So it’s a Monday afternoon and I’m drinking in bed because I’m a grown-ass man and you’re not the boss of me, when suddenly an iPhone buzz announces an email from Vince. Furious that my spam filter isn’t working, I open it to read the following headline: Kevin Smith to Reinvent the Sequel by Beginning ‘Clerks 3′ as a Fan-Influenced Book. Lickety-split, I threw my Pimm’s Cup at a housekeeper of dubious ethnicity and dove for my laptop.

Let’s just take a look at some of these block quotes.

I haven’t talked about this yet. I want to do Clerks 3 as a book first. I want to do it in episodic chapters, so that as I release it people can read the whole thing, see what it would look like. I get to go inside the characters’ heads, tell year one origin stories. The first chapter is Dante and Randal meeting in kindergarten…all the stuff I can’t do in a movie. I’m a stoner [GUHHH – Ed.], so I want to investigate the inner life of every character, and I can’t do that in 90 minutes.

“I wonder what Dante and Randal were like in kindergarten” is what I imagine my ex-girlfriend screaming during yacht sex with her new Brazilian boyfriend. I don’t quite know what that means either, but just know that I find the query both completely irrelevant and yet utterly torturous given the circumstances. And the reason, Kevin, that you can’t do kindergarten Dante in a movie is because no one cares. Sure, if Quentin Tarantino made a movie about Vincent Vega and Jules Winfield in kindergarten, the world would explode. Babies in bespoke suits washing baby brains off their baby hands is a priori awesome. What are we supposed to do with baby Dante? “Hey everybody, look at this whiny baby in a Cosby sweater. He wasn’t even supposed to BE here today!” F*ck that baby and f*ck you, Kevin.

Also, didn’t you already make Clerks: The TV Show, Clerks: The Animated Series and Clerks: The Comics? Weren’t those episodic? So, to be clear, you already once before chopped-up the dead horse you’ve been beating, and now you’re announcing that you’re going to finely dice it too?

If I’m doing it in pieces as opposed to just writing one big fat book, I’ll be honest with you, the audience is going to influence it as I read each chapter. And I know a lot of people are going to be like, ‘Well that’s ridiculous, it should be your artistic statement,’ but my whole thing, my leitmotif [Pssh, more like “weight-motif” – Ed.], my entire career has been about audience interactivity.

Your career was launched due to your own hard work and ability to stretch a shoe-string budget. There wasn’t an audience to interact with then, so I’m not sure what you’re even saying here. You can’t just call your recent pandering “leitmotif” and think you’ll get away with it. Also, how dare you make me ask Siri what “late motif” means. Bitch probably thinks she’s better than me now.

For me to kind of write [Clerks 3] episodically, and let people read it chapter-by-chapter, and then pipe in…it could actually allow me to change direction. And again, I know there are a lot of people out there going “Why would you want to? You’re an artist,” well now I’m a New Media artist, and the New Media artist involves the audience, and that’s something I’ve been doing for like nearly twenty years at this point anyway. And if I’m working on this book version, I think that’d be fun to be influenced by the audience every step of the way.

“I am here to announce for the first time that I am now a New Media artist. Which I, uhhh, always have been. Even back then, when New Media didn’t exist.” Look, Clerks 3 is already the embodiment of a cash-grab from a man with nothing more to say, so perhaps it’s fitting that Kevin Smith would decide to just turn it into some sort of sycophantic Mad Libs. Here, let’s try it: “Meanwhile at the Quick Stop, Dante whines like a bitch while Silent Bob just f*cking stands there.” Boom. Scene One in the bag.

In closing, the poster for Clerks 3 should just be a picture of Kevin Smith shrugging while farting.

[Via Movies.com]