Here Comes Trouble (2 page)

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 but 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 airport (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!

Yours,
Michael Moore
#999126

I sat and stared at this letter for the longest time. That night I had a bad dream. I was at the execution of Michael Moore—and, needless to say, I didn’t want to be there. I tried to get out of the room but they had locked the door. Michael Moore started laughing. “Hey! You’re next, good buddy!” I froze in place, and as they administered the lethal injection, he would not take his dying eyes off me as his life expired.

The following day I called the anti–death penalty advocates who were helping him. I offered to do whatever I could. They told me that things seemed pretty hopeless—after all, this
was
Texas, and
no one
gets a stay or a pardon from the governor here—but they were filing one last appeal nonetheless. They said I could write a letter to the governor or the Court of Criminal Appeals.

I did more than that. I began a letter-writing drive on my website and appealed to the half-million people on my e-mail list to help me. I spoke out publicly against Michael Moore’s execution. I told people the story of a young man, a Navy veteran of nine years, who was severely abused as a child and never mentally recovered from the abuse. Now at the age of thirty, he kept a notebook of the high school girls in town he liked to stalk. One night he thought he would sneak into one of the girls’ homes and steal what he could. She wasn’t home. Her mother was. He was drunk and he freaked out and killed her. Pulled over an hour later for a traffic violation, he volunteered to the police (who were unaware a murder had been committed) that he had just done something bad. And that was that. He got a lousy lawyer (who, to his credit, filed a statement on behalf of his appeal, admitting he didn’t do a good job for Michael) and a quick trial. Michael Moore was found guilty and given the maximum sentence: death.

Thousands responded to my appeal to stop the execution of Michael Moore. The Texas governor and prison board were deluged with letters and calls from people protesting his killing.

And then something unusual happened: on the day before he was to be put to death, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals granted a stay of execution for Michael Moore. Michael Moore to live! In
Texas
! Unbelievable. No, really,
unbelievable.

I can’t describe the relief I felt. Michael Moore wrote me another letter, thanking me. But now the hard work of the real appeal would begin.

And then 9/11 happened. You know the cliché “9/11 changed everything”? This was one of those things. Compassion for killers went
way
out the window. It was killing time in America, and if an innocent man could be killed while eating a danish during a business meeting 106 floors above Manhattan, then a murderer in Texas certainly could not expect to be kept alive. Kill or be killed was all that mattered to us; we were now a people ready to go to war, anywhere, one war after another, if need be. You would soon be able to sum us up the way D. H. Lawrence once did: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”