Kevin Smith believes that Harvey Weinstein owes him royalty checks for his film, Clerks.
Weinstein distributed Smith's debut movie though his company Miramax. In a new interview with Variety, Smith alleges that Weinstein never fully paid what he owed for the film: “He was notorious for that. I did encounter that. And I’m still out money,” Smith explained. “But you got to understand, I never cared about the money. My whole career, my reps were like: ‘You’re supposed to be making far more.’ Money’s never been a motivator for me.”
“This much I know," he continued. "They bought Clerks for $227,000. And the movie went out and made $3 million at the box office and stuff. And it took seven years for us to see any profit from that movie. For seven years, they were like, ‘Nope, the movie is still not in profit.’ And we were like, ‘How?’ And then there were things.”
By "things," Smith goes on to explain that the Clerks team was billed for a yacht at Cannes Film Festival they were not even invited on.
“If I was a better business person, I would have gone for more money,” Smith says. “But it felt like – ‘Oh, there it is. That’s their process. Movie math.’ And, to be fair, I worked at studios and they have way more paperwork and you can see where every dime is going. But the nature of this business is everybody wants to keep as much money as they possibly can.”
[Via]
