WHERE'S MICHAEL?

By Roger Rapoport

Michael Moore likes to boast that he is “a dangerous guy to give a lot of money to.” He tells movie studio CEOs, “You are just giving me money to further my lifelong ambition to bring an end to the system you believe in.”
Despite his considerable personal wealth, he remains in some sense an underdog. And for the first time Moore is blazing a path that may ultimately do for the motion picture industry what Craig’s List has done to newspaper classified advertising.
His old distribution partners Harvey and Bob Weinstein are not distributing the film about his 60-city election campaign tour for John Kerry in 2004, a project they helped finance. Nor are any of his friends at Walt Disney Pictures, Warner Bros., United Artists, NBC, the BBC or Bravo. The Great Slacker Uprising, due out September 23, is being given away as a free internet download.
There are easy ways to explain his decision. The film was panned at last year’s Toronto Film Festival (where Moore had debuted as an unknown in 1988 with Roger & Me and left town on a first-class ticket to Los Angeles courtesy of Disney). Variety called the Slacker film a “self indulgent” yawner. In a year when documentaries are doing miserable at the box office, the only practical way to get the film out for the election was to self-distribute with Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films (get your free download at http:slackeruprising.com).
While Moore insists that the nonprofit film is his personal voter registration drive, it is also a step down from 2004, when his George Bush satire, Fahrenheit 9/11, grossed a record-breaking $222 million and netted Moore an estimated $21 million. Not bad for a $6 million investment. That year Moore caused a sensation by upstaging John McCain at the Republican National Convention. Flanked by bodyguards capable of strangling evildoers with dental floss, he was traveling by private jet, propelled by the success of Fahrenheit 9/11. Now the story of that tour is a giveaway. This year Moore took a pass on the convention and was lightly mocked from the dais by one speaker, Senator Joseph Lieberman.
Moore’s new strategy is magnanimous, but it is going to be hard on fans who like to watch the big guy on the big screen. In the past Moore has voiced strong feelings on this matter. As recently as this summer’s Traverse City Film Festival, he was regaling audiences with the story of how he triggered Pauline Kael’s devastating New Yorker review of Roger & Me. She wanted to see a video, and he told her nothing doing. “I had made a movie, I told the executives at Warner Bros., not a video, a movie that was to be seen on a movie screen, not a 25” TV. No, I said, she must watch it…. on a movie screen! In a theater!”
Kael was forced to drive 150 miles in a snowstorm to watch the film at a Manhattan theater and, according to Moore, was so angry she panned the documentary and challenged its accuracy. While Kael didn’t live long enough to download The Great Slacker Uprising at home, it’s clear that Moore is no longer guaranteed the stadium-size audiences of 10,000 or more who watched his 2004 campaign tour.
While most events at the recent Traverse City Film Festival near Moore’s supersized log home on Torch Lake were sold out, he wasn’t able to fill a room at the City Opera House. His “I Worked With Michael Moore and Lived to Make This Movie” panel began with empty seats in the front row. A surprising number of audience members left early, lest they miss Sunday brunch dates.
Could Moore’s magic be wearing off? To be fair, this panel lacked the sizzle of the previous night’s glitzy charity fundraiser for AIDS orphans in Malawi, the second poorest nation on the planet. That may have had to do with the fact that the producer, writer and narrator of the African documentary I Am Because We Are, was Moore’s fellow University of Michigan dropout, Madonna, back at the top of the celebrity food chain with a new number-one hit single and about to embark on her eighth world concert tour.
The Sunday morning panel featured Michael Moore colleagues who had made their own documentaries. It had the feel of a VFW reunion. Moore and his vets eagerly compared old shrapnel wounds inflicted by the evil Hollywood empire and TV networks, which the director says he wants to torpedo even if it means lower grosses for his own work. Despite the tens of millions he has made on his own films, Moore remains in some sense the underdog. His love-hate relationship with the studios is perhaps the ultimate irony at the Traverse City Film Festival.
Moore’s fellow panelists included Jason Pollock, a fellow Midwestern college dropout who spent three years as Moore’s personal assistant and was now desperately seeking national distribution for his new documentary, The Youngest Candidate.
Not long after Pollock started with Moore in 2003, the Bowling For Columbine director’s personal security force blossomed from one to nine. There were “no ex-cops,” according to Moore. “If you’re an ex-cop there’s probably something wrong.” The idea of Moore being safeguarded by former Navy Seals, Special Forces troops and Green Berets might surprise some of the director’s diehard peacenik fans. But that’s what it takes to guard the Big Bopper of investigative journalism.
And thanks to these guards, Moore now knows what to do when someone points a gun in his direction: “You lunge toward them, instead of running. They are so discombobulated that fifty percent of the time it’s enough. The other fifty percent of the time you hope you’ve got a great will and said goodbye to loved ones.”
Pollock reminisced about Moore’s 15 minutes of infamy at the 2004 Republican National Convention, where he was denounced by John McCain, who didn’t realize that the muckraker was sitting nearby in the audience. “People saw you like a giraffe in a pink tutu,” Pollock said to Moore. “You were nearly raped on the way out.”
“That was only because we ran into (Senator) Larry Craig,” deadpanned Moore.
The director’s comedy routine was part of a nostalgia trip. Now he is conflicted about his breakthrough 1989 documentary Roger & Me, which nearly became a silent movie when he couldn’t dig up the $10,000 he needed to complete the soundtrack. A merciful New York sound production company donated their services to rescue the film.
All Traverse City Film Festival screenings began with a trailer honoring three colleagues, major donor Buzz Wilson, festival attorney Stuart Hollander and volunteer Kyle Sonnemann who had
passed away during the previous year. Yet there was no mention of former General Motors Chairman Roger Smith, the centerpiece of Moore’s Roger & Me who had gone to the great showroom in the sky in November 2007.
An earlier panel touched on perhaps the greatest irony of the festival. Michigan now has the most generous filmmaker tax credits in the country—up to 42 percent of production budgets. For Moore, who had made Roger & Me a hit by attacking General Motors for winning huge tax breaks at the expense of the working class, this deal created an ethical dilemma. Although he had encouraged Governor Jennifer Granholm to support the film industry with tax breaks, some legislators believed the deal was far too generous to Hollywood.
Michigan has already approved applications to subsidize films worth over $300 million luring such distinguished directors and performers as Clint Eastwood, Drew Barrymore and Sigourney Weaver. Some of these credits give filmmakers cash refunds for taxes they never paid in the first place. Moore himself, who is now planning to start shooting a film in the Traverse City area, could be eligible for corporate tax credits well beyond Roger Smith’s wildest dreams.
Moore also discussed—but declined to show—the legendary pilot for his proposed Fox late-night talk show, one of the most famous television interviews that has never aired. The would be talk show host stunned a studio audience with a remarkable lead-in. “Our next guest, a Heisman trophy winner and star of many TV shows and movies, please welcome Mr. O.J. Simpson.”
The interview, just two months after Simpson was found not guilty in the 1994 murder of his ex-wife and Ronald Goldman, began with a question Moore was dying to ask—the relative merits of moving the professional football kickoff back 10 yards. After discussing sports for five minutes, Moore said: “You know O.J., back in your day, you caught the ball with your bare hands. These days receivers wear these tight fitting gloves . . .”
Unlike his morning film festival panel, a sneak preview, Mike’s Surprise, later in the day drew long lines. Sadly no Americans beyond those present in Traverse City would be able to see it. As security guards kept a close watch on the audience, Moore discussed his decision to exhibit a film not scheduled for American release. This movie was “something that I have been afraid to show since 9/11, and I am not going to show it anywhere else in this country, other than here tonight. I will release it in Europe and elsewhere, but really, for my own peace of mind and my own safety even this many years after 9/11, I have a stipulation that it cannot be shown in the USA. But I am going to show it to the good folks who bought tickets.”
A film version of Moore’s one-and-a-half-man show (wink wink) Michael Moore Live in the fall of 2002, at London’s Roundhouse Theater included a politics-and-geography game show called “Stump the Yank,” in which average Brits easily won over American Ivy Leaguers. Moore also had great fun demonstrating the use of items banned from planes by the Transportation Security Agency. They included lawn blowers, hand grenades, cattle prods, meat cleavers and portable drills. He then called for audience members to give up their supermarket and gas station loyalty cards, prompting some to toss them on the stage. As he began slicing the cards in half, he appealed to audience members to “be loyal to yourself and your conscience and not BP.” He also asked the audience to question news coverage of the 9/11 tragedy. “Why don’t we read ‘multi-millionaire kills 3,000’? How come we haven’t rounded up all the multimillionaires? It was a multimillionaire who did it.”
For no apparent reason, Moore left out one of the funniest scenes from the stage shows—a live call to a McDonald’s in Kuwait in search of Osama Bin Laden. This would have been the perfect lead-in to the most controversial part of the film. He argued that the 9/11 planes might not have hit the World Trade Center or the Pentagon if a different demographic had dominated the passenger list. “If these planes had been filled with 90 black guys, tell me what they would have done?” he asked. “Or 90 firefighters, or 90 people from South Central or the South Bronx. If you are in a comfortable class, don’t raise a ruckus. Someone will come and save you.”
Moore’s decision not to release Michael Moore Live in America was coupled with his wish that his country would one day “come to a sane place,” open to his political satire on 9/11. But it also raised questions about his ability to make a difference in the upcoming election.
In 2000 his decision to do hilarious campaign warm-up acts for Ralph Nader appearances was essential to his former employer’s campaign.
In 2004 he barnstormed like a rock star to defeat Bush.
But in 2008 his announced focus is on state and congressional elections, hoping to help the Democrats and Obama undo Bush’s mistakes or at least create a veto-proof margin in the event of a McCain victory. His new book, Mike’s Election Guide focuses on Congressional campaigns where Democrats can unseat Republicans.
Moore’s passionate call for humanitarianism and social justice brought cheers from audience members who had skipped a beautiful Grand Traverse Bay sunset to sit inside a school auditorium with him. But at least one spectator, Mary Holland, a Lake Orion stay-at-home mom enrolled in law school this fall, played devil’s advocate. She wondered how he “reconciled a life with access to riches with a sense of empathy and charity for those less fortunate.
“You spoke about the disparity between rich and poor, black and white. This theater is filled with white people, and that makes me sad.”
To Moore, this kind of criticism seemed off target. He had donated hundreds of thousands dollars to get the film festival started and reopen its principal venue, the State Theater. This year, he had rejected proposals to price some Madonna tickets at the $500 level. (Even so, tickets for her sold-out show had gone up on eBay for as much as $3000 a pair.)
Mary Holland countered that the $25 ticket price made it impossible for her and her husband to see Madonna’s documentary about orphaned Malawi children. And there was no way she could afford a ticket to meet the third world filmmakers at the special $25 opening and closing night parties. “My thought is that you could bus interested but impoverished people up here to see some films. My only concern is what they might do if they knew how bad they really had it via comparison to all of us up here so very fortunate to enjoy a film festival at our ‘mini-Hollywood.”
Moore deflected the question by reminding his affluent audience of the dangers of an economic system where the wealthiest 10 percent control the country. At the same time, Moore expressed optimism that the film industry’s decision to bring new projects to Michigan would mean good new jobs, including $20 an hour just for carrying coffee to the sets of directors like himself. This, he reminded the crowd, was a long way from his own pioneer days in Flint shooting Roger & Me. During the filming of a poor black family being evicted from their home on Christmas Eve, a camera battery died. One of his colleagues pulled a battery from his car and hooked it up to the camera, enabling Moore and crew to film the sheriff tossing all the family’s belongings on the curb—even their Christmas tree.
The power source, a 1979 Mercury Capri battery, belonged to cameraman Bruce Schermer, who was conspicuously absent from the stage at the Opera House event. Schermer, who was paid a paltry $5,000 for shooting 60 percent of Roger & Me over a two-year period, recalls in a separate interview that Moore then took a more direct approach to obtaining power for the portable lighting system: “We just plugged our cords into the home wall sockets of the woman who was being evicted. Hopefully the landlord ended up paying for it.”
The election of Barack Obama, whom Moore supports, could be bad for the filmmaker’s box office when he returns to theatrical releases. At least that’s the view of another key colleague who was not part of the Opera House panel in Traverse City. John Pierson, the producer’s representative who sold Roger & Me to Warner Brothers for a record breaking $3 million in 1988, points out that Moore’s biggest film failure came during the Clinton years. His comedy feature, Canadian Bacon, co-produced by Madonna, cost $10 million to make and grossed only $132,000 at the box office. “Moore was dying during the Clinton years,” Pierson recalls. “The election of George Bush was the best thing that ever happened to him.”
Still, Moore did ridicule Clinton on issues ranging from the bombing of Kosovo to welfare reform, just as he had criticized previous Democrats from Walter Mondale to Jimmy Carter. Can Obama expect anything less?
Moore says has not yet decided whether to apply for the Michigan film subsidy. But even if he saves millions from these controversial tax breaks in a state that leads the nation in unemployment, he is not assured of an easy path in the years ahead.

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Roger Rapoport is the author of Citizen Moore: The Making of an American Iconoclast, winner of the biography gold award in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of The Year competition. The book is published in America by RDR Books, in the United Kingdom by Methuen and France by Al Terre Editions.