Kevin Smith Reminiscing
This is the best laugh I’ve had in a long time. Kevin Smith chronicles his life with Jason Mewes (Jay, of Jay and Silent Bob fame), his time with Jason and the work of getting him off heroin.
The navigation on his site is kind of clunky, so I’ve included links to the each part of the story here:
My favorite out loud laughing moment came during Part 2:
For months, I’d impressed upon him the importance of learning all of his lines in advance, as this time around, we were gonna have real actors in the flick.
“What, like Ben?” Mewes asked.
“I said REAL actors,” I corrected. “Like Alan Rickman.”
“Who’s that?”
“The guy from ‘Die Hard’.”
“Bruce Willis?”
“No, man the other guy.”
“The ‘Yippie-kay-ay Motherfucker’ guy?”
“That’s Alan Rickman.”
“What’s so special about him??
“He’s British. And Brits invented acting. So he won’t put up with any of your ‘Snootchie Bootchies’ bullshit. He’ll tear you up if you’re not excellent, because he’s Alan fucking Rickman. So you’ve gotta know all your lines. We can’t be asking people to leave the set because you’re nervous, like we did on ‘Clerks’. This shit’s serious – because Rickman will go ballistic if he smells blood in the water. You’ve gotta come correct.”So naturally, I was pretty nervous when Jason and I sat down for our first, Pittsburgh-based, one-on-one “Dogma” rehearsal, and the boy was script-less.
“Where’s your fucking script, asshole?” I sighed.
“I don’t need it.”
“You don’t need your script for rehearsals. Right. Take mine and let’s get going.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t need it. Go ahead. Try me.”So I turned to the first Jay and Silent Bob scene and fed him Bethany’s lines, and without looking at my script, Mewes delivered Jay’s lines in a letter-perfect fashion.
“Alright, so you’ve got the first scene down,” I allowed. “Let’s mix it up and try a scene from later in the flick.”
So I fed him his lead-in lines from the church exterior scene, and Mewes spits out the Jay responses without hesitation.
“You memorized ALL the lines in the script?!?!”
“Even the girl parts.”
“What’re you, fucking ‘Rain Man’?! Why’d you memorize the whole goddamn script?!”
“I don’t wanna piss off that Rickman dude.”
I had this image of Alan Rickman dressed as Professor Snape reprimanding Jay for not knowing his lines. Beautiful!
This story is so sad at some points that I didn’t want to finish reading it, but I kept on and so should you. This is a wonderful read!
Thanks for posting this. It was a brave tale, and well-told.
Comment by Eh... not so much — 8/5/2006 @ 9:37 am
Could you just post it all cause I cant see it.
Comment by Etta — 2/4/2008 @ 1:47 am
Etta,
It looks like Kevin removed those entries from his blog. I hope they’re not lost forever, but they are at least lost to us.
Laura
Comment by Laura Moncur — 2/4/2008 @ 1:12 pm