"Manufacturing Dissent": Turning the lens on Michael Moore By John Anderson Monday, February 26, 2007 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?'" Melnyk added, "We were very lonely." Their film "Manufacturing Dissent" will have its premiere on March 10 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. To say it sheds an unflattering light on Moore — whose work includes the hit "Fahrenheit 9/11" and the Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine" — would be an understatement. Moore, who was reportedly in London finishing "Sicko," a planned exposé of the American health care system, did not respond to voice mail, e-mail messages or third-party requests for an interview; a spokeswoman for the Weinstein Company, the distributor of "Sicko," said Moore had no comment on "Manufacturing Dissent," and referred inquiries to a Web address, www.michaelmoore.com/books-films/ f911reader/index.php?id=16as. That link contains a refutation of a number of complaints taken up by conservatives regarding "Fahrenheit 9/11," but the Melnyk-Caine movie isn't really about that. "We didn't want to refute anything," Melnyk said. "We just wanted to take a look at Michael Moore and his films. It was only by talking to people that we found out this other stuff." In part the "stuff" amounts to a catalogue of alleged errors — both of omission and commission — in Moore's films, beginning with his 1989 debut, "Roger & Me." That film largely revolved around Moore's fruitless attempts to interview Roger Smith, then the chairman of General Motors, after his company closed plants in Moore's birthplace, Flint, Michigan: an interview that occurred, Melnyk and Caine said, although Moore left it on the cutting-room floor. "I'm still a big proponent of 'Roger & Me,' especially for its importance in American documentary making," said John Pierson, the longtime producers' representative who helped sell the film to Warner Brothers and now teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. "But it was disheartening to see some of the material in Debbie and Rick's film. I wouldn't say I was crushed. I'm too old to be crushed. But my students were." Calling the Melnyk-Caine film "unbelievably fair," Pierson said it asks what really matters in nonfiction filmmaking: Should all documentary-making be considered subjective and ultimately manipulative, or should the viewer be able to believe what he or she sees? "I found it encouraging," he said, "that my students were dumbstruck." In "Manufacturing Dissent" Caine and Melnyk — whose previous films include "Junket Whore," about movie journalists, and "Citizen Black," about Conrad Black — note that the scene in "Fahrenheit 9/11" in which President George W. Bush greets "the haves, and the have-mores" took place at the annual Al Smith Dinner, where politicians traditionally make sport of themselves. Melnyk and Caine received a video of the speeches from the dinner's sponsor, the Archdiocese of New York. "Al Gore later answers a question by saying, 'I invented the Internet,'" Caine said. "It's all about them making jokes at their own expense." Still, support for Moore can be found in the film, from the likes of friends like Ben Hamper, from the actress Janeane Garofalo, and even from Pierson, a self-proclaimed "flag-waver" for "Roger & Me." Others, including the writer Christopher Hitchens, and filmmakers Albert Maysles and Errol Morris, take exception to Moore's methods, which have involved questionable lapses in chronology and what some would call a convenient neglect of pertinent material. There have been attacks on Moore: "Michael Moore Hates America," a rebuttal of "Bowling for Columbine," was produced in 2004 by Mike Wilson, who says he was inspired by "righteous indignation," but came to a more temperate conclusion. "I understood what the guy struggles with," Wilson said. Melnyk and Caine, who are married, admit to one fabrication of their own: They printed their own business cards before an appearance by Moore at Kent State University, identifying themselves with Toronto's City TV and its owner, CHUM Limited, their chief financial backer and owner of Bravo! in Canada, where the film will eventually be broadcast. (The network is no relation to the American Bravo! network.) "We weren't employees, so we didn't have cards," Melnyk said. Despite their ruse, the Kent State sequence ends with them being banished from the event by Moore's sister, Anne, who also knocks away Caine's camera. The incident represents in microcosm the obstacles Melnyk and Caine said they faced while trying to make their portrait of Moore. Among other incidents, they said, they were prevented from plugging into the sound board at Wayne State University in Detroit during a stop on Moore's "Slacker Uprising" tour and were kicked out of his film festival in Traverse City, Michigan, while other press members were admitted. "I don't think he expected us to follow him around," Melnyk said. Caine added: "We're bit more persistent than your average film crew that way."