George Stroumboulopoulos: "When Kevin Smith made Clerks and it got on the big screen, you felt like our voice was winning."

George Stroumboulopoulos in person!

Along with Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Kevin Smith's chatty, micro-budgeted comedy helped set the tone for much of the American independent cinema to follow over the next two decades (for better or worse). Set almost entirely inside a New Jersey convenience store, Clerks focuses on depressed counter jockey Dante (Brian O'Halloran), who whiles away the workday hours discussing relationships, Star Wars ephemera, unusual sexual acrobatics and various and sundry other topics with his buddy Randal (Jeff Anderson) and the parade of acquaintances, customers, girlfriends past and present and assorted hangers-on — including, of course, Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) — who troop through the store over the course of the day. Scrappy, witty, and often hilariously vulgar, Clerks spawned a host of extra-cinematic spin-offs (and a decade-later sequel), defined a generation too disaffected to bother to define itself, and became the foundation stone for the View Askew mini-empire.