Kevin Smith: 'I'm a Sellout!'

On Nov. 14, bearded and bespectacled director Kevin Smith sauntered onto the Tonight Show stage to greet Jay Leno. Dressed in his customary uniform of an oversized, button-down athletic jersey, baggy shorts and calf-high gray socks, Mr. Smith had come to introduce the 14th installment of "Roadside Attractions," a recurring filmed segment where Smith travels the country highlighting cheesy road-trip destinations.

"Settle a bet for me. I've seen the Paris Hilton tape. Is that you?" Mr. Smith asked the talk-show host. "Because I remember that weekend you borrowed my video camera."

Mr. Leno looked down and straightened his immaculate tie à la Johnny Carson. "I wish," he replied. "Did you see the tape?"

"I watched it actively," Mr. Smith said.

"I'm sorry I shook hands with you," Mr. Leno countered.

It's the kind of tepid repartee you might expect from one of the cast members of According to Jim , but not from the writer and director of Clerks , Chasing Amy and Dogma . Mr. Smith's movies used puerile bluntness to crack open those tough nuts of social discourse-sexual politics, relationships, religion and slacker life-that had been all but sealed shut with an epoxy of political correctness. His characters didn't make veiled allusions to masturbation or oral sex, they got down to the nitty-gritty. When Clerks ' Dante Hicks wanted to know his girlfriend's sexual history, he asked her: "How many dicks have you sucked?"

Mr. Smith had a similarly blunt explanation for the change.

"I've been saying I sold out for years," he told The Observer by phone from his newly renovated four-story home in the Hollywood Hills. "When Miramax bought the first movie, that was a sellout. And you know, we followed up with Mallrats . We sell so much damn merchandise on our Web site that it's kind of become a joke that I like to make money. So, it's like, 'Well, obviously that's what Kevin's doing.'"

In the 10-year stretch between the debut of Jay and Silent Bob-the stoner characters that actor Jason Mewes and Mr. Smith originated in Clerks and have since reprised in five other movies-and the scheduled release, next spring, of Jersey Girl , Mr. Smith has fashioned himself as a kind of postmodern sellout, a filmmaker who, in his own words, is relentlessly "pimping" his work and his name without the residual backlash that would have plagued, say, John Cassavetes if he had done the same. In addition to his Tonight Show travelogues, and occasional guest-stints as a writer for Marvel Comics, the once-cult Mr. Smith can now be seen in an ad campaign for Panasonic's DVD recorder that gets more TV play than Mr. Smith's movies. He also operates a Web site (13 million hits since 1996) named after his production company, View Askew, on which he writes an almost-daily journal of his travails and peddles all sorts of movie-related tchotchkes, including Mallrat s "Inaction Figures," Jay and Silent Bob bookends, and An Evening with Kevin Smith , a DVD on which he waxes scatological for over two hours to his target demographic: undersexed, onanistic college students.

But something else has happened to Mr. Smith in that time span that could also account for his recent spurt of mainstream activity. Five years ago, he met reporter Jennifer Schwalbach. Four years ago they were married and produced a baby daughter. Three years ago, Mr. Smith reached his 30's. In other words, Mr. Smith didn't just sell out, he grew up. And so, for better or worse, did the cast of characters that populated his movies. Ben Affleck would seem to fall in the former category. Mr. Mewes, who descended into well-chronicled drug addiction, into the latter. But after spending half a year in rehab, Mr. Mewes has come to live with Mr. Smith and his family as well as Ms. Schwalbach's family in Mr. Affleck's old bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills. It sounds like a Gen-X version of The Addams Family , though Mr. Smith assured The Observer that "all of the ghosts of Affleck have been completely fucking exorcised. All the fluids that he might have left behind have been completely wiped out by the flood" that resulted when a water pipe burst in the house.

And if the subject matter of Mr. Smith's next movie is any indication, he has exorcised some of the more adolescents tendencies of his earlier work-Jay and Silent Bob have been retired-and replaced them with the new perspectives he may have gained as a husband, a father and an in-law. Jersey Girl , staring Mr. Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, is a romantic comedy in which a father learns to cope with his wife and 7-year-old daughter. Its cinematographer is the very grown-up Vilmos Zsigmond, whose credits include The Deer Hunter and The Long Goodbye . The movie's promotional tagline: "Forget about who you thought you were, and just accept who you are."

It is also a film which, if you've been reading the gossip columns, may or may not be a mess. After intially