Moore Better News: War on the Horizon

As then-General Motors Chairman Roger Smith learned, dismissing journalist-filmmaker Michael Moore is something you attempt at your own peril.

The creator of the hilarious and thought-provoking 1989 documentary “Roger & Me,” which skewered GM’s labor practices, could easily concoct a similar lampoon about Hollywood focusing on the peculiar evolution of his debut feature film, “Canadian Bacon.”

“Bacon”--which stars the late John Candy in his penultimate film, Rhea Perlman, Kevin Pollak and Alan Alda as the President of the United States--quickly went from the frying pan into the fire after it completed principal photography last June.

The $12-million satire is described by producer David Brown as a “post-Cold War spoof in which America picks a war with Canada to right its own economic ills.”

With names like Candy and Alda in the cast, Propaganda Films, which financed the project, envisioned a broad release under its deal with MGM/UA. Originally set for release last fall, it was pushed back to this spring. But when the studio announced its 1995 schedule, “Bacon” was missing.

The reason, says an MGM/UA spokeswoman, is that the film was never formally delivered to the studio. But, say other sources at MGM/UA, the results of test-marketing screenings did not justify the $10-million marketing expenditure that would be required to launch the film nationally. There were even rumors that the film would go directly to video. Brown says the studio was expecting a broad John Candy slapstick comedy. “This is not ‘Uncle Buck,’ ” the producer says.

Director Moore says Candy’s performance is edgy, closer in spirit to his work on “SCTV.” “They were deluding themselves in wanting to take the film out that way,” Moore says.

Sources at MGM/UA say “Bacon” tested “good but not great,” yet it actually played better with audiences than the official test scores would indicate.

Moore says that of the four test screenings, two went poorly, and both of those were to teen-agers in malls. “I mean, would you have tested ‘Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’ in Simi Valley?”

A dult audiences, he says, re sponded favorably. Peter Graves, marketing consultant for Propaganda’s parent company, PolyGram Films, concurs. He says the company came away from the marketing screenings realizing that the “smarter the audience, the more they liked the film. Teen-agers were not as enthusiastic. They got Candy’s humor, but that’s only half the movie.”

Early this month it was announced that Gramercy Pictures, another division of PolyGram, would distribute the film in late September.

The entire episode might have remained relatively quiet, but when Propaganda Chairman Steve Golin complained a few weeks ago to Variety about the film’s test results and said he was disappointed in the movie, Moore did not take it lying down.

He responded by attacking some of Propaganda’s more conspicuous failures, such as “Kalifornia” and “A Stranger Among Us.” Further, he contends, PolyGram refused, for political reasons, to allow “Bacon” to be shown at the recent Sundance Film Festival.

“I was very disturbed,” Moore says. “I was told that given the political climate in the country, showing the film this far in advance would allow opposition in the film to build up by those offended by its politics.”

PolyGram’s stance was all the more surprising, he says, since TriStar Television and the Fox network wanted him to immediately create new episodes of his iconoclastic series “TV Nation” in reaction to the ’94 election results.

“Here you have Rupert Murdoch’s network asking me to rush my show into production and a purportedly liberal company like PolyGram being frightened by my film. I would think that ‘Bacon’ is the perfect elixir after last November’s elections.”

G olin has denied Moore’s charges, though he would not comment for this story. Graves says Moore’s accusations “may or may not be true.” But the real reason PolyGram would not let Moore show the film at Sundance, he says, “is that we didn’t want to build heat at a film festival in January and then dissipate it by releasing the film nine months later.”

For his part, Moore is pleased with “Bacon’s” fate: “Gramercy is the perfect company to release my film. They appreciate its subversive nature,” he says.

Says Brown: “When I say this film needs to be released carefully, I mean that it needs to be presented to its core audience, which are grown-ups. Some of the teens in the test screenings didn’t even know who the governor of California was.”

So, Moore cautions, “if you don’t know the governor of your state and at least one of your senators, don’t go see my film.”*