Dogma: Kevin Smith Confesses Secrets of Infamous Boardroom Scene and Mooby the Golden Calf

On the top floor of the tallest building in the biggest media conglomerate in the world, there is a boardroom. And in that boardroom sits an idol, aureate in appearance and austere in effect, despite the comically large buttons on its shorts. This is Mooby, the golden calf, and it is a figure of veneration to C-suite executives who have built a pop culture empire in its likeness. They’ve got movies, magazines, TV specials, and even two bicoastal theme parks. Yet the figure is also held in esteem by those who carry a torch for 1990s counterculture and indie cinema. For Mooby is both catalyst and punchline from one of the darkest, and most brutally funny, gags in Kevin Smith’s oeuvre.

Without Mooby, there would be no scene in 1999’s Dogma in which Ben Affleck and Matt Damon—here playing angels banished from God’s presence since time immemorial—get to cast a terrible judgment on the purveyors of ’90s pop culture. What begins as a bit of typically playful philosophizing by a Smith script, in this case via the juicy soliloquy gifted to Affleck, turns dark as a dancing Damon stops skipping around the room, and then punishes at gunpoint the sinful exploiters of a Disney-like false idol. The scene is all the more ironic, too, since Dogma was ultimately a film distributed by Disney subsidiary Miramax Films, and which starred a future pop culture Batman and Jason Bourne no less.

It remains one of Smith’s most oblique scenes, and one that he had been chasing since nearly the film’s first draft, back when it was ambitiously titled God and ran at about 200 pages in length (all the more audacious since that iteration was written before Smith even finished his fleet 102-minute debut film, Clerks).

“In the first draft, they didn’t go to a Mooby’s restaurant,” Smith explains. He is referring to the scene in the finished Dogma where protagonists eat at a fast food joint that looks suspiciously familiar. “They just went to like a McDonald’s or Burger King. But as you would imagine with a movie like Dogma, it was gonna be tough to get some corporate locations. I mean, it was tough enough to get a church.”

Indeed, the climax of Dogma, where fallen angels Bartleby (Affleck) and Loki (Damon) attempt to kill their way into a house of worship guarded over by God Herself (Alanis Morissette), only featured its church because Smith and producer Scott Mosier found a desanctified location in downtown Pittsburgh.

“No Catholic Church was gonna be like, ‘Yeah, rent the place out. This sounds fun!’” Smith laughs 26 years after Dogma’s release. Nonetheless, realizing he similarly couldn’t use a real fast food chain for his transgressive film, Smith came to the revelation that he should build out the corporate cosmology that Dogma is lampooning. He’d make his own national icon! And it would fit cozily in a post-Tarantino world too.

“Mooby didn’t come along until 1994,” Smith explains. “He exists [because] I see Pulp Fiction in Cannes. That’s when the script takes a different jump, where I was like, ‘Oh my God, you can tone-shift like that? How amazing.’” There was apparently the idea of the angels judging pop culture habits, but Mooby and the angels getting biblical on our media diets came about after watching Quentin Tarantino’s Palme d’Or winner.

“It was [already] a funny scene, I hope,” Smith says, “but I was like ‘oh my God, I could literally have him kill all these people.’ … I’m not going to say Pulp Fiction enabled me to make [Damon’s Loki] the Angel of Death, but boy did I lean into the Angel of Death part after that.”

It would change the direction of Dogma into one of Smith’s most idiosyncratic efforts.

Pop Culture of the ‘90s

The way Smith tells it, now and then, Mooby was not originally meant to be a satire of the Walt Disney Company despite the obvious parallels between Mooby’s media empire and the one that saw Disneyland Paris opening in continental Europe in 1992. Instead Smith originally intended to mock a much more antiquated relic of ‘90s civilization: Barney & Friends.

“At the time, it was based on Barney, which was fucking huge,” Smith remembers. “Mooby is not meant to be Disney… but when I was talking with Scott Purcell, who drew Mooby for the first time, he read this script and he drew some cows. And I was like, ‘Honestly, just make him look like Mickey Mouse. Do Mickey Mouse as a cow with the buttons on the pants and the big gloves.’”

Smith acknowledges the parallels between not just Mickey and Mooby, but also between the Mooby executives who get smited in Dogma and the company which at the time owned Miramax—a former indie studio that we should note was co-founded by Harvey Weinstein. However, Smith says he was not trying to make a statement specifically about Disney. He did want to say something though about the nature of entertainment in the ‘90s.

“It’s a statement on mass consumption culture, which I grew up in,” Smith considers. “It begins in the ‘70s where [corporations said], ‘They like these Star Wars toys? Let’s make as many as we possibly can.’ It continued into the ‘80s, and then in the ‘90s, Disney’s of course got theme parks in multiple countries. So young Kevin Smith, while he was steeped in consumer culture and still is, obviously was like, ‘Hey, I see a thing.’ And he probably tried to be far smarter than he was and make a statement that he was too young and naive to make.”

While Smith is self-effacing about the satire of the scene, he is proud of another element which might apply to a media corporation, then or now.

“It’s got one of my favorite lines in the script,” Smith says, “where [Damon] tells them all, ‘Do you know what makes a person decent? Fear. And therein lies the problem. None of you have anything to fear anymore.’ As a kid, I thought that was like so profound. As an adult, it still stands. It’s a pretty good line… Put through even light scrutiny that sentiment can kind of hold, fear does make a person decent.”

Smith credits the thesis of the scene coming out of his own problems with a childhood steeped in Catholicism. As an altar boy, he was taught to fear God, but even then Smith questioned why he should fear God instead of love the deity.

“They’re like, ‘Of course we all love God, and God loves you,’” Smith remembers. “‘But you gotta fear God as well,’ and the idea of fearing God never quite sat well with me. But it does make you a decent person and keeps you on the straight and narrow.”

Smith sees the scene as a snapshot of the 1990s and “all these things that everyone puts in front of the Lord,” but he also doesn’t think the scene has the power to shock a modern audience watching it for the first time like it did in 1999. Twenty-six years ago, when Affleck whispers the sins committed by Mooby’s CEO, audiences could only shudder when Damon taunts, “You’re his father, you sick fuck.” 

“Could it work today, would it shock anybody?” Smith muses. “I don’t think so.”

Matt and Ben in the ‘Happiest Time’ of Their Lives

While the scene gets very dark, especially for Smith, it is still buoyed like most of the film by Damon and Affleck’s incandescent chemistry. The pair are clearly having a ball, especially as Damon’s Loki starts hopping like a child to the Mooby theme song. Meanwhile Bartleby’s public airing of media executives’ dirty laundry is delivered with a virtual pep in his step.

“[Affleck] is absolutely magical in the movie,” Smith beams. “I know naturally I’m biased, but I think it’s one of his best performances, and I won’t even take credit. I didn’t direct the cast of Dogma… the boys were just so damn happy. They were at the happiest time of their life.”

In fact, Affleck and Damon shot Dogma during the height of the Oscars race of Good Will Hunting, a movie Smith and Mosier at least partially made possible by executive producing the film and bringing it to Miramax.

“All of their dreams were coming true, and that joy comes through in the performance for most of the movie,” Smith says of seeing Affleck and Damon return from the Sunday they won their Best Original Screenplay Oscar. “Whenever I think of that performance, I think about those dudes at the moment when they were becoming the dudes they would be for the rest of their lives.”

Which is all the more ironic since initially Smith expected neither to star in Dogma. In the case of Damon, that went until late in the process since the writer-director came to view the role of the Angel of Death as perfect for Jason Lee, an actor he had worked with on Mallrats (1995) and Chasing Amy (1997).

“Ben and Jason Lee had just been partners in Chasing Amy, so I was like, ‘Oh my God, they’ll port over so nicely,’” says Smith. However, Lee was unable to commit to Dogma at first because of another project—although Dogma’s production was delayed long enough that he still ended up in the film as the villainous demon Azrael. Yet in Lee’s absence, Affleck had a grand idea: “Matt will do it.”

For the two childhood friends and collaborators, it was a wonderful opportunity because unlike the movie they won their screenwriting awards for, Dogma would allow them to share nearly every scene together as partners. Smith credits them as “playful as fuck” every day on the set, and also eager to sink their teeth into Smith’s famously trenchant dialogue, including in the Mooby Massacre scene.

“Matt brought something really playful to the role, something that Lee would not have done,” says Smith. “Because of that, Matt plays the role like he’s 11 years old, and it’s charming as fuck.” Smith was all the more impressed that Damon ran headlong into a character that later drafts had tilted toward Lee’s sensibility. 

“I never did a redraft,” the filmmaker points out. “Matt’s like an actor, right? So for him, the fun is ‘oh, I’ll make it work! Even if it’s not made for me, I’m gonna make it mine!’”

Conversely, Affleck wanted the role of Bartleby, the indecisive philosopher angel who eventually goes more homicidal than Loki, for years before production. Despite even discovering the character existed after Smith wrote another character specifically for him, Chasing Amy’s Holden, the then-unknown Affleck was still more taken with the idea of Bartleby.

“I had written half of Chasing Amy back in’96 and gave it to him,” Smith remembers. “He came down to Jersey on a train from Boston, just so I could give him half the script for Chasing Amy.” But upon learning that it was only half finished and that Smith had no intention of driving him back to Boston, Affleck begged for anything else to read to help pass time on the train ride home. (This was a time before iPhones, Smith points out.) So Smith handed Affleck a Dogma draft, and the next day got a surprising phone call when he checked up on Affleck to see what he thought about Chasing Amy.

“He goes, ‘Yeah, guy falls in love with a lesbian, real good. But this Dogma movie! Holy fuck, dude! I didn’t know you could write like this!’” Already Affleck had the role of Bartleby earmarked, but at the time Smith was dubious.

“The only way this movie gets made is if a movie star plays that role,” Smith told his young leading man. “The whole movie is about the fucking Catholic Church. There’s no way I get to make this one with my friends. They’re gonna make me cast movie stars.” Despite the cold water, Affleck remained confident that it was going to be him, an assurance he never lost.

“[After Good Will Hunting], the boys blow up fucking huge and are pot committed to Dogma the whole time. Ben’s like ‘I want to play Bartleby!’” Smith says. Cut to the first day of production on Dogma at an airport in Pittsburgh where, after destroying the faith of a nun, Damon’s Loki hops over a seat to screw around with Affleck’s Bartleby.

“Right before I say action, Ben goes like this,” Smith remembers with a smile. He repeats Affleck’s gesture of framing his face as if it were on a poster. “I look at him and he goes, ‘Movie star.’ I was like, ‘I guess so. Action.’ And we went and made the movie.”

The 4K remaster of Dogma is currently playing in theaters and will have a Blu-ray and home media release later this year.