“The way I do things is that I start talking about them until they’re true,” Kevin Smith said this morning on the WMMR show “Preston & Steve,” and he couldn’t have put it more perfectly. The writer/director loves to share the various things he’s cooking up even if they’re a long way from fruition, so when last year he teased a sequel to “Mallrats,” even he admits it was just an idea.
“When I started talking about ‘Mallrats,’ there was nobody involved except me, and then I brought the cast together, and the script, and everything. And the one component that was missing was Universal,” he explained.
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Advised by his agent that it would be no problem, Smith plowed ahead and wrote the script for “Mallrats 2,” thinking he would self-finance the project and be able to buy the rights for the title from the studio. But when he was finished, his agent had some bad news.
“So I wrote my script and put everything together, and then when I was done [I told my agent], ‘I’m ready to go. Do I have to reach to Universal for approval or something?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, we have to submit the script.’ And I was like, ‘Why do we have to submit the script?’ And he’s like, ‘They own the property, and it’s a formality. It’s going to be fine.’ So we submitted the script and he came back to me and goes, ‘Well, apparently Universal has never let a catalog title go. Any title they own, they’ve retained.’ ”
However, as these things tend to happen for Smith, not only did “Mallrats” find a new direction, but after helming a very well-received episode of “The Flash,” another project came calling as well.
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“What we did was reconfigured it. ‘Mallrats’ is a 20-year-old movie, and the idea of sequelizing a 20-year-old movie to some people is just like, ‘Well, why would you bother, it wasn’t successful the first time.’ However, I went and directed an episode of ‘The Flash.’ But when I [went to make the show] that was kind of a weird game-changer in my career. Apparently, that’s like the best work I’ve done in long time. Not just the internet, but the press were like, ‘This is the best thing he’s done’ and stuff. I felt at home in the medium,” Smith explained. “And suddenly, because I did the episode of ‘The Flash,’ MGM reached out about ‘Buckaroo Banzai’ and that came together, and we went out and pitched yesterday and found a home for it. I can’t say who it is, because that deal’s not final, but yesterday we sold ‘Buckaroo Bonzai’ as a TV series.”
“So, while I’m in that world and space, a couple months ago we started reconfiguring the idea of doing ‘Mallrats [2]’ not as a film, but as a series,” Smith added. “And Universal and I are just about to close our deal to do ‘Mallrats: The Series’ and then we take it out in the world and find a home for it. So instead of doing a ‘Mallrats’ movie, I’m going to do 10 episodes of a ‘Mallrats’ series.”
So everything has worked out and then some for Smith, who seems to have found an inviting new home on TV. In addition to “Mallrats” and “Buckaroo Banzai,” Smith also revealed he’ll be shooting another episode of “The Flash” in August. So lots on the way from the director who doesn’t like to stay idle too long.
Listen to Smith’s full talk on with Preston and Steven below — it starts at the 1 hour, 31 minute mark.
