Liberals Film Documentary Attacking Michael Moore

Documentary 'Manufacturing Dissent' Turns Cameras on Michael Moore and Questions His Tactics

By CHRISTY LEMIRE

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) -- As documentary filmmakers, Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine looked up to Michael Moore. Then they tried to do a documentary of their own about him - and ran into the same sort of resistance Moore himself famously faces in his own films.

The result is "Manufacturing Dissent," which turns the camera on the confrontational documentarian and examines some of his methods. Among their revelations in the movie, which had its world premiere Saturday night at the South by Southwest film festival: That Moore actually did speak with then-General Motors chairman Roger Smith, the evasive subject of his 1989 debut "Roger & Me," but chose to withhold that footage from the final cut.

The husband-and-wife directors spent over two years making the movie, which follows Moore on his college tour promoting 2004's "Fahrenheit 9/11." The film shows Melnyk repeatedly approaching Moore for an interview and being rejected; members of Moore's team also kick the couple out of the audience at one of his speeches, saying they weren't allowed to be shooting there.

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But after four months of unsuccessfully trying to sit down with Moore for an on-camera interview, they realized they needed to approach the subject from a different angle. They began looking at the process Moore employs in his films, and the deeper they dug, the more they began to question him.

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She and Caine also had trouble finding people to talk on camera about Moore, partly because potential interview subjects assumed they were creating a right-wing attack piece; as self-proclaimed left-wingers, they weren't.

Despite what they've learned, the directors still appreciate Moore.

"We're a bit disappointed and disillusioned with Michael," Melnyk said, "but we are still very grateful to him for putting documentaries out there in a major way that people can go to a DVD store and they're right up there alongside dramatic features."

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"Manufacturing Dissent": Turning the lens on Michael Moore

Excerpts:

Michael Moore, who carries around controversy the way Paul Bunyan toted an ax, has won legions of fans for being a ball- cap-wearing fly in the ointment of Republican politics. For tweaking the documentary form. Even for making millions of dollars in the traditionally poverty-stricken genre of nonfiction film.

Many despise him for the same reasons.

The Toronto-based documentary filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk started out in the first camp. But during the course of making an unauthorized film about Moore, they wound up somewhere in between. In the process, their experience has added a twist to the long-running story of an abrasive social critic who has frequently been criticized from the right, but far less often, as is the case with Melnyk and Caine, from his own end of the political spectrum.

"What he's done for documentaries is amazing," said Melnyk, 48, a native of Toronto and a freelance TV producer, who even now expounds on the good she says Moore has done. "People go to see documentaries now and, as documentary makers, we're grateful."

But according to Caine, 46, an Ohio-born journalist and cameraman, the freewheeling persona cultivated by Moore, and the free-thinking rhetoric expounded by his friends and associates were not quite what they encountered when they decided to examine his work. "As investigative documentarists we always thought we could look at anything we wanted," Caine said. "But when we turned the cameras on one of the leading figures in our own industry, the people we wanted to talk to were like: 'What are you doing? Why are you throwing stones at the parade leader?'"

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