Kevin Smith Net Worth

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Img Source: Wikipedia.org

Born: August 02, 1970 in Highlands, New Jersey, United States

Nationality: American

Occupation: Movie producer

When independent films began to have their heyday during the 1990s, Kevin Smith was at the forefront of the movement with Clerks, his witty depiction of disaffected youth working in the service industry. He was immediately hailed as one of the preeminent voices of Generation X for his mix of gritty, hilarious banter and personal musings. Subsequently, his works have grown more sophisticated in their content while remaining sharply funny. After concentrating mainly on relationship issues in his first few endeavors, Smith in 1999 caused waves with Dogma, which turns its attention to religion. Though some condemned the picture as heretical even before it was made, Smith has avidly defended it as an affirmation of faith. That is not to say, however, that it has shied away from scatological and sexually-oriented humor, which remains a cornerstone of Smith’s works and has helped ensured his success.

Smith was born on August 2, 1970, in Red Bank, New Jersey, and raised in nearby Highlands. He is the youngest of three children of Donald, a retired postal clerk, and Grace Smith. His father used to yank Smith out of school sometimes to go catch a matinee. “Thank God he did that,” Smith remarked to Chris Smith in New York. “His tastes are awful, though. My dad’s the kind of dude that liked Navy SEALS.”

Though Smith had dreamed of making his own film ever since he saw Jaws at age five, he did not immediately enter the career track to directing. After attending Henry Hudson Regional High School, where he daydreamed of writing for the television show Saturday Night Live, he enrolled in a writing program at New York City’s New School for Social Research

It is a meandering film that follows around several quirky, mostly college-age layabouts, and was shot on a budget of $23,000. “I was always a big movie fan,” Smith related to Kenneth M. Chanko in the New York Times. “I was a ‘Star Wars’ generation kid. But here was a movie, ‘Slacker,’ that had no plot, no car chases, no villain and no three acts, and yet it was really engaging because of the dialogue. And dialogue was the thing I did best.” Smith was also intrigued by Slackers because it was set wholly in the director’s hometown of Austin, Texas, which led Smith to believe he could shoot a relevant film about his environs, too.

Lured by a newspaper ad, Smith set out for film school in Vancouver, British Columbia. There, he met Scott Mosier, and the two agreed that the school was not for them. Smith did end up making one project, however–Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary, which outlined his ordeal of a film falling through when the subject decided not to cooperate. Four months into the program–halfway through–Smith dropped out and returned to Leonardo to work at the Quick Stop. Soon, figuring that the daily human drama of selling lottery tickets and beer would make a fascinating tale, he also began working on a script based on his experiences behind the counter.

Smith finished the script for Clerks in 30 days and asked the Quick Stop’s owners, Saral and Tralochan Thapar, if he could film on location in the store and video-rental shop. They agreed, and Smith then recruited his friend Mosier, who had graduated from the Vancouver Film School by then, as coproducer. Another film school cohort, David Klein, served as its cinematographer.

Smith raised funds by maxing out several credit cards and selling his prized comic book collection. His parents chipped in as well, and Smith also ironically got lucky when two of his cars were totaled in a storm and flood, reaping him $3,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Mosier also went into debt to finance the project. In addition, Smith signed up for a cooking class at the New School for Social Research in order to obtain a student I.D. card so he could get a discount on film stock. He immediately dropped the course once he bought his supplies.

Using a collection of friends and would-be actors from the community theater, Smith and Mosier filmed Clerks over the course of 21 nights at the Quick Stop in between shifts. They would shoot from 10:30 p.m. to 6 a.m., then Smith would open the store at 6 a.m., work until 11 a.m., and go home and sleep until 4 p.m. He returned to the store from 4 p.m. until the store closed at 10:30. Many a time, Mosier would fill in at the register while Smith edited film. The two of them also appeared in the picture, with Smith playing the aptly named Silent Bob and Mosier as dope-smoking Willam.

Like Slacker, Clerks is a free-form extended dialogue regarding the lives of aimless twentysomethings, but Clerks focuses on two main characters, Dante, a mild-mannered Quick Stop clerk who has to put up with annoying customers and bothersome friends, and Randal, a philosopher-clerk at the adjacent video store. The patrons provide an endless parade of amusements, until a dirty old man meets his end in the store’s bathroom while aroused. In between dealing with this incident and doing their jobs, Dante and Randal pontificate on free will and other existential questions.

The finished version of Clerks had its premiere in 1993 at the Angelika Theater. Only about a dozen people, mostly friends and family of Smith, attended. Mosier noted to Smith in New York, “Kevin was devastated. I had to talk him down from the ledge, basically Clerks ended up snagging the Filmmaker’s Trophy at Sundance in 1994 and the Young Cinema Award at the Cannes Film Festival in France that year as well.

Before long, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax picked up Clerks for $250,000 and it ended up earning $2.8 million. Smith used the funds to pay his actors and pay off his credit cards, then he purchased a Dodge Neon and a condo. He also bought back his comic books. The film initially received an NC-17 rating, the first ever to garner the industry’s most restrictive rating strictly for foul language. After protests by some other directors and attorney Alan Dershowitz, the Motion Picture Association of America relented and nudged it down to an R rating. Meanwhile, Smith also directed the video for Soul Asylum’s “Can’t Even Tell,” which appears on the soundtrack to Clerks.

After this early blast of success, Smith signed with the Creative Artists Agency and he and Mosier went to Hollywood to sniff out their next project. There, they were offered several abominable films. “What’s really funny,” Smith commented to Smith in New York, “is that these studio guys start off going, ‘Clerks is such a really good film; it’s really intelligent, it’s well-written–,” and Mosier added, “‘So here, do something dumb.’” One of the possibilities they heard about was a comedy called Beer Money, about two young men working at a fast food restaurant called the Taco Pup who stumble across an alien who has crashed in the woods. They plan to sell him to a television show so that they can have beer money to last the rest of their lives, but when the alien heals, they befriend him instead.

Kevin Smith Net worth listed above is only an estimate based on our current research, it is possible that Kevin Smiths net worth has changed since the net worth estimate date listed above.