Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [3]
But none of this mattered to me as I was hidden away backstage at the Oscars. All I felt at that moment was alone, that I was nothing more than a profound and total disappointment.
An hour later, when we walked into the Governors Ball, the place grew immediately silent, and people stepped away for fear their picture would be taken with me. Variety would later write that “Michael Moore might have had the briefest gap between career high and career low in show business history.” The Oscar-winning producer Saul Zaentz (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus) was quoted as saying, “He made a fool of himself.”
So there I stood, at the entrance of the Governors Ball, alone with my wife, shunned by the Hollywood establishment. It was then that I saw the head of Paramount Pictures, Sherry Lansing, walking determinedly up the center aisle toward me. Ah, yes—so this was how it would all end. I was about to be dressed down by the most powerful person in town. For over two decades, Ms. Lansing ran Fox, and then Paramount. I prepared myself for the public humiliation of being asked to leave by the dean of studio heads. I stood there, my shoulders hunched, my head bowed, ready for my execution.
And that was when Sherry Lansing walked right up to me, and gave me a big, generous kiss on my cheek.
“Thank you,” she said. “It hurts now. Someday you’ll be proved right. I’m so proud of you.” And then she hugged me, in full view of Hollywood’s elite. Statement made. Robert Friedman, Lansing’s number two at Paramount (and a man who years ago had helped convince Warner Bros. to buy my first film, Roger & Me) hugged my wife and then grabbed my hand and shook it hard.
And that was pretty much it for the rest of the night. Sherry Lansing’s public display of unexpected solidarity kept the haters at bay, but few others wanted to risk association. After all, everyone knew the war would be over in a few weeks—and no one wanted to be remembered for being on the wrong side! We sat quietly at our table and ate our roast beef. We decided to skip the parties and went back to the hotel where our friends and family were waiting. And as it turned out, they were anything but disappointed. We sat in the living room of our suite and everyone took turns holding the Oscar and making their Oscar speeches. It was sweet and touching, and I wished they had been up there on that stage instead of me.
My wife went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and turned on the TV. For the next hour I watched the local TV stations do their Oscar night wrap-up shows—and as I flipped between the channels, I listened to one pundit after another question my sanity, criticize my speech, and say, over and over, in essence: “I don’t know what got into him!” “He sure won’t have an easy time in this town after that stunt!” “Who does he think will make another movie with him now?” “Talk about career suicide!” After an hour of this, I turned off the TV and went online—where there was more of the same, only worse—from all over America. I began to get sick. I could see the writing on the wall—it was curtains for me as a filmmaker. I bought everything that was being said about me. I turned off the computer and I turned off the lights and I sat there in the chair in the dark, going over and over what I had done. Good job, Mike. And good riddance.
Over the next twenty-four hours I got to listen to more boos: Walking through the hotel lobby, where Robert Duvall complained to management that my presence was causing a commotion (“He did not like the smell of Michael Moore in the morning,” one of my crew would later crack to me), and going through the airport (where, in addition to the jeers, Homeland Security officials purposefully keyed my Oscar, scratching