“The Little Movie That Couldn’t”: ‘Mallrats’ Turns 30

In the summer of 1995, a few days before his 25th birthday, the filmmaker Kevin Smith attended his first San Diego Comic-Con. “It was like a circus,” he wrote years later, “wrapped up in a treasury edition-sized comic book, stuffed inside a month of Saturday morning cartoons, served with cheese sauce.” Smith was at Comic-Con for an early screening of Mallrats, his second movie with film school pal Scott Mosier under the duo’s View Askew Productions banner.