American audiences' rejection of the terrible movie, whose low point is Angelina Jolie as a Freudian mother from hell vamping with snakes while talking in a Natasha Fatale accent, is a sign of "a raging fundamentalism in morality," Stone complained in London.

"I was quite taken aback by the controversy and fierceness of the reviews about a character we don't really know too much about.

"I operate on my passion, and sometimes I'm naive; I don't think about the consequences," he said.

"From day one audiences didn't show up," the director dithered. "They didn't even read the reviews in the South because the media was using the words, `Alex the gay.' As a result you can bet that they thought, `We're not going to see a film about a military leader that has got something wrong with him.'"

You might recall that execs at pro-Democrat Paramount Studios also blamed Christians for the failure of their unnecessary remake of "Alfie."

News flash to Tinseltown: Maybe people just don't want to watch bad movies.

Editor's note: