Posted by veronicas37th at cache-mtc-ab09.proxy.aol.com on March 24, 2004 at 18:45:33:
'Jersey Girl' has director on edge
Sweet story line, Bennifer breakup are worrisome
March 22, 2004
BY TERRY LAWSON
FREE PRESS MOVIE WRITER
Kevin Smith has been doing more pre-emptive strikes than a politician. Nearly two years ago, when he started making "Jersey Girl," he rhapsodized about star Jennifer Lopez on his Web site, refuting any suggestion that she might be less than a consummate professional.
Then, in January, he released a statement defending his patron Harvey Weinstein, who was accused of many things -- including being a big fat bully -- in a book by Peter Biskind about the roles Weinstein's Miramax Films and the Sundance Film Festival played in the rise of independent film.
Then, this month, Smith issued a statement alerting fans that "Jersey Girl" is not like his other films. Not much cursing, no outrageous diatribes, no Jay and Silent Bob. Just Ben Affleck as a single dad with a cute little daughter. It was, the director admitted, kind of sweet.
"Come on, do I sound like a puss?" says Smith, up early on a weekend for an interview. "I said the stuff about Jen because she had a bad rap and she couldn't have been any more different than you imagine. She was great on my movie. I thought people should know that. As for Harvey, hey, I'm still a Jersey guy. I stand up for my boys.
"He didn't need me to defend him, but if it hadn't been for him and Bob (Weinstein, Harvey's brother), I wouldn't have a career."
As for "Jersey Girl" . . .
"The truth is, I have very vocal fans, and they have become like a weird, dysfunctional family in a way."
Smith felt a responsibility to warn fans who live for Jay and Silent Bob or who can't get enough trash talk. "This movie is going to be very different," he says. "It's a movie about a father and his daughter, and learning what being a man is really all about it. I'm saying that knowing I'm going to get killed or made fun of, but it's the best movie I've ever made.
"It's like 85, 90 percent what I wanted it to be. But besides the baggage that it's me doing something new, it has that other baggage, too."
A good idea at the time
That other baggage, of course, is the thing called Bennifer. When Smith was writing "Jersey Girl" with Affleck slated to star as a New York publicist who blows his career, he was wondering who could play Affleck's wife, a character who (stop reading here if you want even the prologue to be a surprise) dies in childbirth. Smith's wife suggested Lopez, whom she had liked in "Out of Sight," and when Affleck and Lopez teamed up to make "Gigli," the director figured she was right.
"I think great, 'Gigli' is a big hit. We come in right behind it with this. Boom. I get a break. They show up for the movie. Jen does her thing. They have great chemistry. She becomes the linchpin, the thing that sets the story in motion, and she's out of there."
But the on-again, off-again Affleck-Lopez romance and engagement become a tabloid obsession. Then comes "Gigli,' which is generally, gleefully and correctly, for once, pilloried as one of the worst big-budget movies ever released.
The release of "Jersey Girl" is delayed to distance it from the disaster, and rumors abound that Miramax is demanding Lopez be removed from the poster or perhaps from the film altogether, to avoid comparisons. Finally Lopez and Affleck break up for good, and Smith does make a cut in the opening segment, removing a wedding scene he figured "would just take people out of the movie." In other words, generate laughs.
"I feel like the most hapless dude on the planet," says Smith. "I'm like a character in an Alfred Hitchcock movie where all this terrible stuff is happening and I have no control over it all. So I can either go into the Witness Protection Program, or I can do what I do, which is go out and try to have a sense of humor about the thing."
To prove it, when the film had its premiere last week at the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, Smith took the stage to quiet the crowd when the screening was late getting started.
"We're just waiting for J-Lo," he deadpanned.
A street-smart good guy
Even those who haven't succumbed to the low-rent, lowbrow allure of Smith's films -- and if for some reason you still haven't seen "Clerks" or "Chasing Amy," you should -- tend to enjoy Smith because he is the real thing, a movie-loving, comic book-obsessed and street-smart good guy who loves hearing and telling stories. His speaking gigs -- one of which was released on DVD as "An Evening with Kevin Smith" -- are more entertaining than most of his movies, which, as he has no problem admitting, are less than artful.
"I'm never going to be Martin Scorsese, and that kills me, you know," he says. "But there are people who like what I do, and I hope they'll take a chance on 'Jersey Girl' because it's a movie about the things I really care about and I really worked to make it look good, like a real movie. Ben is just butt-kicking good in this.
"Having a kid completely changes your life, and that's what I wanted to make a movie about. If that's cornball, well, so be it. But as anyone it's happened to knows, it's also true."
He gushed about George Carlin, who plays Affleck's father, and Liv Tyler, who becomes his love interest.
"When people see Ben and Liv together, they'll forget all that other stuff. She was my favorite character in the script, and she really did her justice. The thing I'm proudest of maybe is that fact that you take these two actors, who had like zero chemistry in 'Armageddon' and you really believe they're made for each other in this."
Affleck says he can only hope people judge the movie on what it is -- meaning sincere. "No matter what he says, it has a lot of Kevin Smith stuff in it. You'll know it's the same guy who made 'Chasing Amy,' " he says.
Smith, whose next movie is an $80-million action-adventure based on radio and TV crime-fighter "The Green Hornet," recalls that he first tried to go straight with "Chasing Amy," a film that starred Affleck as a guy who fell in love with a lesbian.
"But then I got nervous and stuck the Jay and Silent Bob characters in there for insurance. And I've always regretted that, you know. Yet it brought the fans, and I'm always worried about that because they pay the rent.
"Every time we have one of these test screenings, and Harvey packs the audience with all these Kevin Smith fans to see how they react, I'm like, 'Dude, don't do that.'
"This is it, my entire audience. If you let them in free, you ruin the whole first weekend opening gross. It's like I know them, every one one of them."