Posted on 03/04/2007 4:44:31 AM PST by MadIvan
THE hunter has become the hunted. Michael Moore, the celebrated left-wing film-maker, has become the unwilling subject of a new documentary that raises damaging questions about the credibility of his work.
The director and star of successful documentaries such as Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore has repeatedly been accused by his right-wing enemies of distorting or manipulating the material in his films. On his website he dismisses his critics as “wacko attackos”.
Yet the latest assault on Moore’s film-making techniques has come from an unexpected quarter. In Manufacturing Dissent, a documentary to be shown for the first time at a Texas film festival on Saturday, a pair of left-wing Canadian film-makers take Moore to task for what they describe as a disturbing pattern of fact-fudging and misrepresentation.
“When we started this project we hoped to have done a documentary that celebrated Michael Moore. We were admirers and fans,” said Debbie Melnyk, who made the film with her husband, Rick Caine. “Then we found out certain facts about his documentaries that we hadn’t known before. We ended up very disappointed and disillusioned.”
Melnyk and Caine are best known for their previous documentary Citizen Black, about Conrad Black, the Canadian-born former proprietor of The Daily Telegraph. Last week both of them acknowledged an important debt to Moore for popularising the documentary genre.
Yet when Caine and Melnyk began to follow him as part of their own documentary, their efforts to interview him met with the same kind of obstruction, denial and, ultimately, physical ejection that Moore had suffered when he tried to track down Roger Smith, the former chief executive of General Motors, for his first film, Roger & Me.
It was in Flint, Michigan, Moore’s former home town, that Caine and Melnyk made the first discovery that they say rocked their confidence in his approach. Roger & Me was a hugely successful account of what Moore portrayed as a fruitless task to force Smith to answer questions about GM’s policies in closing the car manufacturing plants that had long been Flint’s economic lifeline.
Caine and Melnyk claim that Moore interviewed Smith on camera twice. But the scenes were left on the cutting room floor, apparently for greater dramatic effect.
Manufacturing Dissent includes a long catalogue of alleged exaggerations or distortions in several of Moore’s films. In Bowling for Columbine, a scathing indictment of US gun violence, Moore visited Toronto to show parts of the city that were supposedly so free of crime everyone left their front doors unlocked.
“In the film, Michael makes it look as though 100% of the doors were unlocked, but his local producer told us it was really only 40%,” said Caine.
Caine and Melnyk said they had hoped to interview Moore about his views on how much editing was acceptable before a factual documentary turned into misleading propaganda.
“We had met him at a premiere of the Columbine film in Toronto, and he said, ‘Oh yes, talk to my people and they’ll set something up’,” said Caine. “We then called his people and they said he’s not doing any more interviews in Toronto. We had his e-mail, we sent a letter to his lawyers, we had his phone number in New York. But each time he said no.”
Then Caine and Melnyk began to run into open hostility. Eventually, in a scene that might have come from Roger & Me, they were bundled out of an event at Kent State University, where Moore’s sister, Anne, knocked aside Caine’s camera.
Moore is reportedly editing his next film, Sicko, about the US healthcare system, and a spokesman said he had no comment on Manufacturing Dissent. On his website he dismissed critics of Bowling for Columbine as “lying liars” and claimed that “organised groups [are] going full blast trying to discredit me”.
Yet Caine and Melnyk insist they should not be confused with the right-wing hordes who want to damage Moore.
“If you have to sell out your values and principles to get at a greater truth, where does that leave you?” said Melnyk.
“If we think it’s wrong for the government to lie and manipulate, how do we think that [left-wingers] doing it is the solution?”
Big fat BUMP!!
In 2000, Al Gore was NOT elected President because of Tennessee, his home state voting against him.
In 2006, bucking an anti-Republican tide in the election, Tennessee elects a Republican over Harold Ford, Jr despite massive MSM support.
Tennessee can stand proud.
“The great misfortune of the Twentieth Century is to have been the one in which the ideal of liberty was harnessed to the service of tyranny, the ideal of equality to the service of privilege, and all the aspirations and social forces included under the label of the "Left" enrolled in the service of impoverishment and enslavement. This immense imposture has falsified most of this century, partly through the faults of some of its greatest intellectuals. It has corrupted the language and action of politics down to tiny details of vocabulary, it has inverted the sense of morality and enthroned falsehood in the very center of human thought.”
The Flight From Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information
1991, Random House Jean Francois-Revel
The more intense the love, the more intense the hatred after betrayal.
If more conservative film makers and documentarians actually got off of their collective @sses and made and distributed a barrage of films, TV, shows etc as the left knows how to do so well, I truly believe that the public will start rebelling against the extreme hypocrisy that is being practiced by the left. The truth needs to get out there.
This IS the only way to preach to this entertainment and media driven culture and society. You must enter into the industry and use it to teach the masses that they are being duped. This has to be done outside of talk radio and Fox News in order to get the message to the main stream public. With enough cash and flash in the projects, the public will be attracted to the new way of thinking.
You know, much like the same way people are attracted to shiny objects, a well made and attractive production will be attractive to the masses. The liberals realize this and use it well and to their advantage.
Why don't we?
Perception is reality as they say.
Any "documentary" that won an Oscar after 2000, is by definition, a complete fraud and 100% propaganda.
I can show you a neighborhood where 90% of the doors are unlocked. It's mine. In the US.
I don't have any list. Those are the ones that I personally noticed. There are lists on the Internet that you can Google.
With a title of "An Inconvenient Truth" I guess we're supposed to believe someone is hiding massive planetary changes from everyone except Al Gore.
Thanks will do.
I have a friend who sets up for big concerts, conventions, etc. He worked on the DNC convention and he says that MM was a complete jerk to the hands. Someone brought them a box of doughnuts and MM ate a bite out of every doughnut and then left them on the tray.
Seems like he has the typical leftie's contempt for the "lower" classes.
These lefties get it half right. It's not "a greater truth" or any kind of truth at all that Michael Moore is after.
“If we think it’s wrong for the government to lie and manipulate, how do we think that [left-wingers] doing it is the solution?”
Because the only way to promote leftist ideals is to lie. Honesty leads away from liberalism.
All kinds of good news today about so called left wing documentaries. Good for these people for standing up for the truth.
Wow, think I'll give Revel a look.
His stuff is definitely worth your while.
AMEN BUMP
I'm surprised they didn't mention Larry Elder's movie "Michael and Me"
MadIvan
Good point!
Michael Moore began his parasitical career based on the glaring false illusion that he was the common man’s champion.That is what his movie Roger was all about. If examined closer the shaded beginnings of Moore’s existence, and his career ever since, is built upon the backs of activist auto worker rebels many years ago….not Moore’s.
Moore was no blue collar activist rebel, he had no credentials, he led nothing and did nothing but occasionally assist these Flint rebels. Moore wasn’t even from Flint and was no more then a very unsuccessful unknown talking head that took on the identity of these blue-collar rebels who were putting everything on the line every day.
He has gotten away with it and has fooled the world for 25 years…until now.
There are sites with historical documentation of these events…
http://michaelwestfall.tripod.com/id17.html
Examine this particular piece closely especially the … “conclusion.” .
Thanks to films like Manufacturing dissent this Moore story is going to explode in America.
Given a choice between two documentaries exposing Michael Moore for the odous, hypocritical pile of crap he is, and three documentaries exposing Michael Moore for the odous, hypocritical pile of crap he is, I'll take the latter. Enthusiastically!
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