Citizen Moore: The Life and Times of an American Iconoclast
AUTHOR: Roger Rapoport
ISBN: 978-1-57143-163-9
FOREWORD MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD FINALIST
"A full absorbing look at the man who has made documentaries as popular as feature films....engaging... fascinating." - American Library Association Booklist Starred Review.
Citizen Moore: The Making of An American Iconoclast wins ForeWord Magazine's Gold Award for Biography.
His fearless satirical assaults on formidable opponents like General Motors, the National Rifle Association and George W. Bush's White House, have made Michael Moore both a box office hit filmmaker and a bestselling author. Investigative reporter Roger Rapoport interviewed over 200 people who played key roles in Michael Moore's life, from the nuns at his boyhood Catholic school to Ralph Nader and other employers - not to mention a seven-foot chicken! For the first time this definitive biography traces the untold story of the 30 years of struggles and failures that led to the "overnight" success of this quintessential late bloomer who:
- Began shooting his first movie with George Bush's first cousin as lead cameraman
- Interviewed GM's "elusive" CEO twice and left all the footage on the Roger & Me cutting room floor.
- Made an estimated $30 million for Disney on an incendiary film the company refused to distribute.
-Walked away from a prime time NBC audience of 9 million into the hands of Rupert Murdoch's Fox Network that quickly fired him.
- Battled with NPR's Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg over her alleged plagiarism.
- Convinced Republican presidential candidate Alan Keyes to leap into a campaign mosh pit.
- Persuaded 30,000 Americans a week to call a seven-foot tall chicken.
- Fell in love with Hillary Rodham Clinton and then dumped her after she declared her Presidential candidacy.
Unofficial Movie Tie-in - Michael Moore has two new films set for release, Sicko (about the American health care industry) and The Great '04 Slacker Uprising, focusing on his 70 city nationwide campaign tour to unseat George Bush. Sicko debuts at the Cannes film festival and is scheduled for general release in June. It is expected to become the centerpiece of America's political debate over national health care.
The Author - Roger Rapoport is the author or co-author of 17 books including Hillsdale: Greek Tragedy in America's Heartland and The Great American Bomb Machine. He is co-editor of Saving Our Schools. His magazine articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Mother Jones, Parade and many other magazines. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times.
AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION BOOKLIST STARRED REVIEW
Acclaimed filmmaker Michael Moore began his career as muckraker and crusader in the industrial Midwest with an abiding curiosity and determination that earned him the consternation of the nuns in his Catholic school and the admiration of autoworkers. Rapoport compares Moore to Upton Sinclair and Ralph Nader, chronicling the filmmaker's early activism, community organizing, radio and theater career, and involvement in alternative journalism. Moore's crusading Flint Voice gained a national reputation and brought him to the attention of Mother Jones. The culture shock of the move from the Heartland to San Francisco and Moore's difficult management style made his tenure short and turbulent. But Moore's film career redeemed him, earning him national gravitas and an Oscar. Rapoport interviewed more than 250 friends, producers, agents, managers, editors, and employees, who recall Moore's brilliance and shortcomings, for a full, absorbing look at the man who has made documentaries as popular as feature films. From Roger & Me to Bowling for Columbine to Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore has taken on General Motors, President Bush, gun manufacturers, and drug makers. In this engaging profile, Rapoport portrays the quirks and complexities of a man whose life is as fascinating as his films.
- Vanessa Bush
MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW
Michael Moore is both a hit film maker and best-selling author, so any who have followed his works in either medium will find Citizen Moore the perfect biographical reference to understanding his life and times. Veteran investigative reporter Roger Rapoport interviews over two hundred friends, producers, agents, employees and actors who all contribute different insights: the result is a well-rounded biographical treatment essential for any who would understand the filmmaker's creations and methods.
-Diane C. Donovan
FOREWORD MAGAZINE
Rapoport's breezy and glib style admirably captures the hip, antiestablishment demeanor of his subject, the kind of guy who delighted in being perhaps the only Academy Award nominee to "show up at the ceremony wearing a tux from Sears."
ORLANDO SENTINEL
Citizen Moore, the new biography from journalist Roger Rapoport is a pretty even-handed look at Moore's life, career controversies and reputation among America's and the world's left, and among America's right. Rapoport's big knock appears to be that Moore's titanic ego tramples all around him, that he's every bit as good at shouting down the opposition as your typical Fox News anchor.
....Interesting to me is the biographical material from Moore's school days, his first blush of the limelight (a Davison, Michigan, school board member at 18, a publisher under assault by the local powers that be by 19, a controversial local playwright/journalist/gadfly who occasionally made the national news). Moore plainly fell in love with that attention, and has had a hard time doing anything, for long, that didn't match that heat. The local muckraking Flint Voice, which he founded, a stint at Mother Jones, TV Nation, all held his attention about as long as they held everybody else's attention.
I liked the anecdote about Moore's memory of people in his hometown church applauding when they learned Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered. Did it happen? It certainly could have. Nobody would admit it now, but the Nixon-Wallace "Silent Majority" hated King's guts. Those haters still living hate Moore's guts, now.
- Roger Moore
LANEY TOWER
An in-depth, richly nuanced look at the career of the multifaceted author/filmmaker Michael Moore. It succeeds admirably well.
-Joe Kempkes
Citizen Moore: The Making of an American Iconoclast
Reviewed by Rod Liddle
Michael Moore made himself extremely famous with a 1989 campaigning documentary feature film called Roger and Me, in which he passionately expounded on the devastation wrought by General Motors (GM) on his home town of Flint, Michigan. He became, almost immediately, the American left's favourite person after Jane Fonda uncompromisingly blue-collar Midwest with his baseball cap and jeans and diet of junk food, uncompromisingly radical but also incredibly (for a leftie) funny.
The narrative thread of Roger and Me hinged upon Moore's increasingly desperate attempts to confront Roger Smith, the CEO of GM, and being continually snubbed and manhandled by the firm's security goons. The message of the film, then, was of an unseen, ruthless and insouciant CEO who couldnÕt be arsed to face the evidence of his policy of abandoning the Michigan communities which had helped make his firm the richest in the world.
This, as Roger Rapoport reveals in this delightfully catty biography, was some distance from the truth. Far from avoiding Moore, Smith met him on three occasions and was interviewed, on camera, twice. But the footage ended up on the cutting-room floor at Moore's insistence because the reality of it failed to square with the point of the film. Further, once the film was out, Moore allegedly persuaded colleagues and former colleagues to perpetuate the lie that he had never met Smith. And he left behind a wake of discontent among the auto-workers in Flint (who felt they had been sold down the river by MooreÕs sensationalist approach) and by producers and researchers who found Moore impossible to work with and, as one of them puts it, more interested in me than we.
The picture we get, then, is of an at times unscrupulous, overambitious, often incompetent and always arrogant hybrid of journalist and comedian, with a monstrous ego. His former manager, who also seems to hate him, describes him contemptuously as a 'vaudevillian'. Rapoport marshals a parade of disgruntled former associates and employees to fling the ordure; the grievances are endless and sometimes of marginal significance. I am not certain we should worry too much about the complaints from John Derevlany, who dressed in a giant chicken costume for Moore's weekly show TV Nation and found the outfit a bit on the warmish side. ÒIt could get over 100 degrees in there. I couldn't take it, he whined. Moore told him, rightly, to 'chill'.
But there's enough here to make fans of Moore of which I am one wonder a little, at least. And plenty in which his many enemies on the left and the right might revel. Moore has made a lucrative career from exposing social injustice and making people laugh at the same time. But there is also quite a bit of money to be made out of kicking the man himself. Rapoport almost blames Moore for that greatest of all evils, the Bush presidency, given the journalist's support for Ralph Nader, the Green candidate, who split the left vote.
The truth would seem to be that Moore needs a decent editor, someone to stop him riding roughshod over colleagues and twisting the facts to fit his stories; but also that he is a very clever, dynamic and fearless journalist and persuasive to boot Ð Òa man who could have talked Hitler into holding a barmitzvah, as one former colleague put it. And that film on GM got the job done: Smith lasted just one more year at the firm.
"His movie was one of the best films on capitalism I've ever seen . . ." said an enthusiast of Michael Moore's debut Roger & Me - a film followed by Bowling for Columbine, the anti-Bush Fahrenheit 9/11 and the indictment of the American health-care system, Sicko. But others expressed unease: "A documentary film-maker documents," said one. "You don't make changes to a story line. But it became a fictionalised movie." Rapoport sustains these ambiguities throughout this biography. Sacked as editor of a radical national monthly for incompetence, Moore sues and claims the moral high ground; and while no one queries his credentials as a local campaigner, the critic who dismisses as fabrication "the aw-shucks homespun character" that he portrays is not alone. What adds interest is the insight the book gives into the American radical left and its shifts since the 1960s - the dedication of individuals, the infighting, and the peculiar paradox of US protest, epitomised again by Roger & Me - a film whose purpose was to expose the injustices of big business, but which was distributed by Warner Brothers.
-The Guardian