Will Controversy Cost ‘Roger’ an Oscar? : Movies: The film’s chronological shuffle prompts a debate on the nature of the documentary, but Moore says he’s trying to advance an art form to a new phase.

A reasonable person sitting through Michael Moore’s critically praised documentary “Roger & Me” might come away from the film believing that since 1986, when Moore began his two-year quest to get General Motors chairman Roger Smith to visit economically-depressed Flint, Mich., that:

* An automotive theme park, a mall and a new Hyatt Regency hotel had been initiated to encourage tourism during that period.

* President Ronald Reagan popped in on Air Force One, ate pizza with laid-off workers and suggested they consider relocating to Texas.

* The Rev. Robert Schuller delivered an inspirational message on the heels of a Great Gatsby society party in Flint in 1987.

The truth is that all of those events occurred before Moore left his job as editor of Mother Jones magazine and began making his independently financed film about the effects of GM plant closings on his hometown of Flint. The scene in the pizza parlor occurred before Reagan had even arrived in the White House.

That Moore did not explain his chronological shuffles in the film has not only prompted a debate about the nature of a “documentary” but has also--in the minds of some people--compromised the film’s integrity just as it is being considered for an Academy Award nomination.

“It’s one thing to do a Tom Wolfe-like profile and quite another to present something as factually accurate,” says a member of the Academy’s documentary committee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I’m uncomfortable with Moore’s juxtapositions. He presented a time continuum which didn’t exist, which in my mind is dishonest and unethical.”

“There are rules to follow,” says Moore, defending the structure of his film. “You don’t misquote or take out of context and the facts must be right. But no documentary is in linear chronological order. If you’re looking for that, watch C-SPAN. You can see congressional hearings exactly as they happen. I wanted to paint a portrait of this town in the ‘80s. I never said that the film began in 1986. I consciously avoided using dates. Everything depicted did stem from the closing of the plants. It was cause and effect.”

Moore, 35, sprung into national prominence about two months ago when he sold the distribution rights to “Roger & Me” to Warner Bros. for a reported $3 million. The film had been the surprise hit of festivals in Telluride, Colo., Toronto and New York, and then was named best documentary of the year by the Los Angeles, New York and National film critics societies. Moore and his supporters believe the film’s popularity has made him the target of purists.

“Any time a person comes along and tries to advance an art form to a new phase, he meets resistance from those who consider themselves the keepers of the old flame,” Moore says. “Truman Capote was told that ‘In Cold Blood’ wasn’t nonfiction. ‘How could you write it? You weren’t there.’ Yet, he helped usher in a new era--the New Journalism. People never heard of a docucomedy but I tried to make a film people want to see.”

And people do want to see “Roger & Me.” When it opened nationwide this past weekend, the film grossed a solid $687,000 at the 103 theaters in 40 cities where it played.

“Michael Moore has broken down some barriers, the most important of which--God bless him--is showing that a documentary can be as compelling, mischievous, and involving as a feature film,” says Arthur Barron, a documentary film maker with KCET. “By bringing more people into the tent, he allows us to invent new forms and reach a wider audience.”

Still, there are some strong dissenters. Pauline Kael, film critic for the New Yorker magazine, dismissed “Roger & Me” as “an aw-shucks, cracker-barrel pastiche” and, after repeating the list of misdemeanors committed by the film maker (first reported by Harlan Jacobson in Film Comment), said it looked like “the work of a slick ad exec.”

“He comes on in a give-’em-hell style,” Kael wrote, “but he breaks faith with the audience.”

Even fans of the movie say the director should have tipped the audience to his methods.

“The film is spiritually accurate,” says New York magazine film critic David Denby. “It’s a terrific illustration of Reaganism as an illusion system--the need to escape from reality with phony uplift and P.R. schemes. But the film has a credibility problem . . . one that could have been solved with a few sentences of narration. It’s still a great film, but Moore shot himself in the foot.”

Esther Boynton, a Flint native who practices law in Los Angeles, agrees that most of the film “is absolutely on target, that “the town is in deep trouble.” But she was says she was thrown when she noticed that a row of mansions depicted in the film as being in Grosse Pointe was actually shot in the Flint neighborhood where she grew up.

“That goes a little beyond poetic license,” Boynton said. “It’s very misleading and I started to question the rest of it.”

The director pleads guilty to the geographic mix-up. He says that, as a novice, his labeling was at first haphazard. All the “rich houses” were combined on one reel. For that matter, he offers unapologetically, some of the Flint rats shown on screen were actually shot in Detroit. “If you’re talking about rats,” he says, “it’s even OK to buy them. I really don’t think it matters.”

The big question for Moore, and for Warner Bros., which would love an Oscar nomination for the film’s continuing promotion, is whether the documentary committee of the Academy buys his argument. This is the same group that last year shut out Errol Morris’ highly-acclaimed “The Thin Blue Line,” prompting much speculation that they frowned on the film’s dramatizations of events surrounding the killing of a policeman.

The committee members will decide on the five nominees on Thursday; the results won’t be announced until Feb. 14.

“ ‘Roger & Me’ is a long shot,” says one of the committee members. “Of the 59 films we saw, there are easily five better candidates. And the controversy doesn’t help, does it? If even a small contingent is uncomfortable with a film, it’s enough to knock it out as a nominee.”

Still, the majority of people interviewed for this article, even those who said they were uncomfortable with Moore’s compressions, believe the merits of the film outweigh its flaws.

“If it’s a complete fabrication masking as a documentary, (Moore) has something to answer for,” said Michael Apted, a feature (“Gorillas in the Mist”) and documentary (“28 Up”) film director. “But if there is, in fact, cause and effect, good luck to him. I’d rather he make the film and take a few liberties than not make it at all. What he’s raised is troubling stuff.”

Moore himself has waffled on the issue of whether his film qualifies as a “documentary,” concluding finally that “it’s an entertaining movie . . . a documentary told in narrative style.”

Harrison Engle, president of the International Documentary Assn., has no problem with that description. “A documentary isn’t wedded to information as much as people--especially journalists--seem to think,” Engle says. “You have news at one end of the spectrum, feature films at the other and documentaries somewhere in the middle.

“Michael Moore isn’t an informational film maker as much as he is a broad-stroke satirist,” Engle says. “If the film is based in reality and factually accurate, there’s nothing wrong with using cinematic techniques to make a case or create an impression.”

“Part of the problem is the public’s lack of sophistication with regard to the genre,” says documentary film maker Gina Blumenfeld. “Documentaries are about point of view--that’s what you get. The temptation is always to make as strong a case as possible and not just let the facts speak for themselves.

“But the question arises: Where do you draw the line? Sadly, I’m afraid, the line will be drawn right across Moore’s film.”