Kevin Smith almost died. He stayed alive to make ‘Jay and Silent Bob Reboot’ (next: 'Clerks III,’ in N.J.)

Kevin Smith was in the hospital, facing down death.

He first felt strange during a break between two “Kevin Smith Live!” shows in Glendale, California. Covered in sweat, beset by nausea and a heaviness in his chest, he almost didn’t go to the emergency room.

But it wasn’t long before a doctor confirmed that Smith had suffered a massive heart attack.

As Smith began to process the sudden turn of events, a sense of peace washed over him.

“'Well, I had a good life, great career, wonderful family, great wife and kid. Can’t complain,'” he remembers thinking. “'If this is it, go gracefully. Don’t be the last guy at the party going, “it’s 4 a.m., you got any beer?"'”

Still, a pang of regret pierced his bubble of calm.

“If I die tonight," he thought, “the last movie I made was ‘Yoga Hosers.'”

Smith, 49, recalled his brush with death in a phone interview with NJ Advance Media on Oct. 9. Just a month before the heart attack, his film “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot" had gotten the green light for production. That, he says, would have been the better movie to go out on.

After he underwent surgery to remove the 100 percent blockage of his left anterior descending artery — a condition not-so-subtly nicknamed “the widowmaker” — Smith’s mission was clear: Snoochie Rebootchies! He began shooting “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot” on February 25, the one-year anniversary of his heart attack.

The film debuts with Fathom Events screenings on Oct. 15 and 17 before a 65-city Jay and Silent Bob Reboot Roadshow tour.

“Reboot," starring a significantly slimmer Smith as an emoji-proficient Silent Bob and Jason Mewes as an evolved form of Jay, is both a sequel to the 2001 movie “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” and the ultimate flex of the Kevin Smith Extended Cinematic Universe.

“I call it a cinematic gravestone, which the marketing people think is a terrible thing to say," Smith says. “This one has to stand for who I was in life, not just be a dopey comedy that’s a sequel to a dopey comedy.”

Like Smith’s film from 18 years ago, “Reboot” is a road movie. The film boasts a long list of cameos as Jay and Silent Bob travel to Los Angeles to stop the Kevin Smith reboot of the Jay and Silent Bob-inspired “Bluntman and Chronic” film they tried to squash last time. (“Supergirl” star Melissa Benoist plays Chronic and former Batman Val Kilmer plays Bluntman.) Along the way, the duo encounters the Ku Klux Klan and even some Russian collusion.

However, it’s the series of sequels within the sequel that makes this movie the “Avengers: Endgame” of Smith’s New Jersey-set View Askewniverse: “Clerks." “Mallrats.” “Chasing Amy.” “Dogma.” The cast list is packed with Kevin Smith all-stars: Brian O’Halloran, Rosario Dawson, Jason Lee, Joey Lauren Adams, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

“It’s the biggest love letter in the world to myself,” Smith says. But it’s also a love letter to every Kevin Smith fan out there.

Back to the Quick Stop and ‘Clerks III’

On Saturday, Smith, a Red Bank native who grew up in Highlands, will be in Asbury Park to launch his Reboot Roadshow tour for a sold-out audience at the Paramount Theatre. He plays both Silent Bob and himself in the movie.

The director now feels he’s living on borrowed time, particularly since his father had two heart attacks, and the second proved fatal.

Just two months after his own heart attack, Smith, now a vegan, signed up to be a Weight Watchers ambassador, dropping upwards of 50 pounds. The ever-changing “Reboot” script helped him cope with recovery.

So did dipping into the past. Smith says he’s in a constant state of nostalgia.

“The older we get, that’s all you become interested in,” he says.

This year, Smith marked the 25th anniversary of “Clerks.” After its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994, the little black-and-white movie filmed at the Leonardo Quick Stop where he worked sent him into the Hollywood stratosphere. It’s the film that introduced Jay and Silent Bob as the lovable stoner-loiterers whose banter would go on to flavor every film in Smith’s View Askewniverse.

“We weren’t even on the poster for ‘Clerks,’” recalls Mewes, 45, who went back to work as a roofer after filming the movie. (Now that Smith and Mewes live in California, he recently made his own directorial debut.)

“Unfortunately, I haven’t died yet, so now I gotta make another one," Smith says.

The other one? “Clerks III,” a long-shelved project that got new life this month after Smith reconciled with Jeff Anderson. He plays Randal Graves, the salty video store clerk to Brian O’Halloran’s Dante “I’m not even supposed to be here today" Hicks in “Clerks” and its 2006 sequel, “Clerks II.” The actor, who hails from Atlantic Highlands, also starred in Smith’s 2008 film “Zack and Miri Make A Porno.”

Anderson initially wouldn’t join the project for the money being offered, Smith says. After the director patched things up with Ben Affleck following a decade-plus stalemate (caused by what Smith once described as his own “big mouth”), he had to try again with Anderson.

“It really was less about money and more about value, about respect," the director says. “It was an absolute valid point that took a few years to sink in with me.”

Warning: Trailer contains profanity and nudity.

With Anderson on board, Smith is writing a new “Clerks III” script set at the Quick Stop, which he calls a departure from the original script’s more expensive and less life-affirming story.

“Reboot” was filmed in New Orleans. Smith teared up as the Quick Stop was recreated on the facade of a building. (“I’m a middle-aged stoner, so everything f---ing touches me,” he says.)

“Trust me, if ‘Clerks III’ happens, it’s going to be in New Jersey," he promises. “It’s going to be in Leonardo, or it ain’t going to be made.”

Smith is also helming an animated “Masters of the Universe” series for Netflix, and isn’t stopping there. He hopes to revive another shelved concept: “Mallrats II.”

Reboot: The next generation

In a shifting cinematic landscape of direct-to-streaming releases, the rollout of “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot" is still unconventional. The movie premieres at theaters nationwide through Fathom Events screenings this week — by itself on Tuesday, then on Thursday as a double feature with “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back." After that, Smith and Mewes set out on their four-month tour of the United States and Canada.

At first, Smith was told the tour would open in Chicago.

“I said, ‘are you f---ing nuts? These characters are from New Jersey.’"

Following each show — a number of dates are already sold out — the film comes to a local theater. In New Jersey, after the Saturday event, “Reboot” is due at the Atlantic Cinemas in Atlantic Highlands, Smith says.

The live show-screening hybrids are modeled after the “Jay and Silent Bob Get Old" events Smith and Mewes hosted for a decade. Playing off the fan-culture aesthetic of the movie, Smith has rolled out “Reboot” merchandise including (in states where it’s legal) real-life versions of Jay and Silent Bob’s three “super strains” of marijuana: Snoogans!, Snoochie Boochie and Berzerker, named for the metal song Silent Bob’s Russian cousin sings in “Clerks.” (Another weed-fueled duo, Method Man and Redman, pop up in the film.)

“I counted on that audience to be there for me when we did this flick,” Smith says. "When you work for the audience, you never work a day in your life.”

Saban Films picked up “Reboot” after the 2017 Harvey Weinstein allegations moved Smith to donate all of his residuals from Weinstein Company and Miramax movies to the nonprofit Women in Film. (If he would’ve been made aware of the Weinstein claims before his deal with Miramax, Smith says he would have chosen to remain a store clerk.)

If Smith was going to get the band back together, that meant his family, too. In “Reboot,” Smith’s daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, who made her film debut as baby Silent Bob in the first movie, plays the third lead.

“Kids are like our reboots, another chance to tell a brand-new version of the same old story,” Ben Affleck’s “Chasing Amy” character, Holden McNeil, says in the movie. He’s based on Smith, but the film is inspired by Mewes: specifically, his parenting skills. Smith’s collaborator welcomed a daughter in 2015. In “Reboot,” Jay discovers he’s a father.

“Jason Mewes is a guy we always made fun of for being Captain Irresponsibility," says Smith, who met his friend back in Highlands, long before Mewes developed the drug addiction that would compel him to have heroin sent to the press junket for “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back." Following a relapse, Mewes has been sober for nine years.

“When he turned out to be not only a really good parent but the single best dad I’d ever seen in my life, it was flabbergasting, to say the least," Smith says. (“I have nothing to base it off of because I never met my dad,” Mewes says.)

Harley Quinn, who is named for the Batman character, plays Jay’s daughter, Millennium “Milly” Faulken, named for Hans Solo’s ship in “Star Wars." She’s the leader of the 2019 version of Smith’s “girl gang" from the first film.

“He has been wanting to make a father-daughter sequel to something for a while," says Harley Quinn, 20, who recently played a member of the Manson family in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” The Red Bank native decided to pursue acting after a small part in Smith’s 2014 film “Tusk." She went on to co-star in his 2016 movie “Yoga Hosers."

Harley Quinn was excited to appear in “Reboot” alongside her “Office” and “Portlandia” favorites, Craig Robinson and Fred Armisen. She was less enthusiastic about the scene where her mother and Smith’s wife, Newark native Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, has a romantic interlude with Silent Bob.

“That’s not something that a child wants to see their parents do,” Harley Quinn says, her grimace nearly audible through the phone.

Logan Lee Mewes, 4, daughter of Mewes and his wife, “Reboot” producer Jordan Monsanto, also appears in a tender father-daughter scene with Affleck.

“Hopefully in 15, 20 years, she can go back and look at the movie and be like, 'oh my gosh, there I am as a 4-year-old with Batman and sh-t,” Mewes says. “Maybe in 15 years we can make another Jay and Bob and she can play the adult.”

To see where “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot” is playing locally on Oct. 15 and 17, visit fathomevents.com/reboot.

Have a tip? Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.

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