Kevin Smith outlines scrapped Clerks III script

This script wasn’t even supposed to be here today! Or any day, really. At the premiere of Clerks III, writer, director and Southwest Airlines extra baggage Kevin Smith offered some details about how the movie almost turned out.

In what Kevin Smith called “a movie about dealing with grief”, the original Clerks III script opened during Hurricane Sandy, which pummeled Smith’s home state of New Jersey (and others) in 2012.

“Dante and Randal were locked in a jail because the original version of Clerks III was the opening of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot where the cops come in and bust Jay and Silent Bob.”

Once the gang is released from prison for safety reasons, they find their beloved Quick Stop has been destroyed. To cope, Randal goes to the movies but the picture he wants to see hasn’t been released yet, prompting him to “[build] a lean-to version of Quick Stop, like a bodega-shanty version, and becomes the unofficial mayor of this town.” Mayor Graves, you say? Four more years! Four more years!

It’s actually not a terrible idea, although it may have fit better as an episode of the Clerks cartoon. It sounds way better than Dante being killed off in the first one, at least.

“It was so far-flung from Clerks…Mercifully, we never made it. And then suddenly, I had the heart attack and was like, oh, that would be a good backbone for this movie.”

Clerks III sees Randal surviving a heart attack of his own, kicking off an attempt to make a movie about the Quick Stop convenience store. Sound familiar?

Other than the expected returns of Randal, Dante, and Jay and Silent Bob, Kevin Smith’s Clerks III will bring back Rosario Dawson and Trevor Fehrman’s characters from Clerks II, Marilyn Ghigliotti’s Veronica from the first Clerks and a real-life Lando, introduced in Clerks: The Animated Series.

Clerks III comes to theaters on September 13.

What are your thoughts on Kevin Smith’s abandoned Clerks III script? Which plot do you like better?