Trivia
Kevin Smith financed this movie by maxing out credit cards, selling a majority of his comic book collection and borrowing money from family and friends.
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Filmed at the same store in which director Kevin Smith was working at the time. As he was only allowed to film outside of business hours, and because bright enough lights couldn't be afforded, the plot included an explanation for the shutters being always down.
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Randall and the Happy Scrappy Hero Pup lady are not actually in the room at the same time. Jeff Anderson refused to read the list of porno movies in front of her, and particularly in front of the child (although the reaction shots of the Happy Scrappy Hero Pup lady were obtained by reading the list to her).
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Willem Black was supposed to be a collegiate type, but the original actor for the role, Dan Hapstak, changed his mind and opted out of the role. Scott Mosier was then cast as the role, but since he didn't look collegiate, they reworked the character into an idiot man child.
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Walter Flanagan, who plays the guy who buys the cigarettes even after the Chewlies Gum Rep does his lecture, is wearing one of Brian O'Halloran's stage beards as a wig.
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The "smoker's lung" that the Chewlie's Gum rep slams on the counter is actually a calf's liver thrown in dirt and burned with cigarettes.
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Despite having almost no violence in the film (with the exception of the fight between Dante and Randal), it was originally given an NC-17 rating by the MPAA based solely on its graphic dialogue. The film's distributor Miramax hired attorney Alan M. Dershowitz (of the O.J. Simpson defense team) who successfully petitioned the MPAA to lower its rating to R without any cuts.
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The "Clerks" logo is made out of letters cut from various magazines and food items. The C is from Cosmopolitan Magazine, the L is from Life, the E is from Rolling Stone, the R is from Ruffles potato chips, the K is from Clark Bar and the S is from a Goobers box.
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The offended customer in the "jizz mopper" scene is buying paper towels and glass cleaner.
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Dante wears a Pittsburgh Penguins jersey during the hockey game, playing against opponents wearing New Jersey Devils jerseys. Randal wears a USSR (CCCP) jersey during the game, but wears a New Jersey Devils hat.
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The anti-smoking sentiment in the film represented Kevin Smith's own viewpoint when he wrote the screenplay. Silent Bob doesn't inhale when he puffs on his cigarette because of this. After filming this movie, he became a two-pack-a-day smoker.
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Silent Bob is not so silent. In Clerks. and Mallrats, he speaks only once, but in Dogma, he speaks twice. In Chasing Amy he has quite a long speech while in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, he becomes almost chatty.
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This is the first film in Kevin Smith's intricately interconnected View Askewniverse series (the others being Dogma, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and Clerks II). The movies are all linked by characters, themes and events and each contains numerous references to the others.
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There are at least two different versions of the scene where Randall is ordering a video for the woman with her little girl. The two versions have two distinctly different voices for the little girl when she says "Happy Scrappy"
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The hat Jay is wearing while stealing the donuts during the roofer's story is a San Jose Sharks hat. The Sharks are an NHL team.
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Clerks is loosely based on "The Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri hence the name. Also, there are nine breaks in the movie to represent the nine rings of hell.
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Kevin Smith originally cast himself as Randal which is why Randal gets some of the best lines.
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When Jeff Anderson (Randal) auditioned, he read Jay's lines because he had nothing else to use (the actors were allowed to bring in a separate dialogue to read instead of the script).
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Director Kevin Smith's childhood friend Walter Flanagan appears in several different roles. Due to this, Smith later said that Flanagan was the Lon Chaney of the '90s.
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According to Kevin Smith in an interview in the book "My First Movie", part of the movie's financing came from an insurance settlement. The settlement was from a car that he and Jason Mewes both drove, that was destroyed in a flood. Jason Mewes had told him there would be a flood, and asked if he could move the car uphill, but Smith didn't trust him.
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Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier attended the Vancouver Film School, British Columbia, Canada and made a pact that whichever of them first started directing a movie, the other would produce. Smith created his film first, and Mosier produced it, as he has all of Smith's films.
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In Snowball Effect: The Story of 'Clerks' on the special edition DVD, Kevin Smith says that the film's original title was "Inconvenience". Then it was changed to "Rude Clerks" before being shortened to Clerks..
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Kevin Smith has said on speaking tours that the reason he cast himself in the movie was that if the movie failed and he was in near-permanent debt for the rest of his life, he could at least point at his face in the movie as proof he did it.
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Jason Mewes (Jay) was so camera shy, that during the dance scene with him and Kevin Smith (Silent Bob), everyone had to leave and go into the video store, and just left the camera rolling, so that Mewes wouldn't be so nervous
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The scene where Dante confronts Caitlin about her marriage to an Asian design major in the video store is done in one shot, which lasts for over five minutes. It was shot on the first night of filming.
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According to an unfilmed scene that was animated and put into the 10th anniversary DVD, Clerks. takes place on Saturday. In Mallrats, a reference is made to Julie Dwyer dying "yesterday". Mallrats takes place on Friday.
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Kevin Smith says that he got his inspiration to be a film maker and make "Clerks." after seeing Richard Linklater's Slacker.
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Kevin Smith, a keen comic book fan, sold a large part of his collection to help fund this film. He has since been able to buy most of them back.
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Randall watches a porn movie called "The Best of Both Worlds", which is the name of a real series of porn movies. However, the real movies are about bisexuals, not hermaphrodites.
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The role of Dante was written for Ernest O'Donnell, but Kevin Smith felt he wasn't quite right and also the fact that he did not learn his lines for the audition and cast him as Rick Derris instead.
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The "Dave's Fruit Pies" sold at the mart are actually Hostess Fruit Pies with the word Hostess blocked out and "Dave's" put in its place.
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The "RST" in RST Video stands "Rajiv, Sarla, Tarlochen." Those are the first names of the son, mother, and father team who owned (and still own) the video store and the Quick Stop.
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In the final scene we see Dante leaning on a newspaper rack. The tabloid headline reads "Worlds fattest man weds tiniest woman".
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Vincent Pereira originally had a scene in which Randal (Jeff Anderson) talks to a clerk at Big Choice Video, a perfect clerk, but the sound machine gave way in the middle of the take and they had to scrap the scene. Sound survives up until that point.
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The word 'fuck' and its derivatives are said 91 times throughout the film, mostly between Dante and Jay.
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Jason Reitman has said that this film revealed to him his desire to be a filmmaker. Reitman later told Kevin Smith this, which lead Smith to jokingly quip, "You're the son of Ivan Reitman. You grew up on the sets of Ghostbusters, and Stripes. It took ME to let you know that you can be a director?".
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Kevin Smith raised the film's minuscule $27,000 budget by selling off his comic collection, borrowing $3,000 from his parents and maxing out his credit cards.
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Kevin Smith worked in the store where they shot the film. They shot for 21 straight nights. He would clock on at 6am and finish at 11pm. They would then shoot till 4am, after which he would try to grab an hour or two's sleep before getting ready to go back to work.
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The film was never dubbed into German, an extremely rare occurrence for German audiences. The DVD and Blu-ray release feature German subtitles, though.
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The reason prices end in $.95, $.99, set under a round figure was so that cashiers would always have to open the register to give change, thus recording a sale and preventing them from pocketing the bills.
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Silent Bob's line was originally meant to be delivered by Jay, but Jason Mewes had such trouble delivering it that Kevin Smith decided to say it himself.
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The film's shoestring budget is part of the reason it was shot in black and white. A number of different types of lighting were used, and this would have required a lot of post production to resolve issues related to the varying color temperatures. With black and white, this isn't a problem.
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Kevin Smith directed the music video for Soul Asylum's song, "Can't Even Tell" which closes the film.
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Dante says "I'm not even supposed to be here today" 5 times. He also says 2 similar things 1 time each: "No, I don't work today" and "Yeah, I know I'm not scheduled today."
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Director Trademark
Kevin Smith:
[jaws]
After the fiasco involving Caitlin and the dead guy in the bathroom, Randal is pulling a chip through a jar of salsa saying "we're gonna need a bigger boat..." alluding to Jaws, one of Smith's favorite movies.
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Kevin Smith:
[Star Wars]
There are many multiple conversations and references to the films including, but not limited to, Randall's discussion about the end of Return of the Jedi and the song about Chewbacca.
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Spoilers
One of the early scripts penned by Kevin Smith involved Dante being shot in the chest by a robber at the end of the film, after Randal leaves the store. This scene, devised simply because Smith didn't know how to end the movie, was actually filmed but was cut from the released version. It was later included on the 10th Anniversary DVD.
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