What a Way to Go: Network

Our Dinner With Michael (Moore)

You never know how it’s going to go with celebrities.

During the production of What A Way To Go we learned to temper our high expectations of our literary, journalistic, and scientific heroes. Most of the authors and experts we interviewed were warm, genuine, and human. But others were, to be honest, somewhat less than that.

We were happy when Deb Lake, executive director of the State Theater in Traverse City Michigan, emailed me an invitation to come and screen What A Way To Go. The invitation included the opportunity to meet Michael Moore. The theater is home to Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival. It’s a volunteer-run, non-profit, and beautifully refurbished old downtown theater. Michael Moore helped, with funding and leadership, to bring it back to life. And their IndyFlix film series sponsored the screening of What A Way To Go. As plans evolved, the invitation included having dinner before the screening with Michael Moore and others from the committee that organizes the monthly independent film series.

And so Our Dinner With Michael came into being.

It takes a lot for a human being to put himself on the line in the ways that Michael Moore has. He’s had incredible guts over the years. He’s shown up and told the truth to the corporate and political powers-that-be in ways that make my stomach watery. And we learned that, at times, it’s been hard and scary for him and his family. We would have understood if he’d developed a sizable and arrogant ego to meet the task of standing up to those powers in the ways that he has in every one of his films. We’d not have been surprised or offended to get a cursory “Hi,HowAreYa,I’mAnImportantGuy,SeeYaLater.” It would not have bothered us nor would we have taken it personally if that had been the extent of our interaction with him.

What a pleasure it was, then, to be greeted instead with tremendous, genuine warmth and respect. His appreciation was palpable as he reached out his hand and began to joke with us about his surprise when he viewed our movie for the first time.

Our Dinner With Michael proved to be more gratifying, and unexpectedly healing, than we could have guessed.

You have to understand what it has been like for us to be essentially unfunded, virgin, documentary filmmakers who embarked on making a movie that takes on the biggest questions facing human beings; a movie that takes apart the very core assumptions of the American lifestyle; a movie that forecasts the immanent dissolution of all that Americans have come to expect as their birthright: endless economic growth, material comfort, and growing prosperity, from now on and until forever.

It was a big story to approach for a first effort. But there wasn’t time, or any reason we could see, to do anything less ambitious.

So we did it. And in doing so we stepped into the unexpected role of prophet of unhappy times, tumultuous times, and perhaps, tragically, even the end of times. It was not what we had really planned to do by making a movie, to step into such a role. But we found out, after the fact, that it comes with the territory.

It’s been hard, scary, and alienating to be in this role. It’s also been deeply fulfilling and gratifying. We’ve received tremendous feedback from grateful viewers of our movie who had lost hope of finding others who were able to look so soberly and squarely at the crisis of which the human species, and indeed the whole life of the planet, is in the midst. That’s been the upside.

The downside is that people have also responded with criticism and anger. They’ve questioned our integrity. They’ve called us names. They’ve suggested we’re only in it for the money. (What a joke that is.) Comments have been such that Tim decided to have his email screened, to eliminate from his “director” in-box the nasty and ignorant feedback that serves only to sock him in the gut, over and over again. We learned to request that people resist playing film critics when we conduct post-screening dialogues. Out of ignorance and fear people can be unbelievably thoughtless and hurtful.

In addition to harsh comments we’ve gotten from strangers, we were not popular at home either. We’ve now left the local community where we lived prior to and while making the movie. We found that the old adage, “A prophet is never known in his own country” holds far more wisdom than we could have known. And not only is a prophet not known, but the prophet, like the messenger, can and will be shot if the neighbors don’t happen to like the content of the prophesy. Spoken and unspoken, the reaction and response we got from all but a very few of our local progressive community was pretty consistent: “You guys are way too scary. We don’t want any more to do with you if you won’t lighten up and join us in our fantasy of easy sustainability. You need to read some light fiction and rejoin the rest of the sleeping human race.” We were very sad that so few people were able to stand by us and engage in this critical conversation, especially people we’d known for a decade or more.

I’m not whining. We’ve come to terms with this. We understand that the message of our movie is a very bitter herb to ingest, a tremendously hard bullet to bite, an apparently insurmountable emotional challenge to the vast majority of progressives who are doing their best to try and make a difference in the world. Over time, as the world situation unwinds further, we realize that the message we deliver in What A Way To Go will be more widely received. We’ve sensed a difference even in the past couple of months with the rise in gas prices and undeniable chaos in weather patterns. We’re just a few years, or weeks, ahead of our time. More and more people are going to want to understand what the hell has gone wrong with their American Dream and how come the nightmare isn’t ending. Then What A Way To Go, and our intentions in making it, will be appreciated by more people. Then it will serve the purposes we’ve had in mind: to empower people to engage in thorough and thoughtful dialogue about our collective diagnosis.

In the meantime we’ve licked our wounds and built a personal support network to weather the criticism and shunning that has come our way.

We had no idea that our trip to Traverse City would have any impact on this aspect of our lives. We wondered, even hoped a little, about doors that might open to distribution. We expected it would be nice, at least, to meet Michael Moore, a cinematic hero, a profound documentary maker. We were open to a good experience, but we didn’t expect the outcome of this train trip to address our experience of the last couple of years.

So it was a complete surprise when Our Dinner With Michael healed those wounds. Michael Moore stepped up to the spiritual plate as a true elder. And he blessed us.

As Sally Neal, the gutsy activist who started the film series introduced us, Michael, with his unassuming boyish smile, extended his hand with unforgettable warmth and genuineness. We stood, the three of us, in the midst of a busy restaurant, in a cocoon of sweet camaraderie. We were in the presence of someone who knew what we’d been through without us speaking a word of it. We listened, somewhat spellbound, as Michael talked about his experience of seeing our movie. He laughed and joked with us about the warning card at the beginning of the movie, saying that What A Way To Go is a long and dense film. He said he’d had no idea what he was about to watch but when he saw the warning he realized that he was likely in for a ride. And indeed, he said, it was a ride. So much so that he did something he didn’t remember having done in the last decade or more. As soon as the movie was over, he told us, he reached up and hit the play button again and watched it through a second time. “Four hours,” he said, “I watched your movie.” He was riveted.

Hearing this from a hero was a balm for two weary and road-wounded souls. It’s been a very long four years. It’s been hard and lonely. But Michael Moore watched our movie and he liked it. He liked it enough to watch it immediately a second time. He liked it enough to agree with the IndyFlix committee that they should bring us to Traverse City when they screened the movie. I guess what he’s saying is that it’s good.

It’s good. It’s good not in spite of the fact that it tells the truth, but because it tells the truth. It’s good not in spite of the fact that it’s long and dense, but because it is long and dense. And when he introduced us and the movie at the State Theater later on, Michael Moore went further. After he told the story of hitting the play button again after his first viewing, he said something that really hit the spot for me. He said it is not often to find people like us who respect their audience enough to tell them the whole truth. With that, he nailed it for me. Because that is true, truer than anyone else had put into words previously. We do respect our audience that much. We do believe our audience wants the whole truth. How amazing for us to have him really understand that, and to put words to it.

Michael Moore may not know what a gift he gave us, and how it healed us. But that’s how true elders are. They act without pretense or expectation. They shine on their people simply because it is the thing to do. Elders in a tribe, or in a community, or in a social movement, are people who have, by facing their own significant challenges and personal losses, accumulated considerable personal power. And true elders use that personal power to empower others, often to heal them, and then to send them off, renewed, into new challenges. .

And that’s what Michael Moore did. That’s what Our Dinner With Michael accomplished. He saw us. He acknowledged deeply our efforts and intentions. And by doing so, he blessed us.

Thank you, Michael Moore, for being even better than we expected you to be. With this healing, and your blessing, we are ready to get to work again.

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