How Dogma Finally Escaped Harvey Weinstein

Kevin Smith had given up on Dogma. By last year, the hockey-jersey-loving, New Jersey–born writer-director had lost all faith that his ecclesiastical fantasy-comedy — which follows fallen angels (portrayed by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) attempting to exploit a Catholic sin-forgiveness loophole to reenter heaven — would ever be sprung from the movies purgatory to which it had long been banished. Theatrically released in 1999, the $10 million ensemble satire (which features supporting performances by Chris Rock, Salma Hayek, Alan Rickman, George Carlin, and Alanis Morissette as God) had immediately attracted controversy. It was protested sight unseen for its perceived irreverence toward Christian doctrine and denounced by the Catholic League and other religious groups for mocking “God, the Church, the Mass and Mary’s virginity” en route to grossing a healthy $30 million at the box office. But after Dogma’s theatrical rollout and DVD run, the film largely disappeared from public consumption. It remained unavailable on streaming services and was kept away from digital rental by its rights holder: the disgraced former Miramax/Weinstein Company head honcho Harvey Weinstein.

Smith began trying to “wrestle the movie free” in 2009, angling for some kind of tenth-anniversary rerelease. He was met with stony silence from Weinstein for both personal and business reasons. The studio chief had struck a DVD distribution deal with Columbia TriStar that precluded any Dogma rerelease before 2014 — but also in 2008, Smith had bad-mouthed Weinstein’s marketing of his sex farce Zack and Miri Make a Porno, effectively torpedoing their studio partnership that dated back to the 1994 release of Smith’s debut Clerks. Smith tried emailing Weinstein about the film again in 2014. But by then, he had managed to further infuriate the bellicose mogul by yelling at Weinstein to “shut the fuck up” for “boisterously talking” throughout a Sundance Film Festival screening of Smith’s 2011 horror-thriller Red State. In 2019, Smith offered first $250,000, then $500,000, and then (with the backing of “rich and famous” friends) $1 million to buy Dogma back from Weinstein, who at that time was battling numerous criminal charges for rape and sexual assault and faced an avalanche of legal bills. Again and again, Harvey wasn’t selling; he wanted $5 million to transfer the rights, which was too rich for Smith. “So I let it go at that point and gave up hope,” the director tells Vulture. “I love Dogma. But if I had $5 million, I would make a whole new movie.”

Wordy but bawdy and showcasing a number of still viable stars, Dogma stands as one of Smith’s most successful films. But were it not for the surprise intervention of independent producer Alessandra Williams, the film would in all likelihood still be barred from theaters and kept off streaming, the exclusive province of illegal torrent sites and $200 eBay DVD copies. Williams sprung the movie from IP jail through a fire-sale purchase of a tranche of Weinstein’s most infamous and treasured films. Among them: Larry Clark’s “NYC youth run amok” drama Kids and Michael Moore’s highest-grossing documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, sold to a United Arab Emirates–based company, Flick Ventures Holding Ltd. Explicit in Williams’s proposal to the Flick investors: “I need to be in control of Dogma. We can sell all the other films, you can make your money back. And then I have Dogma.”

The producer then struck a profit-sharing deal with AMC and helped tee up the sold-out, 20-city Dogma: The Resurrection Tour this spring (for which Smith personally screened the film across the country and presided over rowdy Q&A sessions). Williams also brokered its official selection at the Cannes Film Festival, where Dogma received a seven-minute standing ovation last month — and where she also sold foreign-distribution rights to the French indie sales and production company Goodfellas on the way to her coup de grâce: engineering a June 5 rerelease for Dogma in 1,500 theaters across the U.S. and Canada.

A self-described yoga master and Method actress — who has appeared in supporting roles in such films as the 2020 Mark Wahlberg–starring Netflix action-comedy Spenser Confidential and the biblical drama Paul, Apostle of Christ, and who also wrote, directed, and starred in her own satirical mockumentary short Green Kola — Williams acknowledges she is an unlikely savior for Dogma. “I have not ever rescued any movies out of purgatory before,” she tells Vulture via Zoom video from Cannes. “I just knew the right people. It was the right time.” Smith winkingly refers to Williams as his guardian angel while marveling at her ability to outmaneuver the notoriously vindictive Weinstein. “She rescued my movie about angels from the devil himself,” Smith says.

The director and producer have big plans next: Dogma 2, which Smith has been writing over the course of the Resurrection Tour, and a streaming series set within the movie’s biblical cinematic universe.

Smith describes Dogma as one of his most personal films. It follows Damon and Affleck’s cast-out-of-paradise characters Loki and Bartleby as they maneuver to visit a New Jersey church during its rededication ceremony, where they might land a plenary indulgence. Their hope is to wipe their sin slates clean and reenter the pearly gates, though their plan would also override God and plunge the universe into chaos. Smith was a practicing Catholic at the time of Dogma’s release and says the movie was not intended as a takedown of Christianity. It was an exploration of his family’s religion mixed with “comic-book cosmology” and a big creative swing on the heels of Smith’s relatively minor 1994 breakthrough Clerks and reality-grounded comedy Mallrats. “I remember what I wanted it to be,” he says of Dogma: “My idea of a Sunday service. But with anal jokes mixed in.”

Williams, for her part, grew up shuttling between Manhattan and the suburban New Jersey of Smith’s View Askewniverse. Thanks to her family’s love of cinema, she first managed to watch Clerks and the R-rated Dogma at age 10, and went on to act and direct short films. More crucially, she worked as an assistant to the producer Martin Bregman — whose long filmography includes Serpico, Scarface, and the Denzel Washington–Angelina Jolie two-hander The Bone Collector — learning the intricacies of development, film finance, foreign sales, and even Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences politicking under his mentorship.

Unbeknownst to one another, Smith and Williams — who had never met — set off on parallel paths to acquire the rights to Dogma. In October 2017, Smith received the phone call he had been waiting for: “‘Kevin? Harvey Weinstein. Look, I just realized we’ve got Dogma and we’re not doing anything with it. This has a killer cast and all these people are still working. Would you ever think about doing a sequel or a streaming series?’”

“I was ecstatic,” Smith recalls. “Harvey was like, ‘I think we can make this happen. I’ll give you a call next week.’” Three days later, however, the New York Times exposé first detailing Weinstein’s serial sexual predation took the wind out of Smith’s sails. “Kevin, he had no interest in doing Dogma as a streaming series,” a trusted contact at the Weinstein Company informed the director. “He was just calling to see if you were one of the sources for the New York Times. The fact that you answered the phone told him you weren’t.”

Around 2019, Williams heard Smith lamenting Dogma’s cultural disappearance on a podcast when she had what she calls a “major vision.” “I want to remaster the film. I want to put it into as many theaters as possible,” Williams recalls. “I felt that if I could gain control of this film, I could really put it out there and start a whole company with it. My focus was, Okay, there is value in these hills, and I’m going to climb to the top if it kills me.” Initially, the studios and film financiers Williams contacted were wary of the optics of doing business with Weinstein. But around two years ago, she had what she describes as a eureka deal-making moment. “It just dawned on me who would be the most perfect group of people,” says Williams. “I know these guys from Dubai that are money guys, not Hollywood guys. They don’t care. They’re foreign. They’re not in the public eye. And they weren’t afraid of giving him money. So I asked them to buy the film. And instead of them buying just the one film, we ended up buying all nine films that he had still available.”

From there, Williams cold-called Smith — “Hi, I have Dogma. You want to have a conversation about it?” is his recollection of the outreach — and set up a meeting at Hollywood’s San Vicente Bungalows last fall to discuss next steps. Williams proposed the film rerelease in 2,000 theaters, and Smith imagined taking the title on tour as he had with the Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and Clerks III. At one point, the director remembers being startled when Williams’s rescue dog Mona Lisa popped out of her luxury handbag. “I was like, ‘Oh, I know who Alessandra is. She’s the lady with the dog in the bag,’” he says. “I put her in a box. And that box was completely incorrect, man. Because Alessandra was the one who started all this.”

Ultimately, Williams maneuvered to side-run a studio distribution partner. She negotiated the Dogma rerelease through a novel revenue-sharing agreement with AMC, in a pact somewhat resembling the one Taylor Swift struck with AMC and Regal to self-distribute her Eras Tour concert film. “I guess I took a risk in a way,” Williams says. “When you put a film out, you can either give a percentage to the distributor or you can pay them based on each theater they book. If you do a per-theater booking and nobody comes to the theater, you can lose a lot of money. If you do a percentage, [the theater chain] gets a percentage of that. And you’ll never lose, but the percentage is high. I knew that Dogma would be huge. I felt really confident that people would come. So I went with the per-theater booking.”

She rescued my movie about angels from the devil himself.

A five-time attendee of the Cannes Film Festival, Williams drew upon her acquaintance with fest director Thierry Fremaux and executive Gérald Duchaussoy to finagle a screening of Dogma in the Cannes Classic section that is dedicated to “restored masterpieces.” Never mind that the overwhelming majority of its programming consists of films 50 or more years old. “I just went on their website and submitted the film,” Williams says. “But then I just followed up over and over, again and again, every single day. To the point where most people would think, That’s really aggressive. And you would turn people off, maybe. I didn’t care. I’m like, I have nothing to lose.”

Smith worried his deal with Williams was too good to be true and “kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.” He spent two months on due diligence around the film’s financiers — worrying that Williams was some kind of double agent secretly in Weinstein’s employ. “I kept looking for, What am I fucking missing here? At the end, does Robert De Niro as Louis Cypher come into the room and be like, ‘This was your dream and now you are in hell!’ It feels Angel Heart–ish to some degree.”

He’s still incredulous. “I tried to do this five years ago. I went out of my way! And I got connections! And this was my movie! I know the players involved! And I still couldn’t make this happen.”

I ask him about plans for Dogma 2: Will it be a prequel? Given the — spoiler alert! — deaths of Affleck and Damon’s characters, will the actors-slash-moguls who currently co-head the indie studio Artists Equity be coming back for part deux? “I am going to set the table for every living member of the cast to return, if they like,” Smith says. “Matt and Ben won’t drive the story because I’m not stupid. Back in 1998 when they made the first movie, we paid them scale plus ten. But now I can’t be like, ‘Can I take you out of commission for a month for no money?’ I’ve got to use them very judiciously. The same with everybody. However, I know Bartleby is a part that’s very close to Affleck’s heart. He lobbied for that part back in the day. And if I was like, ‘Dude, here it is. I need you for three days in the Dogma sequel’ — I mean, he showed up for the Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. There’s no way he doesn’t show up for the Dogma sequel.”

The only evident fissure in Smith and Williams’s partnership is over rights retention: She cryptically tells me she has granted Smith an ownership stake of Dogma that she declines to elaborate upon. Smith — after a brief text consultation with his producing partners during our interview — maintains he owns zero percent of the original film but will be able to develop Dogma-related projects in the future. “I gave him part ownership of the film forever, so he’ll always be my partner, which is great,” Williams says.

“I haven’t owned Dogma my entire life, so owning it now, that’s not the aim for me,” says Smith. “Money has never been the aim in my career. Playing with my toys well after the fact — that is all I’m interested in.”