When Kevin Smith’s Clerks was first screened in a nearly-empty theater at the Independent Feature Film Market in 1993, the few people in attendance got to see an ending that wouldn’t surface again until ten years later. Unlike the version we’ve all come to know, the original cut concluded with Dante Hicks (as played by Brian O’Halloran) unexpectedly dying. Just after we see Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson) for the last time, a man walks into the Quick Stop and approaches Dante at the counter. Dante informs him that the store is closed, and the man pulls out a gun, shooting Dante dead.
The jarring sequence wraps up as the assailant takes money from the register and flees. The camera then zooms in on Dante’s lifeless body, and the credits begin to roll. In a post-credits scene, a customer played by Smith comes in, looks around for a moment, and steals a pack of cigarettes. Take a look at the footage—which Smith dubbed the “Snyder Cut”—below.
As Smith explains in the 2004 documentary Snowball Effect: The Story of Clerks, he modeled the structure of Clerks after Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing by having things end on a serious note. He even thanked Lee in the credits for “leading the way.” Nobody else seemed to agree with Smith’s creative vision, however. “I hated that ending,” O’Halloran told Rolling Stone in 2014. “I just thought it was too quick of a twist.”
John Pierson, who served as the producer’s rep for Clerks, insisted that Smith get rid of the murder and felt that it was only included because the director didn’t know how to end the movie. Smith tried to explain that it was the biggest joke in the film, considering Dante’s constant complaints about how he wasn’t supposed to be there that day. “That’s not even funny,” Pierson said to him. “Cut it and this movie has a future.” Although he opposed the scene’s removal, when he realized that it was the key to potentially getting another movie made down the line, Smith ultimately decided, “This ain’t about art, kid. This is about business. You only get to make your art if we do business.”
The deleted scenes were later released on the 10th anniversary DVD collection in 2004.
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