'Michael Moore Hates America' huge hit
10-minute standing ovation for documentary at film festival
Posted: September 14, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Ron Strom
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
"Michael Moore Hates America," a documentary that challenges the leftist filmmaker, received a huge response at the American Film Renaissance festival in Dallas, packing out two showings and eliciting a 10-minute standing ovation.
"That crowd response was bigger than anything I've seen in a theater in my life," Jim Hubbard, the co-founder of the festival, told WorldNetDaily. The festival ran from Sept. 10-12.
Hubbard said demand to see the film was so high, the theater was bursting at the seams during the second showing.
"We really packed them in," he said. "We were having to turn people away."
Hubbard says he is confident the man who made "Michael Moore Hates America," 27-year-old Mike Wilson, will secure a theatrical distributor for his work.
"They're going to get distribution," he predicted. "This thing is just too huge."
Wilson was in attendance for both showings, Hubbard said. "[The moviegoers] were treating him like a rock star."
Added Hubbard, "He really peeled the hide off of Michael Moore."
In one scene, the American soldier who lost both arms in Iraq and who was shown in Moore's Bush-bashing "Fahrenheit 9/11" said he was taken out of context in the left-wing documentary.
According to Hubbard, the soldier said in the new film he had planned to be a technical engineer and could no longer do so because he lost him arms. He emphasized, however, that if he had to do it over again, he would, because "what we're doing in Iraq is important." The soldier said he was furious about the way Moore had portrayed him in "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Hubbard noted, "Moore used the south of France [Cannes Film Festival] to launch his left-wing documentary, and we used the heartland of the country, Dallas, Texas, to launch the counterpunch. There are two conflicting moral views right there."
Other films that were popular at the festival, which Hubbard says was the first conservative film festival in the nation, included "Is it True What They Say About Ann?" a documentary about columnist Ann Coulter, "Confronting Iraq" and "Michael and Me," another film responding to Michael Moore.
"Stolen Honor," a film that tells the stories of former POWs who felt betrayed by Sen. John Kerry's 1971 testimony accusing American servicemen of war crimes, also was well-received, Hubbard said.
Hubbard says there were between 3,000 and 4,000 tickets sold altogether for the 17 films that were screened.