Citizen Moore: The Life and Times of an American Iconoclast [Paperback]

Roger Rapoport (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 15, 2006

His fearless satirical assaults on formidable opponents like General Motors, the National Rifle Association and George W. Bush's White House, have made Michael Moore both a box office hit filmmaker and a bestselling author. For the first time this definitive biography traces the untold story of the 30 years of struggles and failures that led to his "overnight" success. To write this revealing, inspirational, often hilarious book, about the quintessential late bloomer, investigative reporter Roger Rapoport interviewed 250 people who played key roles in Michael Moore's life, from the nuns at his boyhood Catholic school to Ralph Nader and other employers - not to mention a seven-foot chicken! Anyone who loves (or detests) Michael Moore will find Citizen Moore an eye-opening book.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Acclaimed filmmaker Michael Moore began his career as muckraker and crusader in the industrial Midwest with an abiding curiosity and determination that earned him the consternation of the nuns in his Catholic school and the admiration of autoworkers. Rapoport compares Moore to Upton Sinclair and Ralph Nader, chronicling the filmmaker's early activism, community organizing, radio and theater career, and involvement in alternative journalism. Moore's crusading Flint Voice gained a national reputation and brought him to the attention of Mother Jones. The culture shock of the move from the heartland to San Francisco and Moore's difficult management style made his tenure short and turbulent. But Moore's film career redeemed him, earning him national gravitas and an Oscar. Rapoport interviewed more than 250 friends, producers, agents, managers, editors, and employees who recall Moore's brilliance and shortcomings, for a full, absorbing look at the man who has made documentaries as popular as feature films. From Roger & Me to Bowling for Columbine to Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore has taken on General Motors, President Bush, gun manufacturers, and drugmakers. In this engaging profile, Rapoport portrays the quirks and complexities of a man whose life is as fascinating as his films. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Michael Moore made himself extremely famous with a 1989 campaigning documentary feature film called Roger and Me, in which he passionately expounded on the devastation wrought by General Motors (GM) on his home town of Flint, Michigan. He became, almost immediately, the American left's favorite person after Jane Fonda uncompromisingly blue-collar Midwest with his baseball cap and jeans and diet of junk food, uncompromisingly radical but also incredibly (for a leftie) funny.
The narrative thread of Roger and Me hinged upon Moore s increasingly desperate attempts to confront Roger Smith, the CEO of GM, and being continually snubbed and manhandled by the firm's security goons. The message of the film, then, was of an unseen, ruthless and insouciant CEO who couldn t be asked to face the evidence of his policy of abandoning the Michigan communities which had helped make his firm the richest in the world.

This, as Roger Rapoport reveals in this delightfully catty biography, was some distance from the truth. Far from avoiding Moore, Smith met him on three occasions and was interviewed, on camera, twice. But the footage ended up on the cutting-room floor at Moore's insistence because the reality of it failed to square with the point of the film. Further, once the film was out, Moore allegedly persuaded colleagues and former colleagues to perpetuate the lie that he had never met Smith. And he left behind a wake of discontent among the auto-workers in Flint (who felt they had been sold down the river by Moore s sensationalist approach) and by producers and researchers who found Moore impossible to work with and, as one of them puts it, more interested in me than we .

The picture we get, then, is of an at times unscrupulous, overambitious, often incompetent and always arrogant hybrid of journalist and comedian, with a monstrous ego. His former manager, who also seems to hate him, describes him contemptuously as a vaudevillian .
...There's enough here to make fans of Moore of which I am one wonder a little, at least. And plenty in which his many enemies on the left and the right might revel. Moore has made a lucrative career from exposing social injustice and making people laugh at the same time.... The truth would seem to be that Moore needs a decent editor, someone to stop him riding roughshod over colleagues and twisting the facts to fit his stories; but also that he is a very clever, dynamic and fearless journalist and persuasive to boot, a man who could have talked Hitler into holding a barmitzvah , as one former colleague put it. And that film on GM got the job done: Smith lasted just one more year at the firm. --Rod Liddle, The London Sunday Times

...Interesting to me is the biographical material from Moore's school days, his first blush of the limelight (a Davison, Michigan, school board member at 18, a publisher under assault by the local powers that be by 19, a controversial local playwright/journalist/gadfly who occasionally made the national news). Moore plainly fell in love with that attention, and has had a hard time doing anything, for long, that didn't match that heat. The local muckraking Flint Voice, which he founded, a stint at Mother Jones, TV Nation, all held his attention about as long as they held everybody else's attention. I liked the anecdote about Moore's memory of people in his hometown church applauding when they learned Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered.... Nobody would admit it now, but the Nixon-Wallace "Silent Majority" hated King's guts. Those haters still living hate Moore's guts, now. --Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel

Rapoport s breezy and glib style admirably captures the hip, antiestablishment demeanor of his subject, the kind of guy who delighted in being perhaps the only Academy Award nominee to show up at the ceremony wearing a tux from Sears. --Forward Magazine

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Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: RDR Books (November 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571431632
• ISBN-13: 978-1571431639
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,926,442 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating look at a complicated man, March 21, 2007

By 

Geoff Pietsch (Gainesville, FL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Citizen Moore: The Life and Times of an American Iconoclast (Paperback)

Within the past two weeks, by sheer happenstance (I found them on the public library's new acquisitions shelves), I've read two books by left/liberals about Michael Moore. This was the second - the first was Jesse Larner's "Forgive Us Our Spins" - and this is clearly the better of the two.
I wanted to read about Michael Moore because I agree with him on almost everything and it troubled me that he sometimes undercuts his own cause through misleading his audience, thus giving ammunition to his political enemies. The two most obvious cases in point: (1)Contrary to the whole theme of "Roger and Me", Roger Smith of GM did indeed give Moore an extended interview; (2)"Fahrenheit 9/11"'s depiction of happy Iraqi children, while unstaged, was clearly misleading about the reality of pre-war Iraq.
Rapoport describes these and other shortcomings of Moore, but he also shows Moore's great strengths. And he does so with very little editorializing. Instead he quotes his many interview sources at great length, which is far preferable to putting their thoughts into his own words. And he also quotes some wonderful Moore passages which make one realize that, despite his obvious, frustrating faults - which inevitably detract from his potential impact - Moore is much needed. He gains a wide audience for countless matters that need attention - and action - and he shows the sins and corruption of so many of the rich and powerful.
As Ralph Nader says (p. 202) : "Overall Michael Moore is definitely a plus. But the problem is that if you become the issue, the subject of your message is defused."

3.0 out of 5 stars Moderately interesting but insubstantial, August 27, 2007

By 

O. Buxton "Olly Buxton" (Highgate, UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Citizen Moore: The Life and Times of an American Iconoclast (Paperback)

Michael Moore's a fascinating figure, and I have equal parts respect for his iconoclasm and disdain for the self-righteous and impractical politics that informs it. I found Bowling for Columbine - for my money Moore's creative peak thus far - entertaining but disingenuous, although ultimately honest enough to admit that the easy, pat, leftie answers didn't really cuit the mustard.

Roger Rappaport's biography doesn't feature any direct, for-purpose interviews with Moore, and is even-handed enough: it tracks, sympathetically, his early progress through the Flint Voice up to his ill-fated and short editorship of Mother Jones, but then unsheathes the knife in the context of Moore's failure to "stay true to his roots" or reciprocate help or acknowledgment from people who have helped him on his way up.

Rappaport's most damning criticism is Moore's hypocrisy: his refusal to confront his own critics, and his own poor sportsmanship (if not quite underhandedness) in cutting them off at the knees. That said, there's nothing like a knock-out blow here, and Rappaport's attempt to affect a New Journalism-style sizzling literary style falls flat - most of Rappaport's efforts at clever wordcraft leads not so much to zip and sparkle as ambiguity and confusion. Once the early history - with which Rappaport seems more familiar - is dispensed with the book moves at a real clip - too much of a clip, really - spending very little time on any of Moore's projects, and certainly including little if any useful political or social analysis of them.

All in all a passable read if you're stuck in an airport terminal, but Michael Moore is an interesting - and politically significant - enough character to warrant a better biography than this.

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating portrait of flawed hero, August 26, 2007

By 

D. Frossard - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Citizen Moore: The Life and Times of an American Iconoclast (Paperback)

Michael Moore is a public gadfly, muckraker, and professional pest -- the kind of person we need many more of in these days of lapdog mainstream media. He's also, it would appear, a hero and a villain, a self-absorbed, self-promoting egomaniac who's a champion of the downtrodden masses and yet treats real individuals shabbily. A spokesman for the poor who lives in Manhattan splendor. A sentimentalist who can be totally unsentimental at times. A human being in all his contradictions. (In short, he's like all of us -- only a lot more so.)

Moore's a complex individual and his complexity is fully on view in this meticulously researched book. The bottom line (for fans of bottom lines): Whether you love Moore or hate him -- the reviews never add, "or are totally indifferent to him," do they? -- you'll find something in this book to make you think, just for a moment, the other way. (And Moore is, after all, a brilliant filmmaker and humorist -- for that we can forgive him some of his tresspasses.)

My only quibble with the book itself is that it could have used a professional copy editor. Really how, hard is, it to learn, to put commas in, the right place? The poor editing sometimes distracts from the story.

But in the end Roger Rapoport has produced a book well worth reading about someone who, despite all his flaws, is well worth paying attention to.