"The Big One"

C. Petersen ottilie at u.washington.edu
Sun May 17 11:03:58 PDT 1998



> Moore has been compared to David Letterman, whose "found humor" on the old
> NBC show was quite edgy. Since Letterman has moved to CBS and aspired to be
> the new "Johnny," he has lost me entirely. Whenever I turn him on, he is
> usually grimacing at the camera and telling racist jokes about NYC's
> immigrant cabbies. If Moore had a TV show, he'd probably be conducting
> sympathetic and humorous interviews with NY's cab-drivers who organized a
> highly successful one-day strike last week. Come to think of it, Moore did
> have such a show, called "TV Nation." His tendency to take the point of
> view of the underdog no doubt explains his banishment from the air-waves.
>
> The exclusion of Michael Moore from network television is as much a form of
> political censorship as is the exclusion of important working-class
> struggles today. For instance, the powerful struggle of dock-workers in
> Australia to win back their jobs after the right-wing government fired them

Me and a couple of friends got to participate in one of his film bits last fall when he was on his book tour. He was trying to demonstrate how absolutely rich Bill Gates is by pretending to hold a housewarming party for him at his big new house (40,000 sq.ft, mostly underground, in a very visible location by Lake Washington), because clearly there is nothing appropriate to give to Bill Gates at a housewarming. He took us on a boat, pretending to be his neighbors holding pies, casseroles, a dirt devil and a weed whacker, and drove by the front of the house shouting through his megaphone. There was almost no response for an hour until a policeboat came to tell us to go away. When he went to the corporation, he said that the front gate people didn't drive him away like usual, but instead invited him in to walk around and talk to everybody, and he thought they were unsettlingly open and nice.

Anyway, this was going to be for a new talk show. He filmed the first week last winter and it sounded really good, and it had lots of his TV nation type skits, plus interviews with OJ Simpson and so forth. But I have the feeling it's not going to be broadcast. But later he said that he's writing a sitcom about some layed off workers which might start this fall. I think his documentary style is a lot better than his fictionalized script writing. CP



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