Where art thou, Dogma?
When Kevin smith’s controversial, scatological comedy Dogma was first released on DVD almost a year and a half ago in a rather bare bones, movie-only edition, it was announced that the film would also receive a deluxe, 2-disc special edition treatment in a subsequent release. After months in production, this mega special edition (complete with commentary, documentary, tons of deleted scenes, new cover art and plenty more) was finally bestowed a January 23, 2001 street date, then quickly (and indefinitely) postponed. Since then, fans have been left to wait (and wait) for this much-anticipated set, wondering “Oh, where art thou, Dogma?”
Since Columbia has never publicly revealed the reason for the delay, and has in fact released no further update at all on the situation since the postponement was announced, we contacted the offices of Kevin Smith, aka “View Askew,” to try and find out just what is up. We talked with Vincent Pereira, a participator in all of Smith’s films on laserdisc and now DVD, and who is also a filmmaker himself, having written and directed the film A Better Place (which itself has seen its share of DVD delays, but we get to that in a moment,) Known around View Askew as “The Cleanest Cat In The Entire Operation.” Pereira shed some light on the delay of the Dogma disc and when fans might finally see the DVD edition of the film they’ve been waiting for since the beginning.
The established rumor around the Internet has been that the Dogma 2-disc set was delayed because of something on the audio commentary track, or some other sort of conspiracy on the part of Columbia or even Kevin Smith. Not so, according to Pereira. “There has been a lot of speculation (for the delay), with most people thinking it had something to do with the audio commentary. But from what I understand, Disney was actually concerned with some of the content in the documentary (the 40-minute “Judge Not: In Defense Of Dogma”) and requested the check discs at the last minute.”
But what could be so terrible as to cause Disney to want to inspect the release? As you may remember, Dogma initially was to be a Miramax release, whose parent company is Disney (only in Hollywood, as they say.) But due to the intense controversy surrounding the film’s mixture of comedy and Christianity, and threats and protests from various religious organizations, the film eventually found a new distributor in Lion’s Gate Pictures (and Columbia TriStar for home video.) The documentary focuses in on the Catholic League (and in particular leader William Donaghue) who were the most vocal opponents of the film, even calling for a boycott at one point, though before they’d even seen the film. For family-friendly Disney, “there were concerns that the documentary might be perceived as being inflammatory, and the issue is one Disney just wants to put behind them.”
So when we finally see this Dogma 2-disc set, will the documentary be edited, or even on the release? Even Pereira doesn’t know for sure, though from what View Askew has been told, the anticipated arrival date for the 2-disc special edition is now 6/26. Columbia would not return calls for this story. And what of Pereira’s A Better Place, which has also been on the way for over a year now as well? Better news for fan’s of the action drama. “We’re just waiting for (Kevin) Smith to finish his taped introduction,” and the disc should be on its way. Stay tuned…
