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Kevin Smith announces Clerks 3 has started filming

Cameras roll on his 51st birthday

Clerks: Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith as Jay and Silent Bob in Clerks

Kevin Smith is marking his 51st birthday by kicking off filming on Clerks 3. The comedy movie sequel was announced last month, and production is well underway.

Smith commemorated the occasion with a short video on Twitter about it being his birthday, and his Clerks threequel coming together. At 51, this means it’s exactly 30 years since he saw Richard Linklater’s Slacker, and decided he wanted to become a filmmaker. “It’s been an excellent first half-century, thank you all,” he says to close the clip, doing his daily walk around the neighbourhood.

The first table-read took place only days prior, when several of the cast gathered with Smith to run through the script. Brian O’Halloran, Jeff Anderson, Trevor Fehrman, Jason Mewes, Jen Schwalbach, and Austin Zajur attended, all visible in a selfie from Smith. Rosario Dawson and Marilyn Ghigliotti were the only two leads missing. the Clerks threequel brings together characters from the first and second, and puts them all back at the famous Quick Stop, where the original was set, for a concluding chapter that draws from Smith’s own life experience.

Randall (Anderson) has a heart-attack, and decides to document his life in a movie. He enlists his best friend Dante (O’Halloran), and the rest of the View Askewniverse regulars, to help him do so. In 2018, Smith himself suffered a cardiac episode, making this one of his most personal movies to date.

Work on Clerks 3 dates back to the early 2010s, with Smith penning a script and openly commenting about his desire to revisit the Quick Stop again. Funding and other production issues meant it kept getting put off for one reason or another, until this year, when Lionsgate acquired it.

We don’t have a release window for Clerks 3 just yet, but in the meantime, here’s the best movies of all time to keep you amused.