Wednesday

After watching Clerks yesterday I decided to visit the IMDb trivia page on the film. I wonder if there is such a thing as knowing too much about a movie? If there is a picture you particularly love, I'd advise against viewing its trivia page. What I found out about Clerks was that it seemed to be entirely an accident. Almost every piece of trivia points out a different direction that should, or could, have happened, but due to chance didn't. For example, Kevin Smith and his friend Scott Mosier made a pact that whoever of them began a film first, the other would produce. It was just luck that Smith started first, and Mosier has produced all his movies since then. All the main characters were initially cast differently. The only reason the shop's shutters are down is because they could only shoot at night. The film was going to end with Dante being shot in an armed robbery of the store. And even the title was going to be different - Inconvenience. It often astonishes me how films are made at all, and how they get to the finished form which we believe they were initially conceived as. It frequently seems these people have no idea what they're doing, but somehow, sometimes, their collective creative efforts and accidents occasionally produce a good movie (although I am being unfair, the basic script for this film is ok). Anyway, only the very greatest directors appear to be able to force through their ideas whole from conception to completion.