A Little Moore

We were excited to hear that filmmaker and author Michael Moore was returning to give Kansas City an infusion of leftist inspiration Monday at UMKC. Sadly, though, he wasn’t free to speak with the Pitch beforehand.

In fact, our efforts to secure an interview with Moore sort of resembled his classic Roger & Me, the hilarious and heart-wrenching 1989 film that documents Moore’s futile dogging of General Motors Chairman Roger Smith. The chairman had shut down auto plants in Michigan — though GM was making a profit — decimating Moore’s hometown of Flint.

After Moore released the film, he produced two television series (The Awful Truth and the Emmy-winning TV Nation) and wrote 1997’s Downsize This! His latest book, Stupid White Men, is Moore’s manifesto against the power elite who got “thief in chief” George W. Bush his job. Half of the first 100,000 copies had been printed before September 11, but publisher HarperCollins stalled on distributing the book. Company execs told Moore his book was “too offensive” now that “the political climate has changed in America” and asked him to “tone down” his dissent. Moore refused, and on February 19 HarperCollins released the book unaltered.

Because Moore wasn’t available for an interview, we were left to ponder what he might have said, based on his previous comments. (The following answers are statements Moore made in Roger & Me.)

Pitch: Watching your movie about what were supposed to be the waning years of the Reagan/Bush era felt eerily contemporary.

Michael Moore: I was kind of a strange child.

Pitch: How were you able to uncover George W.’s connections to Kenneth Lay?

MM: I followed a trail of three-martini lunches in pursuit of the chairman.

Pitch: How do you feel about our elected officials’ response to the current recession?

MM: Just when things were beginning to look bleak, Ronald Reagan arrived and took a dozen unemployed workers out for a pizza.