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Fahrenheit, Fries, Fox, & Fairness: The New Political Documentary (cont'd)

PA: That’s I think the big news here—is that you went from an entirely alternative distribution and also got theatrical distribution. And I think for other people here, it’s sort of been the other way, you’ve been able to pull in the kind of networking after launching theatrical. Is that right?

MS: Well, I think for us with Super Size Me and for Control Room, the benefit of getting accepted into Sundance was that’s already a fantastic feather in your cap, and it really legitimizes your movie in so many ways, that suddenly you know quells a lot of your distributor’s fears, that there is an audience for it. And so for us, for me especially, making this little movie for $65,000, now suddenly having it be there, makes distributors say, “Wow, this is something that could potentially be profitable for us. Let’s wait and see if anybody sues him at Sundance.”

PA: I remember seeing it and being surrounded by people who said, “God what a great movie—it’ll never get its clearances. They’ll never get it out. The lawyers will never…”

JB: Yeah, this gossip started going around that you were being sued and they were shutting you down.

MS: Yeah. I think there were McDonald’s people walking around in trench coats, “Oh yeah, it’s never getting out. No one’s ever going to see that movie.” No, but I think through Sundance over the two weeks that it’s there, a lot of distributors see there is an audience for this movie. They get audience response, they gauge how it is after the first couple of days, and once the dust settles they see the legitimacy as well as the profitability. And I think that coming on the heels of Bowling for Columbine, they realize that there is an outlet.

PA: [To Jeff Gibbs] Did you guys expect the explosion of the box office that happened?

JG: No, I never worked on a film before Bowling for Columbine. I went to high school with Michael. At that time my only thought was, “Please God, don’t let me ruin my friend’s film.” Or let it do as well as Roger and Me anyways, and it tripled [it]. On Fahrenheit, we were initially thinking how can we possibly top Bowling for Columbine? So we’ll do the best we can. There were starting to be these polls I think, that said that half of all Americans wanted to see this film as the movie was being cut, around the time that Disney decided to not distribute it. Actually they decided after seeing—they sent an executive to see the movie and that’s when they decided that it was actually a good movie, and they better not show it. We had reverse problems from you guys. But we were so nose to the grindstone, and just so—we couldn’t even stop to think—we were just trying to get it out before the election.

JB: But that was great publicity. The whole thing, I mean, the first page of The New York Times. I was like, “Wow.”

JG: Every time they attacked the film, we’d just sit there going, “How stupid can you be? This is only going to help.”

MS: Yeah, and that’s the thing with most of these films, I think, is there’s no such thing as bad PR. You know, any time someone will talk about these movies, it just furthers the awareness. It furthers the desire for people to see it, and I think that’s a positive.

JG: We have not been sued, for Bowling for Columbine or for Fahrenheit 9/11, you know, so that tells you something. James Nichols was trying to file suit saying that he didn’t know who Michael Moore was but…

PA: That’s tough to argue. I’ve been wondering if anyone has a question out here.

Audience Member: …Is our audience response reacting to the fact that we feel we’ve been lied to, and we’re out there seeking the truth? Or is it a shift in the type—or the way we want our information to come to us?

PA: I think that the films that are on hot social and political issues are a subset of this huge documentary boom. It’s the fastest growing segment of film. And it’s being fed, I think, by multi-channel television and multi-screen lives that we lead. There’s a lot more acreage to fill, and many, many channels— or programmers are trying to fill it with relatively low-cost material. That’s been the driver for reality TV; that’s certainly been the curiosity for documentary TV that’s tapped into a whole kind of production that was harder to get to people when there were fewer screens. But your first point—do we feel suspicious of what we’re not already hearing—I think that several people on this panel said just that, that there is a growing sense of “Wait a second. Where is there something authentic that I might actually really believe?”

MS: Yeah, I think we’re starved for information in the world today. I think we are hungry for it. We’re seeking it out. We want it. And we’re not getting it; we’re not getting it from newspapers and television. And I think we are anxious to find it anywhere we can, and these movies are playing that role in some part. And also just to address the other part as well, I think reality television has opened up the world of documentary films, and made people who would never go see a documentary film interested in a lot of ways.

JG: I think the thing about film is, maybe this is part of your point, we’re so sick of sound-bytes and small amounts of information maybe sitting for an hour and a half, two hours with something, is much richer. The thing about film is, I think we make a mistake if we think of it in terms of just the cognitive part of the experience. And I think many people try to make documentaries in the old way where it’s a lot of you know white guys talking heads sort of thing and the more you can stay away from that, take people in the middle someplace they’ve never been before.

PA: Can you just say not the old way? There have been wonderful documentaries from the beginning of the genre.

JG: Yes forever.

PA: There are bad documentaries all the way through too.

JG: Point well taken. But it’s providing this whole cinematic experience where you really you’re taken somewhere you’ve never been. The sound has a lot to do with that. You can make a movie cheaply, but getting a film to look great and to sound great is extremely expensive and extremely tedious and time consuming. That’s why I wanted to show this war section. We attempted to mix that in the way that it would be like a fiction film where you were really there in that place and at the end of the two hours that you would have a film experience in addition to the learning…And that’s how we learn, too, we just don’t learn through information. We learn through our whole reaction to the experience.

MS: I tell you one thing that I love that’s happening right now is that for years we would go to the cinema to escape. The cinema was an escape: a place where we could go and not think about our lives and what’s happening. And now here is this incredible boom of movies that is taking us to the cinema to really look at our lives and to look at what is happening in the world [applause]. And that’s a beautiful thing.

RG: I think that—and Jeff talked about it earlier—the media’s coverage of the war was one of those watershed moments. There were millions of people in this country, let alone in the rest of the world,who had very strong opinions and there was nowhere in the primary media for them, and it’s a tragedy what went on [applause]. You know, if you looked at the primary news channels it was generals planning, “Should we bomb them or should we invade by land?” And that was the nature of the discourse, for crying out loud. And people knew that that was wrong and I think that’s when they started in large numbers looking for alternative media. They knew they weren’t nuts. So they went to Alternet, the BBC, other things. And I think that we’re all in a sense feeling that turning point which is why, you know that question, “Well, I think that after the election will all of this stop?” I don’t think so. I think it’s only going to continue. Because it’s a large, vigorous audience that’s not prepared to accept getting its information from those sources.

JG: We tried to go to al-Jazeera and they shut it down. The war was over and they kept shutting the website down.

JB: No, I know. This thing about calling it “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” How can a news channel have all of its little titles and funky editing and montage “Operation Iraqi Freedom”? The point of a lot of Control Room was to show, okay, this is what they’re getting. Because a lot of the problem in terms of international affairs that we are having now is how we are perceiving them and them perceiving us. And we know how we are perceiving them but we don’t really know how they are perceiving us. What is the information that they’re getting? What is this information war— that is actually more important than the military war?

The idea that you’re going to go and bomb a country without authorization from any international community and that the people are going to accept that. Meanwhile, they’re receiving their information from a channel like al-Jazeera, which, you know has a point-of-view of their own. They definitely do. They are focused on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, heavily. And rightly so, in my opinion. But the fact of the matter is that when the Arab people are seeing on their television blood and oppression and the United States supporting Israel then, this is the war you have to win. It’s not the war with bombs. It’s the war we are actually thinking about, what we’re doing and [how] we’re going to change our policies.

Then people are going to start thinking about the United States in a different way. And going through the characters I think this is very important to what we want to do with Control Room. I don’t know how many people have seen it, but we have three main characters, and one of them is Lieutenant Rushing who is a press officer. One of the problems that we encountered was, How are we going to portray these people and how is that going to affect their life – their real life – because these people are real people. We are putting them in a fictionalized way to make their story interesting, but they actually are people that have to go back to whatever they’re doing. Lieutenant Rushing had serious problems with it. He is leaving the military. He asked to be released because he was shut down by the military because he wasn’t allowed to talk to the media during the Control Room press frenzy. And he is now free to talk from the fifteenth of October, which is when, one week later, the DVD of Control Room is going to be released. It will give him the opportunity a little bit before the election to really say all of his opinions and all that he is thinking about from an American perspective.

Which is the great thing—’I was there. I went there with these convictions. I really believed the things our American government did at the time. But I learned a lesson.’ [And that] gave him an opportunity to speak out.

PA: Before I take the next question, you said, “We fictionalized,” and used that word “fiction”. And we’ve been talking about honesty and authenticity. Tell me what you meant by “We fictionalized his life.”

JB: “Fictionalized” means we are trying to tell in ninety minutes a one-month story. If we could show all of the footage of everything that was going on then we would. And actually this is the point of the DVD, it’s to have more of his own stuff, but you are cutting a ninety-minute film and you want this to be sort of cinema verité; you are there.

PA: But you don’t feel like you invented things?

JB: No. You don’t invent anything. The story is there. But when you are editing it you are going to put it in a way that there is a story line going and people are drawn into it so that they are emotionally carried by the characters and the characters – this is what I meant by “fictionalized” – it’s not, as he said, a talking head. You are not seeing someone saying, “al-Jazeera is this, this and that.” No, you’re seeing this guy making an authorization and going to do something. So it’s kind of like these people in a fiction film because you are just watching their lives.

PA: Question?

Audience Member: I want to begin by saying thank you for your courage. [Applause] And speaking of courage I’d like to ask a very sensitive question and that is as a result of doing these very bold films has there been pressure put on you in your own personal lives, because one of the things that I am sensing is that there is a silent majority that is living under fear to speak out. That I’m going to be audited by the IRS. Have there been repercussions and, if so, how do you deal with it?

PA: Her question, much shortened, and correct me if I got the sense of it wrong, is have people suffered pressure or repercussions in their own lives that make it difficult for them to go on doing this given the amount of controversy and conflict that has arisen as a result of the films.

RG: I’m from New York also, so you know, you have to define pressure. I mean, if somebody [laughter] I mean if I wasn’t getting attacked for doing this then I’ve done a helluva lousy job frankly.

So really that was my expectation that I would and that’s part of it. The attacks that I received on the works that I did against the war during the buildup were actually much, much worse. I mean that with the phone calls and the threats and the “we’re going to come get you” and all that kind of silly stuff. With the films, there have been some, but I like to frame it in the positive sense because I think it’s important that we not back down in any way and even yell even louder. And none of it makes any difference. You know, sticks and stones.

O’Reilly called me a “smear merchant.” That’s great. I love the man. And Fox News for a couple of days went after a bunch of people in the movies. But finally we held together and the people from Fox News held together and they came back at them. And similarly with Uncovered. They’re messing with the wrong people. They’re messing with the CIA. That’s moronic. These men and women know how to fight. And in Uncovered I had all these great CIA and Pentagon sources and they started to go after them when the movie came out, but they knew. And as Joe Wilson, Ambassador Wilson says, “We’ve got sharp elbows and we’re not afraid to use them.” In fact he claims that’s the problem with liberals: our elbows aren’t sharp enough. He would lecture me on being tougher.

PA: Let’s talk a little about the cost in your career and your personal life in trying to take on a controversy.

JG: Well, you know, it did dawn us during the edit room toward the end. Especially in that section where Bush is nodding his head and it goes into the Saudis and Halliburton and I was like, “Are we in some kind of trouble here? Are we making some people mad?” The toll on Michael has been very heavy. He’s been attacked and attacked and attacked. We have the same feeling. If we hadn’t drawn blood then they wouldn’t be attacking us like this. But I’m more concerned with, again, we go back home, and Bush came to town and there were a thousand protestors. We didn’t see that on the national news. There were people arrested and you didn’t see that. A town of 20,000 and on the way out, this didn’t happen on the way in and this tells me something, people were yelling at the protestors: “Traitor,” “Whore,” “Slut.” “Get a job.” So I’m more concerned about how they have intimidated the average citizen and the other networks. Fox has intimidated the other networks into shutting up.

MS: Playing their game as well. MSNBC is suddenly turning into a Fox junior.

JG: Where is our courage? Why doesn’t Kerry turn to him say, “Mr. President, flip-flop, flip flop. What about just being a flop?" [Applause, Laughter.]

PA: So, in a way, both of you are saying the question isn’t “Why does it take courage for me to do this, but why don’t people with much more power than me have more courage to do this?”

MS: Yeah, and the other thing I think is really important, too is you make a film that gets people talking, and gets people inspired, and begins a dialogue, you have an obligation to see it through as the creator of that project, as the person who’s gotten that message out there. The thing that I’ve just started doing with even with this movie, is we’ve just started taking the movie to colleges, to high schools, to junior highs. You know, putting the movie in the hands of the people who really need to see it—parents, teachers, kids—and getting that message out there. You know, we’re going to be at over a hundred schools before the end of this year. And if you can do anything to inspire those people to want to change, to want to go out there, to let their voice be heard, to sharpen their elbows, that’s an important thing. And I think that all of us realize that there is an obligation that comes with making a movie like this.

PA: Julia, did you find yourself more in the spotlight than you were comfortable with?

JB: Well, I’m not an American citizen, so—

MS: So you can leave anytime you want. [Laughter.]

JB: On the good side, I can leave and go back down south, and you know I’m just fine. But on the bad side, if at some point I’m applying for this or that or say what it is then, you know, they might or might not. So far I haven’t really had any problems that I wouldn’t have otherwise, but Jehane Noujaim, the director of the film, she was called for an audit as soon as the film came out… maybe it was just a coincidence. You never know. And you know, our characters got in a little but of trouble—Lieutenant Rushing was actually personally hurt a lot. And I’m very proud of him and of his wife, because they went through this a smear campaign, like the military were very attacking Lieutenant Rushing’s wife, Paige.

PA: That’s something we haven’t talked that much about, which is the responsibility you have to your subjects… how much you know. They have no idea, usually, what’s going to happen to them. You probably have a much better idea.

JB: We were very afraid on the edit room. This was the main concern and I was very happy to have all of the characters and all of the people that which were in the film come to me and say, “You exactly portrayed us correctly.” This is the best, most rewarding thing that can happen. And that they are ready to represent that because, in a way, at the end of the day you are editing what they said. And when you are editing you are choosing and picking. It was great to feel that everybody felt that they were themselves. You know, like, “That’s me.”

JG: [to MS] Did you sign a release for your film?

MS: Of course not, because in about another year I’m gonna sue me for a lot of money. [Laughter]

PA: More questions?

Audience Member: About privacy issues and talking about subjects. Very popular documentaries. Their subjects, for instance, women have been portrayed in newspapers, billboards, and in trailers for the documentaries in very unflattering situations to advertise the documentaries. What do you think about using subjects like that both in trailers and promotions and the documentaries themselves?

RG: Out of my league.

JG: I can’t respond to that but I can tell you about for our film the distinction was if you were the recruiters in the film and didn’t know that it was Michael Moore, I think that was ok because we need an entrée into a world that we don’t usually see. The mother of the dead soldier certainly knew who we were and anyone who was in a position like that as a citizen they all had the chance, she had the chance to decide to not do that and the thing that I felt best about for her is that she reported as the process went along for the first time getting relief and being able to sleep in some peace. But you wonder sometimes, this is going to affect people’s lives very profoundly.

MS: But, I think the thing is, is that if there’s a camera on you, and you say something you need to be aware that that could go somewhere. What’s the top line of the Aspen News?

Audience Member: If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.

MS: “If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.” [Laughter.] That really sums it up. If the camera is pointing at you, don’t say anything stupid. Because that could easily get seen. There was the lawyer that we interviewed in the film who was suing McDonalds. We asked him, the first time we talked, “Why are you suing McDonalds.” He goes, “Oh you mean besides monetary compensation? You want to hear a noble cause. Is that it?” And then he goes into this whole blah blah blah thing. But that’s the first thing he said, then I said, “That’s all we need. [Laughter] We can stop right now.” But, instead we sat there for an hour and a half as he like rambled on about nonsense. But the thing was, once again, he summed up his stance in two seconds.

Audience Member: Thank you for having the courage to make these films. Making my own films, the challenge is to try to come up with the money to do it. It’s the $500 weekends. It’s very hard to get patrons to give money to cause which is not going to result in any financial return. It’s nice that Fahrenheit has opened things up to where it becomes an investment proposition, but we all know what happens when the marketplace determines what art gets made. I wonder whether documentaries have reached a point in there economic development where there’s enough interest enough money enough possibility to put together a national organization to have funds available to sponsor and encourage really high quality documentaries.

MS: Like the NEA? Oh no.

RG: Well, part of it is that you have to separate the political documentaries. And you asked about this earlier, I go into these meetings and they say, “God, we loved that movie. It was great. Now, um, could you do something not political for us?” So that’s sort of being careful who you go to bed with. I think money is always a problem. I’ve made 55, 56 films and I’ve begged for every single one of them ultimately. You’re a high class beggar in different forms and it’s very hard. And documentaries are always going to be brutally hard. To me the solution always is get the price as low as possible. And then you do everything that you desperately can. They were going month to month on their movie, as we are. I don’t think that there will ever be a pot of gold that we’ll be able to go to and say, “Please fund us.” I think it’s always going to be brutally hard and unfortunately it comes with the job.

MS: I was moving furniture while we were making the film because I had no money. I was going on Craig’s List to find out who was hiring people and I would go do part-time jobs while the editors would be there just so I could pay their rent and pay for us to eat.

JG: Yeah, I was substitute teaching during Bowling for Columbine.

JB: And I was babysitting.

RG: And that’ll encourage you.

MS: The glamorous world of filmmaking.

JG: When we went to the Oscars I was like “Oh this is cool, there’s four documentary film makers and this is great.” I just want to commend the Aspen Film Festival for having us because this, in a way, much more than Cannes or the Oscars, this is bringing us together, this is our peer group and this is a great kickoff and to networking and to building on this new art form or this alternate art form.

Audience Member: First of all, thanks for bringing your glamour to our community and also to the use some of the words of Nancy Frazier “creating an alternative public sphere” because these alternative views haven’t been expressed. I guess I want to say, “thank you” and I hope this is the nexus of more information getting out there. Thank you.

Audience Member: I have a two part question. Number one. I have been living in Russia for three years and there’s a lot of outcry here because Putin controls the media. But the media I see in Russia is real news delivered by intelligent people. They don’t comment on Putin but they show the world. In Aspen, I have four Russian channels I get here, I see ten times more news from Russia even about America than I do in the media. So what is the hypocrisy of jumping on the Russia and Putin when our media is completely perverted by commercial exploitation. Next question. You have someone like Dish Network who’s got 500 channels and maybe 50 are selling aggressively crap all the time. Nothing but materialism shoved down your throat many times presented as if it were journalism. Why can’t you get access and enough money to buy channels to deliver the message you need?

PA: What I’m going to do is take both of those questions as statements because we just have so many people who need to ask questions to the filmmakers and they’re both great questions that all of us would love to have a better answer to.

Audience Member: I’m just picking up on something that you’ve already said. We’re getting into the area of neutral documentaries. I don’t know what, Antiques Roadshow. And then more polemical documentaries, some political, non-political you said. Are we going to have a future of left and right documentaries or maybe pro-environmental and pro-industry documentaries, and people questioning each others’ sources? I don’t know, but I’m raising that question.

RG: I don’t think anybody knows.

Audience Member: …I wonder what kind of a role books have played in your own lives in making these documentaries?

MS: At least for me, books play an important part in my life in gathering information. In educating myself even beyond school when I was forced to read books and now when I don’t have to and for me, even the process of making a movie. When you’re doing vast amounts of research books become a incredible resource because there’s so much information you can get in a book that you can never find in a brief article or in a lot of places so I find them to be something you just can’t live without.

RG: I would agree with that. Once of the purest most joyous moments is beginning a film and then going and getting every book I can find and looking at this pile and knowing in six months or something I’m gonna know a hell of a lot about that because that’s what I have to do before I can start asking all of the questions. So, to me I couldn’t do it without them frankly.

JB: I think this is actually the joy of being a filmmaker. Even if your film doesn’t get out there, every project you are going to learn so much. Knowing that by the end of it even if you, you don’t really get distribution, you learned yourself and you’re going to take that to the next step or maybe you’re going to, you know, just tell that to a couple of people it’s fantastic. If people read books, there wouldn’t be such a need. Documentary filmmaking is great, but more even of this information, more of the thinking that is I think the important part is getting the information. Processing it yourself. Getting to conclusions that you arrived at yourself instead of that people gave you except that people don’t do that that often anymore…

PA: We have a panel member here whose operation produces books that end up on the bestseller list.

RG: That was part of what was difficult about making the movie is that we had to do the book first. That really helped to do the research for the book and then we of course collected hundreds of books to help make this template. But the thing I’ve been realizing lately is that nonfiction films – and I like nonfiction because it’s sort of like literature—it’s a new form of literature that’s accessible to people. And many people who are good storytellers and good writers would probably be really good and helpful in this medium because it’s really the same skill.

And that’s why, despite the cheapness of the technology; it’s still really difficult to do this, because you have to be able to tell a good story, which is not an easy skill to have. But I do have actually a response to the previous statement which was why don’t we have more choice in what we hear. Simply, the thing we’ve always heard, the corporate control of the media. Sounds trite. Disney, got a $300 million bailout by a Saudi prince for EuroDisney. That’s one small factor. GE, MSNBC, NBC. And how much in defense contracts does GE have? Hundreds of millions of dollars. You look at what their interests are. They’re not the same as the people’s interests.

PA: So you’re making the link back to what Morgan was saying which was the largest corporate America have links into media.

RG: They control. They completely control it.

JB: I just want to say one thing about this. It is an option to turn on the television and watch this stuff. At the end of the day you can turn off your television and not watch this stuff.

PA: We’re approaching the end of our time together. Robert wants to say one thing before I go on to the next two questions.

RG: Just about the point that everyone is making. If you go to outfoxxed.org which is our website there are ten, twelve, fifteen groups working to reform the media. Everything from the work in Washington on the structural work with the FCC to local low-powered radio stations to media monitoring. Ultimately we have to do something about it so we don’t just whine and kvetch about it. And there are people doing something about it and if it’s an issue that you’re concerned about, I just encourage everyone to do that. Whatever your taste is there’s an organization doing work in that area.

Audience Member: Have you given any thought to libraries across the nation or internationally?

JB: Right now, Control Room is owned by Magnolia Pictures, unfortunately, so they are in charge of what’s happening. They are in theatrical and Lion’s Gate bought the rights to the DVD, which is coming out on the 26th of October. So from the 26th you can order it online, and you get it. It’s out in a lot of theaters in the cities in the United States as well. We hope, I hope dearly, that we can do a lot of what Super Size Me has gone through. Going to universities. And we go. We went to Columbia. But, it hasn’t really been that kind of like everywhere sort of thing— let’s really do it. I was surprised by how much media we got but I guess with the overall media, it didn’t get out so much.

RG: We are making an effort with our films because we don’t have Magnolia to get them to the libraries right now. In fact, if you want to call your local library, ask them to order it. If you want to get it to a school, or university, if you email me, we’ll send you a free copy to get it there. We’re absolutely committed to do it.

MS: And if you go on Alternet, which is a fantastic organization, you can buy a copy of Outfoxed and some of the money goes to them and pays for the DVD, which I think is great. It’s where I got mine. [Laughter] We’re getting Super Size Me out to as many schools as possible. We’re using some of the profits we made on the movie to underwrite getting it to as many schools as we can. We also had a screening in July at the Library of Congress for every United States Representative, for Senators for all their staff. The day the DVDs came out we shipped 1100 copies to Washington to every member of Congress. Two to every office. To all the public policymakers who deal with the food in schools, what kids are getting fed, and I think that the great thing that these movies can really do is to start to instigate change in a way that makes people think and want to be active. [Applause]

RG: The last thing I would say, I can’t speak for the others, but for the "Un" movies and Outfoxed, you don’t need to buy more than one copy. Buy one copy and then burn a copy. Make as many as you want. Get it to your friends. [Applause]

JB: Same here.

JG: Fahrenheit’s already shown on Cuban television.

Audience Member: I was in New York this summer. I was talking with someone from Canada and he’s very much on the left, and he’s a Bush-hater. But I was discussing the scene in from Fahrenheit 9/11 when you were in Toronto and you show that people don’t actually lock their doors, but in fact he was telling me that, in fact, it’s just like New York. And I was just thinking that you can use any micro example to distort something, like if somebody was very pro-Bush they could say he just gave fifty million dollars for minorities and that would make him look like he was very pro-minorities and pro-education, but in fact, he’s not. I was wondering if we should really be looking at your films not from an academic standpoint, but more from an entertainment standpoint?

JG: You could look at it from both angles, and the fact that you and your friend had a discussion about that is exactly the point of the film.

MS: I agree.

JG: I’m from Michigan, and if you went to Detroit and you go across the river, and try and take a survey of who has more locks on their doors, the people in Michigan and Detroit and Flint have way more locks on their doors than the people in Canada. So, you know, it’s hard to argue from anecdote, but the point is whether we’re right or wrong we got people thinking, and hopefully, we got all our facts straight; we tried very hard on that.

PA: We have one more question.

Audience Member: I’m from Michigan too, and I was a reporter from the Detroit Free Press I’ve been to hundreds of meetings with the editors when they’re deciding what stories get what play where in the paper, and never once was there a time when the publisher came storming down and said you’re not going to do that story because X, Y or Z, a person or company won’t advertise any more. We’ve written tons of op-ed about industry and the screw-ups that they’ve made. And never once did higher-ups say, “You can’t write that.” So I just want to clarify that, you know, not in every instance of every media company that’s owned by Knight-Ridder that there would be such an example of censorship.

JG: Oh, I’ve written for the Detroit Free Press, too and I agree that newspapers can be a source of great, great information. But let me tell you another thing about the Free Press, they called me wanting to know, “Is it true Michael Moore drives a limo? Is it true he lives in a penthouse? Is it true…?” And I said, “Have you ever ran the story about why Detroit is the most segregated city in this nation? And we made two movies that include the issue of race, and we live in the worst city—you know, the most racially divided city in the country.” So, I think it works both ways. There is a great freedom, but part of why I’m challenging the media is, why is that interview never done with me about the movie, and yet they want to know if Michael takes a limo to the airport.

MS: Whether you’re a writer, whether you’re a filmmaker, whether you’re an author, whatever you create is subjective. From the beginning, from the minute you pick up a camera, from the minute you put your pen down, from the minute you get into the edit room, you’re making a choice about what the person who is reading it or watching it is going think or feel or see. So it’s all subjective in every way, and you know, I think that’s something people need to realize.

PA: It’s so important to have the skills to identify how people argue and how people present their point-of-view, because if you don’t you are really disempowered as a viewer, and you don’t understand the points that you’re making. The point that Morgan’s making is that there’s no way to tell anybody a story about anything without making choices about how you want to tell it. And you can make those choices yourself and know why you made them or you can follow somebody’s orders and they’ll be the one that made them, but there’s no third road. Any last comments before we let these people go on to the next event at this very exciting film festival?

RG: We need all of your support for all of our films in whatever way you choose to do it, because that allows the films to continue to get made. It means getting them, it means showing them to your friends, but I think, at least for me and from what everybody else has said, it’s not just watching the film. Hopefully, these films become engines for the kind of social change for the kind of world and the kind of country we want to live in. And we’re doing what we can do to help all of you have tools to make that change. [Applause.]

Laura: I’d like to thank Pat and everyone on the panel. It was really great. And I know you probably still have questions that you’d like to ask of our guests. What I’m going to ask is that, they need to do something backstage for about 5 minutes, then we’re going to bring them down to the street level, so that you can talk to them outside in the fresh air and the sun. So thank you very much for joining us.

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