Kevin Smith Has Finished Cut of 4:30 Movie

Kevin Smith’s The 4:30 Movie is one step closer to completion, with the filmmaker saying that there is a finished cut of the film, which shot in August and September at Smith’s Smodcastle Cinemas in New Jersey. 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. Despite the ongoing actors’ strike, Smith was able to shoot the film because it’s a truly independent production, not being made for one of the struck studios.

The movie is both a return to form for Smith — filmed at work, mostly in one location, and taking place over the course of a day, like Clerks — and a departure. After all, he has never made a period piece before, and moving his theater back to the ’80s likely took some impressive design work.

“Hopefully we get to show it to [Sundance Film Festival] in the next week or two, because I’ve got it cut together,” Smith said on the latest Fatman Beyond. “For those of you who don’t follow that closely, I just finished making a movie called The 4:30 Movie. I got a SAG waiver, so we were shooting….It’s all pretty much cut together.”

You can see the full podcast below.

“Even though the writers are striking, my script was written, so we were getting ready to go into production,” Smith told fans in August. “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.”

There is no official release date for The 4:30 Movie yet. Smith’s last two movies were released by Lionsgate and distributed by Paramount, but it is not clear whether he could utilize that same arrangement given that he had a SAG waiver, and Paramount is a struck studio.