Kevin Smith Has a SAG Waiver To Shoot The 4:30 Movie

Kevin Smith's next film, The 4:30 Movie, is set to go into production this month or next, the filmmaker revealed during a script reading for Superman Lives on Saturday. Its status as an independent film with a completed script allowed Smith to apply for a waiver from Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), who informed him over the weekend that his waiver had been approved. 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.

The Writers Guild of America is also on strike, and while Smith's own scripts tend to be for his independent film studio View Askew Productions, rather than the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), against whom the writers are striking, he told fans that he "hasn't picked up a pen, except to write my name" since May. Happily for him, The 4:30 Movie is a script that's already completed.

"Even though the writers are striking, my script was written, so we were getting ready to go into production," Smith told the crowd. "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. 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."

Smith told fans that they were putting up some casting calls for background actors in the days and weeks to come. Later in the evening, he suggested that some audience members could snag an "un-cuttable cameo" by bidding at auctions at special screening events held at Smodcastle during the month of August.