It's Michael and them
MICHAEL MOORE earned his celebrity stalking General Motors' chief executive, shaming gun lover Charlton Heston and lampooning President Bush while playing the all-American little guy.
That cheeky style so inspired liberal Toronto filmmakers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine that when their attempts to interview Moore were stonewalled, they Michael Moore-ed the master. They trailed his 2004 tour of college campuses, cornered him at his own film festival, and even faked credentials to get into one of his lectures, antics that got them booted from the event. The result is "Manufacturing Dissent," a "Roger & Me"-style expedition, starring the self-styled champion of the proletariat as an ethically bereft icon of info-tainment.
"We agree the bigger message Michael Moore is talking about is great," said Melnyk. "But you have to give your message in an honest way, and that's the debate we wanted to bring out."
The film has been touring the festivals, just in time to ride the controversy and media froth kicked up by Moore's latest missive, "Sicko," an indictment of U.S. healthcare, opening in L.A. Friday. But the publicity hasn't helped Melnyk and Caine much.
The film still has no U.S. theatrical distribution, though last week L.A.-based Liberation Entertainment bought the rights to distribute it on DVD in the U.S. and Britain on the heels of "Sicko." Moore has repeatedly declined comment on "Dissent," including requests for this story. Last weekend, however, after a screening of "Sicko" not far from his home near Bellaire, Mich., Moore denied the film's most damning allegation: that he'd fabricated the premise of "Roger & Me."
In a few cases, Melnyk and Caine's efforts to screen their movie have bumped up against Moore's substantial influence in the world of documentary film. He's the box office king of the genre, celebrated both by the film elite and by average Americans. Even Moore haters see his films, if for no other reason than to blog about them. At the same time, Moore has become a symbol of the liberal left, one of its loudest and most confrontational voices.
Melnyk, a Toronto-born freelance TV producer, and her husband, Caine, an Ohio native and cameraman, spent about two years on the film, first trailing Moore on his Great '04 Slacker Uprising tour of college campuses for CHUM Television, which will air "Dissent" this fall on the Bravo!Canada network. Every time the filmmakers asked Moore for a sit-down interview, he politely declined, explaining he had no time.
