Here Comes Trouble

by Michael Moore

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  For

  my mother

  who taught me to read

  and write

  when I was four

  Growing up it all seems so one-sided

  Opinions all provided

  The future pre-decided

  Detached and subdivided

  In the mass production zone

  Nowhere is the dreamer

  Or the misfit

  So alone…

  —“Subdivisions”

  Neil Peart/Rush

  A Note from the Author

  This is a book of short stories based on events that took place in the early years of my life. Many of the names and circumstances have been changed to protect the innocent, and sometimes the guilty. They say that memory can be a strange and twisted amusement park, full of roller coaster rides and funhouse mirrors, frightening freak shows and gentle contortionists. This is my first volume of such stories. I wanted to commit them to paper while paper (and bookstores and libraries) still existed.

  SANDY BATES [WOODY ALLEN]: Shouldn’t I stop making movies and do something that counts, like helping blind people or becoming a missionary or something?

  THE ALIEN: Let me tell you, you’re not the missionary type. You’d never last. And incidentally, you’re also not Superman; you’re a comedian. You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes.

  —from Stardust Memories/Woody Allen

  Epilogue

  The Execution of Michael Moore

  I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it… No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out [of him]. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my “What Would Jesus Do?” band, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, “Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore,” and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, “Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.” And you know, well, I’m not sure.

  Glenn Beck,

  live on the Glenn Beck program,

  May 17, 2005

  Wishes for my early demise seemed to be everywhere. They were certainly on the mind of CNN’s Bill Hemmer one sunny July morning in 2004. He had heard something he wanted to run by me. And so, holding a microphone in front of my face on the floor of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, live on CNN, he asked me what I thought about how the American people were feeling about Michael Moore:

  “I’ve heard people say they wish Michael Moore were dead.”

  I tried to recall if I’d ever heard a journalist ask anyone that question before on live television. Dan Rather did not ask Saddam Hussein that question. I’m pretty sure Stone Phillips didn’t ask serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, either. Perhaps, maybe, Larry King asked Liza once—but I don’t think so.

  For some reason, though, it was perfectly OK to pose that possibility to me, a guy whose main offense was to make documentaries. Hemmer said it like he was simply stating the obvious, like, “of course they want to kill you!” He just assumed his audience already understood this truism, as surely as they accept that the sun rises in the east and corn comes on a cob.

  I didn’t know how to respond. I tried to make light of it. But as I stood there I couldn’t get over what he had just said live on a network that goes out to 120 countries and Utah. This “journalist” had possibly planted a sick idea into some deranged mind, some angry dittohead sitting at home microwaving his doughnut-and-bacon cheeseburger while his kitchen TV (one of five in the house) is accidentally on CNN: “Well, more chilly weather today across the Ohio Valley, a cat in Philadelphia rolls its own sushi, and coming up, there are people who want Michael Moore dead!”

  Hemmer wasn’t finished with his dose of derision. He wanted to know who gave me these credentials to be here. “The DNC [Democratic National Committee] did not invite you here, is that right?” Hemmer asked, as if he were some cop checking ID, something I’m sure he would ask no one else attending the convention that week.

  “No,” I said, “the Congressional Black Caucus invited me here.” My anger was building, so I added, for effect, “Those black congressmen, you know.” The interview ended.

  Over the next few minutes, off air, I just stood there and glared at him as other reporters asked me questions. Hemmer went over to be interviewed by some blogger. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked back up to him and said, with Dirty Harry calm, “That is absolutely the most despicable thing ever said to me on live television.”

  He told me not to interrupt him and to wait until he was done talking to the blogger. Sure, punk, I can wait.

  And then, when I wasn’t looking, he slipped away. But there would be nowhere for him to hide! He took refuge inside the Arkansas delegation—the refuge of all scoundrels!—but I found him, and I got right up in his face.

  “You made my death seem acceptable,” I said. “You just told someone it was OK to kill me.”

  He tried to back away, but I blocked him in. “I want you to think about your actions if anything ever happens to me. Don’t think my family won’t come after you, because they will.” He mumbled something about his right to ask me anything he wanted, and I decided it wasn’t worth breaking my lifelong record of never striking another human, certainly not some weasel from cable news (Save it for Meet the Press, Mike!). Hemmer broke loose and got away. Within the year he would leave CNN and move to Fox News, where he should have been in the first place.

  To be fair to Mr. Hemmer, I was not unaware that my movies had made a lot of people mad. It was not unusual for fans to randomly come up and hug me and say, “I’m so happy you’re still here!” They didn’t mean in the building.

  Why was I still alive? For over a year there had been threats, intimidation, harassment, and even assaults in broad daylight. It was the first year of the Iraq War, and I was told by a top security expert (who is often used by the federal government for assassination prevention) that “there is no one in America other than President Bush who is in more danger than you.”

  How on earth did this happen? Had I brought this on myself? Of course I did. And I remember the moment it all began.

  It was the night of March 23, 2003. Four nights earlier, George W. Bush had invaded Iraq, a sovereign country that not only had not attacked us, but was, in fact, the past recipient of military aid from the United States. This was an illegal, immoral, stupid invasion—but that was not how Americans saw it. Over 70 percent of the public backed the war, including liberals like Al Franken and the twenty-nine Democratic senators who voted for the war authorization act (among them Senators Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, and John Kerry). Other liberal war cheerleaders included New York Times columnist and editor Bill Keller and the editor of the liberal magazine the New Yorker, David Remnick. Even liberals like Nicholas Kristof of the Times hopped on the bandwagon pushing the lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Kristof praised Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell for “adroitly” proving that Iraq had WMDs. He wrote this after Powell presented phony evidence to the United Nations. The Times ran many bogus front-page stories about how Saddam Hussein had these weapons of mass destruction. They later apologized for their drumbeating this war into existence. But the damage had been done. The New York Times had given Bush the cover he needed and the ability to claim, heck, if a liberal paper like the Times says so, it must be true!

  And now, here it was, the fourth night of a very popular war, and my film, Bowling for Columbine, was up for the Academy Award. I went to the ceremony b
ut was not allowed, along with any of the nominees, to talk to the press while walking down the red carpet into Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre. There was the fear that someone might say something—and in wartime we need everyone behind the war effort and on the same page.

  The actress Diane Lane came on to the Oscar stage and read the list of nominees for Best Documentary. The envelope was opened, and she announced with unbridled glee that I had won the Oscar. The main floor, filled with the Oscar–nominated actors, directors, and writers, leapt to its feet and gave me a very long standing ovation. I had asked the nominees from the other documentary films to join me on the stage in case I won, and they did. The ovation finally ended, and then I spoke:

  I’ve invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us. They are here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction, yet we live in fictitious times. We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fiction of duct tape or the fiction of orange alerts: we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you! And anytime you’ve got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up! Thank you very much.

  About halfway through these remarks, all hell broke loose. There were boos, very loud boos, from the upper floors and from backstage. (A few—Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep—tried to cheer me on from their seats, but they were no match.) The producer of the show, Gil Cates, ordered the orchestra to start playing to drown me out. The microphone started to descend into the floor. A giant screen with huge red letters began flashing in front me: “YOUR TIME IS UP!” It was pandemonium, to say the least, and I was whisked off the stage.

  A little known fact: the first two words every Oscar winner hears right after you win the Oscar and leave the stage come from two attractive young people in evening wear hired by the Academy to immediately greet you behind the curtain.

  So while calamity and chaos raged on in the Kodak, this young woman in her designer gown stood there, unaware of the danger she was in, and said the following word to me: “Champagne?”

  And she held out a flute of champagne.

  The young man in his smart tuxedo standing next to her then immediately followed up with this: “Breathmint?”

  And he held out a breathmint.

  Champagne and breathmint are the first two words all Oscar winners hear.

  But, lucky me, I got to hear a third.

  An angry stagehand came right up to the side of my head, screaming as loud as he could in my ear:

  “ASSHOLE!”

  Other burly, pissed-off stagehands started toward me. I clutched my Oscar like a weapon, holding it like a sheriff trying to keep back an angry mob, or a lone man trapped and surrounded in the woods, his only hope being the torch he is swinging madly at the approaching vampires.

  The ever-alert security backstage saw the rumble that was about to break out, so they quickly took me by the arm and moved me to a safer place. I was shaken, rattled, and, due to the overwhelming negative reaction to my speech, instead of enjoying the moment of a lifetime, I suddenly sunk into a pit of despair. I was convinced I had blown it and let everyone down: my fans, my dad out in the audience, those sitting at home, the Oscar organization, my crew, my wife, Kathleen—anyone who meant anything to me. It felt like at that moment I had ruined their night, that I had tried to make a simple point but had blundered. What I didn’t understand then—what I couldn’t have known, even with a thousand crystal balls—was that it had to start somewhere, someone had to say it, and while I didn’t plan on it being me (I just wanted to meet Diane Lane and Halle Berry!), this night would later be seen as the first small salvo of what would become, over time, a cacophony of anger over the actions of George W. Bush. The boos, in five years’ time, would go the other way, and the nation would set aside its past and elect a man who looked absolutely like no one who was booing me that night.

  I understood none of this, though, on March 23, 2003. All I knew was that I had said something that was not supposed to be said. Not at the Oscars, not anywhere. You know what I speak of, fellow Americans. You remember what it was like during that week, that month, that year, when no one dared speak a word of dissent against the war effort—and if you did, you were a traitor and a troop hater! All of this elevated Orwell’s warnings to a new height of dark perfection, because the real truth was that the only people who hated the troops were those who would put them into this unnecessary war in the first place.

  But none of this mattered to me as I was hidden away backstage at the Oscars. All I felt at that moment was alone, that I was nothing more than a profound and total disappointment.

  An hour later, when we walked into the Governors Ball, the place grew immediately silent, and people stepped away for fear their picture would be taken with me. Variety would later write that “Michael Moore might have had the briefest gap between career high and career low in show business history.” The Oscar-winning producer Saul Zaentz (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus) was quoted as saying, “He made a fool of himself.”

  So there I stood, at the entrance of the Governors Ball, alone with my wife, shunned by the Hollywood establishment. It was then that I saw the head of Paramount Pictures, Sherry Lansing, walking determinedly up the center aisle toward me. Ah, yes—so this was how it would all end. I was about to be dressed down by the most powerful person in town. For over two decades, Ms. Lansing ran Fox, and then Paramount. I prepared myself for the public humiliation of being asked to leave by the dean of studio heads. I stood there, my shoulders hunched, my head bowed, ready for my execution.

  And that was when Sherry Lansing walked right up to me, and gave me a big, generous kiss on my cheek.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It hurts now. Someday you’ll be proved right. I’m so proud of you.” And then she hugged me, in full view of Hollywood’s elite. Statement made. Robert Friedman, Lansing’s number two at Paramount (and a man who years ago had helped convince Warner Bros. to buy my first film, Roger & Me) hugged my wife and then grabbed my hand and shook it hard.

  And that was pretty much it for the rest of the night. Sherry Lansing’s public display of unexpected solidarity kept the haters at bay, but few others wanted to risk association. After all, everyone knew the war would be over in a few weeks—and no one wanted to be remembered for being on the wrong side! We sat quietly at our table and ate our roast beef. We decided to skip the parties and went back to the hotel where our friends and family were waiting. And as it turned out, they were anything but disappointed. We sat in the living room of our suite and everyone took turns holding the Oscar and making their Oscar speeches. It was sweet and touching, and I wished they had been up there on that stage instead of me.

  My wife went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and turned on the TV. For the next hour I watched the local TV stations do their Oscar night wrap-up shows—and as I flipped between the channels, I listened to one pundit after another question my sanity, criticize my speech, and say, over and over, in essence: “I don’t know what got into him!” “He sure won’t have an easy time in this town after that stunt!” “Who does he think will make another movie with him now?” “Talk about career suicide!” After an hour of this, I turned off the TV and went online—where there was more of the same, only worse—from all over America. I began to get sick. I could see the writing on the wall—it was curtains for me as a filmmaker. I bought everything that was being said about me. I turned off the computer and I turned off the lights and I sat there in the chair in the dark, going over and over what I had done. Good job, Mike. And good riddance.

  Over the next twenty-four hours I got to listen to more boos: Walking through the hotel lobby, where Robert Duvall complained to management that my presence was causing a commotion (“He did not like the smell of Michael Moore in the morning,” one of my crew would later crack to me), and going through the airpo
rt (where, in addition to the jeers, Homeland Security officials purposefully keyed my Oscar, scratching long lines into its gold plate). On the plane ride to Detroit, hate took up at least a dozen rows.

  When we got back to our home in northern Michigan, the local beautification committee had dumped three truckloads of horse manure waist-high in our driveway so that we wouldn’t be able to enter our property—a property which, by the way, was freshly decorated with a dozen or so signs nailed to our trees: GET OUT! MOVE TO CUBA! COMMIE SCUM! TRAITOR! LEAVE NOW OR ELSE!

  I had no intention of leaving.

  Two years before the Oscars and before the war, in a calmer, more innocent time—March 2001—I received an envelope one day in the mail. It was addressed to “Michael Moore.”

  And the return address? “From: Michael Moore.”

  After pausing a moment to consider the Escher-esque nature of what was in my hand, I opened the letter. It read:

  Dear Mr. Moore,

  I’m hoping when you saw that this letter was from you—not really!—that you might open it. My name is also Michael Moore. I have never heard of you until last night. I am on Death Row in Texas and am scheduled for execution later this month. They showed us your movie last night, Canadian Bacon, and I saw your name and I saw that we had the same name! I never saw my name in a movie before! You probably never saw your name in a headline, “MICHAEL MOORE TO BE EXECUTED.” I am hoping you can help me. I do not want to die. I did something terrible which I regret but killing me will not solve anything or undo what I did. I did not receive a best defense. My court-appointed lawyer fell asleep during the trial. I am appealing one last time to the Texas Prison Board. Can you use your influence to help me? I believe I should pay for my crime. But not by killing me. Below are the names of my new attorneys and the people who are helping me. Please do what you can. And I like your movie! Funny!