THIS AREA boasts many local heroes, but one of our principal heroes is John Steinbeck, whose masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath is the ultimate novel of the diaspora of the Dust Bowl.
The Steinbeck Award, reserved for people who embody the values of Steinbeck’s work, is to be given to filmmaker and author Michael Moore, who will accept the honor at a presentation on Thursday, Oct. 14, at Morris Dailey Auditorium on the San Jose State University campus.Moore is currently at work on an undisclosed film, but his blog allows him to keep in touch with the fans of his incendiary documentaries Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, Capitalism: A Love Story and Sicko among others. Moore was recently named one of the “50 Most Influential Progressives of the Twentieth Century” by The Nation, a testament to the power of his contentious and controversial films.
To mangle a Steinbeck title, itself filched from Shakespeare, this is the fall of our discontent: two years after the populist victory of Barack Obama, progressives face the possibility of a Democratic defeat in the midterms. On his blog, Moore wrote, “I am so sincerely disappointed at how Obama and the Dems have blown much of the first 20 months of holding absolute power.” As is customary, however, Moore hasn’t given up hope. In our recent interview, Moore talked about a typically wide range of topics, and that’s not counting the San Francisco Giants (“They’re due”), the spurious David Lynch iPhone commercial, based on an actual Lynch pronouncement (“It is such a sadness to think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone”), and LeBron James, whom Moore feels is unfairly picked on: “He didn’t take the biggest check; he wanted to be with his friends. Look, he’s 25, he wants to hang out on South Beach. They’re pissed at him in Cleveland, not in Akron, because he’ll always be a hero in Akron. I know, I came from Flint, which is to Detroit what Akron is to Cleveland. People back in Flint, who are in the working class, are so happy for anyone from their hometown who doesn’t have to stand on an assembly line. They’re happy for anyone who gets out.”
METRO: Some polls indicate that there’ll be a Republican resurgence. How likely is this to happen, and how much is it wishful thinking by Fox News and the other media conglomerates?
MOORE: I think it’s wishful thinking on all their parts. Those who call the shots have an interest in stopping anything the Democrats might be planning to do. I think that people will be surprised by what happens, though. Four weeks to go, and as we get closer to the election, the last thing we want to do is go back to the era of Bush and Cheney.
What is it that the mainstream media fails to take into account about the rise of the Tea Party?
That it’s much smaller than many movements on the left that have been around for decades; historically, that’s not surprising; the media gives short shrift to the left. Ultimately, the Tea Party is at least partly a media creation.
Which of the potential victories or defeats in the upcoming election do you consider the most worrisome?
None really specifically. What surprises me is the Democrats have squandered a year and a half when they could have gone on the offensive and gotten people excited about going back to the polls. The Democrats are scared of their own shadow.
You’ve created a style of documentary, leavening politics with humor, cartoon interludes and vintage library music to lampoon the moldy docs screened in high school auditoriums. This style has been appropriated everywhere, even by conservatives who claim to loathe what you stand for. Seeing the flood of Moore look-alike documentaries, do you sometimes feel you’ve created a monster?
Well, first of all, thanks! You know when I first started making documentaries, they were considered medicine you were supposed to take. When I filmed Roger & Me, I was trying to create a film that people wanted to see on a Friday night after work, eating popcorn and Goobers while they watched. I didn’t think there was anything wrong making politics entertaining, which would actually provide some talk after people left the theater. I encourage other documentary filmmakers to, first and foremost, make a movie, not a documentary—fiction directors don’t say, “I’m going to make a fiction film next year.” They say they’re going to try to make a good film. That’s the most important thing, fiction or nonfiction, black-and-white or color.
Do you view your films mostly as attempts at making a case or more of an attempt to unearth facts?
Again, I make them to make them good—I set out to make a great film people will want to see after a day’s work. If you put the politics ahead of the filmmaking, no one’s going to see the film. My first thought when making a film is the question of what would make a great film.
Have you seen ‘Waiting for Superman,’ the new documentary about the U.S. public-school system, yet?
Yes, and I’m loath to make comments on other documentary makers’ films—let’s leave it at that. I will say that people are saying Waiting for Superman is heartbreaking, but it’s heartbreaking to white audiences. Black and Hispanic audiences already know what’s going on.
A couple of Steinbeck questions: Do you remember where you were when you first read ‘The Grapes of Wrath’?
In high school. I grew up in a working-class town, so it was a book everyone read, and the movie was a movie everyone saw in school. You could imagine it very well in Flint, Mich., even though the book is about California. The labor struggle and the whole concept of what happens to the poor is very clear there. I’m actually reading Steinbeck’s first novel right now, In Dubious Battle.
Some of the fortunes made in the Silicon Valley out of thin air and speculation have helped give libertarianism a revival. Considering that you’ll be appearing here, I wondered if you would address the limitations of libertarianism.
I’m actually writing what I’m going to say in San Jose right now, and I’m planning what I’m going say about that. On my blog, I just posted something about the libertarian bonfire in Obion County, Tenn. [where firefighters watched a man’s house, as well as his trapped pets, burn because he hadn’t paid the annual tax]. That man’s house—there you have your libertarian vision of the future. A college kid stopped me in New York, a really very bright-looking kid he was, and he was going on about how taxes are illegal and how there’ll be no taxes in the future. I asked him how Broadway was going to get paved and he said, “The businesses on it will pay for it.”
Old-school libertarians used to believe that there should be a government infrastructure, that some money should be raised to defend the country and provide basic services. The new 21st-century version of libertarianism is so wacked out. This kid was smart, he totally believed it, he wasn’t some rube at a Tea Party event in Nevada. I can see we’re going to have some serious political battles in the future.
Some 21 years after you made ‘Roger & Me,’ what do you think you’ve learned as a filmmaker?
What have I learned? I’ve learned that our great American art form known as the cinema has taken quite a beating by the corporate interests. I feel more committed than ever to preserving this art form into the next generation. To do that will require a different approach, especially how it relates to economics and how films are distributed and exhibited. Look, I have an iPhone, and a Mac Book, and a DVD theater where I watch things, but remember when the U.S. Postal service put the Mona Lisa on a stamp? That was cool. It’s great to see art on a stamp, but you can’t tell people you’ve seen the Mona Lisa. I feel it’s not a movie unless you see it in a theater.
To steal from Mark Twain, I always say it’s like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
You’re just not watching the movie the artist who made it intended you to see. I have become an exhibitor in the last three years. Where I live in northern Michigan, I helped reopen a movie palace that had been closed a couple of decades, the State in Traverse City. My plan was to run a theater in the way I think a theater should be run. If I were a painter, and I was having a showing of paintings in San Francisco, I’d want input on how the paintings were hung. If I were a rock musician, I wouldn’t just be playing the music, I’d be doing everything from beginning to end, and I’d have a lot of say how that’s presented to the audience.But filmmakers? We dump our art in a DHL bag, and off it goes, and that’s crazy. Theaters should be designed in a way that filmmakers have a vested interest in the way films are shown. So if you would ever see my theater, you’d see what I’m saying. I live in a county that twice voted for Bush, once for McCain—a county that has the lowest percentage of high school graduates in the country. This is not Berkeley or Madison or Ann Arbor. But we’ve been running the theater three years this November, and we’ve sold some 500,000 tickets over that time.
This last few months, we played a movie that was from Sweden, two and a half hours long with subtitles: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Some 16 to 20,000 people showed up. These are people who never get films before the urban theaters.
I really want the studios to know what the experiment here has produced. People who live in middle America are not necessarily film illiterates, they love what everyone loves—they just need a little help and support.
After that kind of good news, I hate to deliver some bad news. Did you hear that Sarah Palin will be in San Jose the same night as your appearance? $25–$199 a ticket.
What makes her thinks that she’s going to get a crowd. Wow. There’s your irony. The same time I’m there, yet—wait, it says here she’ll be in at 3pm, so you can catch us both.
I blame Wonkette.com for her, you know; they kept putting up these cheesecake pictures of her as “America’s Hottest Governor” and pretty soon the Republicans took note.
The whole country is MILFed to death.
Last question: What are you doing next?
Well, I’m doing it right now—but I’m not going to talk about it. It’s coming out nett year.
What season?
Next year, that’s all I’m going to say.
Michael & Us
AFTER GROWING up in what one might consider a fairly typical Midwestern background in the 1950s—he was a Catholic school kid interested in the seminary, and an Eagle Scout—Michael Moore studied journalism at the University of Michigan, Flint. Afterward, he ran an alternative newspaper that became the Michigan Voice. “I started the Voice because I was upset at the way the daily paper, the Flint Journal, was covering things. We called it the GM Gazette,” Moore told me when I was covering his first film Roger & Me for Metro in 1990.
On the strength of that newspaper work, Moore was invited to San Francisco to edit Mother Jones. This tenure lasted four months. According to Moore, “A lot of the staff was on vacation—I never had 100 percent of the editorial staff while I was there. And [publisher]Adam Hothschild is going, “You’ve got to run this article on herbal teas, and this piece on how unsatisfied the Nicaraguans are with the Sandinistas.'” Depressed by the outcome of his Mother Jones tenure, Moore started going to the movies every day, “everything but ninjas and Neil Simon,” he said. Tim Burton’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure was a favorite; Moore later told Metro that “Roger & Me was a cross between Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and The Grapes of Wrath.”
Returning to Flint with a five-figure settlement from Mother Jones, Moore started to think about the possibilities of making a documentary about the decline of his home town and a central figure in its woes: General Motors’ then-CEO Roger Smith. With aid from Kevin Rafferty (The Atomic Cafe), San Francisco’s Chris Weaver and Judy Irving of the film Dark Circle, Moore started to learn the basics of documentary filmmaking. Moore sold his house and hosted a weekly bingo game.
The decision to make his first film humorous was there from the beginning: “I had said, ‘We’re not going to make a typical doc, with unemployment lines, bag ladies and people sleeping on grates.'” Moore’s decision to blend area celebs, like TV game-show host Bob Eubanks and the then-reigning Miss Michigan, with working people in Flint, made for a documentary with a level of satire not really seen before. When Moore compressed three different sets of layoffs for his film, the tactic was criticized, as was the subjectivity of the storytelling.
In addition to his 1995 feature film Canadian Bacon, and the live on-the-road picture The Big One (1996), Moore worked in television and wrote the 1997 bestseller Downsize This! His next high-profile film was 2002’s Bowling for Columbine, which ultimately won an Oscar for best documentary. Moore zeroed in on the Columbine High School massacre and the way it had been used as an opportunity for politicians and pundits alike. The cornering of an already-ailing Charlton Heston may be the most dubious moment in Moore’s career. Given the 13 dead at Columbine, not counting the shooters—and given the power of the NRA—Moore’s decision to go after a symbol of the gun lobby has some justification. I’ll repeat what I wrote at the time: “An activist’s only hope for sanity lies in following one simple rule: avoid the secondary boycott. For example, a crusading vegetarian would have reason to picket the Harris Ranch feedlot on Interstate 5. However, picketing every Safeway that sells steaks makes you a crank. And the crankiness of Bowling for Columbine is that Moore uses the secondary boycott by pressuring a figurehead like Heston, instead of the NRA lobbyists who actually make some decisions. Or, as Moore also does, by pestering flacks for Kmart, which formerly sold bullets, instead of the bullet makers and gun manufacturers. Bowling for Columbine is passionate. I just wish it were more persuasive, because the people who need their minds changed aren’t going to be moved by emotion or ridicule.”Fahrenheit 9/11, a piece timed for the election year, revisited the previous four years of the George W. Bush regime: a presidency brought in under a dubious election and legitimized by an unthinkable terrorist attack. Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme d’Or, broke the $100 million mark at the box office and was perhaps the most persuasive documentary ever made in America. The sequence of the unfortunate W, frozen over his children’s book, was an indelible image of presidential incompetence.
As matters got worse in America over the last decade, Moore’s more recent films Sicko (2007) and Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) showed his improvement as a filmmaker in every direction: in visuals, humor, pace, selection of music and fact-checking. Moore, physically a hulking, jovial cat recognizable a block away for his baseball hat and a T-shirt, became the right-wing’s public enemy No. 1.
Moore was even the subject of a lamentable 2008 Dickens parody titled An American Carol, which returned only $7 million of its $20 million budget. Had David Zucker, the movie’s formerly funny director, remembered the scene in Roger & Me of Roger Smith reading A Christmas Carol to his employees? If so, why was he to invert that tale so we’d root for the team that supported Scrooge? Clearly Moore was the victor here. Sicko helped keep the health-care system an issue even when nervous Democrats wanted to look elsewhere. As he told Metro in 2007: “Enough people have been hurt. They don’t need to go to a movie to know we have a broken system. I have to hold some kind of hope that change is possible—I’m saying the whole system needs to be upended, and that, to me, makes Sicko a lot more radical and much more dangerous film than anything I’ve done before.In this view, Moore hasn’t changed. As he told us in 1990: “In the long run, I don’t believe that we can continue the economic system we have. It’s unfair, it’s unjust and it creates violence.”
