Kevin Smith claims that Harvey Weinstein is holding ‘Dogma’ hostage
With the release of the long-awaited Clerks III, American indie filmmaker Kevin Smith has once again entered the limelight of contemporary Hollywood, whereupon he has revealed how his 1999 religious satire Dogma has been held hostage by Harvey Weinstein.
The peculiar 1990s movie, which dabbled in questions of angels and demons, starred Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Alan Rickman and Chris Rock and earned Smith great critical and commercial acclaim upon its release. So, why exactly does the film still remain in such cinematic obscurity? Asking himself the very same question, Smith told The Wrap: “In order to tell the story unfortunately, I’m gonna have to say the name that nobody wants to hear anymore. But of course, Harvey Weinstein figures into the story”.
Telling the publication that Weinstein was told by the previous Disney CEO Michael Eisner that making Dogma was not a good idea, Smith and the since incarcerated Hollywood mogul locked horns. As the director explains, the script for the religious movie was “getting attention from the Catholic League” even before the film had officially started production, and, as a result, Weinstein was encouraged to sell the film on.
As Smith sees it, Weinstein took on Dogma to “do a Shining Excalibur with it at the end of the day…And since Disney paid for it whether or not he had to pay them back, it would behoove him to make the movie and deal with the consequences later on”.
Years later, in 2017, Weinstein called the filmmaker and proposed a sequel, with Smith recalling, “All the people that were in it are still around, so we can we can make a pretty good sequel or series even better…I got really excited because I was like, ‘Oh my God, for the first time. The dude remembered me. Like, after a decade he remembered that I was part of the Miramax family’”.
The call came mere weeks before allegations of rape from several sources came out against Weinstein, and Hollywood was analysed in a totally new light of examination. It was around this time that Smith was told that a new Dogma DVD was coming out and that Weinstein was trying to sell the film on for $5 million, with the producer promising that Smith would be involved in the re-release.
Speaking to his lawyers about the new release, the director stated: “Please tell that company that I’ll have nothing to do with it, if he’s still attached to it. I’ll work on a Dogma anything, as long as he has no more ties to it”. In the midst of this, Smith and his lawyers even offered Weinstein money so that they could own the film themselves, which they felt “very dirty about because we didn’t want to give him money”.
Now, the prosecuted and widely condemned individual is sitting on Smith’s movie, “holding it hostage”, as the director describes. As Smith concludes, “My movie about angels is owned by the devil himself”.
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