Kevin Smith on ‘The 4:30 Movie,’ his most personal, Jersey-loaded film ever

When Kevin Smith says a movie is inspired by his life, it isn’t just a loose suggestion.

In “Clerks,” he filmed at his actual job at the Quick Stop in Leonardo.

With the director’s latest, “The 4:30 Movie,” he filmed at the actual movie theater where he would hang out. Nearly 40 years later, he now co-owns the former Atlantic Cinemas with friends.

On Saturday, he’s premiering the film at their Atlantic Highlands theater, SModcastle Cinemas, as a benefit for the theater. So yes, fans can watch a movie set exactly where they’re sitting — only in 1986.

“The 4:30 Movie,” starring Austin Zajur (”Clerks III”) and a group of young actors, is a story of teen shenanigans, summer love and a passion for the movies bolstered by supporting roles and cameos from lots of familiar faces of Smith’s filmography.

Smith has always mined his youth for stories.

The wellspring for his work has been the early ’90s. This time, he’s going back further — to what it was like when he was 16.

Smith’s movie, which opens in theaters Sept. 13, unfolds over the course of a single summer day in 1986.

The lead character, Brian David, is so named because that was originally supposed to be Smith’s name before his parents went with Kevin Patrick.

“My parents changed it at the last second because there was another Brian David already in the nursery at the hospital,” says Smith, 54, who was born in Red Bank and grew up in Highlands. (His mother was worried about the hospital mixing up the babies.)

In the film, Brian David and his friends Burny (Nicholas Cirillo) and Belly (Reed Northrup) engage in the time-honored custom of theater-hopping: paying for one movie but hanging around for others.

“Even though we were raised Catholic and went to church every Sunday — I was an altar boy — theater hopping was encouraged by my parents on the weekend,” Smith says.

He did it at the Atlantic Highlands theater and at the theater in Middletown “which was a United Artists theater that is now a Target,” the director notes. “If you went to the matinee show on a Saturday, you could have your parents pick you up at 10 o’clock and easily see four movies. I saw ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ 86 times in a movie theater. I only paid once.”

And he would be fine with other people doing it at his theater, too.

“We’ll take any more bodies,” he says. “As long as they’re buying popcorn.”

After Smith bought the theater with friends in 2022, he realized the potential for a production. His first thought, along the lines of “Clerks,” was a story about ushers who work there.

“But I’ve never had that experience,” Smith says. “I didn’t wanna lay claim to stolen valor.”

So he fell back on his old love — going to the movies.

“This is like a snapshot of what it was like for us in the mid ’80s to go to a movie theater,” Smith says. “Back then, you would go in to a seven o’clock show on a Friday night or a Saturday night … couldn’t even get a seat. Now, we had ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ open on a Friday night, it was 43 tickets and that was pretty good for a first-release movie.”

By contrast, SModcastle Cinemas recently hosted Smith’s Vulgarthon event which sold out four theaters — “700 people watching all these (View) Askewniverse movies from nine o’clock on Saturday morning till five o’clock in the morning on Sunday,” Smith says.

Special events, which cost more than a regular movie ticket, are the way Smith has tried to save the theater. The “4:30 Movie” jers, billed as a fundraiser, is another such event, featuring appearances from the director and the movie’s cast, including Ken Jeong (it starts at 4:30, naturally).

“Seeing the theater full is like a real snapshot of childhood,” Smith says. “We’ll never see just a normal crowd sell out the place for a normal Friday opening.”

Fiction is reality

From the opening scenes of “The 4:30 Movie,” Brian David’s motivation is clear.

He wants to ask his crush, Melody Barnegat, out on a date to the movies.

The two teens have a history — they made out last summer.

When Melody, played by Siena Agudong (Netflix’s ”Resident Evil”), accepts, he’s overjoyed.

“I got a 24-karat case of love,” he tells his tape recorder.

But there are more than a few roadblocks to their ultimate destination: the 4:30 movie at Atlantic Cinemas.

Smith says the young love storyline is inspired by his first date with his high school girlfriend, Kim.

Melody works at a Chinese restaurant — so did Kim.

In fact, “The 4:30 Movie” filmed in the same location, New Beijing Chinese Restaurant on First Avenue — the same street as the theater — in Atlantic Highlands, as well as at Kim’s actual backyard pool. (The New Jersey Motion Picture and TV Commission says the movie spent $2.4 million filming locally, in Atlantic Highlands, Leonardo and Long Branch.)

The film’s star, Austin Zajur, previously worked with Smith On “Clerks III.”

Zajur, the boyfriend of Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith, was originally slated to have dialogue in the role of Blockchain Coltrane in the Quick Stop-set movie. But Smith changed his mind after the first rehearsal, and the role became wordless — shades of his own “Clerks” character, Silent Bob.

“Take it from a guy who barely talks in movies over 30 years, it’s a gimmick that works,” Smith says.

But he made a promise to Zajur: “One day I’ll give you all the dialogue.”

However, Smith originally envisioned the lead of “The 4:30 Movie” to be his daughter. Harley Quinn Smith, 25, has appeared in many of her father’s films, including “Yoga Hosers,” “Tusk,” “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot” and “Clerks III.” Her other credits include Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and the Freeform series “Cruel Summer.” Her first role: playing Baby Silent Bob in “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” (2001).

Smith wanted to gender-flip the story of his teen love. He points out how his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, has called their child “a beardless, d—less you,” making her a prime candidate.

But Harley hated the idea, Smith says.

So he turned to Zajur, 29.

“I said ‘would you grow a mullet?’ He’s like ‘yeah.’ I was like, ‘right on.’”

Cameo city and the religion of trailers

Brian David does make it to the movie theater, where he watches films with Burny and Belly.

But a number of obstacles threaten his date with Melody.

Along the way, we get plenty of cameos and standout supporting characters.

Jeong shines as the perpetually annoyed manager of the movie theater. Jersey City native Kate Micucci, a frequent presence in Smith’s movies, plays Melody’s mother.

Another Smith regular, Justin Long (”Clerks III,” “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot,” “Tusk,” “Yoga Hosers”), plays an especially offbeat theatergoer. Sam Richardson is a blustery professional wrestler. Rosario Dawson, whose first Smith movie was “Clerks II,” makes an appearance at the theater as Melody’s aunt. Jeff Anderson, who played Randal in the “Clerks” movies, shows up as an angry parent. And Brian David has an encounter of the Method Man variety.

Diedrich Bader, also no stranger to Smith’s View Askewniverse, appears in a movie within the movie, as does the rapper Logic.

Some of the cameos pop up in the movie trailers that Brian David and his friends are watching.

Smith’s wife and daughter play nuns in the trailer for “Sister Sugar Walls,” the story of “a nun by day and a hooker by night.”

Jason Mewes, Smith’s friend from Highlands and partner in the cinematic duo of Jay and Silent Bob, plays a john who Sister Sugar Walls picks up and attacks.

“American Pie” alum Jason Biggs, who grew up in Hasbrouck Heights, makes a particularly memorable appearance in the trailer for “Booties” as a construction worker whose rear end gets attacked by a creature in a porta-potty.

Trailers, Smith says, “were absolutely our religion. They showed you the future.”

As a kid, Smith delighted in seeing these glimpses of what was to come in local theaters. The trailers were “part of the mass, part of the ceremony,” he says.

“My actual church was always the movie theater.”

Compared with the ubiquity of trailers on social media today, the previews of his youth were made more sacred by their scarcity — outside of some short spots on TV, you had to go to the theater to see them.

“The 4:30 Movie” may be set in 1986, but Smith inserts some winks to the future of moviegoing.

“Nobody’s ever going to pay to see a Batman movie,” Brian David’s friend Burny proclaims three years before the release of Tim Burton’s “Batman,” which kicked off an enduring franchise that helped to jumpstart the eventual dominance of superheroes at the box office.

“Everybody gets to be either brilliant or laughably ignorant with their predictions,” Smith says.

Another prognosticator of sorts is an usher at the theater played by Adam Pally.

The easily distracted ticket taker, who looks like he might just be a fan of The Cure, goes off about “Star Wars.” So in a way, Smith, who has a parallel career as a fan’s fan who long ago embraced blogs, connecting with fans online and podcasting, pays homage here to movie fans at large.

“The internet existed, it just didn’t exist in the internet,” Smith says of the ’80s and pre-Information Superhighway era.

People “with insanely strong opinions on things that other people wouldn’t think twice about” — those are Smith’s people. Consider the “Star Wars” dialogue in “Clerks,” he says: a product of 10 to 15 years of obsessive fandom.

“Those people always existed, the internet just allowed us all to find each other,” he says.

Emergency breakthrough

Brian David wants to sit down and see a movie with friends, but that’s not always what happens.

His mother, played by “Saturday Night Live” alum Rachel Dratch, calls the theater to interrupt.

View Askewniverse regular Jason Lee (”Chasing Amy,” “Mallrats” “Dogma” and others) gets on the same call as Brian David’s father.

This is another part of the movie that rings true to Smith’s life — his mother would call the movies and ask for him.

In fact, the very scenario included in the film is lifted straight from something his mother actually did. She’d use emergency breakthrough, also known as busy line interrupt, to reach Smith by phone, whether it was at a friend’s house or the theater.

“When she did that, you knew you were in big trouble,” he says. “That is definitely a snapshot of what life on 21 Jackson Street was like.”

In the scene where Dratch calls the theater as Brian David’s mother, she channels the time when Smith’s mother, Grace Smith, complained about a thank-you note after giving a gift. It was small potatoes, but she just couldn’t let it go.

Smith’s mom, seeing the scene, was all laughs.

“She was like, ‘Why did I care?’” he says.

It was just one detail that poured out of Smith when he revisited that time.

The process of making the film marked another milestone in his life.

“This is the flick that I made when I came out of the mental hospital,” he says, referring to his 2023 stay at an Arizona mental health and rehab facility where he dealt with childhood trauma after he had what he previously described as a break with reality. (Smith then started hosting meetings of Co-Dependents Anonymous at the theater.)

“Most of my life is spent lying in service of trying to communicate a feeling I had once, a memory that I had, an image in my head,” Smith says. “I was kind of torn, in an existential crisis kind of way, like, should I even be doing this anymore?”

Smith’s wife has asked him why he hasn’t been writing movies set in the present.

“Because I don’t live a relatable life anymore,” he told her.

“I always kind of reach back because that’s when I was a normal-ass human being,” he says. “I was a dreamer.”

The director, who often visits his old childhood home and goes hiking nearby, says sentimentality is what drives him to say close with his past, with the young Kevin who delighted in whole days at the movies. The Kevin who would be over the moon to know that he gets to live at the movies (Smith, who resides in California, stays in an apartment above the theater when he’s in town).

For Smith, standing on that same curb and the remnants of his old driveway never loses its potency.

“I think I always returned to that address to honor the kid that started the journey,” he says.

When he’s standing outside his old house, he thinks of young Kevin wondering what he life was going to be.

“Now I know.”

In “The 4:30 Movie,” Brian David encounters a theater employee (Genesis Rodriguez) who has her eyes set on a career making movies. She tells him she thinks he can be a director, too.

The exchange is Smith’s favorite scene in the film.

Smith found encouragement early on from a fifth grade teacher who told him to start writing. Positive reinforcement from a teacher in eighth grade helped to keep him going, but it was Smith’s older sister, Virginia, who had the earliest influence on the budding writer.

He was about 6 years old when he found a composition notebook under her bed. Inside was a drawing of Virginia and her friends, along with a story — “The Secrets of the Cellar Door.” She was writing a book.

“I was so, like, incensed by this,” Smith says. “I was like ‘you can’t just write a book. You have to ask the government first.’”

Virginia clued him in — anyone could write anytime. No one had to ask for permission.

“She always seemed to think I had potential,” he says.

After Smith saw Richard Linklater’s movie “Slacker” on his 21st birthday in 1991, he told her how it made him think he wanted to be a filmmaker.

Her advice:

“Be a filmmaker.”

The message: he was already a filmmaker. He just hadn’t made a film yet.

“It sounded like corny-ass Tony Robbins type of advice and stuff, but, you know, damn if it wasn’t true,” Smith says.

When he was writing the scene between Brian David and the theater employee, he didn’t realize he was writing about his sister. But when someone pointed it out to him, he knew it was true.

His first movie, “Clerks,” released in 1994, proved to be his ticket to Hollywood. The most recent installment in that story, “Clerks III,” arrived 28 years later, in 2022.

Smith’s next View Askewniverse film will be another chapter in the story of Jay and Silent Bob.

As “Clerks” turns 30 this fall, the characters do, too.

In “Jay and Silent Bob: Store Wars,” which Smith calls a “flat-out comedy,” a marijuana dispensary opens across the street from the popular Jersey duo’s own weed store, last seen in “Clerks III.” (RST THC, former home of RST Video.)

Jay and Bob have to contend with the younger owners of the rival store, “basically Jay and Silent Bob’s opposites in every way, shape or form,” Smith says.

In the coming months, he hopes to film the movie in New Jersey, where it all began.

For now, the director is reflecting on the connection between his Catholic upbringing and those childhood days spent in his other church — the movies.

“At the end of the day,” he says, “it’s just us telling each other stories that give us hope and keep us hanging on.”

“The 4:30 Movie,” rated R, will premiere at SModcastle Cinemas in Atlantic Highlands Saturday, Aug. 24 at 4:30 p.m., with appearances from Kevin Smith and the cast.

The movie, which runs 1 hour and 27 minutes, will open in theaters Sept. 13. Smith plans to be at SModcastle Cinemas on opening day; for updates visit smodcastlecinemas.com