They are Totally Fucked
Fahrenheit 9/11 could light fire under Bush
Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
Monday May 17, 2004
The Guardian
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is without doubt the most flaming-hot ticket at the Cannes film festival. And with good reason: Moore hopes that it will bring down the US government.
The American film-maker has hitherto kept a tight lid on the contents of the documentary, saying only that it includes evidence of alleged links between the Bush and Bin Laden families. However, in two appearances in Cannes at the weekend before its premiere today, he revealed that the movie contains shocking footage from Iraq.
Yesterday he said: "When you see the movie you will see things you have never seen before, you will learn things you have never known before. Half the movie is about Iraq - we were able to get film crews embedded with American troops without them knowing that it was Michael Moore. They are totally fucked."
On Saturday he said: "The film is only partly to do with the Bin Ladens and Bush. I was able to send three different freelance film crews to Iraq. Soldiers had written to me to express their disillusionment with the war. It's a case of our own troops not being in support of their commander-in-chief."
He said that at the few low-key preview screenings that have already taken place in the midwest "the reactions were overwhelming. People who were on the fence - undecided voters - suddenly weren't on the fence any more."
Moore was unequivocal about his desire to do everything in his power to help oust President George Bush in this November's elections.
"We thought, 'We cannot leave this to the Democrats this time to fuck it up and lose.'" He wants, he said, to "inspire people to get up and vote in November."
There has already been a complicated saga over the distribution of the film. At the start of the month it became clear that Disney, the parent company of Miramax - which made Fahrenheit 9/11 - was refusing to distribute it in the US.
The film currently has distribution, according to Moore, in every other country except Taiwan.
After a baffling series of rumours and counter-rumours last week, it was revealed that Disney was allowing Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who run Miramax, to buy back their interest in the film so they could seek an alternative distributor. After a fortnight, none has yet been found.
The reasons for Disney's refusal, Moore claimed, were purely political, aimed at delaying the film's release and thus preventing Americans from seeing the explosive material it contains before the election.
"The past year we knew that Michael Eisner [CEO of Disney] was not happy about Miramax making the film but they kept on sending the money every month," Moore said on Saturday. "At the end of April they sent an executive to look at the film. They had a board meeting and five days later they decided not to distribute it, because of its political content."
Yesterday he said: "That's the reason for the blocking: so that Americans don't see it before the election."
He added: "I won't let that happen, and neither will Harvey [Weinstein]. People will see this film, by hook or by crook. I will get this out if it means breaking the law or committing an act of civil disobedience."
Eisner has previously denied that there was anything sinister about Disney's decision to block distribution. "We're such a nonpartisan company," he said. "[People] do not look for us to take sides."
The contract between Disney and Miramax states that Disney can refuse to distribute a film in certain cases, for instance if it has an NC-17 rating - the US equivalent of an 18 certificate. Under such circumstances Miramax has in the past found alternative distribution - for Dogma, a 1999 satire on the Catholic church, and Larry Clark's Kids, eventually released in 1995, which shocked many with its frank depiction of sex among teenagers.
Moore is clearly furious with the company. "I have a lot to say about Disney. It is very dangerous to give someone like me a peek behind the curtain. I will tell all as soon as the [distribution] negotiations have ended," he said on Saturday.
The film-maker is also unhappy with the way the controversy has been handled in the media.
"The press have said, 'Isn't it great for the movie?' But the last two times this happened - with Dogma and Kids - you only have to look at the box office to see that the controversy didn't help. No film-maker wants this to happen.
"I don't like the message this sends, which is, 'Don't even think of making a movie like [Fahrenheit 9/11] - it won't get distributed.' This is a chilling effect it will have. Five men and one woman [the Disney board] make a decision about what Americans can see. This is not a sign of an open and healthy society."
Moore's position has not met with universal sympathy. A piece in the Los Angeles Times last week accused his last film, Bowling for Columbine, of being "a torrent of partial truths, pointed omissions and deliberate misimpressions" and called him a "virtuoso of fictions".
But Moore has no plans to shut up shop just yet. He is planning films "on the Israelis and Palestinians, and the oil industry and lack of oil we are going to be faced with".
Comments
Way 2 go Moore. We'll need a lot more like you to find out the real truth. And like they say, The Truth is Out There!
LA Times, meet kettle.
Isreal, Palestine, Peak Oil, sounds like Moore is on a mission to provide information that the powers that be don't want us to have.
Bruce, someone will have to explain peak oil to me in a way that is convincing. From what I have heard about it so far the idea sounds ridiculous.
Many of the ideas which are most anathema to the powers that be can be found in any college library and need not be censored in the grand and public way that Moore's film might have been censored. Scholars at publicly funded universities in America still argue for socialism, just war theory, and pacifism; and social historians document the heavy costs of wars, and the U.S. government's involvement in a number of seedy operations. These and many other ideas would be a threat to the ruling classes in America if they were heard and taken seriously. But they aren't taken that seriously, and this is due as much to the so-called 'common sense' of the majority as it is to the conscious efforts of elites.
Dende, re: peak oil, Here is an interview with professor Richard Heinberg, who has written a book on it. Basically, once you hit the peak, which we are pretty much at right now, the oil dries up fast because whatever is left becomes an energy sink, i.e. you spend more energy trying to get it out of the ground than you get from the extracted oil.
Oil is like air, no one thinks about it, but without it, everything changes -- for the worse, at least in the economic/industrial system throughout the developed world. We are running out. We should be dealing with it. If the U.S. gov. was honest, they'd admit that they are by launching a war for control of Mid East oil.
by the way, both Bush and Cheney have off-the-grid, energy-sustainable homes.
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/ARTICLES/richardheinberg.museletter.petroleumplateau.2003-05.php
I looked at a Heinberg article, and it did have a lot more good sense in it than other peak oil stuff I've read (no doubt second- or third-hand accounts). Still, he seems to slip occasionally into ill founded conspiratorial claims, like:
"Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that the 2004 national elections will be illegally manipulated via unsupervised computer voting machines."
Where is the evidence of this? Computer voting machines have been killed in many areas where they were proposed, and even if they were manipulated in the few areas where they exist, it would not change many elections. Even so, what evidence is there that there is a nationwide conspiracy to get electronic voting in place and then cynically manipulate it to help Bush? The existence of the will and the means is dubious to say the least. Having said that, I am against electronic voting.
Thanks for the link. Mine didn't work for some reason.
Yeah, manipulation of our democracy and the coming oil crisis -- two paridigm-busters that are hard to swallow.