Smith Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Brand
Every brand has a first step, and the secret origin of Smith’s empire began in the mid 1990s, when the filmmaker harnessed the nascent power of the internet to communicate directly with his growing fanbase. Enlisting the aid of one such superfan, a University of Michigan student named Ming Chen, he established an official View Askew website that featured a message board where Smith could respond to viewer queries.
“That changed everything,” Smith says. “Suddenly, I was never alone again. I could head over to the website and talk to the people who bought tickets to my movies.”
Around the same time, the director dove into the college speaking circuit, screening Clerks and its follow-up, Mallrats, for eager audiences and then sticking around into the late-night hours sharing true Hollywood stories. “I went to any college that asked me,” he says, laughing.
But there was one thing Smith neglected to ask for in exchange for making himself so available to his online and IRL (in real life) fans: money.
In the middle of a three-hour-plus appearance at Rutgers University, a student activities committee representative clued him into that lucrative revenue stream. “She told me, ‘Everyone knows that you come cheap to free,’” Smith remembers. “And I was like, ‘Not anymore!’”
Signing with the now-closed college booking agency Auburn Moon, Smith’s appearance fee immediately went from free to five digits. Meanwhile, he and Chen figured out how to monetize the View Askew website by selling merchandise directly to eager buyers, starting with 200 leftover Mallrats posters that the movie’s distributor planned to junk.
“They started selling like crazy,” Smith says. “Suddenly, I realized, ‘I’m not just a filmmaker—I’m in sales again.’”
Chasing DTC
Smith continued to grow the sales side of his brand over the next decade. In addition to his digital retail operation, he added a pair of brick-and-mortar Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash storefronts—one in New Jersey and one in Los Angeles—that sold View Askew-related ephemera, as well as all of the usual fan merchandise, from comic books to toys. And as his raucous question-and-answer sessions graduated from the college circuit to bigger venues, he took advantage of the boom time for physical media by making high-quality DVD recordings available to the fans who couldn’t purchase tickets.