The knives are out for Michael Moore.
The man who uses a rapier-like wit to skewer the corporate elite himself stands accused of cashing in on success. Newsweek magazine sniffed at his apartment on Central Park West and his teenage daughter’s attendance at “an elite private school.” The New York Observer, which usually tries to put a Trump in its gunsights, howled at Moore’s flying first class at his book and movie promoter’s expense.
To the prodigal son of blue-collar Flint, Mich., it’s par for the course.
First he corrects the errors. His Upper West Side apartment is nowhere near the tony parkside address. And that private school is actually a 60s-style alternative school renowned for its open classrooms.
Then he gets down to motivations. “Nobody from the working class is worried about my success,” he said. “For them, it’s one of us got out to tell the story. The only people who are bothered are people with money.”
Get ready for the next chapter in that story. “The Big One,” Moore’s hilarious and pointed new film, opened in Chicago and across the nation on Friday. Forget the sky-high stock market and unemployment rates as low as they’ve been in a generation. The bad boy of independent filmmaking has once again injected into mainstream culture the simple truth that not everyone is benefiting from this booming economy.
“The Big One” is a classic road movie rooted in American filmdom’s long populist tradition. The film documents the adventures of Moore and his entourage as they proceed through a 47-city tour to promote his best-selling 1996 book, “Downsize This! Random Threats from an Unarmed American.”
He didn’t plan to make a movie of the various political stunts he’d arranged on the tour. In nearly every city and town he visited, people would come to his book signings to recount tales of plant closings, layoffs, downsizings and wage cuts.
But it was only when he bumped into Neal Bush of Silverado Savings & Loan fame at the General Motors headquarters in Detroit that he found his motivation to make a movie from those tales. “He pinched my cheek and said, `Aw, no camera’,” Moore recalled. After that, it was hand-held video cam all the way.
The tour expanded to include places like Centralia, Ill., where Leaf Confection was closing a plant; and Rockford, that year dubbed the least livable city in the U.S. The tour also touched down in Chicago, where on Stud Terkel’s regular radio show, the camera caught Studs beaming like a proud papa.
The centerpiece of the film is Moore’s visit to Portland, Ore., where Phil Knight of Nike invites the filmmaker into his office after being attacked on a local radio show for exploiting Indonesian labor. Knight tells Moore, “I don’t think Americans want to make shoes.” Moore, 43, returns to Flint and films its delighted citizens politely asking Knight to put a plant in their town. Knight’s badly outmaneuvered public relations department has been frantically playing damage control in anticipation of the film’s release.
While Moore’s work has been much praised in certain circles, there’s no shortage of critics. For “Roger and Me,” his 1989 breakthrough film which went on to gross $25 million and become the highest grossing documentary of all-time (since surpassed by “Hoop Dreams”), the attacks centered on allegations that he played with the timing of events in recounting the story of General Motors’ decision to close dozens of factories and lay off tens of thousands of workers, including the majority of factory hands in his home town of Flint.
The new film has come under attack for being too focused on Moore himself. He sings Bob Dylan songs while strumming a guitar along the lead guitarist for Cheap Trick. The poster for “The Big One” features a blowup of the ultra-casual Moore — he usually drapes his schlumpy frame in blue jeans and ball caps — dressed like one of the Men in Black, holding a giant microphone instead of a gun.
Moore shrugs off charges of egotism with a comment about how well the new film has been received by preview audiences. The film got a rousing ovation at the last Sundance film festival. The loudest applause came from a group of 300 Teamsters in Detroit.
Let the purists carp, he said. “I use humor to make a point. I don’t like what I see going on.”
These days, Moore makes his forays into middle America from the cramped midtown Manhattan offices of Dog Eat Dog Productions, where a handful of support staff includes his wife Kathleen. They labor among stacks of boxes and videotapes. The walls are lined with promotional posters for his previous endeavors.
After “Roger and Me,” Moore directed “Canadian Bacon,” a 1994 end-of-the-Cold War spoof starring Alan Alda and John Candy. The movie missed badly, both on the screen and at the box office.
Next came “TV Nation,” his short-lived though critically successful television series that began on NBC and wound up on the Fox network before being canceled. The segments revealed a bravado rarely seen on the small screen.
Who else would put on network television a Rockettes-like lineup of beautiful black and Hispanic women singing the Supremes’ “Stop In The Name of Love” outside the gates of the rural Idaho convention of Aryan Nation? Or comic Janeane Garofalo leading an amphibious assault on the private beaches of Greenwich, Conn., while Moore’s camera hovered in a helicopter flying above? Moore also filmed himself marching with Newt Gingrich in the Cobb County 4th of July parade demanding that government get off the backs of its people by withdrawing the $4 billion in mostly defense spending there.
His fans swear “TV Nation” was the funniest show ever on American television. It was certainly the most pointedly political. In 1996, Fox took a pass on ordering another season.
To recount what Fox chieftain Rupert Murdoch told him during their only meeting, Moore crossed his arms, stroked his chin and mimicked an Australian twang. “Very subversive, very subversive,” he said. Channel 4 in Great Britain is putting up the money for another 16 episodes, although the name may change before it is shown in the U.S.
The son of an autoworker and a secretary, Moore’s taste for the public eye came early. As a high school senior, he ran and won a race for the Flint school board, becoming the youngest elected official in America. Yet he dropped out of the Flint branch of the University of Michigan a year later to take what he assumed was his fate: a job on the line at the Flint Buick plant.
But the economic crunch of the early 1980s intervened. Laid off, he started an underground newspaper called the Flint Voice, which later became the Michigan Voice. His irreverent and humorous slams at the local power structure attracted a number of talented writers to the staff.
Among them were Alex Kotlowitz, whose most recent book, “The Other Side of the River,” plumbs the depths of racial division in Benton Harbor and St. Joseph’s, Mich.; and Ben Hamper, who went on to publish “Rivethead,” a revealing portrait of life on the nation’s auto assembly lines.
“Even then he had a real sense of irony, an irreverence tinged with earnestness and that tremendous sense of humor,” Kotlowitz recalled. “That’s what made the paper such a good read.”
Seizing the chance to take his brand of working-class humor nationwide, Moore went to work as editor of Mother Jones magazine in 1988. But within six months, he was fired by owner Adam Hochschild.
According to Moore, Hochschild rebelled when he sought take that bastion of leftwing muckraking in a more working-class direction. He brought in Hamper as a columnist and rejected articles about Nicaragua he thought weren’t true.
“The Left doesn’t like the working class a whole lot,” he said. “They see us as a bunch of beer-drinking, Reagan Democrats. But they talk out of one side of their mouths while sitting at their computer terminals and looking up their stock quotes.”
Of course, getting dumped by Mother Jones was probably the best thing that ever happened to Moore. Unemployed and depressed, he turned his anger at GM’s Roger Smith laying off tens of thousands more autoworkers into “Roger and Me.”
While filmmaking was never an obsession with Moore, the runaway success of “Roger and Me” allowed him to bring his message about the lack of fairness in modern-day capitalism into the mainstream. “The Big One,” made for less than a half million dollars, is being distributed by Miramax, a unit of the Disney Co. It also paid to have the film transferred to high definition television-quality video, and then to 35-millimeter film, the first time a documentary has ever undergone the process.
He’s also working on a sitcom pilot for CBS starring Jim Belushi that will follow the trials and tribulations of four Wisconsin guys trying to get by on part-time and low-wage jobs. He’s also writing a book with his wife about their experiences with TV Nation, which will be published by HarperCollins. The Murdoch-owned publisher recently dropped a book by Hong Kong governor Chris Patten that was critical of the Chinese government.
Moore has no apologies for making a pact with one set of corporate devils to go after others. “Nobody else is saying this,” he said. “The media has this mantra going that everything is going great. But average Americans are working longer hours for less money and fewer benefits. They think what I’m saying here is true.”
As usual in corporate America, the box office will be the final judge.
