ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke to The 4:30 Movie director Kevin Smith about his new teen comedy movie. Smith discussed recapturing his own childhood, the idea of movie bacon, and the film’s great fake trailers. It is now available to own and rent on digital.
“Writer-director Kevin Smith presents his most personal film to date with this coming-of-age story— set in the summer of 1986 — that follows three sixteen-year-old friends who spend their Saturdays sneaking into movies at the local cineplex. When one of the guys invites the girl of his dreams to see an R-rated film, all hilarity breaks loose, as a self-important theater manager (Ken Jeong) and teen rivalries interfere with his best-laid plans. Justin Long, Rosario Dawson, Jason Biggs, and more contribute outrageous characters to this poignant comic valentine to moviegoing and the youth of the ’80s,” says the synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Kevin, it’s been such a great year for teen comedies with The 4:30 Movie and Snack Shack as well. How was it recapturing the energy of your teenage years? Because it’s just such a sweet movie at its core.
Kevin Smith: Thank you so much. Me and my friends bought the movie theater, which is now called Smodcastle Cinemas. It was the movie theater. We grew up going to the Atlantic Movies movie house back when I was a kid. It was the Atlantic Twin Cinema. The Saturday that just passed was our two-year anniversary since we took over. Once we had the place, I was like, now we got a location. We can make a whole movie here, man, a free location. Like I know the guys that own the place… we should be good.
So since the movie theater is so old and inside, like Theater 1 still has the same seats that I sat in when I saw Friday the 13th Part 2, it felt like, “Oh, we can make a movie about going to the movies when I was a kid, about how we’d pay for one movie and then sneak into the other four before, like, we went home at 11 o’clock at night.
So a sentimental journey of sorts about movie loving from a guy who’s spent his life loving movies, so much so that he aggregated into becoming a filmmaker. So it winds up being this kind of secret origin story. Well, what happens when you spend that much time in a movie theater as a youth? Well, like one day you grow up to pursue that, but never mind, the one day, let’s see… I picked a magical day of May 25, 1986, when I went on a date with Kim Loughran to go see Poltergeist II. Let’s tell that story. I’ve got the location, it looks period. As long as we dress everybody in eighties clothing, we may be able to kind of take a journey in time. Do a little Merchant Ivory without spending the kind of money to do so.
I love all the small touches in The 4:30 Moviebecause so many must come from a real place. One of the characters sneaks in “movie bacon.” Was that an actual thing you were doing?
It was not so much an actual movie thing we did, but my mom, uh, would make me weird lunches when I was a kid. Uh, she would, uh, take tinfoil, put ham on it, put cheese on top of it, melt it, fold it over, tell me bring it to school and put it on the radiator. She’s like, when it’s lunchtime, it’ll be ready, . And so my food was prepared in half by school. My grandmother too was a person that was always like… I was a heavy kid, so she was like, “Kevin, I want you to sit here and watch Richard Simmons this morning and you can while you eat your French toast.” So she’d make me this thick Texas French toast in New Jersey and then make me watch Richard Simmons. It was very confused messages.
Mixed signals.
Yeah, very mixed signals back then. But since the movie, everyone in our theater at Smodcastle Cinemas is like, “You guys gonna sell movie bacon?” And I was like, I guess that we could, man, and it would be so wonderful and ironic if I built a small empire getting rich off movie bacon, if that changed the game.
I love the fake trailers within The 4:30 Movie. How is that as a creative exercise? Because you really just get to commit fully to these goofy ideas. Not that that’s ever stopped you from your full films, either.
True, true. It’s nice to have like a short film format to play with in the middle of the movie. Most of the time, I’m telling a long-format story with the movie itself. But when you make something like fake trailers to the movies, when they’re in those scenes, you realize that like, “Oh, I have to put in multiple shots in order for it to read like a trailer.” Two of the trailers we get off with cheaply, like The Health Nut is just one long-running shot with words on the screen and white words on black card, and The Booties is almost one long lifted scene than anything else. But the Sister Sugar Walls trailer is literally like, we have to go here and shoot a little bit.
We have to go here and shoot a little scene. We have to go here and shoot a line. And so you realize that it’s, it’s time and cost prohibitive on a low budget to make full trailers. We had a trailer I’d written for the Bucklick movie that they were trying to go see at one point in the flick, but it was too cost-prohibitive to shoot. So they’re fun, and they’re like stepping out to do a little short film, which is nice because the days we shot ’em, they were not connected to anything else. It wasn’t like, we gotta remember the continuity. It’s like we just go to set, shoot this, and then we’re done.
Because of Grindhouse, because of what they did with Machete and with Thanksgiving, there’s always this backdoor perhaps promise of maybe making that movie one day. Of the three, the one that calls to me the most, you know, would be like, “From the maker of Dogma and Red State, his third movie about religion, Sister Sugar Walls.”
I love the Major Murder sequence in The 4:30 Movie, which is a riff on Sgt. Slaughter. Sam Richardson is just great. How was it working with him?
Amazing. I was a big Veep fan. So naturally, I loved him as Richard Splett for years. Then, of course, him and Tim Robinson are tight, so I knew him from Detroiters and also from I Think You Should Leave, Tim’s show. So, he came into our flick because I was hanging out with Paul Walter Hauser at a Comic-Con in Dallas, and we became friends and text all the time. I was talking about Sam from one of the sketches, and he was like, “Look, I love you, but Sam Richardson is a massive fan.” I was like, “Are you kidding me? So can you gimme his number?” So we started texting.
When I was making this, like originally, I’d written it for Sgt. Slaughter to do, and I hit him up at a con. I was like, “Hey, man.” Because he lived where we grew up. So as we were kids, we bike ride to his condo and be like, “That’s where Sgt. Slaughter lives.” So I hit him up about it at a con and he was like, “I can’t act. I’m a wrestler. If you need this character to say important things, I don’t think I could do that.” So then I refashioned it, and I thought of Sam and reached out, and he mercifully had the time and was able to do it.
