Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good Read Online Free PDF Page A

same religious groups who powered Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ
to historic box office numbers. We received countless pieces of hate mail, three of which were death threats. The flick screened at Cannes and the New York Film Festival, garnering enthusiastic and supportive reviews, but when Miramax’s parent corporation, Disney, started fielding complaints from church groups, Disney ordered Harvey to dump it. Harvey and his brother Bob bought the movie back themselves, releasing it through Lionsgate.
Dogma
became our highest-grossing film to date, and two years after its release, Norman Lear’s People for the American Way gave me the Defender of Democracy Award for making the flick.
    Jason Mewes had stolen
Dogma
right out from under the likes of Affleck, Damon, Rock, and everyone else, so it was clear he deserved his own movie. Following the Sturm und Drang of all those screaming charlatans pissed about my fourth flick, I wanted to make a fifth flick that wouldn’t offend anybody except those with intelligence and taste.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
was a valentine to the fans who put Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the front and center of their own road movie. It was a fun shoot but a hellish pre-production, since Jason Mewes was still fighting his drug monkey—which in print sounds exciting, with the strong potential for bloodshed as man and simian fight for dominance of the planet!
    In reality, Jay’s drug monkey wasn’t a
Planet of the Apes
refugee at all; it was a heroin and OxyContin addiction, which would plague him on and off from
Chasing Amy
forward. Multiple times over the next decade-plus, Meweswould spin through the revolving door of the finest rehabilitation centers California and New Jersey have to offer, fighting a genetic predisposition to addiction thanks to a mother who shot up while she was pregnant with him.
    But even though Jay had his temperance problems like everyone else (mine was food, his was drugs), he was still a hysterically funny, crudely benign, true American cinematic original. Sure, there’d been buddy teams in movies since the invention of the medium: Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Cheech and Chong, Bob and Doug, Bill and Ted. But thanks to Mewes’s uncanny ability to say the most offensive or outrageous things and still retain audience affection, two stoners stationed in front of a New Jersey convenience store entered that pantheon as well.
    Presented with the opportunity to tread the boards, Mewes took to it like masturbation. Acting was something he’d been unwittingly doing his whole life, enough to be naturally good at it. But while legions of actors in the business would sing the praises of Jay’s raw, undeniable talent (indeed, Matt Damon was the first person to suggest Jay and Silent Bob get their own flick), other thesps with more traditional performance training on screen or stage resented Jason’s outsider status. In an interview to support the second
Harold and Kumar
flick (not the first, mind you, the fucking
second
), Neil Patrick Harris took a wild, prejudiced stab at my boy.
    “They were smart for actually hiring two actors that were actual actors playing parts, instead of hiring two sort of dudes that were those guys,” the former Doogie Howser said in an Ain’t It Cool News interview, overusing
actually
and its root. “They didn’t hire like Jason Mewes and theother dude … Silent Bob … What is that movie
Jay and Silent Bob
, like what’s Jay’s name? He was this drugged out mess of a guy that was his friend and so he just cast him in the movie and filmed him doing crazy shit.”
    What an
asshole
. The guy who once played the genius child surgeon on television must’ve forgotten that was a
role
and apparently started believing he was hyper-smart for his years in real life, too. Shit, can you believe the arrogance in that comment, not to mention the hostility toward a fellow actor he’s never met and apparently knows jack shit about?