MICHAEL MOORE, ONE-TRICK PHONY

But that’s not all. He’s been compared to Mark Twain by the New York Times, to Voltaire by Newsday, to Mother Teresa by . . . himself. And it is precisely that self-regard — that propensity to concur with his clipping service — that’s made Moore what he actually is: a preachy bore and one-trick phony whose work has become so sanctimoniously unamusing it could make Cesar Chavez pull for management.

It was not always so. In 1989, Moore, a virgin film-maker and the former editor of an alternative newspaper in Flint, Michigan, delivered his critically acclaimed documentary Roger & Me. The film chronicled his two-year quest to confront Roger Smith, then chairman of General Motors, whose supposedly callous decision to close several GM plants had helped decimate Moore’s hometown. Not only did Roger become the highest-grossing non-musical documentary in history, it almost singlehandedly resuscitated an ailing genre.

Pre-Roger, social-conscience documentaries (is there any other kind?) tended to be low-sugar, high-fiber affairs. Whether the subject was striking miners, Great Plains soil erosion, or copulating manatees, these pictures were more medicinal than entertaining. Roger was different, and it became to documentaries what the New Journalism had been to feature writing. Moore infused the form with subjective vitality, inserting himself into his narrative to drive it with a novelist’s ingenuity. What he delivered in Roger was a dark and devastatingly funny social satire — a tautly edited trove of snappy narration, vivid characters, and cruel ironies.

Moore intercut his primary story (stalking the elusive Smith from yacht club to stockholder meeting to Grosse Pointe neighborhood) with inspired asides: the Flint gentry at a Gatsby lawn party where unemployed locals posed as human statues; sienna-haired golf-course biddies decrying lazy welfare dependents; animatronic autoworkers in a civic-renewal display singing praises to the robots destined to replace them; and the unemployed Rhonda the Bunny Lady selling rabbits for pets or clubbing them in her front yard to sell as meat.

As cinema, Roger was brilliant. As journalism, it was fraudulent — a point that helped cost Moore an Oscar nomination. Critics noted that some of Moore’s chronology was pure fiction. His much-touted 30,000 GM layoffs came not in 1986, as he implied, but over the course of a decade and in several different states. He showed people getting evicted who’d never been GM workers. As the press began detailing discrepancies, Moore accused various journalists of lying or being GM tools and hung up on at least one of them in a snit.

Inflicting more durable damage was criticism from Pauline Kael in the New Yorker. She charged that Moore used his “leftism as a superior attitude. Members of the audience can laugh at ordinary working people, and still feel they’re taking a politically correct position.” As Moore traipsed from country club to headquarters lobby dressed like an unemployed lumberjack (ratty ballcap, plus-size smell-o-vision dungarees, drugstore-bin running shoes), he honed what would become his trademark tactic, the ambush interview. The formula is simple: With Dorothy Day dudgeon and Stuttering John subtlety, Moore crashes a scene — uninvited, cameras whirring and shooting from angles calculated to make twitchy, hog-jowled flacks, low-level functionaries, and polyblended rent-a-cops look stupid (all to the greater glory of the working class). His reluctant hosts demand that he stop filming or inform him that their CEO, caught unawares by Moore’s impromptu visit, will not be attending his canned hunt.

Critics like Kael notwithstanding, a monster was born, as Moore fashioned himself the populist avenger. Invoking his lunchbucket ancestors who toiled in factories and joined sitdown strikes, Moore easily justified the hammershots he leveled at the working stiffs caught in his camera’s gaze. Nearly every write-up noted Moore’s humble beginnings: how he had financed Roger by selling his bed, how he owned only two pairs of big-boy jeans, how he had collected unemployment before getting a $ 3 million distribution deal from Warner Bros., how he had barely escaped (as if vaulting the barbed wire at Buchenwald) the GM assemblyline birthright of his father and uncles.

The fuller truth dribbled out more grudgingly. Not since Francis of Assisi has a man’s geographic origin been so inexorably part of his identity. But the working-class upstart from Flint actually came from the nearby bedroom community of Davison. John Lusk, who went to high school with Moore, describes their suburb as “lily white, . . . solid middle class. It was idyllic. . . . But you’d think listening to Mike [that he] lived in the pits of the Flint depression.” In interviews since celebrity found him, Moore’s regular refrain has been, “I’m not supposed to be doing this anyway, I’m supposed to be building Buicks back in Flint.” But that was a fate Moore had long ago escaped: He never worked a day on the assembly line.

Moore’s blue-collar persona, it seems, is unsullied by any heavy lifting. The only life Moore “escaped” was a life of obscurity editing bird-cage-lining lesbian manifestoes and screeds on Central America in the weekly Michigan Voice. Before scourging GM for opportunistically closing plants to move to Mexico, Moore himself closed his paper to become editor of San Francisco’s Mother Jones magazine in 1986. Though Moore flashes blue-collar thigh in nearly every media appearance, former Voice staffers say it was actually his mascot, Ben Hamper, a part-time Voice columnist and full-time GM worker, who was Moore’s sole link to authentic auto-plant life.

In factory dispatches (which would become the blisteringly funny book Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line), Hamper painted a nuanced picture of GM that Moore’s film seemed to miss. Despite the soul-killing monotony and frequent layoffs, Hamper wrote, shoprats were paid “handsome wages to mimic a bunch of overachieving simians.” With all the benefits, regular raises, and tide-me-over severance checks, auto workers dubbed their employer “Generous Motors.” The daily grind was lessened by doubling-up on routine jobs, giving workers on-the-clock leeway to take naps, compose rock operas, and get loaded like rivet guns on Mickey’s Malt Liquor.

Before Moore fled Flint for the coast, he dropped by the plant (a field trip!) to hit rivets, act manly, and bid adieu to a life he’d never known. But when Moore wheeled into the parking lot, Hamper writes, it was “in his faithful Honda.” Hamper, too, would become part of Moore’s evolving myth.

As editor of Mother Jones, Moore was fired after four months. Both sides agree his termination was partly due to Moore’s refusal to run a piece critical of the Sandinistas. The better marketing angle, however, was Moore’s insinuation (in Roger and elsewhere) that trust-fund liberals drove him out because they objected to his first cover story’s being written by a sweaty droog like Ben Hamper. Back in Flint, Hamper seemed unconcerned; he would write in Rivethead that he didn’t know whether Mother Jones was a “rib joint or blaxploitation flick.” Magazine sources, however, said they wanted Hamper to keep writing for them — and they let Moore go because he was an incompetent manager and hell to work for, not unlike the alleged slavedrivers back at GM.

Unemployed, Moore sulked through a depressing regimen of matinees and chocolate croissants. He then sued Mother Jones for $ 2 million, eventually winning a $ 58,000 settlement that would one day serve as seed money for his film. Free to return to his beloved Flint, Moore opted out once again — joining forces instead with Ralph Nader in Washington to start a political newsletter. (Moore so alienated Nader by the time his film debuted that Nader briefly climbed into bed with his old bete noire, General Motors.)

Once Moore hit the big time, most journalists swallowed his bootstrap revisionism, ignoring the less sexy reality that Moore had sipped liberally at the usual funding spigots. Laurence Jarvik, in a much-over-looked piece in Montage magazine, reported that Moore (who claimed he had never made more than $ 15,000 a year before Roger & Me) had been an NPR commentator, received two $ 20,000 grants from the MacArthur Foundation, secured a hefty advance from Doubleday for a book about Flint, and benefited from the largesse of Stewart Mott, the black-sheep GM scion who ran a family fund out of his New York pent-house where Moore sometimes stayed. (Moore, as is his way, accused Jarvik of being an envious liar.)

Though Moore’s career has been one long, tiresome impression of a harlequin Reuther brother whistling the song of the working man while cracking the backs of corporate greedheads, he has had no problem adopting celebrity trappings or acting the part of the temperamental starlet. As early as 1990, when Moore was still fresh from the salt-of-the-earth mines, the director of the Sundance Film Festival complained that he was “overly demanding” and “made a scene” when he discovered his accommodations weren’t as deluxe as Clint Eastwood’s.

“Michael’s the greediest man I’ve ever met,” says one studio source. “I’ve been disturbed on vacations by agents shouting down the telephone at me [asking] how could we possibly expect Michael to fly business class rather than first class, and how could we expect him to stay anywhere other than the Four Seasons.”

Moore not only bashes corporate titans, but also derides the “poseur Left” as out of touch with the hockey-watching line-dancers who inhabit his working-class biosphere. His own pose is that of the last leftist with an index finger on the pulse of the noble prole. This has earned him public censure from former friends like Alexander Cockburn, who excoriated Moore last year in the New York Press. “He was so full of s — t,” explains Cockburn, “I just lost it.”

As Cockburn had noticed, the self-proclaimed populist is literally a limousine liberal. In 1989, Moore told Newsday that he had a dream in which “the revolution started and there I was in this limo. I was banging on the windows, screaming ‘No! No! Warner’s made me ride this.’ So I made them take back the limo.” In reality, Moore did attend his Flint premiere in a chauffeured stretch chariot. And these days, he wouldn’t dream of sending one back. In his book, he does an entire page of limo material, belittling his drivers as “by and large . . . a creepy bunch” who “always show up a half hour early and bug the hell out of you” (chauffeurs don’t register as noble proles, but then they don’t work in auto plants in Flint).

Moore also assumes the mantle of the last honest rube, saying people of his stripe are seldom afforded a voice — as if the entire entertainment industry were born in TriBeCa or Bel Air. But if Moore is a rube, he is one whose agents have been Andrew Wylie and Creative Artists, whose studios have been Warner Bros. and the Disney-owned Miramax, whose networks have been Murdoch’s Fox and General Electric’s NBC. For a Ritz-Carlton revolutionary like Moore, such concessions are sacrifices needed “to get the work out there.”

Moore says he could return to life in Flint at any time and be happy; he was forced to leave, he says, because his “privacy was shot.” Moore has opted instead for the tranquil solitude of the Upper West Side, where he has a $ 1.27 million 17th-floor apartment in a building complete with marble lobby, doorman, and fleet of dog-walkers. (He stays true to flyover country by also maintaining a lavish lake house in upstate Michigan.)

To be sure, Moore has given back some of his spoils by setting up a foundation/tax shelter with one-third of his Roger & Me proceeds — a useful hedge against charges of hypocrisy. For Moore has turned himself into the entertainment world’s Jesse Jackson, a migratory Mau-Mauist showing up at corporations to demand concessions that will ultimately benefit him, leaving companies a choice between throwing him a bone and risking public humiliation. In his new film, The Big One, Moore gives chase to Nike chairman Phil Knight, who’s been rebuked for using cheap labor in Indonesia by everyone from Kathie Lee Gifford to the Methodist Church. Contending that Americans would like a chance to sew the swooshes on our own crosstrainers, Moore tried to coerce Knight into putting a factory in Flint (a suggestion so ludicrous even the Flint Journal scoffed).

Knight rebuffed Moore, but not before getting patted down for a $ 10,000 donation to Flint schools — a donation that Moore himself matched. Moore’s generosity is hardly anomalous. He often kicks into the till of the Rust Belt Jakarta whose misfortune he so relentlessly pimps. (“These days, everyone . . . lives in their own Flint, Michigan,” says Moore — though Flint’s unemployment rate is now a respectable 4.4 percent, down from 27 percent when Moore began his odyssey in the late ’80s.) But some who know him say his motives are less than altruistic.

Donald Priehs, Moore’s high-school teacher, helped him get elected to the school board at the age of 18. Now Priehs echoes the sentiment of the Flint Journal and some of Moore’s friends when he says, “Moore has always used Flint. . . . Michael is not the great benefactor.”

Priehs recalls the beginnings of Moore’s modus operandi: “He made a proposal one year that we abolish homecoming at Davison. You know why he wanted to? Because he himself is nothing but a big blob. He loathed the athletes because they got all the good girls. Michael couldn’t have gotten a date if he’d put gold bullion on the table.” To redeem what Priehs considers a revenge-of-the-nerds fantasy, Priehs says Moore, whom he labels a “conniving opportunist,” wanted to donate the homecoming savings to UNICEF.

Moore claims to give half his income away to left-oid causes, independent filmmakers, and Flintians, though all my queries to verify this went unanswered (one of Moore’s publicists said I lacked the “the proper tone”). Moore says he “does it quietly.” Quietly, that is, if you discount the fact that he said this to a journalist, and that he invites CNN to tag along while he passes out Christmas turkeys, and that Miramax (distributor of The Big One) sends out press releases that they’ll be donating half of their profits from the movie to Flint’s working stiffs (at a time when the Department of Labor found that over 136 Miramax working stiffs were owed more than $ 80,000 in overtime — but Moore never got around to Miramax in his latest corporate-bashing spree).

Such grand gestures, of course, are contrivances to maintain Moore’s authenticity. They allow him to continue prowling the country as a high-cholesterol Cassandra, prophesying ruin and worker revolts in the midst of a 94-month economic boom, with unemployment rates and union membership at record lows, and consumer confidence and disposable income at record highs.

To pull off such a pose, it takes a relentless breed of self-promoter. While most venerated directors pay homage to those from whom they take their inspiration (Woody Allen: Bergman; De Palma: Hitchcock; Scorsese: Godard), Moore gives his work a self-referential synergy that should have him suing himself for copyright infringement or paying himself for product placement. (Even his wedding invitation contained a guide to Roger & Me landmarks.)

Vowing never to do a sequel to Roger, he waited all of three years before producing Pets or Meat, a flaccid epilogue in which the Bunny Lady sells her rabbits as snake-food (“a metaphor,” Moore said, for Flint auto workers’ fate). His occasional magazine articles detail the successes of his films (Roger & Me was a Wheel of Fortune answer) and the machinations of his enemies (his one fictional feature, Canadian Bacon, was supposedly sandbagged by its own studio, not because it was unfunny, but because distributors feared its leftward slant was “too political” and might offend conservatives, a little-known Hollywood phobia).

Like Roger & Me, Moore’s television news-magazine TV Nation saw him regularly brutalizing such masters of the universe as Love Canal real-estate agents and Pakistani cab drivers. He also satirized broad targets who’d been so worked over they were slatless (Moore paid visits to the KKK and discovered — brace yourself — that they are haters). Though TV Nation was a ratings-basement habitue and earned quick cancellations on NBC and Fox, Moore is undeterred. He is not only reprising the show with financing from Great Britain, he is also writing a TV Nation book for superagent Judith Regan. That is, when he isn’t working on his CBS sitcom Better Days, a show about — what else — four unemployed factory workers.

Now he presents The Big One — an exercise in narcissisme verite the likes of which haven’t been seen since John Lennon’s 1969 Self Portrait, a 42-minute contemplation of the former Beatle’s penis. Moore has just come off a tour promoting his movie, which is about a tour in which he’s promoting his 1996 book, Downsize This! (which itself pays homage to all his own past projects).

But the only thing that’s been downsized is Moore’s artistic ambition. The Big One depicts bookstore audiences hugging and extolling and applauding Moore, who takes special care to announce his New York Times bestseller status. A typical testimonial from his media escort: “Michael is like a floor sample that we can all be.” Our only reprieve is when Moore once again takes his guerrilla theater to the office parks of America, where several more badly permed, yellow-toothed lobby underlings are poleaxed for getting between Moore’s ego and the camera.

But even vaster than Moore’s ego is his hypocrisy. For when he bemoans “people today working longer . . . for less . . . with no job security” and says “people are frightened,” he could be describing what it’s like to work for Michael Moore. This is hardly news to Mooreologists. Vicious take-outs featuring Moore’s ex-employees have appeared in the New York Post, Salon, and New York magazine. War stories include everything from Moore’s discouraging union membership to his not adequately paying or crediting his subordinates. To mine such material once more might seem a gratuitous rehash. Then again, so is most of Moore’s work.

It is striking how many former associates — all predisposed to side with Moore — bitterly revile him. Randy Cohen, a former Letterman writer and co-executive producer of TV Nation who was fired by Moore (though he remained contractually obligated to fork over ideas), offers a typical compliment: “I despise Mike and regard him as a vile and dishonorable man, but I think Roger & Me was terrific!”

Conversations with some dozen former employees turn up such descriptions of Moore as “mercurial,” “demanding,” “paranoid,” and a “fork-tongued manipulator” who is “totally disingenuous” and “feeds on people’s insecurities.” Former TV Nation staffers compare their working conditions to “a sweatshop,” a “repressive police state,” “indentured servitude,” and a “concentration camp.” One former staffer says, “Most people hated Michael, not because he was a perfectionist, but because he was an a — hole.” A former producer, casting about for a despot appropriately “large, with gluttonous appetites — not just ruthless, but sadistic,” finally compares a stint with Moore to “working for Idi Amin — without the laughs.” Another staffer simply states, “My parents want him dead.”

Former employees tell tales of random firings, of no health benefits, of having to crank out daily story-idea quotas that often went unread. Like a surly bear, Moore required gentle care and regular feeding. He often ate in front of staffers held hostage well into the night, their stomachs rumbling as he gorged on chocolate confections and Chinese takeout. They tell stories of Moore’s fighting “tooth and nail to try to avoid paying writers in the Writers Guild”; of his threatening to fire the assistant who sent a yellow cab instead of a limo to retrieve him from the airport; of his pouting in his office for hours in the middle of shoots and making assistants cover the windows with tape so he couldn’t be seen.

Haskell Wexler, one of the world’s foremost cinematographers, worked with Moore on Canadian Bacon. Wexler says that Moore, who “didn’t know s — t from shinola” about making feature films, chose to “maintain his adversarial view toward . . . everything and everybody around him.” Moore seemed intent, he says, on proving his bona fides by “abusing himself gastronomically” with regular McDonald’s hamburger work stoppages that allowed Moore to feel “closer to the Real People.”

Wexler himself not only has won Academy Awards for films like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but also has had a distinguished career shooting left-wing documentaries, working with everyone from Jane Fonda to the Weathermen. Of Moore, Wexler says, “He’s not unlike a lot of people I used to know in the left-wing movement. They love humanity and hate people.”

Finding anyone not currently employed by Moore to offer unvarnished praise proves a challenge. One former staffer asks if I want the number of someone who likes him. “Sure,” I say gamely. “I’m sorry,” she backpedals, “I can’t think of anyone.”

“You won’t find a range of opinions,” Randy Cohen confirms. “You’ll find everyone has a range of anecdotes to illustrate the same opinion.”

Or almost. In a typically inane passage of Downsize This!, Moore’s slapdash satire of the political landscape, he pens a chapter proclaiming “O.J. Is Innocent.” O.J. Simpson, it would stand to reason, might be the one exception to Cohen’s claim.

After I faxed Simpson, he called me from his new home in Pacific Palisades. “Obviously, I like Michael Moore,” says O.J., who met the filmmaker when Simpson was a surprise guest on Moore’s talk-show pilot last fall. “I think he is an unusual, independent person, and I’ve learned to appreciate independent thinking more today than ever before.”

Moore is so independent, in fact, that he made a defense of O.J. that eluded even Simpson’s excuse-rich defense team. For the populist avenger, the most racially charged double murder in history boils down to an issue of class. O.J., according to Moore, couldn’t possibly have killed Ron and Nicole — because O.J. is rich. And rich people, who won’t do their own shopping or de-grout their own toenails, wouldn’t stoop to offing their ex-wives when “there are so many unemployed, desperate individuals” willing to ice someone for $ 200.

When I confronted Simpson with Moore’s logic, he seemed dumbfounded: “I don’t know, I think you’re just as responsible if you hire a person as if you did it yourself.” But forging consensus between the two leading proponents of the O.J.-is-innocent theory proved impossible.

I was unable to reach Moore after leaving several messages at his unlisted home phone, his unlisted work phone, and with a battery of publicists. Though he left one after-hours message for me, promising he’d call again, he never did, despite a round of follow-up attempts on my part. One suspects, however, that the Moore-Simpson rift could be easily resolved. The two, after all, are peas in a pod: Both have a tenuous grasp of reality. Both make embarrassing assertions of their own probity. And both, upon growing cranky, tend to snap off people’s heads.

There is one minor difference, however. Moore, the People’s Filmmaker, who preys on gulping, unwitting victims as they flee the white light of his ambushes, eluded me over the course of a one-month publicity tour. A couple of faxes to the reclusive People’s Killer, and O.J. Simpson called right back.

Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.