It’s no secret that Hollywood accounting is a shady way of making even the most successful of blockbusters never turn a profit, so it’s no surprise that convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein would be great at making his most successful movies appear to be flops. One of the films that, on paper, still isn’t the obvious success the public knows it to be is the 1994 breakout hit “Clerks,” from which Kevin Smith still hasn’t received full royalties.
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Smith came into the spotlight at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, when he sold his feature debut “Clerks” to Weinstein and Miramax for $227,000. According to the initial agreement, Smith was going to receive a backend if the movie became profitable once it played in theaters. The film winded up becoming a cult hit, grossing $3.2 million in North America, but Smith didn’t start receiving any money from it until years after the initial release. In an interview with Variety, the filmmaker talked about encountering Weinstein’s known knack for not paying people what they were owed. “He was notorious for that. I did encounter that. And I’m still out money,” Smith said. “But you got to understand, I never cared about the money. My whole career, my reps were like: ‘You’re supposed to be making far more.’ Money’s never been a motivator for me.”
The filmmaker goes on to tell of the time he went to the Cannes Film Festival with “Clerks” in 1994. That year, Miramax had three other films screening at the festival, “Fresh,” “The Picture Bride,” and “Pulp Fiction.” As Smith tells it, “We were in the International Critics Week section, which we actually won,” Smith said. “I get flown over by the festival. I was given a free hotel room from the festival. This is a long way of saying Miramax didn’t have to pay for anything. There was a yacht, the Miramax yacht, it was called. That’s where all the stars were. We hung out on it, hung out with Quentin [Tarantino] after he won his Palme d’Or and stuff. But that yacht wasn’t for us. When the festival was over, we got the financial statement. They had taken the entire Cannes bill, everything they spent in Cannes, and just chopped it up into four and “Clerks” was charged as much as ‘Pulp Fiction.’ So we all paid an equal share.”
According to Smith, it took him seven years before he started seeing any profit from the movie. “For seven years, they were like: ‘Nope, the movie is still not in profit.’ And we were like ‘How?’”