15 January 2000

Ten years ago Sunday night, I, too, was standing there accepting that same critics' group award for Roger & Me. It was an honor, though, that almost wasn't, as the dean of the New York film critics, Pauline Kael, was on a mission to whack my film.

Kael was the critic for The New Yorker magazine, a publication I had never read up to that point. Though I had heard her name before, I did not realize she was the most respected -- and the most feared -- film critic in the country. A few weeks prior, I had received a call from Warner Bros. asking my permission to send a tape of my film to Kael so she could review it from her home in Massachusetts. I was confused by this request. I had made a MOVIE, I told the executives at Warner Bros., not a VIDEO, a MOVIE that was to be seen on a MOVIE SCREEN, not a 25" TV set.

"No," I said, "She must watch it like all the other critics -- on a movie screen! In a theater!"

They tried to explain to me who Pauline Kael was, but I would hear none of it. Like some sort of sudden "artiste", I was demanding purity, insisting my work be treated like the piece of art it was.

Oh brother.

What an idiot.

They called Ms. Kael and told her my response. She was elderly and it was winter and she lived over a hundred and fifty miles away. And I, the great film auteur Michael Moore, was demanding she drive down to New York City to view my masterpiece.

And so she did.

She sat alone that Friday afternoon in the Warner theater in mid-town Manhattan, watching Roger & Me, and doing what was best conveyed to me as a "slow burn." The following day was the annual meeting of the New York film critics at which they were to discuss and vote on their selections for best films of the year.

Pauline Kael went to the meeting and wasted my movie. She made an impassioned plea to those gathered NOT to give me any award. Her many followers in the room (they were known as "The Paulettes") were in a quandary -- while they didn't want to break ranks with their mentor, they had already weighed in on Roger & Me with their own positive reviews when it first appeared at the New York Film Festival back in September. How could they do an about-face on their already published opinion and retain their credibility? The vote was taken, and when the ballots were counted, the critics had gone against Pauline Kael, and they presented the award to Roger & Me.

Well, you can pretty much guess what happened next. Two weeks later, she wrote a nasty, mean review of my film in The New Yorker. It was OK with me that she didn't like the film, and it didn't bother me that she didn't like the point I was making, or even how I was making it.

What was so incredibly appalling and shocking is how she printed outright lies about my movie. I had never experienced such a brazen, bald-faced barrage of disinformation. She tried to rewrite history, saying that Flint had not lost 30,000 General Motors jobs, that it was only -- only! -- 10,000! She wrote that I had rearranged the chronology, that places like AutoWorld were built before the GM layoffs. She wrote that a few things in the film never happened, like the cash register being stolen when Reagan visited a restaurant in Flint.

Her complete fabrication of the facts was so weird, so out there, so obviously made-up, that my first response was this must be a humor piece she had written. A quick check of even a pro-General Motors publication like The Flint Journal (12/31/89) would confirm to anyone that the correct figure of jobs eliminated in Flint in the 1980's was indeed 30,000 (another 25,000 people have been sacked since I made the film.)

But, of course, she wasn't writing comedy. She was a deadly serious historical revisionist. What was even more shocking was how some journalists picked up on her "facts" and reprinted them verbatim, without once lifting a finger to look up the correct number in the local Flint newspaper.

It become quite painful to read the writings of those who had never visited Flint, people who probably never even knew where it was before my film came out. To have someone completely rewrite your own (and your town's own) personal history by saying something to the effect of, "Well, it wasn't really all that bad, only 10,000 people were lost in GM's final solution" -- I just couldn't believe it. Historical revisionists, I discovered, force you into defending that which requires no defense, i.e., the truth. ALL the events in that movie occurred after a series of GM layoffs in the '80s. From AutoWorld to Reagan's visit, they ALL took place each time GM tossed another bunch of workers out into the street. Absolutely nothing was out of that kind of "chronological order". And everything in the film happened just as I said it did, including the theft of the cash register while the Secret Service were sweeping the restaurant before Reagan's lunch there. You don't have to take my word for it; it's all backed up by many independent sources and two great articles that appeared in the Sacremento Bee and the St. Petersburg Times, the only two papers that I know of who sent reporters to Flint to investigate what Kael had written -- and who found that what she had said simply wasn't true.

I didn't worry much about her review at the time because I was sure everyone who read it would just laugh it off. Boy, was I wrong! Her comments were quoted everywhere, and film professors still pass out her review when teaching Roger & Me to film classes (an extreme example of which would be like, after showing Roots or Schindler's List to the students, you say, "Now, people, you should know, there are TWO sides to every story, so please read this essay by Mr. Hess!")

"Moore Reflection"