The Snowball Effect

Included in the three-disc set of Clerks: The 10th Anniversary Edition is a documentary called The Snowball Effect: The Story of Clerks. Its purpose is to drive home a single point: Kevin Smith is a lucky, lucky bastard.

A talented bastard, yes. A hard-working and well-intentioned bastard, it's true. But mostly, after a long period of misfortune involving a flood and financial ruin, Smith got wildly lucky. At a poorly-attended screening in New York, Clerks caught the eye of a film consultant, who told a producer's representative, and so on until the film was sold to Miramax for ten times its production budget.

Snowball Effect rewinds the tape of Kevin Smith's life back to the very beginning, including not only the obligatory childhood and high school photos, but also rolling in random bits of home videos and footage of Smith himself at the wheel of a car, pointing out the landmarks of his youth in the town of Highlands, New Jersey. Interviews with his family, high school friends, cast members, and producer Scott Mosier round out the picture of Smith as a person while comments from Miramax employees and Clerks boosters like Amy Taubin and John Pierson fill in the details of the pictures rise from obscurity. Even Harvey Weinstein makes an appearance to call himself an old fart (he walked out of the first screening and had to be held in place by younger Miramax employees for the second).

This love letter of a documentary will evoke pangs of jealousy in the hearts of Smith's former peers -- he is, after all, the poster boy for indie directors making good. However, it should also stir some hope that they too might be discovered by the next Harvey Weinstein (now that Weinstein himself has moved on to funding megamillion dollar projects). Smith's fans will enjoy the extended story of Clerks' genesis, though it does make me wonder: if this is the volume of supplemental material we get on the tenth anniversary of Clerks (three discs including the original cut and a documentary almost as long as Clerks itself) how much more will we get on subsequent "milestone" anniversaries and for Smith's later films? View Askew fans have shown a remarkable appetite for tie-in products, but with a DV-cam documentarian around every corner, I can only imagine just how much fluff we'll see in the years to come.