Michael Moore
Michael Francis Moore (born April 23, 1954) is an American documentary filmmaker and author. He is best known for his work on globalization and capitalism.
Moore won the 2002 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Bowling for Columbine, which examined the causes of the Columbine High School massacre and the overall gun culture of the United States. He also directed and produced Fahrenheit 9/11, a critical look at the presidency of George W. Bush and the War on Terror, which earned $119,194,771 to become the highest-grossing documentary at the American box office of all time. The film also won the Palme d’Or at the 2004 Cannes film festival. His documentary Sicko, which examines health care in the United States, is one of the top ten highest-grossing documentaries as of 2020. In September 2008, he released his first free movie on the internet, Slacker Uprising, which documented his personal quest to encourage more Americans to vote in presidential elections.He has also written and starred in the TV shows TV Nation, a satirical news-magazine television series, and The Awful Truth, a satirical show. In 2018 he released his latest film, Fahrenheit 11/9, a documentary about the 2016 United States presidential election and the subsequent presidency of Donald Trump.
Early life
Michael Francis Moore was born in Flint, Michigan, and raised in Davison by parents Helen Veronica (née Wall) (1921–2002), a secretary, and Francis Richard “Frank” Moore, (1921–2014) an automotive assembly-line worker. At that time, the city of Flint was home to many General Motors factories, where his parents and grandfather worked. His uncle LaVerne was one of the founders of the United Automobile Workers labor union and participated in the Flint sit-down strike.
Moore was brought up Catholic, and has Irish, and smaller amounts of Scottish and English, ancestry. He attended parochial St. John’s Elementary School for primary school and later attended St. Paul’s Seminary in Saginaw, Michigan, for a year. He then attended Davison High School, where he was active in both drama and debate, graduating in 1972. As a member of the Boy Scouts of America, he achieved the rank of Eagle Scout. At the age of 18, he was elected to the Davison school board. At the time he was the youngest person elected to office in the U.S., as the minimum age to hold public office had just been lowered to 18.
Moore dropped out of the University of Michigan–Flint following his first year (where he wrote for the student newspaper The Michigan Times). At 22 he founded the alternative weekly magazine The Flint Voice, which soon changed its name to The Michigan Voice as it expanded to cover the entire state. Popstar Harry Chapin is credited with being the reason the magazine was able to start by performing benefit concerts and donating the money to Moore. Moore crept backstage after a concert to Chapin’s dressing room and convinced him to do a concert and give the money to him. Chapin subsequently did a concert in Flint every year.
In 1986, when Moore became the editor of Mother Jones, a liberal political magazine, The Michigan Voice was shut down by the investors and he moved to California.
After four months at Mother Jones, Moore was fired. Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard reported this was for refusing to print an article by Paul Berman that was critical of the Sandinista human rights record in Nicaragua.Moore refused to run the article, believing it to be inaccurate. “The article was flatly wrong and the worst kind of patronizing bullshit. You would scarcely know from it that the United States had been at war with Nicaragua for the last five years.”
The 1989 film Roger & Me was Moore’s first documentary about what happened to Flint, Michigan, after General Motors closed its factories and opened new ones in Mexico where the workers were paid much less. Since then Moore has become known as a critic of the neoliberal view of globalization.[citation needed] “Roger” is Roger B. Smith, former CEO and President of General Motors. Harlan Jacobson, editor of Film Comment magazine, said that Moore muddled the chronology in Roger & Me to make it seem that events that took place before G.M.’s layoffs were a consequence of them.[citation needed] Critic Roger Ebert defended Moore’s handling of the timeline as an artistic and stylistic choice that had less to do with his credibility as a filmmaker and more to do with the flexibility of film as a medium to express a satiric viewpoint.
Moore believes that Mother Jones fired him because of the publisher’s refusal to allow him to cover a story on the GM plant closings in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. He responded by putting laid-off GM worker Ben Hamper (who was also writing for the same magazine at the time) on the magazine’s cover, leading to his termination. Moore sued for wrongful dismissal, and settled out of court for $58,000, providing him with seed money for his first film, Roger & Me.
Fahrenheit 9/11
Moore’s next film, Fahrenheit 9/11, released in 2004, examines America in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, particularly the record of the George W. Bush Administration and alleged links between the families of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. Fahrenheit was awarded the Palme d’Or, the top honor at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival; it was the first documentary film to win the prize since 1956. Moore later announced that Fahrenheit 9/11 would not be in consideration for the 2005 Academy Award for Documentary Feature, but instead for the Academy Award for Best Picture. He stated he wanted the movie to be seen by a few million more people via television broadcast prior to Election Day. According to Moore, “Academy rules forbid the airing of a documentary on television within nine months of its theatrical release”, and since the November 2 election was fewer than nine months after the film’s release, it would have been disqualified for the Documentary Oscar. Regardless, Fahrenheit did not receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The title of the film alludes to the classic book Fahrenheit 451 about a future totalitarian state in which books are banned; according to the book, paper begins to burn at 451 °F (233 °C). The pre-release subtitle of the film confirms the allusion: “The temperature at which freedom burns.”
As of August 2012, Fahrenheit 9/11 is the highest-grossing documentary of all time, taking in over US$200 million worldwide, including United States box office revenue of almost US$120 million. In February 2011, Moore sued producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein for US$2.7 million in unpaid profits from the film, claiming they used “Hollywood accounting tricks” to avoid paying him the money. In February 2012, Moore and the Weinsteins informed the court that they had settled their dispute
Fahrenheit 11/9
In May 2017, it was announced that Moore had reunited with Harvey Weinstein to direct his new film about Donald Trump, titled Fahrenheit 11/9, which was released in approximately 1,500 theaters in the United States and Canada on September 21, 2018. Sexual assault allegations against Weinstein prompted Moore to revoke the plan to work with The Weinstein Company, which stalled production. The title refers to the day when Donald Trump officially became President-elect of the United States. In a column for Variety responding to the film’s low opening weekend, “How Michael Moore Lost His Audience”, sympathetic film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote “He’s like an aging rock star putting out albums that simply don’t mean as much to those who were, and are, his core fans”. According to Glenn Greenwald, “what he’s trying is of unparalleled importance: not to take the cheap route of exclusively denouncing Trump but to take the more complicated, challenging, and productive route of understanding who and what created the climate in which Trump could thrive.”
Personal lifeMoore married film producer Kathleen Glynn on October 19, 1991. He filed for divorce on June 17, 2013. On July 22, 2014, the divorce was finalized.
Moore was raised a Catholic but is no longer a practicing member of the Church. He disagrees with church teaching on subjects such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In an interview with The A.V. Club, when asked if there was a God, he stated, “Yes, there is. I don’t know how you define that, but yeah.”
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