Last week I was working with a Santa Monica gentleman heavily involved in film production. Let’s call him Joe, so he can keep his job. Joe’s hands are on just about everything Hollywood puts out, the kind of guy who can’t stand going to movie theaters anymore because he spends every sunny day cooped up in a darkened studio. We were involved on the same project that had to be redone multiple times because no one on a certain film’s production team were talking to each other; to make matters worse, they were all technically incompetent. As I promised him he wouldn’t have to see my company’s film again, I asked him if everything was going OK. “Man, I have fifteen things on my plate and they were all due yesterday.” We usually lament the state of the industry whenever we talk, but this time he erupted. “I really wish someone just understood FILM!” he exclaimed. “Everyone working in this town thinks they know everything because they have a computer and know how to edit but they’ve never laid their hands on a piece of neg.” Joe would surely love to sit all those bastards down and make them watch “Snowball Effect,” the 90-minute crash-course in guerilla filmmaking on the third disc of the mammoth tenth anniversary DVD edition of “Clerks.”

How is a great movie made better? Easily, if you’re Buena Vista Home Video and this is the product. Few gift sets are worth the time to go through each bonus feature even once without producing snores. This sucker has enough to repeatedly garner more laughs the 247th time around. Kevin Smith’s directorial debut, “Clerks” is an indie touchstone. Almost as big as his film about the day in the life of Quick Stop register jockey Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) and his buddy Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson) is the back story about its $27,000 price tag. Between “El Mariachi” and “Clerks,” doing films on the cheap was now a realistic process. For a budding auteur like me (also, like Smith, living in NJ in the mid-1990s and wanting to get into the film business) those two movies made young filmmakers’ dreams real.

Little has not been written about this film. “Clerks” is a nasty pleasure, a curse-filled examination of the wasting lives of Dante and Randal as they verbally explore temporary options that in a better world could befall our heroes. They don’t care enough to fight to leave their surroundings; their unspoken excuse is partly because of the focus their mind-numbing jobs remotely demand. How is this possibly helping them prepare for their futures? When did customers become so incredibly moronic? Where can they possibly go? Are girls worth this much energy? Are friends supposed to be this aggravating? Is hockey everything in life? Did Dave Klein really have that much hair? From sunup to sundown, “Clerks” is a film that attempts to answer many questions. The challenges are real, the situations absurd and the views ahead are uninviting but the laughs are frequent. Smith helms a ship filled with the most bizarre yet familiar denizens and melds them into 92 minutes of hilarity.

Previous investment in the 2002 DVD of “Clerks” means a tough choice. Commentaries are repeated (the “Classic Commentary” option), as is Smith’s clip of Soul Asylum’s video for “Can’t Even Tell.” The first disc includes the popular theatrical version, and the deleted scenes from the 2002 DVD appear in the original unrated cut (mastered from a VHS), which the second disc consists of. The charm of the shorter cut is lost – it’s seedy, dreary, less endearing and its shock ending was wisely excised. “Clerks” dragged anyway, but it moves like lightning compared to the dark and slow original. Newer commentaries and segment introductions are here, and a third disc has 150 minutes of bonus features, including the early short film “Mae Day: The Crumbling Of A Documentary.” This also contains uncharacteristically nervous but shyly assured journal entries from the writer/director. Sound like a lot? It is, but a few things stand out.

The animated deleted scene is a jewel sure to go down in DVD history as one of the top bonus features ever. Smith and producer Scott Mosier realized they had no dinero to pull off the segment’s special effects nor did the story merit its inclusion. For “Clerks X” they handed it to the team of animators that created the short-lived cartoon TV series based on the movie. Right away, it works in the DVD setting. Dante and Randal find themselves in a funeral home, but their lack of any respect for their surroundings combined with fern-sized belly button lint and bad luck cause the most unthinkable of cadaver molestation to occur. It’s funnier than watching Britney Spears try to run for office and just as entrancing. To stop the laughs are impossible, and they come so hard it hurts.

The riotous Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) MTV spots are also included on the first disc. The 1998 promo films for the cable music channel are often brilliant vignettes with the occasional lame entry. The finest is “Gvmt. Cheese,” in which Run-D.M.C.’s “Peter Piper” provides the soundtrack for an ill-suited babysitting effort by Jay and Bob. I am still snickering about it as I type this. I repeatedly played it until I started to annoy my neighbors and even then I told them to screw off. The Marilyn Manson spoof is more famous, but as a whole they sum up the team’s impact on film history. Jay and Bob are this era’s Cheech and Chong or Laurel and Hardy, a pair with incredibly natural comic timing that is rarely forced. That they were a part of Smith’s next four films (the remaining chapters in what would become Smith’s Jersey trilogy, “Mallrats” and “Chasing Amy,” along with “Dogma” and “Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back”) are testaments to an enduring popularity that straddles millenniums.

“Snowball Effect” is the meat of the third disc, an overdose of mullets and anecdotes about the foundation that was laid to create “Clerks.” An exhausting history of preproduction, a 21-day shoot and its journey from the first takes at RST Video in Highlands NJ to Sundance 1994 and beyond is chronicled. If you think making a movie is all makeup trailers and limos, prepare for a wakeup call. Find out what it really takes to get a cat to poop on cue when a lack of cash flow mandates a single take, two at most. Grabbing a hockey stick to construct a makeshift boom pole never hurts, and writing a lock full of gum into the script would take away half the lighting costs!

Between nonexistent screening audiences, a flooded Monmouth County, crap placement in a film festival, two actors (Anderson and Marilyn Ghigliotti) despising each other and more that never showed up, it’s an inside look at the genesis of a classic. “Snowball Effect” is the story of what a lot of people have called “grunge filmmaking” when in reality it’s about the faith, strength, determination, creativity and passion of several individuals on both sides of the camera. Mosier’s giddy monologue of the ride he took with “Clerks” and Bryan Johnson’s humorous description of the writing class he shared with Smith are outtakes, but their honesty is hypnotic. Phil Benson, Rich Fox and crew do a fantastic job with the dozens (37, perhaps?) of people interviewed for an in-depth look at a film that, like “Easy Rider” and “The Graduate,” wound up defining a generation. For as much insight into Smith’s great writing or the effective use of a single set a la “Panic Room” or “Rear Window,” the documentary bursts with as much confidence in the heart of its subject as its creators did a decade ago.

As the director says in the 10th anniversary Q & A, it’s about making movies with your friends. In his case, it was more than timing and chance. It’s the people. Smith earned a place as a person to watch among his peers. Two versions of the same production in one package is often overkill, but the decision is clear. “Clerks X” blows away every version ever made of this film for public consumption. For completists? Sure. The first-time buyer? Definitely. Could care less and simply need to upgrade? Flip a coin. DP Klein says that “Clerks” has never looked better, and he would know. The sound, newly mastered from the original source tapes, has never been better either. “Clerks X” is the bomb: everything you need to know about a little movie that could – and did – and still does.

Reviewer's Opinion: BUY IT!!

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Before Kevin Smith became a Hollywood darling with Chasing Amy, a film he wrote and directed, he made this $27,000 comedy about real-life experiences working for chump change at a New Jersey convenience store. A rude, foul-mouthed collection of anecdotes about the responsibilities that go with being on the wrong side of the till, the film is also a relationship story that takes some hilarious turns once the lovers start revealing their sexual histories to one another. In the best tradition of first-time, ultra-low budget independent films, Smith uses Clerks as an audition piece, demonstrating that he not only can handle two-character comedy but also has an eye for action--as proven in a smoothly handled rooftop hockey scene. Smith himself appears as a silent figure who hangs out on the fringes of the store's property. --Tom Keogh