Do we want a new thread for EVERY film that takes aim at Michael Moore? Probably not, but if so, I'm game...
- - -
Michael & Them: Filmmakers Chase MooreMICHAEL MOORE, who carries around controversy the way Paul Bunyan toted an ax, has won legions of fans for being a ball-cap-wearing fly in the ointment of Republican politics. For tweaking the documentary form. Even for making millions of dollars in the traditionally poverty-stricken genre of nonfiction film.
Many despise him for the same reasons.
The Toronto-based documentary filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk started out in the first camp. But during the course of making an unauthorized film about Mr. Moore they wound up somewhere in between. In the process, their experience has added a twist to the long-running story of an abrasive social critic who has frequently been criticized from the right, but far less often, as is the case with Ms. Melnyk and Mr. Caine, from his own end of the political spectrum. . . .
"We didn't want to refute anything," Ms. Melnyk said. "We just wanted to take a look at Michael Moore and his films. It was only by talking to people that we found out this other stuff."
In part the "stuff" amounts to a catalog of alleged errors -- both of omission and commission -- in Mr. Moore's films, beginning with his 1989 debut, "Roger & Me." That film largely revolved around Mr. Moore's fruitless attempts to interview Roger Smith, then the chairman of General Motors, after his company closed plants in Mr. Moore's birthplace, Flint, Mich.:
an interview that occurred, Ms. Melnyk and Mr. Caine said,
although Mr. Moore left it on the cutting-room floor."I'm still a big proponent of 'Roger & Me,' especially for its importance in American documentary making," said John Pierson, the longtime producers' representative who helped sell the film to Warner Brothers and now teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. "But it was disheartening to see some of the material in Debbie and Rick's film. I wouldn't say I was crushed. I'm too old to be crushed. But my students were."
Calling the Melnyk-Caine film "unbelievably fair," Mr. Pierson said it asks what really matters in nonfiction filmmaking: Should all documentary-making be considered subjective and ultimately manipulative, or should the viewer be able to believe what he or she sees? "I found it encouraging," he said, "that my students were dumbstruck."
Mr. Pierson and students in his advanced producing class have even made a project out of promoting "Manufacturing Dissent" (a title that echoes "Manufacturing Consent," the 1992 Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick film about Noam Chomsky). They have helped to publicize the Austin premiere with slogans that include: "Michael Moore doesn't like documentaries. That's why he doesn't make them." And "It's never been so hard to get Michael Moore in front of a camera." . . .
New York Times, February 25