Coming up for air

Posted by Kevin at spider-mtc-tj061.proxy.aol.com on September 16, 2001 at 20:35:16:

Is it me, or are there a slew of twelve year olds hanging around on the

board lately?

Would you all kindly stop picking fights and then dramatically exiting the

board only to show up again mere posts later? Thank you.

Sorry for my absence. I've been knee-deep in the new script. I'm almost

done, too. Got a title and everything.

'Course, it's a little too early to share any of the particulars of the

film with you, but I'll start talking about it soon enough. Suffice it to

say, it's pretty much the biggest 180 you can make from 'Jay and Silent Bob

Strike Back'.

Speaking of which, another reason I've been MIA: I was off licking my box

office wounds. Don't get me wrong - thirty million is nothing to sneeze at

(ask the 'Rock Star' folks if they'd be happy with a thirty million box

office take). But the feeling was that we'd do better than 'Dogma', as the

movie wasn't a niche film about Catholicism. However, we forgot that the

flick was, ultimately, a niche film about the View Askewniverse. Oops.

That being said, I've since made peace with what we'll wind up making.

Once the expectation was cleared away, it was kind of nice to know that me

and Mewes "opened" the movie ourselves - to the tune of eleven million

bucks (and I'm not even movie star pretty... or a movie star at all, for

that matter). That's all due to you folks - the ladies and gents who've

encouraged our nonsense, flick after flick. Because of you all, and your

fierce loyalty, I get to continue making whatever flicks I want to make.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: thank you.

So, as we place thirteenth at the box office for this week, drop down to

twelve hundred or so screens, and prepare to do our last lap toward that

thirty million dollar figure, some have asked what my perspective on 'Jay

and Silent Bob Strike Back' is? Was it worth the effort?

Fuck, yes.

It was a blast. We made the ultimate fan's flick and were extremely well

reviewed, by and large. I got to put my wife and kid in the movie, as well

as all of my friends. We made the exact film we wanted to make that the

large majority of you really dug - and it's a flick that'll be very

profitable for Dimension, when all's said and done.

Yes, dear friends and peers, I've dodged yet another bullet.

But box office, shmox office - let's talk about something that really

matters.

Good Lord, the horror of Tuesday the 11th...

I was on the west coast during the attack, sleeping. The phone woke me up

at around seven thirty, west coast time. My mother had left a message,

urging me to turn on the television, as the United States was under attack.

What I saw when I did so shocked the hell out of me. The burning WTC. The

reports of people jumping from the building. The Pentagon broken. After

watching about ten minutes of coverage, for me, the whole tragedy

crystallized into one thought...

This is what happens when people take their religion far too seriously.

My prayers go out to the survivors of the attack and those who've lost

loved ones, but my heart goes out to the hijacked passengers and the folks

who populated that grand monument that always made New York City seem

bigger than life, the World Trade Center. These were the folks who wound

up as afterthoughts to some misguided lunatic's political statement, and I

can't imagine a worse way to go than dying for someone else's

self-righteous cause - and doing it while being held in check by a box

cutter and the threat of a phantom bomb.

As a Nation, we're sad. We're horrified and scared. We're outraged.

We're hungry for vengeance. That was all to be expected.

What wasn't expected - but should have been, really - has been watching us

band together as Americans.

The candle-lit vigils I witnessed dotting the streets of L.A. Friday night.

The report that there have been more food donations made than can be

handled in NYC.

The news that volunteers had to be turned away, so many were there offering

to clean up the debris at what was once the World Trade Center.

If you're not proud to be an American this week, I urge you to get your

jaded head out of your ass and stand in front of a flag and say the Pledge

of Allegiance with as much fervor as you did when you first learned it in

grade school. Because all that rhetoric we're usually fed during election

years about patriotism and love for our country that normally seems like

bullshit? That rhetoric has become a reality again. And I'd like to think

of it as the parting gift of the passengers of the hijacked airliners and

the nearly five thousand innocents who perished in both towers of the World

Trade Center. That's the silver lining to the dark and evil cloud that

loomed over our country just long enough last week to remind us why we're

all on this particular land mass to begin with...

Because we choose to be Americans.

I'll check back with you late





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