BY : Sharon Waxman

When Kevin Smith created 'Dogma', his controversial indictment of the Catholic Church, he knew he'd have a holy war on his hands. But he never expected his patron, Miramax, to turn Judas. Hey, that's entertainment!

So the boys are sitting around one lazy Sunday afternoon - after church, because there's always church - and wondering. What if God was a woman? And she had a spokesman who was an alcoholic? And what if Jesus Christ was black? And he had a descendant who worked in an abortion clinic? And what if there were these two evil angels who started blowing away random sinners?

Coool.

Of course, once Kevin Smith put all that in a film with big movie stars - which is set to open in theaters across the country - he was bound to end up in trouble. And trouble is exactly what the provocative creator of 'Clerks' and 'Chasing Amy' has found with his new film, 'Dogma', an unabashedly profane satire of a Catholic Church Smith professes to have loved since childhood. It doesn't mean he's anti-Catholic, he says. It just means he has, you know, issues.

'I go to church every Sunday,' says the 29-year-old writer-director. 'I would still like to go to church every Sunday. I don't want to get to the door and have them say, 'Sorry, here's your letter, you're excommunicated.''

Hey, Kevin, have you been smoking a tad too much incence lately? We are living in an age of extreme religous sensitivity, an age of corporate, middle-of-the-road, don't-rock-the-boat moviemaking. Independent studios aren't really independent anymore. Hollywood would just as soon go looking for the next 'The Last Temptation of Christ' - director Martin Scorsese's masterful reinterpretation of the life of Jesus - as it would melt down an Oscar statue for pocket change.

Which is why it should have come as no surprise that before 'Dogma' was even completed last spring, Disney-owned Miramax - the studio that brought you 'Pulp Fiction' and 'The English Patient' - decided to dump it. Miramax chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the self-professed protectors of the art-house set, bought back the film from their own studio with the intention of finding another distributor. 'As the film developed, Harvey and Bob made a decision they thought would avoid any controversy and would give the film a life somewhere else,' says Disney corporate spokesman John Dreyer.

Not that ther had been much controversy. One media-hungry right-wing group, the Catholic League, denounced the film without having seen it (in fact, without even having asked to see it). But 'Dogma' was suddenly damaged goods. Every mahor studio passed on it, as did every small independent studio except newcomer Lions Gate. Says senior Miramax executive Mark Gill, 'Other distributors were interested, but they were scared of it.'

Terrified is more like it. Even the Lions Gate deal took four months to seal and was announced two months before the film was scheduled to open in November. Why so long? 'Details,' says Lions Gate co-president Mark Urman, offering no actual details.

In the meantime, summer passed and autumn began with neither trailers nor posters for the film in sight. Miramax publicists ceased returningpress calls about the movie in July. Harvey Weinstein declined to be interviewed for this article. The crowning insult: Smith received a memo from the studio in September demanding that the name of every Miramax employee who worked on the film be excised from the credits.

'Of course I think that's a wussy thing to do. But I'm not surprised anymore,' he says with a sighin his New Jersey office (his three-month-old daughter, Harley, is in the room next door). You night say the experience has left him, hmmm, bitter. 'I thought people lived up to their word. I thought they were chockablock with integrity. I don't know what I was fucking thinking.'

'Dogma' isn't exactly chaste. It almost certainly will rattle some rosaries once it's shown. The story features a deceptive cherubic Matt Damon and a venally handsome Ben Affleck as Loki and Bartleby, two fallen angels looking to con their way back into heaven. How? They find a loophole called 'plenary indulgence' in Vatican dogma (translation: a nifty little mechanism by which you are magically absolved of sin) once they walk through the doors of a particlular church in New Jersey - where else?

Linda Fiorentino, who plays the scion of Mary Magdaleve, is an abortion-clinic employee who is tapped to stop the nefarious angels; if they succeed, their action will wipe out all existence, a detail not lost on Rufus (Chris Rock), a heretofore unknown thirteenth apostle written out of the Bible, he claims, because he is black ('A black man can steal your stereo, but he can't be your savior,' he says amid a stream of profanities).

As critics who saw the film at film festivals in Cannes and Toronto agreed, 'Dogma' may be irreverent but it isn't really anti-Catholic. Instead, the film is fundamentally rooted in Smith's desire to explore the validity of his faith. Not everyone will agree on this point - it depends on how you look at it.

For example, the film presumes that there is a God (played by singer Alanis Morissette, decked out in Versace and doing headstands. Unfortunately, a trash-talking stoner-prophet named Jay says about her, 'The bitch is hot.'

Damon is a contrite angel who regrets crossing God' unfortunately, he's also an Uzi-wielding mass murderer who spews comments like 'I love to fuck with the clergy' and Organized religion destroys who we are.'

A church official, Cardinal Glick, enthusiastically speaks of revitalizing Catholicism to appeal to young people; unfortunately, he's played by George Carlin, better known as the first comic to use all seven swearwords federally banned from the airwaves on the air.

Catholic League president Willian Donohue says that Smith's own devotion to Catholicism does not excuse the movie, which Donohue still hasn't seen, although he has read the script.

'Oh, you're not going to give me the I-was-hit-by-the-nun-on-the-knuckles argument, are you?' Donohue asks. 'Recovering Catholics should get over it. Move on. Work it out. And maybe Kevin Smith can work it out with a therapist instead of working out his angst in a bigoted format.'

'Dogma' he continues, 'is a filthy-worded, insulting statement against Catholics. We're just so sick and tired of seeing our religion being held up for cheap, Howard Stern-type humor. When you're dealing with heavyweights like Disney and Miramax, I can't afford to pretend this doesn't bother me.'

Smith insists that the film was never intended to be seen by the churchgoing crown. He made the film, he insists, to introduce faith to a younger generation. To do that, he had to spead their language (hence the profanities) and be brutally honest in the pointing out Catholicism's flaws.

'I'm trying to say it's okay to go to church,' he says. 'It's not stupid. It's not the tooth fairy. You can't sell young people the church as something 100 percent clean and on the up-and-up. It's easier to handle if you point out the flaws. I'm saying, 'I'll make the leap with you and say it's flawed, but it's there.''

Smith still doesn't get why the Catholic League sees him as such a threat. 'To me, if you're buying a car, you're allowed to kick the fucking tires,' he says angrily. 'Why can't I kick the tires of the church? I'm not driving, but I'm in the car. I don't think that's a bad thing. More people should do it.'

The Catholic League, however, has spent more time denouncing Disney and the Weinsteins than picking apart Smith's motivations. Indeed, a September 12 ad the league bought on the op-ed page of the 'New York Times' was all about freedom of expression. 'What's our line? Freedom of speech. What's their line? Censorship,' it read because the Weinsteins have hired high-powered attorney Daniel Petrocelli (who successfully prosecuted the civil case against O.J. Simpson) to warn the Catholic League against inciting violence over the film (this, apparently, came after Miramax recieved several violently anti-Semitic letters, thought none from the Catholic League). In a diatribe on the League's Web site, the group continues to appeal to Disney to jettison Miramax, even though neither studio is now attached to the film.

'There's a history of this with the Weinsteins,' says Donohue. 'Just about everything they could offend in the Catholic religion, they have offended. I'm sick and tired of it.' Interestingly, no other Catholic groups have joined the League in attacking 'Dogma'. Even conservative presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who until now has make a career of bashing Hollywood, declined to comment on the film, saying he had not seen it.

The Catholic League, a conservative group that has more than 350,000 members, has taken on Miramax and Disney before, notably when a movie called 'Priest', about a gay man of the cloth, was released in 1995. Similarly, the league organized a petition and boycotted the ABC series 'Nothing Sacred' (the network is owned by Disney) in 1997, because it portrayed a family of dissenting Catholics in a positive light (the show was eventually yanked due to poor ratings).

The cumulative impact of these proteses seems to have shaked Miramax, once a leading proponent of independent voices in film but lately a distributor of more mainstream fare, such as 'Shakespeare in Love' and 'Scream'. One top Miramax insider says, 'It was pretty miserable going through the problems with 'Priest'. I just think Harvey and Bob didn't want to go through that again.'

Disney executives acknowledge they were relieved that the Weinsteins saved everyone the headache of the anti-'Dogma' protests at Disneyworld but say their main problem was that the film is just plain bad. 'This movie ain't gonna do well,' says one high-ranking exective on condition of anonymity, calling Smith's vision 'puerile theology.' 'It didn't offend. It was boring. It was dumb. It was juvenile. It was a precocious ninth grader in Jesuit high school who thinks he knows theology but doesn't. If I were in the Catholic League, I'd ignore this film.'

Smith is incensed when he hears this remark. 'I'm her to tell you that not one fucking person in that organization was saying this is a bad movie or 'I don't like this. It's not my cup of tea.' They can't-it has Ben [Affleck] and Matt [Damon]. Anyone who says they didn't like this movie is lying through their corporate teeth.' For the record, Disney studio cheif Joe Roth declined to comment on the whole mess.

But what's the point of arguing? The fate of a movie like 'Dogma' is preordained now that studios are small pieces of great big corporations that make most of their money elsewhere: in theme parks (Disney, Universal), in publishing and cable television (Time-Warner's Warner Bros., News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox, Viacom's Paramount), or in electronic products (Sony-owned Columbia). Once-independent studios are now, almost without exception, divisions of larger studios: Miramax belongs to Disney, USA Films is part-owned by Universal, Fine Line is part of Time Warner, Fox Searchlight is part of Fox, Sony Pictures Classics is part of Sony - and so on The upshot, insiders know, is that it is hardly worth the trouble for any of these corporations to release a small movie that might offend customers who buy Sony PlayStations or subscribe to 'Time' magazine or visit Universal Studios.

That includes just about everybody, at least in theory.

'The trend in the industry as a whole is to be less and less controversial,' says producer Tom Pollock, who until recently ran Universal. Pollock endured a boycott of the Universal Studios theme park and demonstrations when he released 'The Last Temptation of Christ' in 1988. He says that a sort of film would probably not get made today.

'The real chill today on controversial films is the censorship that goes on before the film even starys shooting: 'Oh - we don't want to make that movie. It's too controversial,'' Pollock says. 'Look at the policy of Blockbuster [owned by Paramount's parent company, Viacom]. They don't but videos of controversial movies. They don't but NC-17 rated films. They'll carry soft porn, but they won't carry 'The Last Temptation of Christ'. And they're 30 percent of the rental market. It's fine to do art as long as it doesn't interfere with entertainment. When it does, studios will have to go the other way.' Even Urman of Lions Gate agrees, and his four-year-old company is one of the few that are not attached to a conglomerate. 'These days, there is such a growing hypersensitivity, a kind of wierd conservatism,' he says, recalling a recent incident when a newspaper in the South refuse an ad for the film 'The Red Violin' because it included the image of a woman's bare back (ironically, the film had no sexual content).

Yet religious controversy isn't the only thing avoided these days. Universal shelved the critically acclaimed 'Happiness' last year because it portrayed a child molester as ambigous character; a remake of Nabokov's 'Lolita' by the established director Adrian Lyne, starring Jeremy Irons as professor Humbert Humbert lusting after the preteen nymphet, limped along without a U.S. distributor for two years until it was finally picked up by the cable channel Showtime last year for a fraction of the production cost. And Fine Line flushed the David Cronenberg film 'Crash' down the toilet because a principal stockholder, Ted Turner, found the subject matter involving sex and car crashes objectionable.

And 'Dogma'? It isn't exactly dead on arrival, but the film has been off moviegoers' radars for months. With Lions Gate stepping in with a promotional campaign so late in the game, the film will have a hard time winning the public's attention from such high-profile movies as 'The Bone Collector', starring Denzel Washington, Tim Burton's 'Sleepy Hollow', and the latest 007 installment, 'The World Is Not Enough'.

All this probably makes little difference to the Weinsteins, who alreade recouped the film's $12 million production cose by selling the foreign rights at Cannes (Lions Gate did not have to pay for domestic rights but agreed to spend $10 million to promote the film).

Urman, for one, believes 'Dogma' can still be a hit and plans a wide release on more than 1,000 screens across the country on November 12. 'By the end of the day, the movie will be relatively unperturbed,' he says. 'Very few people care about the controversy.'

But the process, as with other controversial films, has been exhausting. Says producer Scott Mosier, 'It's been, overall, a long two years. It's nice to see it coming to a close.'

Kevin Smith was raised in one of those hard-core New Jersey Roman Catholic families in which faith is a kind of mortar in the bricks of a no-bullshit, working-class suburban home. His parents sent the boys - Smith and his older brother Danald - to Catholic school, Our lady of Perpetual Help: daily prayer, blazer and tie, nuns in full habits, the whole bit.

Smith was no rebel in grade school, but he was positively inspired to be just that by Sister Theresa, a forward-thinking nun who opened Snith's eyes to new interpretations of the Bible. 'She taught us that when Christ called the Peter the 'Rock,' he was actually taking the piss our of him, he was ribbing him. He knew Peter would deny him,' Smith says in the sort of advanced Catholicism riff that sometimes makes 'Dogma' fell canonical rather that satiric. 'That's when Chrise came alive for me - when I discovered he had a sense of humor.'

But in his adulthood, Smith came to feel dissatisfied and sought out other religions for a deeper sense of fulfillment. 'I definately was kind of disenchanted with the church by virtue of sitting in church Sunday after Sunday, listening to the priest rail against abortion - which, to me, how can you even talk about it if you can't do it yourself?' he asks. The church's rigid anti-homosexuality stance also bothered him.

In his early 20s, Smith tried a born-again Evangelical congregation, which was fine until he read a piece of their literature that proclaimed, 'We believe that the Bible is God's word.' That was too extreme. Then he tried the Pentecostals - speaking in tongues, ecstatic singing - which was cool but 'wasn't for me.' He even flirted with the Baptists, whom he enjoyed, but couldn't find a church in his neighborhood.

So he found himself back where he started. Part of that process ended up becoming 'Dogma', which he wrote about five years ago. Actor Jason Lee, who plays a demon in the film and has been in nearly all of Smith's other movies, says the topic had been on Smith's mind for a long time. 'It was really important to him,' says Lee. 'He saw it as his biggest film, his most important statement.'

But after all the controversy, will anyone care to see Smith's sacred sendup? Parhaps they'll come because of the firestorm. Either way, the public's perception of the film will almost certainly be colored by a vocal minority that still hasn't seen it.

Producer Mosier is beyond hoping for the best. 'Do I feel screwed by Miramax? It depends on what day you ask me the question,' he says. 'This has been going on for a long time, and I'd be lying if I said there weren't days when I sat in this office and cursed everybody from Bill Donahue to Miramax to society in general.'

But Smith believes the movie will ultimately reach the audience for whom it was meant - Kevin Smith fans. 'This movie is not blasphemous nor offensive,' Smith insists. 'When I watch this movie, I think, 'This is a really dumb movie with a lot on its mind.'' He pauses a beat. 'I'm a 29-year-old who makes dick and fart jokes for a living, but I can have an idea, too.'