Kevin Smith’s 1994 film Clerks put the director on the map, with the low budget black and white film going on to become not only a box office success, but a cult classic that remains a pop culture touchstone nearly 26 years after its release. But when it comes to the royalties for that film, Smith says that former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein refused to pay him royalties he was owed for Clerks for seven years — and even then, it didn’t quite work out as one might expect.
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In an interview with Variety, Smith explained that he’s never been fully paid for the royalties he’s owed for Clerks, something that Weinstein was “notorious” for.
“He was notorious for that,” Smith said when asked about not being paid. “I did encounter that. And I’m still out money. But you got to understand, I never cared about the money. My whole career, my reps were like: ‘You’re supposed to be making far more.’ Money’s never been a motivator for me.”
“This much I know,” he continued. “They [Miramax] bought Clerks for $227,000. And the movie went out and made $ 3 million at the box office and stuff. And it took seven years for us to see any profit from that movie. For seven years, they were like: ‘Nope, the movie is still not in profit.’ And we were like ‘How?’ And then there were things.”
Those things, Smith explained, were costs associated with the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, but they weren’t exactly fees that Clerks had incurred. Smith explained that Clerks‘ profits paid, in part, for a yacht used at the festival for Pulp Fiction.
“There was a yacht, the Miramax yacht, it was called. That’s where all the stars were,” Smith said. “We hung out on it, hung out with Quentin [Tarantino] after he won his Palme d’Or and stuff. But that yacht wasn’t for us. When the festival was over, we got the financial statement. They had taken the entire Cannes bill, everything they spent in Cannes, and just chopped it up into four and Clerks was charged as much as Pulp Fiction. So we all paid an equal share.
Ultimately, Smith said he and his lawyer ended up auditing Miramax years later and got paid.
“I remember John Sloss, my lawyer, being like ‘This is nuts. We have to audit them. And I said, ‘No, I can’t audit people I’m in business with. That’s gross,’” Smith said. “And we never audited them for years until after Clerks 2. And then, we audited them years later and got a bunch of money.”
As for any future money Smith gets from the movies he made with Miramax — including not just Clerks but Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and more — the filmmaker has previously said that he will give those monies to the nonprofit Women In Film, a nonprofit that helps women in the film industry achieve their dreams.
“My entire career is tied up with this man,” Smith said during an episode of Hollywood Babble-On in 2017 after sexual assault allegations against Weinstein surfaced in 2017. “Everything I did in the beginning has his name on it. And I spent many years lionizing him, telling stories. Whenever I tell the Clerks story, there’s, you know, and then we got bought by Miramax.”
“So I’ve been trying to think of what to do,” Smith continued. “Everyone on the Internet of course has an opinion; a lot of people when I said that I’m ashamed, I wrote a tweet saying I’m ashamed, a lot of people of course were like, ‘Give all the money back.’ Well, I don’t have money from 20 years ago, do you?. But that being said, I work in an industry where thankfully there are dividends that come out of a movie for the rest of your life, so there’s such a thing as residuals, where I still get money for those movies, for the movies I made at Miramax and for the movies I made with at Weinstein. The first thing I feel like I can do is, I don’t want that anymore.”
Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison back in March after a jury found him guilty of rape in the third degree and a criminal sexual act in the first degree.
