By Jason Apuzzo. Yesterday’s LFM post on Michael Moore being voted to the Motion Picture Academy’s Board of Governors was mentioned yesterday in Patrick Goldstein’s LA Times piece on the controversy. We want to thank Patrick for his regular readership of our site.
I also wanted to respond to one point made in Patrick’s article:
Inside the industry, reaction was more muted, with one screenwriter musing: “If the academy has any brains at all, they’d better frisk Moore before every meeting to make sure he doesn’t try to bring a hidden camera. If you thought Wall Street and General Motors were fat targets for muckraking, that’s nothing compared to the academy.”
This is actually the first thing I thought of when I heard about Moore’s election – not so much that he would bring a camera into board meetings (a droll idea, by the way), but that he would grandstand in public over matters that might otherwise be kept in-house. The basic métier of people like Moore is to turn everything into a public, political controversy – essentially a circus spectacle, with him as ring master. It’s all too easy to imagine this sort of thing happening in the case of, say, the awarding of honorary Oscars. An acquaintance of mine on the Board, for example, was involved some years back in the controversial decision to give Elia Kazan an honorary Oscar. What would Moore have made of that? Would he really have kept his mouth shut?
The ironic thing here is that Moore’s career has basically been on the slide since Fahrenheit 9/11, and all this sort of thing does is reanimate him like some shambling vampire from an Ed Wood movie.
Beyond this, it’s come to my attention that certain on-line conservatives are actually praising this election of Moore on the basis of him being a gifted documentarian. What a farce. Moore has absolutely destroyed documentary filmmaking, turning it into a cheap vehicle for filmmaker narcissism and half-assed propagandizing. Moore has absolutely reversed all the advances that Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker (Primary, Monterey Pop, The War Room) or Albert and David Maysles (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens) brought to documentary filmmaking from the 1960s forward, in terms of letting the documentary camera tell stories without the intrusiveness of narration or editorializing. This is what American documentary filmmaking represented at the height of its influence on the world cinema stage – when filmmakers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard, George Lucas, Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese cited the American documentary school as their chief influence.
As Pennebaker said back in 1971:
“It’s possible to go to a situation and simply film what you see there, what happens there, what goes on, and let everybody decide whether it tells them about any of these things. But you don’t have to label them, you don’t have to have the narration to instruct you so you can be sure and understand that it’s good for you to learn.”
This sort of approach to the cinema was revolutionary in its day. Yet Michael Moore and his self-absorbed progeny of filmmaker-editorialists oppose this kind of filmmaking completely. Moore would never just let the camera tell the story – unless it’s telling his story, the story of his dubious charm, faux-populism and smug humor. [An interesting side note: if you Google images of D.A. Pennebaker or Albert Maysles, for example, most of what you find are images from their films. When you Google Moore, you find images of him.]
Elevating Moore to the position of an Academy Board Member is an embarrassing decision that will haunt the Academy for years to come.
For his part, Mr. Moore will no longer be able to play the part of the outsider any longer, the merry populist prankster guilelessly searching for the truth. He is now firmly entrenched as a member of the Establishment – Hollywood’s Politburo, as it were – which I suspect was his ambition all along.
Posted on July 8th 2010, 2:04pm.
Well put, Jason. Moore is a shoddy filmmaker, period, regardless of his politics. It speaks very poorly of the Academy that they would elevate him to this position of responsibility.
Thanks, H. Keep commenting here at LFM.
Who the hell is defending Moore..?
Nobody important.
I just read Nolte’s post over at Big Hollywood. I guess his point is that you’re “blacklisting” Moore by simply opposing his election to the Academy Board. I think that’s a little over the top. It’s also ironic because of who really has the power to blacklist in Hollywood. It certainly isn’t conservatives.
While on this topic, I was really offended by what Moore did to Charlton Heston in “Bowling for Columbine.” He basically reedited Heston’s words, and set them out of context, in order to score a political point. I really don’t see why Big Hollywood wants to defend this guy.
I’d love to say more about all this, but … isn’t the picture of Bar Refaeli lovely? Really lovely.
https://www.libertasfilmmagazine.com/hollywood-round-up-78/
I’m glad to see Moore on the board, just in case anyone had any question about what was really important to AAMPAS.
Right.
How do you deny Moore’s obvious talent? Of course he perverted the very idea of a documentary pretty much from his very first film. But how else could a man weave so many lies into film and form them into a narrative that sounds almost plausible if not with talent? Black magic? No one is giving him a pass for his propaganda and documentary-ish tactics, but you have to give him credit for being able to thrive in that genre despite not actually participating in that genre. Ben Stein’s “eXpelled” couldn’t match that, despite being cut from the same cloth except the opposite side. Perhaps you have less problem with conservatives who see Moore’s talent and more with those people who classify Moore’s films as documentaries?
Shinsnake, thank you for commenting, as always. But I deny him any talent whatsoever. The man is a hack who is propped up by the system due to his politics. End of story. I give him no credit at all, because I’m familiar with what great documentary filmmaking is, which – may I be frank? – 99% of the on-line ‘conservatives’ opining on this matter seem to have no knowledge of, whatsoever. Mr. Moore is purely and simply a product of our narcissistic celebrity culture, and has cleverly used the format of the documentary to propel his own career. He’s not actually all that different from Kim Kardashian, frankly, except that instead of making a spectacle out of his body (thankfully) he makes a spectacle out of his radical politics.
If you’re interested in this subject, I recommend that aside from the documentaries I mention in the post above, you investigate the work of someone like Claude Jutra – or maybe even Arthur Lipsett or Jordan Belson. What you’ll be exposed to in the work of these filmmakers is the genuine artistry that the documentary form can take when pushed to its limits. These guys had a huge influence on young Hollywood filmmakers coming up in the 1960s and 1970s. You could even go way back and watch something like Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” series, which isn’t about Capra himself – the way Moore would’ve done it.
Beyond all this, though, it puzzles me that certain conservative film commenters are going to the mat to defend this guy – and that somehow criticizing his election to the Academy Board constitutes ‘blacklisting.’ I’ve never seen anything so idiotic in my life. No one is denying Mr. Moore the right to work, or to say whatever he pleases. But that doesn’t mean he’s entitled to a seat on the Academy Board. Such an opportunity is a privilege. One of my own instructors in documentary filmmaking at USC film school, for example, was Mark Harris – who also has won an Academy Award, for his film on the Kindertransport during World War II. Why shouldn’t he be on the Board? There are all kinds of legitimate people out there who they could’ve selected instead of this divisive, ugly and talentless hack.
There are people who find Moore’s films entertaining but my biggest issue with him is that he flat out lies in his movies. It’s like rewarding a plagiarist you know is a plagiarist with an A because you still found his paper entertaining.
The Oscars have been an embarrassment over the past couple of decades and putting a hack like Michael Moore on the board of governors is par for the course. I fully expect Snooki and JWoww to present Oscars at next year’s ceremony and for the stars to out do this year’s MTV Movie Awards f-bomb count.
Yeah, that would be great – wouldn’t it? Snooki handing out Best Documentary Short.