What the Fuck is Going on with Clerks III?

Jorts and hockey jersey enthusiast Kevin Smith recently made headlines once again it was announced that he would be presiding over a staged reading of the unmade Clerks III script in New Jersey for eighty lucky fans willing to pay one hundred dollars for a once in a lifetime charity experience. 

This, honestly, is exactly the kind of thing I would love to write about in exchange for money but I live in Atlanta and I can’t think of anyone, or any organization, that would be willing to fund a worthwhile journalistic endeavor like that. 

Why is Clerks III an unmade script rather than an underwhelming motion picture? The answer, surprisingly and bizarrely enough, is Jeff Anderson, who played Randal in Clerks and Clerks II and various Clerks-related projects like Clerks: the Animated Series and subsequently has done just about nothing outside of the warm, comforting, inclusive world of the View Askewniverse.

According to Smith, everything was in place for Clerks III to get made with an eight million dollar budget until Anderson decided that he didn’t want to make it, and Smith decided that there was no Clerks III without Anderson and he is unwilling to recast the role with a less recalcitrant thespian. 

Well at least Hit Somebody is DEFINITELY still happening.

In a Q&A in connection with his Fatman on Batman podcast the affable auteur explained to disappointed fans, ““One of the four main characters did not want to be involved. It quickly spiraled out of control in a big, bad way, and wound up not happening and probably could never happen after the stream of events that hit a wall, and sometimes that’s a wall you can’t get over…So, yeah, sadly, that gets put to the side”, later adding,  “I want it so badly but I can’t do it without him, it was written for him. But the Randal part is the whole movie, like it’s Randal’s flick. So unless he changes his mind — if and when he changes his mind, I doubt that’ll happen — then we can kind of move forward. I could never recast it, he is Randal, Jeff Anderson.”

I find this dynamic utterly fascinating because it’s so utterly perplexing. If I were Jeff Anderson, and my legacy consists of being lucky enough to get cast as a lead actor in a movie that turns out to be a beloved cult classic despite not really being much of an actor, and then being even luckier to star in a bigger-budget, much more polished sequel as well as a short-lived but fondly remembered animated spin-off I would spend every day pining desperately for my old buddy Kevin Smith to make another Clerks movie so I could stop doing whatever it is that occupies my days and become a cult movie star again. 

I would be so grateful for the opportunity to star in another motion picture that I wouldn’t even mind if the script called for me to soil myself in every scene and talk constantly about my painful, explosive diarrhea. I wouldn’t fucking care if the script was garbage and my role in it an embarrassment: I would just feel obscenely grateful for the high-profile, high-paying work and everything it might lead to, from promotional appearances on Kevin Smith’s many podcasts to, well, that’s probably about it, that I would happily throw myself into any second sequel to Clerks, no matter how transparently abysmal 

I would leap at the chance to make an eighty thousand dollar Clerks III or an eight hundred thousand dollar Clerks III, let alone a Clerks movie with a nearly eight figure budget. 

So why on earth doesn’t Jeff Anderson, a man with seemingly nothing else going on, famous only for playing Randal in the Clerks series, want to make another Clerks movie? What could possibly be so objectionable about its screenplay that he’s unwilling to accept what I imagine is a sizable amount of money to star in an eagerly anticipated follow-up to one of the most influential American independent films of the past thirty years? 

By rejecting the Clerks III script Anderson isn’t just perversely sabotaging his own acting film career, such as it is; he’s also fucking over that other guy who was in the Clerks movie and nothing else, and that dude got to make out with Rosario Dawson the last time around. You don’t think that dude, whoever he is, wouldn’t happily give up a limb if it meant starring in another major motion picture? 

Yet Anderson perplexingly turned Clerks III’s green light into a red one for reasons I can’t begin to understand. I’m befuddled enough that I’m tempted to fly out to New Jersey on my own dime so I can see and hear for myself if the script for the concluding entry in the Clerks trilogy is in fact so dreadful that even someone without much in the way of an acting career would turn it down. 

Jar Jar mourns what this could have been.

Why, Jeff Anderson, why? What was so bad about the Clerks III screenplay? What about it proved a deal-breaker? Feel free to answer in the comment section below because I am legitimately very curious as to what could possibly be going on to keep Clerks III from being realized in a universe where Yoga Hosers and Tusk both exist in violent defiance of God’s will. 

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