Shootout

Michael Moore

Guerrila documentarian and anti-corporate gadfly Michael Moore wields a Swiftian satirical sword in his multi-media battle against contemporary robber barons, for whom "enough" is a dirty word. Raised in working-class Flint, Michigan, the tall, burly, bespectacled filmmaker had never made more than $17,000 dollars a year when the highly profitable documentary Roger and Me (1989) introduced his affable manner, comforting girth and omnipresent baseball cap (usually the Detroit Tigers, Michigan State University or another Michigan-centric emblem), catapulting the "lefty" journalist to millionaire celebrity status. Prior to that, Moore had become one of the first 18-year-olds elected to public office when he won a seat on the local school board in 1972 and went on to found and edit The Flint Voice (later The Michigan Voice). He had also served as a commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and had a brief stint as executive editor of Mother Jones magazine before making his feature debut as the producer, director, writer, narrator and on-screen interviewer of Roger and Me.

It took the self-styled Robin Hood with a camera three years and $250,000 to complete this darkly ironic film, following Moore's inspired attempts to track down General Motors chairman Roger Smith and show him how factory closings had impacted the Flint economy. (Warner Bros. acquired it for $3 million, including $25,000 for Flint's homeless families.) Along the way, he made a co-star of Sheriff's Deputy Fred Ross, who, with cool efficiency, traveled around the town proclaimed by Money magazine "the worst place to live in the country," pounding on doors and evicting families from their homes. Moore savagely exposed the heartlessness of the Reagan 80s, lampooning such establishment lackeys as the Reverend Robert Schuller ("Tough times don't last, tough people do") and Anita Bryant (singing a buck-up rendition of "You'll Never Walk Alone") who arrive to offer lip service as balm for the disenfranchised of Flint. Of course, there were the charges he tampered with chronology (Pauline Kael said he "improvises his own version of history" and uses "leftism as a superior attitude"), but he concocted with his non-objective cinema-verite a bit of "alternative" propaganda so entertaining it can only reside on Comedy shelves in video stores.

Following the success of Roger and Me, Moore established the Center for Alternative Media, a foundation devoted to supporting independent filmmakers and social action groups. He also made a short "sequel", Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint (1992), revisiting Bunny Lady Rhonda Britto from Roger and Me, before venturing into TV with a summer replacement series--the irreverent TV Nation (NBC, 1994). Working with three partners (Columbia TriStar TV, the BBC, and NBC), Moore served as executive producer and anchor, as well as writing, directing and reporting segments of the left-leaning newsmag which earned the 1995 Emmy as Outstanding Informational Series. Despite critical acclaim, TV Nation, which also aired in England. remained merely a summer replacement, and though Fox revived the series in the summer of 1995, that network also chose not to pick it up for the regular season. Moore's merry band of troublemakers included Janeane Garofalo, Steven Wright and investigative reporter Crackers the Corporate Crime Chicken, opining on such subjects as pets on Prozac, a real-estate broker pushing houses along a toxic dump site, a day with Dr. Death (Jack Kevorkian) and Avon ladies in the Amazon.

Moore segued into fiction films with Canadian Bacon (1995), a fanciful political satire in which the USA declares war on its northern neighbor, and though the writer-director claimed it tested badly because audiences were reluctant to laugh at or laugh with the late comic John Candy in his final screen appearance, critics almost universally panned it for its dearth of yucks. The one-man insurrection rebounded nicely with a return to guerrilla tactics for The Big One, pointing out in true kill-joy fashion that, despite the much-ballyhooed economic boom of the 90s, there were people all across the nation suffering labor pains resulting from the capricious decisions of their employers. On the 47-city book tour promoting his best-selling 1996 book Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American, Moore journeyed to Centralia, Illinois, where a good year at the Payday candy bar factory (a $20 million dollar profit) had enabled ownership to sell the company, resulting in the plant's closing, prompting Moore to say, "In other words, if the workers had done a lousy job, and the plant only made $100,000 dollars in profit ... " and the manager finished his sentence: "They'd have had to keep it open."

The rabble-rousing Moore had great fun writing checks like the one for 80 cents ("The first hours wage for a Mexican worker") he tried to present to Johnson Products of Milwaukee along with a Downsizer of the Year Award. There was a $100 check for Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign from Abortionists for Buchanan and checks from Satan Worshippers for Dole, Pedophiles for Free Trade (Perot) and Hemp Growers for Clinton, but the big coup of The Big One was his on-camera corralling of Nike CEO Phil Knight. Unlike Roger Smith, who had consistently dodged the dogged Moore, Knight welcomed the pesky miscreant with open arms, then, amazingly enough, spoke with more candor than business savvy about his company's use of cheap Indonesian labor (some workers as young as 14) to manufacture its trendy sneakers. Nike's attempt at damage control after the "horse was out of the barn" did not move Moore to remove the CEO's imprudent comments, though a deal could have been struck if Knight had acceded to the filmmaker's request that he build a factory in Flint. Knight, however, remained true to his original statement that "Flint's not on our radar screen."

Moore next turned up on TV with The Awful Truth (Bravo, 1999), claiming: "I loved TV Nation, but The Awful Truth is the show that we always wanted to do but could never get past the censors." Crackers the Corporate Crime-Fighting Chicken also returned, and the humor was darker than ever. For one segment, he invited the employees of an HMO that denied a transplant to a sick man to attend the man's funeral--before his death, so thoroughly embarrassing the company [Humana] that it reconsidered in the man's favor. Other stunts included leading a merry bunch of carolers--sans voice boxes due to laryngeal cancer--to the homes and offices of tobacco executives and attempts to give Bill Gates a weed-wacker and some Martha Stewart sheets for the multi-billionaire's new $60 million house, not to mention trying to find a date for Hillary Clinton once she is "officially free" in 2001. Moore's brand of satire may even be more popular in England where Channel 4, who had first seen the merit of Roger and Me but had delayed sending a promised 20,000 pounds to edit it, wasted no time outbidding the BBC to commission the uncensored 12-part series.

In 2002, Moore produced the documentary Bowling for Columbine, a characteristically sardonic and scathing examination of America's gun-obsessed culture. The film, while typically presenting Moore's very particular viewpoints and not always interested in fair and balanced coverage, was hailed as brilliantly constructed and entertaining at the least and enthralling and eye-opening at best. Moore received a special Award along with the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his film (which marked the first time a documentary was allowed into the festival in 50 years), an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and many other plaudits, including a surprising Writers Guild of America award for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen despite the fact the film was a documentary. Despite being at last embraced by the filmdom elite--or perhaps because of it--Moore created a minor scandal at the 2003 Academy Awards when he used his acceptance speech as an opportunity to vehemently lash out at President George W. Bush and the then-just-launched war against Iraq, a outburst that shocked and offended many in both the Oscars' live and television audience. It may have intrigued and inspired even more: in the wake of the speech, attendance for Bowling For Columbine skyrocketed.

In 2004 Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11--focusuing on the U.S.-Middle East relationships and events (particularly the long-term links and feuds between the Bush and bin Laden families) contributing to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorists attacks on America and the subsequent fallout--fanned the flames of controversy yet again: Disney CEO Michael Eisner decreed that distributing the film (the film's distirbution label, Miramax, has Disney as a corporate parent) would harm the company’s negotiations for favorable treatment for its Florida theme parks from Governor Jeb Bush; Miramax co-chairs Bob and Harvey Weinstein instead bought back the film rights and distributed it independently (teaming with Lions Gate and IFC Films), thus relieving Disney of any corporate responsibility for the film (Disney even donated the buy-back fee, estimated at about $6 million, to charity). The pre-release furor only heightened interest in the film, and that interest subsequently skyrocketed when Fahrenheit 9/11 won the coveted Palme d'Or at the Cannes International Film Festival almost two months prior to the film's release, resulting in the film becoming the first documentary in history to debut as its opening week's top-grossing film, netting $21.8 million. Although Moore the outsized Everyman personality and his socio-political agendas typically stand squarely at the center of most of his previous films, in Fahrenheit 9/11 he serves primarily as the narrator and guiding force with only a handful of appearances; instead, the auteur saved his real-life role for the bigger battle on the American political and media stages, using his distinctive image and "brand" to ensure that audiences would see the film and hear its message.