Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [150]
“Imagine if we had an hour’s worth of film in the camera and film was as cheap as paper,” someone on the crew observed. “We’d just get lazy and shoot everything. Wouldn’t have to think about it while shooting. Worry about it later!”
“I want to go down to GM headquarters and see if Roger Smith will speak to us,” I told Kevin. “Are you up for that?”
“Are you kidding?” he said with his typical droll, sarcastic voice. “I was wondering when things were going to get interesting.”
And so we drove down to Detroit and entered the lobby of General Motors. I went straight to the elevator and hit the button. The doors opened and we went inside. I pushed the button for the fourteenth floor, where Smith’s office was. The button wouldn’t light up. I kept pushing but nothing happened. The doors wouldn’t shut. And that was when a security guard asked us to step outside. He was a polite, older man and he told us to hang on while he called someone. He came back and said that we needed an appointment, and to come back when we had one.
For the next two-plus years I tried to get that appointment. And when I couldn’t, I made numerous trips to Detroit to just show up and see what would happen. The search for Roger, to get him to come to Flint so I could show him the damage his decisions had caused, became the thread of the movie. But the real mission of the film had nothing to do with Smith or GM or even Flint. I wanted to make an angry comedy about an economic system that I believed to be unfair and unjust. And not democratic. I hoped that would come through.
Our week with Kevin was up. I thanked him profusely for all that he and Anne and the others did to give me my start. He said he would help in any way he could, just give him a call. I showed him an application I had received to apply for a grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts. I asked him if he could help me fill it out, as I assumed this was something he had to do all the time.
“What do I put in this box here,” I asked him, pointing to the line that asked for my “occupation.”
“Filmmaker,” he said without missing a beat.
“I’m not a filmmaker,” I responded. “I haven’t made a film.”
“I’m sorry,” he replied curtly. “You write down that you’re a filmmaker. You were a filmmaker the second that film started rolling through this camera.”
And so I wrote “filmmaker.” And for the next two and a half years, I made a film. There would be over a dozen more shoots. Kevin connected me to friends of his in the documentary community, most importantly to a couple from San Francisco, Chris Beaver and Judy Irving. They, too, came to Flint and shot for me for a week. The rest of the time it was just me, my wife, and a few friends (plus a cameraman or two from Detroit) bumbling around with the equipment, trying my best to make a movie. There were never more than four of us in the car as we drove from shoot to shoot. Left on our own, we would constantly screw up the camera and the sound recorder—so many times in fact that by the end of shooting in 1989, only about 10 percent of the footage we shot was usable.
I was having a hard time staying above water financially and so the film lab, DuArt in New York, said I could defer payment until I was done. It was run by an old lefty, and he liked seeing the footage as I shipped it in. I heard about an event in New York where distributors and funders came together to look at films in progress. If you paid them a fee, you could show them fifteen