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Michael Moore has transformed the documentary film, drawing huge audiences to tales of greed and hypocrisy. But his biographer, Roger Rapoport, believes there's a darker, less attractive side to this crusader.
Is Michael Moore running out of steam? He is one of the greatest documentary makers of our time, a folk hero of the left, the scourge of presidents, politicians and business leaders, winner of Oscars in Hollywood, Palmes d'Or at Cannes, and the inventor of the personal-essay-style, feature-length political documentary. His latest film, Sicko, has had a vast amount of publicity. But amid the glad-handing, one awkward question is being whispered: could Michael Moore be running out of steam?
Let us consider the evidence. His new documentary, on the subject of health care, appears to not be doing as well at the box office as his last one (Fahrenheit 9/11, on George W. Bush). While some Sicko reviewers have been kind, others are not convinced: the influential New Yorker magazine says Moore "scrapes bottom" with his superfluous new film.
Critics aren't the only ones unhappy. US federal officials are considering serving Moore with a subpoena to seek more information about his trip to Cuba to film parts of the movie. Moore flew to Guantanamo Bay with three emergency rescue workers suffering from illnesses contracted during the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, to compare the US healthcare system with government-funded healthcare systems in other countries.
Elsewhere, Moore's methods and past work are under scrutiny while another film about Bush's last election campaign appears to have been placed firmly on the backburner. Rumours abound, sparked by the man himself, that he may now decide to abandon documentaries, instead to write romantic comedies and straight dramatic features with a slice of wry. Where else is there left for Moore to go?
The long gestation period for Sicko, Moore's paintball-style attack on the American healthcare system, reflects parallel changes in his own life. Recognising the irony of an overweight director on a bad diet preaching healthy living, Moore decided to heal himself. He hired a personal trainer and began taking long walks. He also created the Traverse City Film Festival near his impressive home on Michigan's Torch Lake. As he personally reviewed entries, Moore also continued working on fictional screenplay ideas of his own.
This decision to create feature-length film dramas is curious, though, when you consider what happened to his one previous attempt. It was a US$10 million ($13 million) John Candy comedy called Canadian Bacon, and it cratered. Now, it looks like the Big Bopper of ambush journalism wants to turn to romantic comedies and other dramas that will win over the audiences who skip his non-stop assaults on the super-rich, warmongers, gun-slinging vigilantes and heartless drug companies out to grind the faces of the poor. It's as if the sheriff has decided to get out of Dodge City and take up macrame.
As to Moore's current market value, it seems likely his tell-all on American healthcare will attract a smaller audience that his previous hits, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine. Although the director spearheads an admirable political campaign for national health insurance in America, there is evidence he's having trouble recapturing the zeitgeist that made him famous.
Consider one work in progress, a virtual self-parody of his barnstorming American campus tour designed to unseat Bush during the US election three years ago. Called the Great 04 Slacker Uprising, it has the feel of a YouTube video, with endless over-the-shoulder shots of crammed stadiums cheering Moore as he fillets the Bush Administration with one-liners. But, in commercial terms, does it work? Do audiences really want to relive the 2004 election and watch Moore's failed attempt to man the lifeboats for a sinking John Kerry? The only break he has had so far on this project took place at the Toronto Film Festival, where a depressing preview screening was aborted thanks to projection-room difficulties.
Timing is everything in the documentary world and, in the post-Sicko era, documentarian Moore's time may be up. The fact that Sicko's initial gate is well below his last film is just one indication that his documentary career peaked three years ago. Now that he's a firebrand name, it's harder for him to interview the big guys he likes to blame for the world's problems.
In recent years, corporations have posted mug-shots with their office staff, and even hired profilers to disarm Moore with small talk (such as how did you lose all the weight?, or how about those Detroit Tigers?) while security is paged with a silent alarm. In other words, alert chief executives won't follow in the footsteps of the naive Nike leader Phil Knight, who famously made the mistake of telling Moore on camera that his Indonesian 14-year-olds made sense.
Even worse, for a man who launched his career with Roger & Me in the final days of George Bush senior's reign, and broke documentary box-office records with Fahrenheit 9/11 (a film about George W. Bush's ineptitude), his beloved Democrats appear to be on their way to retaking the White House.
Moore certainly understands his vast left-wing constituency has a hard time with his attempts to bash Democrats like Bill Clinton or, more recently, Hillary Clinton. His career on this front has been mixed, to say the least. He ditched an audience of more than nine million that watched his network show TV Nation for Rupert Murdoch's Fox, where he promptly mixed it up with broadcast-standards censors and was fired. A self-aggrandising autobiographical film, The Big One, about a book-publicity tour, sank nearly as fast as the Lusitania. His attempt to launch a talk show featuring OJ Simpson as his first guest bombed.
The pilot for Better Days, a blue-collar sitcom about laid-off workers featuring Jim Belushi (the brother of the late John Belushi) was dead on arrival. And, lest we forget, Moore's script for his only fictional feature, Canadian Bacon, was turned down by 37 studios and production companies. The 38th rashly sank US$10 million into this drama in which Moore ended up in huge battles with his co-producer, and famed cinematographer, Haskell Wexler. The production team was also devastated by the loss of the film's star, Candy, who died shortly after the completion of principal photography. Following a disastrous test-screening in front of a blue-collar audience, the film opened to pathetic reviews and was quickly pulled from distribution.
As Moore's first agent, John Pierson, explains, the Clinton years were a disaster for Moore. When Moore relentlessly attacked "sad, pathetic" Clinton and his disgusting, hypocritical fellow Democrats on issues ranging from the bombing of Kosovo to welfare reform, fans were perplexed. Their anxiety grew when he gave the right-winger Alan Keyes the nod for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2000. Keyes won the on-air endorsement of Moore's TV show, The Awful Truth, because he was the first Republican to accept the director's challenge to jump into a portable mosh pit during the Iowa primary. And feminists were apoplectic when Moore predicted, incorrectly, that a Bush presidency would not lead to the appointment of Supreme Court justices likely to tamper with abortion rights.
Should the Democrats regain power, Moore inevitably would find himself tangling with the kind of people who now flock to his movies. Historically, he has been quick to blame the party for selling out their own constituency. And there's another problem with his documentary work: a lack of subtlety that delights many of his fans, but does not draw serious consideration from students of the problem. Negative attacks have made this critic of capitalism rich and famous; unfortunately, they have not led to the changes he advocates.
I hit on another reason for Moore's career shift while working on my biography, Citizen Moore: An American Maverick. During more than 250 interviews with insiders central to his career, I discovered that many film-makers had never actually seen a Moore movie. Neither had close friends in Flint - Moore's hometown- nor the monsignor who was one of his seminary instructors (not many people realise that Moore is a practising Catholic). Radio talk-show presenters on both sides of the Atlantic admitted they had never made it to one of the Moore's films.
One reason people skip his work are rumours about his rough handling of co-workers. But a more likely reason ties in to the most-asked question I've been hearing from audiences and interviewers: "Are his films documentaries, or are they fictional comedies?" Since Moore gets the credit for making documentaries as popular as dramatic films, I turned to the first camera-man Michael hired, Kevin Rafferty, for the answer. This famed cinema-verite film-maker, who is also George W. Bush's cousin, gave Moore his film debut in Blood in the Face, an expose of the "racialist right". The then-Flint journalist Moore scored a major coup when he helped Rafferty's team film a Michigan Ku Klux Klan rally where two lovebirds said their marital vows in a ceremony illuminated by the glow of a burning cross.
Rafferty says instead of shooting first and editing afterwards, in the traditional manner of documentaries, Moore scripted Roger & Me like a dramatic feature.
Another problem is a lack of trust. There are nagging questions about well-documented omissions. Moore's decision to leave two filmed interviews with the General Motors chief executive Roger Smith on the Roger & Me cutting-room floor raises questions he has not answered. The ethics of launching his career by falsely claiming he couldn't get an interview with the head of General Motors creates a credibility gap. Is it a good idea to rewrite history so it creates the storyline and publicity necessary to reach an audience who normally skips documentaries?
After years of dodging the subject, Moore confirmed my story that he did film an interview with Smith. Then he made the mistake of arguing that this event took place before he began working on Roger & Me. According to his commentary on the documentary's DVD, shooting began in February 1987, three months before the first filmed interview at a GM annual meeting in Detroit. The second deleted interview, a "home run" according to the soundman, also Moore's friend and Ralph Nader's attorney, Jim Musselman, took place in January 1988.
Even some of Moore's fans worry he partially stages scenes, undercutting the value of his own work. I spoke about this recently with the cameraman Bruce Schermer, who was paid US$5000 for shooting about 60 per cent of Roger & Me (which was sold to Warner Brothers for US$3 million). He points out that, during the shooting of the film's famous Christmas Eve eviction of impoverished Flint tenants, Moore was apparently not getting what he wanted. Off camera, he discussed the problem with an unemotional mother. When Schermer turned his camera back on, the woman amped-up the scene by screaming. Ironically, adds the cameraman, some of the auxiliary lighting power required to shoot this scene came from the woman's electricity supply.
Of course, Moore has made many important contributions to cinema. He has done a good job of bringing on to the media front-burner important social issues such as corporate greed, gun control, George Bush's mistakes leading to September 11, and a failing American healthcare system. His success has also made it easier for young documentary-makers to find distribution for their work. But the directors success also depends on his ability to start an argument that won't die.
Even before its general release, Sicko resurrected unresolved controversies. For instance, Moore was made to sound paranoid by his contention that the Jewish hierarchy at Mother Jones magazine engineered his 1986 firing because, as editor-in-chief, he didnt want to publish a story critical of Israel.
Controversy, says his former employer Ralph Nader, is Moore's oxygen. In the case of Fahrenheit 9/11 Moore's attempt to derail Bush's 2004 presidential bid he was able to turn the Walt Disney Corporations 2003 decision to not distribute the film into a last-minute 2004 publicity bonanza that hyped the movies release. In his rush to accuse the company of censorship, the director didn't mention Disney actually held on to its share of the movie, earning an estimated US$30 million more than Moore's estimated US$21 million.
Throughout his career, Moore has been the master of constructive failure turning defeat into a publicity windfall that guarantees career advancement. His firing at Mother Jones brought his reverse Horatio-Alger-style story to the pages of The New York Times. His alleged inability to interview Roger Smith created a marketable Quixotic hopelessness, and one of the most fascinating films ever made on capitalism. His latest letter from the US Treasury questioning his Cuban mercy mission for ailing September 11 first-responders guarantees a bigger box-office.
Will his new dramatic films lure audiences who have skipped his famous documentaries? Might they end the ceaseless, at times painful, debate over the truthfulness of his work? And, through fictional features, might he be able to dislodge the black hats on his personal axis of evil? With his firebrand name, Moore's future dramas could work nicely. Think about the possibilities: Love Boat on The Detroit River, Desperate Rack and Pinion Assemblers, or Idi Amin in Love?
Shining the spotlight into the dark recesses of the American dream is his special gift. Perhaps now he is ready to take on the world and win over those who have skipped his pioneering work.
- Independent
