Michael Moores Auto Biography

As movie stars go, he's not precisely standard-issue. Plump and bespectacled, Michael Moore is given to wearing shapeless windbreakers and nylon-mesh baseball caps with a hank of mousy hair thrusting straight out the back. His previous credits? Well, he dropped out of college to run an alternative newspaper called the Michigan Voice. Then he was hired to edit the lefty magazine Mother Jones; he was fired four and a half months later. Back in his native Michigan, he spent a lot of time feeling depressed, going to movies, and watching his hometown of Flint crumble around him. It seems the General Motors plants there were being shut down one by one; within ten years, some 30,000 workers were laid off. Moore decided to make a documentary about it, little suspecting that three years later the result, Roger and Me,

would become the most enthusiastically received film at the 1989 New York Film Festival, would be bought for an unprecedented $3 million by Warner Bros., and would soon be opening at a theater near you.

In Roger and Me, Moore turns his depiction of Flint's woes into a savagely funny dissection of the end of the American industrial empire. Watching him slouch with his camera crew from country clubs to prisons, from star-spangled parades to grueling factory closings, we get a hilariously kitschy portrait of rustbelt Americana—and a breathtaking lesson in the economics of catastrophe as well. Moore, of course, is thrilled by the response to his first film, and he plans to make more documentaries. "American journalism is so boring," he says, "because it strives to be fair. But G.M. and Ford, their side of the story is always told. The guy who's being evicted on Christmas Eve—that's the story you never see." -STEPHEN SCHIFF

STEPHEN SCHIFF