Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [149]
I got word that the UAW in Flint was going to hold a rally on February 11 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike. I thought this might be a good place to start shooting. I called Kevin to see what he thought about that.
“Good plan,” he said. “I’ll get everybody together, we’ll bring all the equipment with us, and I’ll go buy the film and put it on my credit card. You can pay me back when we get there.”
I wanted to say, You have a credit card?! but I didn’t want to offend him. I was just glad that he had one.
“Thanks,” I said.
“It’s about $200 for a ten-minute roll of Kodak. I’ll bring about sixty rolls. That’ll be about $12,000. Can you handle that?”
“Um, yeah,” I said, lying.
“Good. You don’t have to develop the film right away, but it’s best if you do. That’ll cost you about $12,000 more to do the developing and sound transfers.”
Gulp.
I had some money saved from my four-month job in San Francisco, but that would not be enough. I would have to sell the building that was the office for the Flint Voice. It was a four-bedroom house with a yard in a nice part of town. The depressed economy in Flint would get me a whopping $27,000 for it. I was all set.
Kevin, Anne, and the others arrived from New York the day before the first shoot was to begin. A friend offered his home as a place for them to stay. We met that night in his house and invited a few Flint people over to discuss ideas for the movie. Everybody had a good idea about what this movie should be. I was getting a little overwhelmed and Kevin motioned me to step outside so he could have a smoke—and a talk.
“Movies are definitely a collaborative process,” he said to me outside in the cold. “But they are not a democracy. This is your movie. You don’t hold meetings and have discussions. We shoot your ideas. We just need to get out there tomorrow and start shooting.”
Kevin’s philosophy was to just film whatever happens, cinema verité style.
“I do have an outline of the things I’d like to get,” I said, pulling the list out of my pocket.
“I don’t use shot lists,” he said. “I just shoot. But this is your movie, so we’ll do it your way.” He did not like my idea of having a little bit of a plan, but he was willing to go along. “Let’s just call this meeting to an end and get some sleep and get to work in the morning,” he said as his cigarette concluded.
“Roger,” I said—which reminded me of the title that I had come up with for the film. I decided to wait for another time to tell him. I figured he wouldn’t think much of titling something before you knew what you had.
But I knew what I had. I’d been living it for thirty years, all the while taking notes in my head. I’d been writing about Flint and GM for over a decade. I was already operating at 24 frames per second, even though I had not yet encountered a woman who raised bunnies to sell for “pets or meat,” or a deputy sheriff who evicted people from their homes on Christmas Eve, or a future Miss America parading down Flint’s main street on top of a convertible and waving at the boarded-up stores, or the elite of Flint dressing up at a party like the Great Gatsby and missing the irony, or one tourism scheme after another to convince people to spend their vacations in Flint. And I was yet to meet a man named Roger Smith.
None of that was known to me as the very first roll of film made its way through the sprockets of Kevin’s Aaton 16mm camera on that cold February day in 1987. We filmed the Sit-Down Strike remembrance, and we shot thirty other scenes in the next seven days. The plasma center where the unemployed sold their blood, the free cheese line, the GM flak who said GM was only in the business to make money and not to help out its hometown. We filmed from sunup to long after dusk.
I watched what Kevin and Anne did as they pointed out