//metrognome logo// NEW York filmmaker George Bogdanich received some good news and some bad news last week. The good news was that his documentary, "Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War," which opens at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater on March 15, was submitted as evidence at the war-crimes trial of former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic. This is the kind of publicity that a documentary filmmaker just can't buy. The bad news is that Milosevic submitted the film into evidence himself, using it to show that he did not commit crimes against humanity in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia. The film certainly does not let Milosevic off the hook. So Bogdanich spent last week in the awkward position of having to distance himself from the Butcher of Belgrade while still making sure to benefit from the dictator's rave review in The Hague. "It's not exactly how we would've chosen to introduce the film to potential viewers," Bogdanich said the other day. "But maybe now people will see the movie, and we can have a real debate about who did what in Yugoslavia." That's been Bogdanich's goal for nearly a decade. A journalist specializing in political affairs, he became obsessed with Yugoslavia in the earliest days of its breakup. Since then, he has visited numerous times, interviewed all of the key players and spent more than $200,000 of his own money to document the country's collapse. "That was supposed to be my retirement money!" he said. "So much for that." While Milosevic highlighted a section that served his purposes, the movie is an unblinking look at how all sides - from the Croat-backing Germans to the Bosnian Muslim-backing United States to the atrocity-committing Serbs and their counterparts in the Kosovo Liberation Army - bear the responsibility for destabilizing the region. "Milosevic showed an edited portion, roughly 45 minutes of the entire 165-minute film," Bogdanich said. "And even within those 45 minutes, he edited out a part that depicted him as an opportunist whose only goal was to score points with his hometown crowd." How did Slobodan Milosevic even get a copy? Bogdanich is uncertain, but the film obviously caught the attention of the Yugoslav ambassador to the United Nations, who attended a 1999 screening. Now that he's impressed Slobodan Milosevic, the serious, studious Bogdanich is going Hollywood. His next project is a feature film on the life of Nikola Tesla, the inventor and champion of the alternating current (AC) system, who went toe-to-toe with Thomas Edison - who favored direct current (DC) - and won. "It's a story that has everything," Bogdanich said. "Competing capitalists, bitter rivalries, cutting-edge technologies. We're talking to Johnny Depp to play Tesla!" Yeah, that's nice, but who's going to mention Nikola Tesla at a war-crimes trial? --30-- gersh.kuntzman@verizon.net