Irreverence, Umbrage & Him

Michael Moore heaves a big sigh. He has the air of someone much put upon. So many balls in the air. So much on his plate. Recently he completed a talk-show pilot. Today he flies to Los Angeles to sign the principal cast members of his sitcom pilot, “Better Days,” and to shoot a cameo in Ron Howard’s new film, “Ed TV.” In four days he has to turn in a book, “Adventures in a TV Nation.”

And on top of all this, he’s spent the last several nights editing out a scene in his new documentary, “The Big One,” in which actor and cable TV personality Charles Grodin says: “I don’t feel like there’s any blood going to my brain. I mean, nothing.”

Apparently Grodin didn’t think this was funny. It comes at the end of a sequence in which Moore fantasizes about the accolades coming his way after the publication of his book “Downsize This!”--Nobels, Pulitzers, appearances on “The Charles Grodin Show.”

“About four months ago he objected to this,” Moore says. “And I had told him at the time, ‘Look, it’s fair use, you’re a public figure, copyright laws allow you to use up to 30 seconds in something like this.’ And then at the last minute, meaning three or four days ago, they told Miramax--the BBC, they own the film--they told them to yank it.”

Moore says the BBC did this because it lost in a bidding war with Britain’s Channel 4 to fund 16 more episodes of his TV show “TV Nation.” The show, which has been picked up and dropped several times, features such lefty gadfly pranks as the CEO Challenge, in which corporate chiefs were invited to perform the same tasks as their lowliest employees.

“It’s just kind of a childish retaliation to sort of muck things up,” Moore says of the BBC’s decision, adding that he plugged the hole that was created when he dropped Grodin’s quote by adding a free-for-all from “The Jerry Springer Show.”

“That’s absolute nonsense,” says a BBC spokesperson. “It has nothing to do with the fact that Channel 4 has beaten us to getting Michael Moore’s future.”

It’s a constant battle with Moore. He will bite the hand that feeds him and expect others to do the same. At a Sundance Film Festival panel he put fellow documentarian Ken Burns on the defensive by challenging him to criticize one of his backers, General Motors.

Moore has a special interest in GM. His fame rests on “Roger & Me,” the 1989 documentary about the economic collapse of his hometown of Flint, Mich., and his attempts to track down GM Chairman Roger Smith and show him the devastation wrought by GM plant closings. Moore’s mockery excited much praise and also a backlash: by GM (naturally), union officials (who felt they were depicted as uncaring), and some film critics (Pauline Kael said he “improvises his own version of history” and uses “leftism as a superior attitude”). Generally Moore’s M.O. is to get people to say something revealingly stupid on camera--his manner is gentle, folksy, disarming--so critics can and do attack him and his techniques rather than his message.

For example, Moore, 43, has been criticized for abandoning his working-class roots by using the profits from “Roger & Me” to move to a fancy apartment in New York City. But he says he spends about four months a year in Flint and has used a portion of the film’s profits to establish the Center for Alternative Media, which has funded everything from Act-Up to the 1992 Academy Award-winning documentary, “The Panama Deception.”

“It’s really about class,” he says. “Nobody from the working class would ever criticize that I was able to go from turning in a 1040 in 1990 that had $12,000 in income on it--when you come from the working class, your goal is to try to improve your condition, improve the condition of your children.”

Similarly, some critics attacked “TV Nation” by going after his administrative skills on the show and his alleged unwillingness to allow its writers to unionize.

The same ad hominem fate may befall “The Big One.” The film follows Moore’s 47-city “Downsize This!” book tour and his search for each city’s most irresponsible corporate citizen. Moore is front and center, delivering lectures in bookstores to rapturous audiences, comforting a teary fan who’s just been fired, receiving a cigarette lighter homage in the very auditorium where Secretary of State Madeleine Albright took such a beating, meeting clandestinely in a parking lot with grateful unionizing Borders bookstore employees.

He even heroically ventures into the lion’s den, offering Nike CEO Phil Knight a ticket to Indonesia to confront his company’s child labor practices there.

“That was the editor’s idea,” Moore says of his starring role. “We had a project that we had to do, so I said, ‘I’m going to let you go ahead and piece it together for a month and then I’ll come in for the next two months and we’ll work in the editing room.’ I said, ‘My one rule is when in doubt, cut me out.’ It’s not what people want to look at, to see me 40 feet blown up.”

“He wanted himself out,” agrees his wife, Kathleen Glynn, who also serves as his producer and co-wrote “Adventures in a TV Nation.” “It took a long time to get him to understand that in a way it doesn’t matter if it’s him. People are starving for the message. And it just happens to be embodied in him.”

In his last film and first fiction feature, 1995’s “Canadian Bacon,” the message was about a presidential spin doctor who fabricates a war with Canada to divert public attention from an administration’s shortcomings. Sound familiar? Moore wasn’t anticipating the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He was reacting to our entry into the Gulf War.

Needless to say, Moore was gratified by the skeptical reception accorded Secretary Albright, Secretary of Defense William Cohen and national security advisor Samuel Berger when they tried to explain the administration’s recent showdown with Iraq at a town meeting at Ohio State University.

“I’m surprised that people from the East and West Coasts do not understand those of us from the Midwest,” he says. “They just think that, like lemmings, people out there are going to go for this. I get a kick out of the fact that they thought they could go there and be safe. They don’t understand that the safe place to go is California, where they continually elect Republican governors and gave us Nixon.”

Moore had trouble getting “Canadian Bacon” released because its star, John Candy, died before its release. He says tests showed that audiences didn’t want to laugh at, or with, a dead man. It was eventually released by a Polygram subsidiary, Gramercy, dying a quiet death at the box office.

After that, Moore was in no particular rush to return to film. In fact, originally he had no intention of filming the “Downsize This!” book tour. What finally pushed Moore over the edge was an encounter with George Bush’s son Neil in the lobby of a GM office building in Cleveland where Moore was being interviewed for radio.

“He sees me and he goes, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” Moore says. “And I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ He goes, ‘Where’s the camera?’ And I said, ‘There is no camera.’ He comes over and pinches my cheeks. He goes, ‘Ah, no camera. That’s why you didn’t shave.’ I said, ‘Get your hands off me.’ It was really weird.

“I said, ‘That’s it, no more being without my camera.’ ”