Kevin Smith is someone who seems genuinely comfortable outside the realm of Hollywood politics. The writer/director has always served his career time on the fringe of the studio system while, at times, dabbing his foot into the crux of a big-budget movie. The foul-mouthed filmmaker also has the ability to produce a movie at a Woody Allen-esque pace as his films are made relatively cheap with non-complex productions. Smith has recently been given the green light to make a new film thanks to a waiver bestowed to him from the Screen Actors’ Guild.
ComicBook.com is reporting that Smith is ready to move forward with his next project, The 4:30 Movie. Smith famously wrote the doomed Superman Lives script for Tim Burton, whose Nicolas Cage incarnation now infamously became realized in The Flash, and he held a script reading event for the unmade project. It was here that the Jersey native revealed that production of The 4:30 Movie is set to begin later this month or sometime in the next month. The film was granted a waiver from SAG thanks to its status as an indie movie with an already completed screenplay.
The synopsis, according to ComicBook.com, says, “The movie will star Austin Zajur (Clerks III, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) in the lead role, and centers on a group of teens in the 1980s, who pay to get into one movie, and spend the day theater-hopping.”
Smith told the attendees at the live reading, “Even though the writers are striking, my script was written, so we were getting ready to go into production. Last week, we were supposed to be in production. But then SAG struck, the Screen Actors Guild. And you can make a movie without a writer, if you’ve got a script already, which we did. You can’t make a movie without actors. So that kind of killed our plans for the summer to shoot a movie, unless we could qualify for a waiver. Since the movie was never goin to be an AMPTP movie — that’s who the strike is against — that gave us a chance to apply to SAG and get a waiver. We were already a low-budget movie; it’s only $3 million. Our movie is not a threat to SAG or WGA. It doesn’t set back the cause. So SAG gave out 39 waivers already to productions that were three days away from wrapping, one week away from wrapping, or something like that. Low-budget productions that were not AMPTP-related productions.”
He continued, “So we applied for a waiver and we were really hoping to get one so that we could maybe shoot the movie this summer, instead of waiting until the strike ends….Here’s something I found out last night: we got our waiver. So that means by the end of August, we’re going to start shooting a movie right here. It’s a movie that’s set in 1986 and it’s set at this movie theater right here, and it’s kind of about me, and [Clerks star Ernie O’Donnell) and our friend Michael Belicose, and what we used to do with our free times when we were kids. We would go to the movies at a multiplex like this, pay for one movie, and then hop from movie to movie all day long and see free movies.”