‘Dogma’ as Art

What do you do with a controversial film about religion--one that features rocker Alanis Morissette in the role of God and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as renegade angels? How do you blunt the criticism of Catholic groups, which months before the film’s release have already begun threatening protests and pickets? For starters: Recast “Dogma,” the upcoming film from “Chasing Amy” director Kevin Smith, as art. That’s what Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the co-founders of Miramax Films, are said to have in mind now that Smith’s film is being screened at the Cannes Film Festival, which kicks off in France this week. Last month, the Weinsteins personally acquired the rights to “Dogma” in an attempt to protect Miramax’s corporate parent, Disney, from the wrath of the religious right. Now they hope that the movie’s special screening in Cannes will help further defuse the situation by legitimizing the film as serious cinema, not just slacker irreverence. Meanwhile, last week Disney acquired another much-anticipated Cannes entry: David Lynch’s “The Straight Story,” about a 73-year-old man who rides a lawn mower 350 miles to mend a relationship with his estranged brother. The studio plans to release the film--which is based on a true story--under the kid-friendly Disney banner, indicating that its story line is much tamer than other Lynch fare (think “Blue Velvet” or “Wild at Heart”). “It’s my first G-[rated] movie,” Lynch said. Peter Schneider, president of Walt Disney Studios, added: “But that doesn’t mean it’s a kids movie. David has made a very uplifting emotional story. An amazing journey. It’s about values, about the Midwest, about the elderly, about hope.” Entered in the prestigious competition section of the festival, “The Straight Story” stars Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek and Harry Dean Stanton. Some who have read the script, by Lynch’s longtime editor Mary Sweeney and John Roach, predict it will be the breakout American film of Cannes 1999.

Handed Down From Father to Son to Script

Children of Holocaust survivors grow up as secondhand witnesses to the horrors of the war. Both of Sam Egan’s Polish-born parents survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, but it was his father, Leo, who made sure he shared his experiences with his son, including how he lost his first wife and daughter in the camps. “My father was of the mentality of constantly recalling the horrors of the war as a way of coping with the anguish,” Egan said. “It was difficult for me as a child to assimilate that.” Today, Sam Egan is 50 and an executive producer on Showtime’s science-fiction anthology “The Outer Limits,” but his father’s experiences return in the series’ 100th episode, which airs Friday night, part of the cable channel’s marathon tribute to the series, with continuous installments beginning at 8 p.m. An updating of the original science-fiction series that aired on ABC from 1963 to ‘65, the current “Outer Limits,” produced by Trilogy Entertainment Group and Alliance Atlantis, and shot in Vancouver, has been running on Showtime since 1995. The episode Egan wrote, which is titled “Tribunal,” airs at 10 p.m. and stars Saul Rubinek as Aaron Zgierski, the son of a Holocaust survivor who, with the aid of a mysterious time traveler, hunts down a Nazi war criminal who may have murdered his father’s wife in Auschwitz. Now 87, Leo Egan remarried after the war and settled his family in Los Angeles, where he worked as a waiter at such entertainment industry haunts as Chasen’s and Scandia. These days, Egan’s father is retired but still shares his Holocaust memories, in the form of poetry. “He’s sort of the poet laureate of [Holocaust] survivor organizations,” Sam Egan said. Friday night, the son gets to show the father that his stories have officially been passed down.

--Compiled by Times staff writers