‘Clerks’ returns, with hints of growing up

updated 12:17 p.m. ET July 17, 2006

LOS ANGELES - They may be the rudest guys to ever sell you a cup of coffee. Yet Dante Hicks and Randal Graves are the most beloved store clerks the big screen has ever seen.

The boys are back in a followup to “Clerks,” writer-director Kevin Smith’s comic gem that was part of an eruption of 1990s talent that led to the modern independent-film scene.

“Clerks II,” opening Friday, picks up a decade later with Dante and Randal as foul-mouthed, overly analytical and underachieving as ever, though they’re dealing with grown-up matters like marriage, fatherhood and what passes for a career change in the slacker world.

Smith, who resurrected “Clerks” characters in “Dogma,” “Chasing Amy” and “Mallrats,” had tantalized fans by promising a “Clerks” sequel at the end of the “Dogma” credits. He later changed his mind.

“I was just like, that’s a sacred cow, and I shouldn’t really mess with the first movie,” Smith said. “It’s the one that put me on the map. What if your sequel sucks, and then people retroactively go back and hate the first one, and you lose all that good will?”

The good will is 12 years of adoring fandom for “Clerks,” a rambling, talky, black-and-white flick shot for a paltry $27,575. Smith paid for the film largely by maxing out credits cards while working as a store clerk himself.

After a disastrous debut to an almost empty theater at New York’s Independent Feature Film Market in 1993, “Clerks” caught some buzz in the press and was picked up by Miramax at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival.

“Clerks” took in a respectable but unremarkable $3 million at the box office, then gained a cult following as fans introduced friends to the movie on videotape.

“You’re that ‘Clerks’ guy, aren’t you?” a Blockbuster video executive once asked Brian O’Halloran, who starred as Dante. The executive told him “Clerks” was one of Blockbuster’s most stolen or unreturned videos.

“I was like, ‘That’s our fan base. A bunch of no-returning thieves,”’ said O’Halloran, who re-teams with Jeff Anderson as Randal for “Clerks II.”

What made Dante and Randal so popular?

“These guys don’t have a filter in their conversation,” O’Halloran said. “They’re saying things in the male-companionship type of conversations that are taken obviously to a certain Nth degree that normal conversations wouldn’t go. But it’s subject matter not far from subject matter I and my friends and other people talk about.”

Outlandish sexual escapades. Insults involving anatomical impossibilities. Idle speculation about favorite movies, such as the notion Luke Skywalker and friends killed innocent independent contractors when they destroyed the unfinished Death Star in “Return of the Jedi.” The plaint of the menial worker called in on a day off: “I’m not supposed to be here!”

That was the stuff of “Clerks,” which along with such movies as “Slacker” and “Reality Bites” tapped into the ennui and restlessness of twentysomethings in the 1990s.

“For me, it was always far more luck and timing than talent,” Smith said. “It said the right thing at the right moment about being overeducated and underemployed.”

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