Open All Night: Kevin Smith Brings Clerks Back Home

There are famous filmmakers whose work becomes easier to reach as their careers grow and whose actual presence becomes almost impossible to reach. Kevin Smith has somehow spent more than three decades moving in the opposite direction.

He tours. He talks. He does Q&As. He owns a movie theater in Atlantic Highlands and keeps finding reasons to be in it with the people watching the movies. Spend enough time around New Jersey fans and a pattern starts to emerge: a surprising number of people seem to have a Kevin Smith story. They met him at a screening. They saw him at the Stash. They caught him after a show. They heard him talk for longer than anybody expected. The stories are rarely just, "I saw Kevin Smith." They tend to have a second sentence.

That is part of what makes Clerks: Open All Night 3 feel different from a standard repertory screening. On Friday, September 25, SModcastle Cinemas will start the original black-and-white Clerks at 11 p.m., move into Clerks II at 2 a.m., and follow with Clerks III at 4 a.m. The theater is advertising Q&As with Smith along the way, and by 6 a.m. the survivors will greet daylight with commemorative coffee mugs in hand.

It is, objectively, a slightly ridiculous way to watch three movies. It is also probably the correct way to watch these three movies.

Clerks began as a tiny New Jersey movie about people talking their way through a shift they did not particularly want to work. Decades later, the trilogy has become something closer to a running record of what happens when those people get older but remain recognizably themselves. Watching all three in one night collapses that distance. The jokes, frustrations, friendships and accumulated years sit next to each other instead of being separated by decades of release dates.

And then there is the location. This is not a touring retrospective passing through an anonymous multiplex. SModcastle is Smith's own independent theater in Atlantic Highlands. For an event built around Clerks, that matters. The films have always carried New Jersey in their bones, and the all-nighter brings the trilogy back into the kind of local, conversational setting where Smith's work has always seemed most at home.

What I am most interested in, though, is the accessibility around the whole thing. Smith could have spent this stage of his career becoming increasingly remote from the audience that made the early work matter. Instead, he keeps creating rooms where the audience and the filmmaker occupy the same night.

That accessibility changes the tone of fandom. It turns a filmography into a collection of encounters. People do not only remember when they first saw Clerks. They remember the screening where Smith stayed to talk, the convention where he stopped for a minute, the local appearance that produced a story they still tell years later. The work remains the center, but the distance around it gets smaller.

An overnight marathon leans directly into that relationship. Nobody attends a movie that begins at 11 p.m. and ends around sunrise by accident. There will be people there because Clerks is funny, people there because it is part of their personal history, and almost certainly people there with a Kevin Smith story already in their pocket.

By morning, a few more people will probably have one.

Event Details

What	Clerks: Open All Night 3
When	Friday, September 25, 2026, beginning at 11:00 p.m.; the trilogy runs through sunrise.
Where	SModcastle Cinemas, 82 First Ave., Atlantic Highlands, NJ 07716
Schedule	Clerks at 11 p.m.; Clerks II at 2 a.m.; Clerks III at 4 a.m.; daylight and commemorative coffee mugs at 6 a.m.
Includes	Q&As with Kevin Smith and a commemorative coffee cup with admission.