IN THE BEGINNING WERE the words—lots of them. Before he broke onto the independent filmmaking scene with Clerks (1994) and confirmed his potential with Chasing Amy (1997), Kevin Smith was wrestling with his religious beliefs and artistic ambitions in his ongoing project Dogma. A combination of Animal House and John Milton's Paradise Lost, it would be his epic of faith, freedom and fart jokes.

The process was long and the script underwent many revisions over the years. "I wrote a script back in '94 and did a subsequent draft every year," recalls Smith. "It was close to 200 pages."

"Kevin and I talked about it in an abstract way back in film school," adds Smith's longtime filmmaking partner, producer Scott Mosier. "Back in '92 it was something he was thinking about doing. Then we made Clerks and realized that we would be able to make another film, but we thought it would be too ambitious to do Dogma next because it was just too big."

Fending off the fuss

TOO BIG, BUT not too blasphemous. When the production finally got underway in 1998 with the enthusiastic backing of Miramax, a Disney affiliate, and a cast including stars like Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Chris Rock, Smith and Mosier found out otherwise. The Catholic League, a morality-in-media watchdog group headed by Bill Donohue, had gotten a hold of a pirated version of the script off the internet and began a letter-writing campaign against Disney chastising their involvement.

"One of the letters was 'You Jews better invest your money in flak-jackets, cause we're coming in there in shotguns,'" says Mosier. "From the very beginning the issue has been the film's affiliation with Disney. Donohue was saying how could Disney call themselves a family entertainment company and make this film? So ultimately we felt that we're in the middle of a political battle between the Catholic League and Disney. Instead of dealing with all that, we decided to remove Disney from the situation. Just focus on the movie."

Consequently, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, owners of Miramax, bought the rights to the film from their parent company Disney and found a new distributor, Lions Gate Films, willing to take the heat.

And the heat has continued. Dogma's screening at the New York Film Festival drew several hundred demonstrators—some perhaps doing double duty at the Brooklyn Art Museum protesting its "Sensations" show with its infamous elephant dung-adorned painting of the Virgin Mary. As for the film's November 12 release, Mosier is cautiously optimistic. "Now that it's not affiliated with Disney," he says, "it's sort of died down a bit."

Affleck & Damon play fallen angels

IS DOGMA HERETICAL? TRUE, the language is raw, Chris Rock as the 13th apostle makes an entrance butt naked, and some of the film's notions —that God is a woman played by Alanis Morrisette, that Christ's last surviving descendant is a worker in an abortion clinic—might seem a little, well, undogmatic. All in all, though, its tale of two fallen angels, played by Affleck and Damon, trying to get back into heaven is, according to Smith, pretty much by the book.

"I thought we were safe," says Smith. "I thought the worst thing would be that audiences would see the movie and say, 'did you see the Clerks' guy's new movie? It's just two hours of him talking about Jesus. It's too preachy.' But it turns out that some people were offended by it, and I don't know why. I find it confounding that people can be offended by something like a movie or a painting at the museum. And these same people aren't really offended by a couple of cops in a room raping a guy with a broom handle or the Holocaust or just murder in general.

"Plus, they haven't even seen it. They pulled off a draft of the script on the internet, which would have been our 3rd draft. But most of the stuff they objected to—surprise, surprise—wasn't in the shooting script of the movie.

"The movie is devout; it's pro-faith. It puts God up on a pedestal. It starts off in frame one insisting that there is a God—most movies don't do that or even think about that. Watching what has spring up around the movie in terms of the controversy has been a little saddening. You scratch your head and say, 'Lord, protect me from your followers.'"