Clerks is a American black-and-white comedy film written and directed by Kevin Smith in his feature directorial debut. It is the first of Smith's View Askewniverse films, and introduces several recurring characters, notably Jay and Silent Bob played by Mewes and Smith respectively. It was shot in the convenience and video stores where Smith worked in real life.
In , a sequel was released, followed by a third installment in Often regarded as a cult classic and a landmark in independent filmmaking, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". On his day off, Dante Hicks, a retail clerk at the Quick Stop Groceries convenience store in Leonardo, New Jersey , is instructed by his boss via phone call to cover another employee's morning shift.
Dante asks to end early at noon to play a hockey game with friends later that day, with the boss coming in himself. The first customer of the day is a man who attempts to convince cigarette-buying customers that they should buy Chewlies brand gum instead of cigarettes, displaying a bag containing what he claims is a diseased human lung corroded by tar. A crowd soon gathers around Dante, hostilely blaming him for the ills of cancer because he sells cigarettes at the man's impassioned urging. Dante's girlfriend Veronica Loughran enters, quickly calms the crowd down with a fire extinguisher, and confronts the man, who is revealed to be a Chewlies representative wishing to sell more gum.
She then orders him out along with the crowd, chiding them for wasting their lives. Shortly after, Dante and Veronica converse behind the counter regarding Dante's current disposition.
She then encounters an old boyfriend of hers, a customer named Willam Black, and admits to Dante that she engaged in snowballing with Black and performed fellatio on 36 other guys before their current relationship. Dante jealously considers her past acts as more severe than his own, which include having sex with twelve different women before her. She then storms out, furious with Dante's insensitivity. Dante's best friend, wisecracking slacker Randal Graves, soon arrives late for his own workday at the RST Video rental store next door, although he mostly keeps Dante company at the Quick Stop.
