was re-released by Image Comics last week under the title of ‘Chasing Dogma’…

JAYWhat the fuck is this country coming to?!?
First, we’re accused of brown-humping each
other, and then we get kicked to the fucking
curb for having a smoke! You know, there was
a time when a man could fuck his friend, AND
enjoy a goddamn toke, and nobody said shit!
Where’s the so-called freedom for the pursuit
of happiness?! What if I WANTED to fuck you,
Silent Bob?
(quieter)
I’d never, because I fucking love chicks man -
even though I know you think about cuddling
up to my three-piece set all the time.
(continuing)
But what If I was all pent up, and all I needed to
keep me from going postal on that bus was to
bust a nut in your dark and stinky? That’s the
problem with the climate of consciousness on
this planet today! Everyone gives too much of
a shit about who fucks what! The moral majority
has to wake up and realize that it’s better to have
two guys stink-dicking or two chicks gargling clit,
than it is to have four complete fucking lunatics
nine millimeting random people from a rooftop
because they’re not allowed to ‘unpack their bags’
in whatever ‘hotel rooms’ they want, so to speak!
And by that token, I should be able to scream - if
I so desired - from the bathrooms of the buses
that traverse the unending roads of this great
country, to the bathrooms of the public parks
and rest-stops that dot the landscape like a
thousand points of light…
(second balloon)
“I’M HERE! I’M QUEER! GET USED TO IT!!!”

Homophobic indeed.

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