Rude Buddha

NO SH*T: LIFE ADVICE FROM A FAT, LAZY SLOB WHO DID GOOD

By Kevin Smith

264 pages

Available at National Book Store

He made us laugh our yarbles off with Clerks and Chasing Amy. He made us chuckle over Dogma and that Jay and Silent Bob movie. But can Kevin Smith really tell us how to live a better life?

Actually, yes, if you believe what worked for him can work for you. In No Sh*t, the indie director who became a worldwide name with Clerks and gained a huge Web following spills all in a memoir of sorts.

First thing to realize about Smith is that he’s not full of sh*t. Says so right in the book. The fact that each chapter title in this tongue-in-cheek self-help manual contains a variation of that scatological noun indicates he has nothing to hide. From an opening chapter where he marvels at the fact that he came from his dad’s balls, out-swimming millions and millions of other sperm (hey, I didn’t write it; he did), Smith comes off like the Carl Sagan of puerile humor. Yet it works, somehow. His big opening epiphany is this: “This is the truest thing a stranger will ever say to you: in the face of our eventual, unavoidable death, there is little sense in not at least trying to accomplish all of your wildest dreams in life.” True dat.

Full disclosure: I’ve never cared much for Kevin Smith’s movies. Chasing Amy was good, but the rest seem pretty ramshackle, which is possibly his point. He wants people to know that, hey, anyone can make a movie, tell a story.

“There are plenty of ‘Why?’ people in the world. Whenever you hit them with an idea, they start in with their bullsh*t. ‘Why bother?’ ‘Why try that?’ ‘Why do you think you’re better than everyone else?’ To counteract this, simply surround yourself with folks who ask only ‘Why not?’ As in, ‘Wanna make a movie?’ ‘Sure. Why not?’”

Smith lays down the well-known story: Jersey boy does good after watching Richard Linklater’s Slacker and thinks to himself, if that’s a movie, I can make one, too; writes script for Clerks and films it for $27,000; sells it at Sundance to Miramax for $227,000. Continues to make rude, crude movies and entertain geeks at Comic Con for years to come.

But that’s not the whole story. A whole chapter is devoted to Smith directing Bruce Willis in a studio cop comedy called Cop Out (original script title: A Couple of Dicks). Though the studio is accommodating and helpful, Smith quickly grows disillusioned with Willis, another Jersey native who did good. He spills the beans on what a diva-ish a-hole the Die Hard star was on the set. It’s amusing, but I’m not sure what “advice” Smith is trying to impart through this lengthy tirade. Possibly just this: Don’t work with Bruce Willis.

Another chapter details Smith’s embrace of marijuana as a “creative tool.” Shockingly, to most readers, Smith never smoked weed much until he was 38, though characters in his movies always blaze up. He didn’t, that is, until he met Seth Rogan while filming Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Rogan apparently is the Zen master of cannabis, managing to convince Smith he could be funny, productive and high all at the same time. Hopefully, this is not advice intended for young readers.

Smith writes about the hockey movie he’s now working on (tentatively titled Hit Somebody). He’s apparently embraced hockey much as he embraced weed, finding wisdom in this bit of advice from Wayne Gretzsky’s dad: “Don’t go where the puck’s been; go where it’s gonna be.” Apparently this means think ahead, plan your next move, don’t just react to life, get in the game. Or something like that.

Another life lesson Smith shares comes down to this: It’s not the steak, it’s the sizzle. He describes exiting a screening of Clerks at Sundance, following a Q&A session he gave. Afterward, two dudes wandered out. First Dude: “How did you like the movie?” Second Dude: “I thought it sucked. But the fat guy was funny.” In other words, Smith believes in selling his movie, usually through personal appearances laced with dick jokes and slacker wit. As Harvey Weinstein once told him, real filmmakers get you talking and thinking about a movie before you’ve even seen it, and great ones get you talking long after you’ve watched it. I can’t help recalling Quentin Tarantino, in Manila for Cinemanila years ago, promoting his latest movie Death Proof. He gave it such a talk-up before the screening, I know the Manila audience got more out of it than if we’d simply watched the thing in the dark. That’s salesmanship.

More important than ticket sales or critical acceptance was the praise he got from Tarantino, another Miramax alumnus who figured out how to do his own thing. Smith credits Tarantino with teaching him 1) it’s okay to write dialogue about other movie dialogue; 2) it’s okay to let characters ramble and pontificate; and 3) it’s okay to mix comedy and jaw-dropping, scene-stopping violence in a movie.

The director of Mallrats also talks about falling in love (and lust) with his wife Jennifer Schwalbach, and how comedian George Carlin made him want to become a professional foul-mouth. Not one to skip a good story, Smith also writes about being ejected from a Southwest Airlines flight in 2011 because his weight was considered a “safety concern.” Although he claims he was able to sit comfortably with armrests down, the director of Clerks was told to get his bag and leave the plane. Humiliated, Smith immediately tweeted his anger at Southwest, and it became a national story, but — not surprising to him — his weight became the punchline, not Southwest’s apparent insensitivity. (Incidentally, the dude has shed about 60 pounds since the Southwest fiasco.)

One refreshing thing about Smith is that he knows he’s no Kubrick or Kurosawa: he realizes he’s not a great director, and never will be. His movies primarily exist to impart the World of Kevin Smith, which is probably all he ever hoped to do. That he’s managed to convert a large group of web trawlers to his point of view is another lesson for the indie world: break down the wall between movies and audience, and you might get them eating out of your palm (or at the least, reading your blog and listening to your podcast). “I always had a Deadhead thing going on with my audience,” writes Smith, and he’s found it valuable for collecting all the praise as well as the criticism. Because the blog world has removed the distance between artist and audience, to some degree, and Smith was there almost at the start, a Comic Con geek like all the rest of them. With one minor difference: he was making movies, not just geeking out about them. And so should you, he seems to say.