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Kevin Smith has remembered being sent “bona fide” death threats from viewers who were offended by his 1999 comedy, Dogma.
Directed, written by and starring Smith, the movie was led by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as two fallen angels who discover a dangerous loophole to return to heaven. It additionally featured the late Alan Rickman, Salma Hayek and Chris Rock.
Linda Fiorentino also starred as Bethany, an abortion clinic counselor who is called on to stop Loki (Damon) and Bartleby (Affleck).
While the film was mostly well-received by critics at the time, it faced some major backlash from people who found the religious-themed movie blasphemous.
Looking back at his full filmography in a recent video for Entertainment Weekly, Smith recalled receiving “400,000 pieces of hate mail and three bona fide death threats,” all pertaining to Dogma.
He remembered an especially disturbing note, which said: “You Jews better take that money you stole from us and start investing in flak jackets, because we’re coming in there with shotguns.”
“The movie had a rubber poop monster in it,” Smith laughed. “Can you imagine getting that irate over a movie with a rubber poop monster? I hope whoever wrote that missive found peace. Sounds like they ran for Congress.”
Days before its release, the movie faced backlash from various religious entities, including the Catholic League, a media protest organization unaffiliated with the Catholic Church.
Speaking with EW at the time, Smith shared that he received one letter “comparing me to Hitler.”
By the time he had come out with Dogma, Smith had already written and directed a handful of comedies: Clerks (1994), Mallrats (1995) and Chasing Amy (1997).
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Earlier this year, Shannon Doherty, who appeared in the 1995 romcom Mallrats, confronted Smith on an episode of her Let’s Be Clear podcast about the box office flop, claiming it killed her film career.
“That’s kind of the interesting thing about Mallrats, right, is that it wasn’t a box office success,” she told Smith, who agreed: “Oh, it died.”
“It died,” Doherty repeated. “So did my film career. That was it.”
“Boy, I apologize for that,” the director responded.
In a 2022 interview with The Independent, Smith discussed how suffering a massive heart attack in 2018 influenced the rewrite of his 2022 Clerks sequel, Clerks III.
“It was a movie that was obsessed with death, written by somebody who hadn’t tasted it yet,” he said. “Now that you’ve tasted the immortal you have something to say, motherf***er.”
The original script had placed the entire story in the parking lot of a movie theater while the characters waited to see Ranger Danger And The Danger Rangers.
“It was complete artifice,” Smith admitted. “It was Waiting for Godot, not Clerks III.”
