Weekend, 15-16 January 2000

NEWS BY THE NUMBERS What news?!?! How many numbers?!?!

Normally, this is the top ten stories of the week, faithfully recounted by moi, with my own p.o.v. attached. However there were only two stories remotely worthy of note this week, and both were huge. First, AOL takes over Time-Warner, though it turns out that the board is 50-50, which gives Gerry Levin some real control. Second, Joe Roth takes a powder from Disney. Ironically, both stories involve companies I work for (TNT is a Time-Warner company and I co-host a show on Disney-owned KABC radio every Saturday.) More ironically, for me, I don't expect to feel the sting from either story until the real new millennium. (That would be 2001.)

And so, faced with my weekly task of picking and choosing stories worthy of note, I am undone.

And so, given my commitment to bringing other voices to both The Hot Button and roughcut.com, I shall steal an interesting one. Michael Moore has made this column before, on the subject of runaway production. I found him a bit over-the-top on that, but here, in a look at the AOL/Time-Warner deal and the dangers of mixing media, he ranges from extreme to quite rational and clear. As I have written so many times, between Entertainment Weekly and roughcut.com, the only two times I felt any pressure from the corporation over something I was reporting was once while printing a story on New Line's independence from the corporation during the week of the stockholders meeting, and once when I was working a negative piece about Ted Turner and New Line. Hmmm... hadn't thought of that coincidence before.

But even on the subject of Pauline Kael, who beat him up, as you'll read, over Roger & Me (which is really why I am running this), Moore runs the gamut of emotional insight. He's mad, he's kind, he's mad, he's kind. And that is how truth tends to work.

Also, I must confess before Michael's piece takes over, I was one of the many who got wind of what were Ms. Kael's false accusations leveled in her review. Understand, 10 years ago, when Roger & Me came out, I was writing sitcoms and trying to get a pilot made. I wasn't a journalist. I wasn't writing a column looking at dis-n-mis information in entertainment coverage. I was just reading and absorbing. And while, oddly enough, I dismissed such issues as the timeline or the veracity of certain stories in Roger & Me as irrelevant, I did assume they were true. And apparently, I was a sucker.

Before I go and leave you to Moore's mind (with thanks to fiercetrikes for point the piece out), let me just remind you that starting next Thursday, we'll be presenting 10 Days At Sundance 2000, with coverage every single day of the festival (including weekends) by myself, with an assist from Ray Pride. So, whatever work I'm escaping today will return two-fold next week.

And so, with that, I turn over the column, for today, to Michael Moore and his piece...

PAULINE KAEL, THE TRUTH, AND NOTHING BUT... BROUGHT TO YOU BY AOL TIME WARNER

Ten years ago tonight, just three days after Time Inc. officially merged with Warner Bros., Warners opened Roger & Me nationwide on over 300 screens (eventually placing it in over 1,300 theatres.)

On Monday of this week, Time Warner announced they will merge with America Online, creating the largest corporate merger ever.

Back in 1990, when the Warner Bros. first merged with Time, a reporter asked me what I thought of it, considering the anti-corporate nature of my film and the obvious irony of who was distributing it. I said then what I will say now about this week's news:

"In a democracy, it is dangerous to have The Few control what The Many will see and read. The electorate is able to come to the best decisions when they are presented with ALL the alternatives and ALL the information available to them. Less knowledge -- i.e. ignorance -- insures that bad decisions will be made. The strength of a free society is maintained by the diversity of voices and the free flow of information. If you limit that flow, if you restrict that access to knowledge and ideas and points of view, then you make the society less free. "

This past Sunday evening, I was asked to hand out an award to the film, Election, at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Election was one of my favorite films last year (Three Kings was the best,) a brilliant satire of how the democratic process seems to be run by opportunistic morons -- and it all starts with those ridiculous high school elections. Have you been wondering lately why you just can't stand to go through another presidential election year? Well, remember those irritating wonks who were always running for student government? They're still with us -- except now they run for Congress and President! If we had known then that we would end up, years later, forced to watch their smarmy dweeb a--es every night on TV, yakking away about a bunch of nothing, I truly believe that even the non-violent ones among us would have beat the living crap out of them on the monkey bars.

That's it. It's our fault! Not enough swirlies for the little smirking ciphers like George W. Bush, Future Business Leaders of America like Steve "I'm Blinking Now" Forbes, drones and clones like Gore and Bradley -- we failed to send them the correct message in 7^th grade that if they even THINK of running for office again, its wall-to-wall t.p. and eggings wherever they go.

In one scene in Election, an unpopular freshman girl -- a troublemaker who is decidedly not a future politician -- decides to run for school president. She is booed and hissed until she utters this statement in the gymnasium full of students at the high school assembly:

"Who cares about this stupid election, anyway? If I win, the first thing I'm going to do is abolish student government so we never have to attend any more of these stupid assemblies!"

The students roar with approval, and, even though the principal expels her and crosses her name off the ballot, her fellow students reject the two "major" candidates and vote for her anyway. Although she wins, the principal voids her victory.

"Michael & Pauline"