'bout Time

Mainstream Hollywood, after decades of ignoring the pious - or occasionally defying them with the likes of Martin Scorsese's revisionist "Last Temptation of Christ" and Kevin Smith's profane parody "Dogma" - is adjusting to what it perceives to be a rising religiosity in American culture. . .

Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians number an estimated 30 million in the United States, and Hollywood - faced with a prolonged slump in ticket sales - has followed its natural instincts in trying to tap one of the country's most powerful niche markets.

"There's definitely more of an awareness, but it's just another group to be marketed to, albeit a very strong one, with incredible grass-roots tentacles," said Russell Schwartz, president of theatrical marketing at New Line Cinema, a Time-Warner company.

The vice chairman of Universal Pictures, Marc Shmuger, said, "It's a well-formed community, it's identifiable, it has very specific tastes and preferences and is therefore a group that can be located and can be directly marketed to."

In some cases, such customizing has meant sanding the edges off dialogue that might offend churchgoers. For example, the actor Peter Sarsgaard, speaking at a tribute to his work during the Seattle Film Festival recently, said he was instructed to strike the word "Jesus" from his dialogue during shooting this year of the forthcoming Disney thriller "Flightplan."

"They said: 'You can't say that. You can't take the Lord's name in vain,"' Sarsgaard said he was told by the film's producers. He said he offered to say the line more reverently, but "they wouldn't buy it. I had to say 'shoot,' and that isn't as good."

We suspect the new movies won't offend, but they might be banal. We'll see. These folks may want to study Flannery O'Connor's thoughts on using profane symbols and language in the production of fiction. This book would be a good place to start.