Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (3 page)

Vincent spoke passionately about film—about wanting to be a director. Before meeting him, I’d never heard anyone
say they wanted to make movies. Nowadays, you can throw a rock and hit a film school kid. But back then? If they were talking about it anywhere, it wasn’t in the central Jersey burbs. For Vincent, it was
religion
. I thought
I
was way into movies, but Vinny was into
film
and would teach me the subtle distinctions between the two (Vincent was a film snob long before there was an Internet). He’d teach me about aspect ratios, which were a new concept to a full-screen VHS culture. I used to complain about the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen cutting off half the picture until Vinny explained cropping and scope to me. Every week, we’d pore over the lone copy of
The
Village Voice
Quick Stop carried, marveling at the cool cinematic shit happening merely a bridge or tunnel away.

When you live in the suburbs, the idea of driving more than twenty minutes to a movie theater is ludicrous. In Monmouth County, I had three cinematic options: the Atlantic Highlands Twin Cinemas, the Movies at Middletown, and, later, the Hazlet Multiplex. Each theater showed a steady diet of studio-produced fare—the mainstream blockbusters. In the Middletown theater alone, I saw
Return of the Jedi, Back to the Future, Top Gun
, and
Batman.
Whenever Vincent and I would read the
Voice,
we’d see ads and showtimes for films that were
never
coming to our local theaters or video stores.

There was a flick called
The Dark Backward
that caught our attention. It sounded so different and indie, featuring a cast we could trust: Judd Nelson, Bill Paxton, Lara Flynn Boyle—all of whom were going to be at a midnight screening of the flick, along with director Adam Rifkin, in an NYC movie theater called the Angelika, the indie film shrine on
Houston and Mercer. For two movie lovers at the ass end of the motion picture universe, even the notion of hearing the director speak and seeing famous people wasn’t enough to inspire action. Drive to
Manhattan
?! At
night,
when all the crime happens? To see a
movie
? We were like rabbits, the species that never travels beyond five miles from the spot it was born.

The Pig Newtons, however, changed all that.

In
The Dark Backward
, the characters nosh not on Fig Newtons, but instead pound Pig Newtons. And according to the bomb-burst graphic on the full-page ad for that midnight screening, the director and cast were going to distribute an actual prop from the movie to every ticket holder: a free pack of Pig Newtons!

You’ll meet no end of skinny busybodies in your life who’ll tell you that if you wanna improve yourself, you’ll put down the snacks. Ironically, it was the mere
promise
of a processed nonfood that would change the vector of
my
eventual fate. In that way, this fat man’s life was
shaped
by junk food. So was this fat man’s
ass
. And his
gut
, too. Also: his child-bearing hips and thunder thighs.

It was Friday night as we both stared at that sirenlike ad, the promise of props and the allure of indie glamour in the temple of film rewiring our programming. We mused about going to the screening as if it were a shuttle to Mars: “
Imagine if …”

By Saturday night, we’d talked ourselves into it. The store closed at ten thirty; we called for directions, looked at a map, and did something nobody we knew or had even heard about had ever done before: We drove fifty miles into the city to see a film.

To me, the Angelika Film Center is what Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto or the Forum in Montreal were to Canadian hockey fans of old: a magical structure where the impossible happened every night. The indie-est of indie flicks, serious cinema, could be found at the Film Forum, but the Angelika was something new and wonderful: an indie film multiplex, boasting five screens featuring the most high-profile indie flicks of the moment. We boys from the burbs got over the sticker shock of a twenty-dollar parking charge the moment we ascended the steps, proudly purchased our
Dark Backward
tickets like we were getting away with something, and stepped inside the ground zero of a burgeoning indie resurgence, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since John Cassavetes picked up a camera. They didn’t have a snack bar in the lobby; they had a coffee bar in the café. For the first and only time in my life, I ate a scone at the cinema. I was so drunk with culture that night, I didn’t even care that I don’t like scones.

The theaters at the Angelika are subterranean, so periodically while you’re watching a flick, you hear the subways rumble by beside you somewhere deep in the earth’s guts. It only added to the atmosphere, reminding Vincent and me that we weren’t in Kansas anymore. Shit, we weren’t even in Oz. This was the Village. This was New York City. This was indie film.

And the trailers before the feature were indie as fuck. There was no familiar voice-over—no narration starting with “
In a world …”
Indie trailers were a series of images or dialogue pulls, critical quotes hailing the picture, and huge title cards. The lack of identifiable studios like Warner Bros. or Universal at the heads of the trailers made the movies
seem more important somehow—like someone had figured out how to make a movie
without
the usual suspects and gatekeepers.

The first trailer was for Hal Hartley’s
Trust.
It was weird and wonderful, and all the characters spoke like they were in a play, not a film. The second trailer was for Richard Linklater’s
Slacker
—a flick that seemed to not be about anything or anybody in particular. An art film. I nudged Vincent and nodded at the screen to indicate my interest as the
Slacker
trailer came to a close. I didn’t wanna speak out loud; after all, we were in a church of sorts.

The Dark Backward
unspooled, and while I dug it, it would not be the film that made me want to be a filmmaker. For starters, it had famous people in it. I didn’t know any famous people, so I didn’t walk away feeling empowered. I did, however, walk away with Pig Newtons—which were actually just Fig Newtons with a prop sticker on them. But that powerful, faux-snack talisman had worked its magic: Vinny and I had busted our indie film cherries with
The Dark Bac
kward.

All week long, I had to explain to my friends and family
why
I’d gone to New York to see a movie, then argue it clearly
was
possible to visit the city at night and return unmugged. When he came in to mop the floors and stock the shelves, Vinny and I would plot our next move. We couldn’t go back to our local multiplexes just yet. Stay down on the farm once we’d seen the Angelika?
Impossible
. The minute you start getting blow jobs, handys seem kinda dopey. The minute you discover a vibrator, your tolerance for getting clumsily fingered disappears.

So on Friday, August 2, 1991—the evening of my twenty-first birthday—Vincent and I closed up Quick Stop, took the Garden State Parkway North to the New Jersey Turnpike North, got off at the Holland Tunnel exit, went up to Houston and hung a right, and parked the car. One Kevin Smith stepped out of the vehicle and headed into the Angelika Film Center, but two hours later, a very different Kevin Smith would emerge. It was like taking the blue pill in
The Matrix
.

Richard Linklater’s
Slacker
was the movie that
would
change my life. This shaggy paean to those who follow the road not taken offered me a glimpse into a free-associative world of ideas instead of plot, people instead of characters, and Nowheresville, Texas, instead of the usual California or New York settings most movies elected to feature. That Nowheresville was actually Austin speaks volumes on how culturally bereft and state-capital ignorant I was at the time. That night, Richard Linklater and his film not only captured my imagination, they kick-started my ambition. The simplicity of the story and filmmaking, the unpolished cast, the nontraditional storytelling—it was like cumming with someone else for the first time: Suddenly, you never wanted to cum by yourself again; figuratively speaking, this movie was teaching me how to fuck.

By the time we hit the turnpike tollbooth on the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel, I finally said it aloud. “I want to be a filmmaker.” I’d say that for a few weeks until my sister, Virginia, gave me awesome advice.

“Then
be
a filmmaker.”

“That’s the idea,” I said. “I want to be a filmmaker.”

“You don’t have to want to be a filmmaker, just
be
a filmmaker,” Virginia said. “Every thought you have, think it as a filmmaker. You’re already a filmmaker; you just haven’t made a film yet.”

It sounded artsy-fartsy as fuck, not to mention easier said than done, but it turned out to be million-dollar advice. A slacker hit the sheets that night, but the
Clerks
guy got out of bed the following morning, ready to do the impossible. Most of the supposedly challenging stuff in life usually isn’t as difficult to pull off as some folks would have you think. Believing in yourself and becoming a filmmaker is easy; only pull-ups are hard.

There’s a trick to being whatever you want to be in life. It starts with the simple belief that you are what or who you say you are. It starts, like all faiths, with a belief—a belief predicated more on whimsy than reality. And you’ve gotta believe for everybody else, too—until you can show them proof. If you’re lucky, someone starts believing with you—first theoretically, then in practice. And two people believing are the start of a congregation. You build a congregation of believers and eventually set out to craft a cathedral. Sometimes it’s just a church; sometimes it turns out to be a chapel. Folks who don’t build churches will try to tell you how you’re doing it wrong, even as your steeple breaks the clouds. Never listen.

But before all of that, you gotta start with the
idea
. And I don’t mean the idea for the story/movie/novel/installation/song/podcast/whatever. You gotta start with the idea that
you can do this
—something that’s not normally done by everybody else. Since it’s not second nature to take leaps of faith, you have to motivate yourself. You’ve gotta embrace
a reasonable amount of unreasonability, because what you’re saying is, “I’m gonna try this thing that very few people attempt, let alone succeed in doing.”

But nobody else can believe in you if
you
don’t believe in what you’re doing. I’ve willed almost all the stuff I’ve done into existence, and if I can do that, anybody can do that. So start your chatter: Talk about what you’re
going to do
.

Plant the seeds early and take as much time as it requires to will your goals into existence. Don’t wait for God or Zeus to move you around the chessboard. God is busy and Zeus is doing movies now, so take control of the game yourself. Expect moments of discouragement; just don’t wallow in them. When shit gets tough (and it will), simply tell yourself, “If an ass-hat like fat Kev Smith can succeed, then what the fuck is stopping me from doing the same?”

The only guy I ever heard of who got an amazing life literally handed to him was Hal Jordan. Don’t wait for a dying alien to give you a magic ring; just do it yourself, Slappy. We can’t all be Superman, but we sure as shit can train hard, and with loads of practice, we can be Batman.

And who the fuck doesn’t wanna be Batman? Batman has an impeccable moral compass, he’s clever and mysterious, and when fucktards get sassy, he punches them in the face.

S
cience tells us our dreams never last more than a few minutes. No matter how involved the plot may feel, we screen
multiple
five-minute minimovies in our cranial cinema every night. It’s gotta be the same for the American Dream as well. While it’s always thought to be about working hard, owning a house, getting married, and having kids, I think even
that
dream is subject to the same laws of nocturnal whimsy: The American Dream changes
constantly
and varies from person to person.

My American Dream has always been simple, and it’s one I encourage you to adopt as your own: Figure out what you love to do, then figure out how to get paid to do it. Film would become that for me—a passion I got paid to pursue—but the theory can be applied to almost anything: If you like dogs, monetize your canine interest with a dog-walking or
washing business. If you like jerking off, sell your sperm or wank for porn.

’Slike folks who start movie Web sites: They just love movies. Not sure what their endgame’s gonna be, but writing about movies and hosting trailers is a start, right? For some, the endgame will be to make a film. For others, just having people read what they have to say about a subject they love is good enough. Regardless, the smart ones will always find a way to earn off it. Because once you’ve got a taste for working for yourself, doing what you love doing? You’ll work ten times harder than any bricklayer or paralegal, but you’ll never feel it and never recognize it.