Cinema verities

Michael Moore, the subject of the documentary Manufacturing Dissent. (HotDocs)

In 2003, when filmmaker Michael Moore accepted his best documentary Oscar for Bowling for Columbine with the now infamous anti-Bush jab, “We live in fictitious times,” he wasn’t being self-referential. But the phrase sours into irony and hangs over Manufacturing Dissent, a skeptical examination of Moore’s more dubious filmmaking tactics that’s one of the most controversial offerings at this year’s Hot Docs film festival in Toronto.

The night of the Bowling for Columbine Oscar speech, married documentary filmmakers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine were watching the Moore-incited huzzahs and hurrahs from their house on a quiet, hilly street in east Toronto. Firmly on the left side of the political divide, the pair were unadulterated fans of Moore’s Angry Joe persona and films like Roger & Me, his 1989 anti-corporate-greed screed, and Bowling for Columbine, his 2002 dissection of gun violence in the United States. Moore had made the documentary form palatable to the masses, and they were grateful. 

“Look, we’re old-school lefties. I play basketball on a team with Linda McQuaig and we don’t keep score. We jokingly call it the Communist Basketball league,” says Caine, with Melnyk sitting next to him in the sunny living room of their house.

But a film that started out as a tribute to a peer hero took some strange turns, and soon Melnyk found herself chasing Moore the way Moore chased GM CEO Roger Smith in Roger & Me. She discovered a complicated, evasive man, described by one old friend as “a megalomaniac with a touch of paranoia” — and that’s from someone who likes him.

When Melnyk finally, and nervously, corners Moore, he defuses questions about whether or not his private foundation owned stock in Haliburton (it did) with a condescending bear hug, almost as if to shut her up. On another occasion, Melnyk and Caine are ousted from one of Moore’s public appearances by Moore’s sister, who knocks their camera to the ground in a fury. The pair discovers that while Moore demands accountability of his political nemeses, he makes himself inaccessible to the media and usually walks away from anyone who doesn’t flatter his worldview. The film includes a fascinating 1995 interview conducted by then CBC arts journalist David Gilmour, who dared to confront Moore on the poor quality of his one non-doc, Canadian Bacon. An agitated Moore comes across as surprisingly thin-skinned.

And yet, these glimpses into the filmmaker’s psychology aren’t the substance of the film.

“We decided not to follow the personal, biographical dimension too much,” says Caine. “We wanted to examine his filmmaking and his techniques, and take the high road. We never intended to do an attack film.”

“The original version is three hours and 45 minutes and even more balanced,” says Melnyk. “I’d be down in our basement with our editor going: ‘You just put in something bad, now put in something good!’”

The result is a film too complex to be slotted into the sub-genre of anti-Moore films like conservative talk-show host Larry Elder’s Michael & Me, often shown at right-wing film festivals. Moore’s generosity comes across — he gives one employee free plane tickets to Vancouver for an important personal event — and his dedication to his causes is undeniably sincere.

Michael Moore introduces his film Fahrenheit 9/11 during the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival. (HotDocs)

But Manufacturing Dissent — a riff on the title of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s seminal book about media manipulation, Manufacturing Consent — also implies that Moore flagrantly violates documentary ethics. Moore apparently has a propensity for unacknowledged stunt journalism, taking people out of context, major chronological leaps and lying. In Roger & Me, a film about the destruction of Moore’s hometown of Flint, Mich., in the wake of GM’s profits-first pullout, Moore’s quest for GM honcho Roger Smith is fruitless; the joke, and tragedy, is that Moore never meets his Godot. But in Manufacturing Dissent, a former friend and union activist named Jim Musselman confirms that Moore met with Smith twice, once landing a 20-minute interview. Moore essentially asked him to bury the footage.

In the film, Melnyk calls Smith himself, who picks up the phone and politely debunks another famous scene from Roger & Me: a shareholder meeting that shows Moore, face to face with Smith in public at last, having his microphone cut off before he can get a question out. According to Musselman, the entire moment was a fiction staged for the camera. Smith agrees, telling Melnyk he doesn’t remember Moore being at the meeting, but he does remember Ralph Nader and Jim Musselman, who both confronted GM over their labour practices. Finally, Smith says that he would never cut someone off at a public shareholder’s meeting: “It’s not my style,” he explains.

When Moore has been called on to answer for these kinds of transgressions (something that happens rarely; the film subtly shames the press for giving Moore a free ride), he employs the kind of media-savvy techniques that he crucifies President Bush for in Fahrenheit 9/11, either flat-out denying the allegations, or refusing to engage in a dialogue about his methods at all. Moore did exactly this when he claimed in a recent interview that he was unaware of Manufacturing Dissent.

The question, in the age of James Frey and “truthiness” (Stephen Colbert’s term for truth that just feels true, regardless of the facts), is why Moore doesn’t cop to a theatrical streak — the guy was a drama geek in high school — and acknowledge that what he does isn’t quite documentary, but it’s still important.

“One of his old friends told us that Michael has a pathological need to be right, and I believe that informs everything,” says Caine. “All he has to do is say: ‘I made a mistake [faking these events],’ but he never accepts responsibility for anything.”

Adds Melnyk: “When Michael started, Jon Stewart, truthiness and all of that wasn’t around. It was Michael who elevated documentary to an entertaining form. That sly way of looking at things, the tongue in cheek, comes from him. It’s sort of like society has caught up with him. The difference is that Jon Stewart lets you in on the joke, and Michael never would.”

Deception is also at the heart of Melnyk and Caine’s two other films. The 1998 documentary Junket Whore exposed the corruption of celebrity journalism, and then they went after another moral question mark: Conrad Black. Last fall, American prosecutors in the Black case (the fallen media baron is on trial in the U.S. for defrauding his company, Hollinger International) asked the filmmakers for footage taken surreptitiously at a shareholders meeting during the making of their film Citizen Black. They handed the film over under advisement of a lawyer who told them they would have to do so anyway due to a reciprocal treaty with the U.S. “The whole meeting was available in transcript from Bloomberg anyway,” says Caine, sounding a little miserable about what could be interpreted as a pair of whistleblowers violating their own journalistic ethics. “I do now regard that as bad advice.”

“Conrad was an evasive subject, too, and really difficult. After him, we wanted to do something easy, about someone we liked,” laughs Melnyk. “We seriously considered abandoning [the Moore film] once we started getting into it. It was just such an exhausting, depleting project. But we really felt like what Moore is doing is dangerous to our profession.”

They aren’t alone. In Manufacturing Dissent, documentary veterans Errol Morris (The Fog of War) and Albert Maysles (Gimme Shelter) weigh in with their hesitations about Moore. Maysles, a pioneer of the cinema verite style of observational filmmaking, is particularly appalled by Moore’s methods.

“Maysles basically thinks Moore is tarnishing the name of the documentary,” says Caine. “He’s gone so far as to say the documentary community needs to speak up because if you’re a fruit vendor, and you put your apples with the worms up front, people are going to stop buying after a while.”

But people do buy Moore’s apples, wormy or not, and his fans are devoted — so much so that Caine and Melnyk have received a handful of death threats via e-mail from people accusing them of helping the right in America, and harming the left.

“I think people get invested because we want to believe him,” says Melnyk. “If he’s telling a story you want to hear, you don’t want to question it.”

But for these two filmmakers, skepticism has its limits. “If one more person contacts us about taking down An Inconvenient Truth, we’re running,” laughs Caine.

Manufacturing Dissent plays April 22 and April 24 at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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