Michael Moore : Exposing the Truth
There is perhaps no other director in the American film industry that is more controversial than Michael Moore. Moore’s specialty is exposure. He loves to expose social issues. He is a political activist, and a social critic. His films have a way of eliciting strong emotional responses.
Moore was born in Flint, Michigan in 1954. His father was an assembly-line worker at the General Motors, an automobile-manufacturing plant; his mother was a secretary. He attended the University of Michigan, Flint campus, where he dropped out after his first year. He found work as a journalist with a couple of different local publications, but was fired from one of his jobs because of a controversy. Moore wanted to run a story about American involvement in Nicaragua, but his editors refused, which led to his dismissal. He was awarded $58,000 in an out-of-court settlement after he sued his employers.
Moore used the money to start making documentaries. His first was “Roger & Me,” which was a piece designed to expose GM’s closure of the Flint plant and its decision to open a plant in Mexico, where wages were much lower. His film exposes the greed corporations like GM cutting off the lifeline of many American workers so that GM could make more profit. GM had reported record profits before the closure, which irritated Moore greatly.
He followed this film with a string of documentaries that touched on many of the social and political problems Americans face daily. His film “Fahrenheit 9/11,” probes the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001. He is not kind to the George W. Bush administration for their lack of response to the attacks, and to the Bush family’s alleged ties to Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the attack.
