Roger & Me Moore Than Just A Movie!
Roger & Me
Moore Than Just a Movie!
by Ken Garber
"My mission was simple," says filmmaker Michael Moore. "To convince Roger Smith to spend a day with me in Flint and meet some of the people who were losing their jobs." Moore failed to bring the General Motors chairman to Flint (or even to make it into Smith' s office), but his sly and often hilarious film may succeed in bringing the plight of Flint, Michigan into the consciousness of millions of people around the country.
The story of Flint during the '80s is the story of the quintessential company town abandoned by the company . Due to massive GM layoffs, 35,000 of the 150,000 residents of Flint lost their jobs during the decade. "Roger and Me" is Michael Moore's film record of the devastation.
Moore, the former editor of the iconoclastic Michigan Voice, didn't want to make just another grim documentary on rust-belt decay . (He vowed not to shoot any unemployment lines.) Instead, during his dogged pursuit of Smith, Moore interviewed everyone he could talk to in Flint, from an Amway "color analyst" to the manager of a Taco Bell who tried to train laid-off assembly line workers in the art of making chicken fajitas.
Several visiting celebrities offer Moore's camera crew earnest advice to pass on to laid-off workers. "The key is attitude," says entertainer Pat Boone, who once sold Chevrolets on TV. "People should be saying, 'losing my job on the line is the best thing that ever happened to me. " ' (He suggests starting an Amway distributorship instead.) "I'm a big supporter of employment and working in Michigan," says Miss Michigan, Kaye Lani Rae Rafko. "I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they'll be back working real soon." And TV evangelist Robert Schuller, paid $20,000 by the mayor of Flint to "rid the city of its unemployment plague," offers this helpful admonition: "Just because you've got problems is no excuse not to be happy."
Juxtaposed with these images are others showing the brutal consequences of GM 's plant closings. The camera pans down whole blocks of bombed-out buildings; sheriff 's deputy Fred Ross (an unwitting star of the movie) evicts the family of a laid-off auto worker on Christmas Eve; and a woman slaughters and skins a rabbit to help pay the bills, explaining that she was "brought up to learn to survive."
The city of Flint responded to the layoffs by squandering millions on projects aimed at making Flint a tourist mecca (the biggest white elephant was the $100 million Auto World theme park, which closed after six months due to lack of visitors). Meanwhile, garbage collection was cut back and the city's rats soon outpopulated the humans, who were leaving town in droves.
Moore doesn't limit himself to pillorying corporate baddies and mindless civic boosters. Neither Governor James Blanchard, who lauds the opening of Auto World as "the first day of the rebirth of Flint," nor UAW president Owen Bieber, who urges workers to resign themselves to the plant closings, are spared by Moore's camera.
Moore financed the film by selling his house, sponsoring weekly bingo games, and finding a few small investors to back the project. Now "Roger & Me," which has won prizes at several national film festivals, has been picked up by Warner Brothers for nationwide distribution. It remains to be seen whether a black comedy about unemployed auto workers will appeal to mass audiences. But filmgoers won't be able to say, as Roger Smilh does after Moore finally corners him at the annual GM Christmas party, "I'm sorry for those people, but I don't know anything about them."