Posted by Frank Reynolds at spider-we043.proxy.aol.com on October 13, 1999 at 20:54:37:
So I pick up my issue of JAY & SILENT BOB#4 today (great issue by the way, I think this one and #1 are the best of the bunch), and I see the ad for the CLERKS: THE LOST SCENES comic on the inside front cover.
In the ad, Dante and Randall are sitting in front of a Steenbeck (that's a film editing machine) watching what is presumably a "lost scene" from CLERKS, and Randall is laughing his ass off.
So what's the problem?
Well, the Steenbeck that they're watching the scenes on is a 35mm WIDESCREEN Steenbeck. CLERKS was a 16mm NON-WIDESCREEN film!
(For you non-film industry people: a widescreen film is a film where the picture image is more than twice as wide as it is high, and exactly twice as wide as a TV screen....hence letterboxing. Pretty much most Hollywood blockbusters are shot in widescreen. Non-widescreen films are only a little bit wider than a TV screen, so when they're letterboxed, the black bars on the top and bottom are smaller. Compare a letterboxed copy of CLERKS with a letterboxed copy of STAR WARS, and you'll see what I mean.)
My first reaction was that the artist, Duncan Fegredo, simply got his research wrong. Then I got to thinking, and now I believe I have discovered Mr. Smith's nefarious plan....
Come on Kev, fess up! You really DID shoot CLERKS in 35mm widescreen, didn't you? You wanted to cash in on that big micro-budget indie film gravy train five years ago, so you dumped the film down to 16mm, chopped the edges off, ran the print through some sand and gravel, and sent it off to the IFFM!
And now (and here's the really nefarious part)....
Sometime in the future, you'e actually going to RE-RELEASE CLERKS in it's original 35mm widescreen format!!! Thereby making all of us shell out another $9.50 to see it again in theaters and another 20 bucks to buy yet ANOTHER DVD of it....
Sheesh...directors...always out to make a buck.....
Frank Reynolds
Film-Editor Extraordinare
(so I knows of whats I speaks....)
P.S. Oh my god....I just realized...was the original in COLOR????
You cad, Smith.....