Television

Kevin Smith Says Directorial Finale 'Hit Somebody' Is Now A Mini-Series, Hopefully To Shoot Next Year

By Russ Fischer

It's interesting to me that some of the biggest names from the '90s indie cinema boom in America are planning to end their directorial careers on television. Steven Soderbergh will close out his run as a director with Behind the Candelabra, on HBO. Quentin Tarantino has suggested that he's only got a limited number of theatrical features in him, but could see doing a huge Kill Bill-style story as "a six-hour mini-series or something."

And now Kevin Smith, who was a huge indie success thanks to Clerks in 1994, says his final project, the hockey movie Hit Somebody, originally meant to be two features, will be a mini-series on an unspecified network.

Let's start with a tweet:

On that episode of Jay & Silent Bob Get Old, Smith tells a long, very entertaining story about taking Hit Somebody to Jerry Bruckheimer, in the hopes of getting some advice from the veteran producer and hockey fan about making his ambitious two-film story. The short version is, Bruckheimer explains how difficult a time he's had trying to get another hockey movie made, and that made Smith think he was facing impossible odds.

So that led to the idea of cutting Hit Somebody down to one movie — we just reported on that days ago. And he did a lot of work cutting it down to one long script. But the cutting was difficult — "it plays like a novel," Smith says, suggesting that there's a point at which cutting just wasn't going to work.

Then Jason Mewes said to him, "well, stop hacking it down — why don't you make it a mini-series?"

That's where Smith goes for the dramatic pause while the audience applauds. Then he says "I started restructuring Hit Somebody thusly," and continues "we've now drawn in on the close of this." He won't name the network, but he says "yes, Hit Somebody is going to happen as a mini-series," and it looks like we'll be going into production next year."

It happens, of course, that Smith has a nice little thing going on AMC, thanks to Comic Book Men. But he says the network wants to make the announcement itself, and so we'll have to wait to see what the home will really be.

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