I really want to, but wasn’t able to do the poster for Manufacturing Dissent, a new documentary about Michael Moore, so I passed the project on to Robot Johnny who did the smashing artwork above. The film will be at Hot Docs in April.
Robot Johnny writes a little bit about the poster in his blog.
I have a problem with Moore: there are good messages and ideas in his documentary films and TV shows (on the other hand, his attempt at non-doc work, Canadian Bacon was downright terrible) and a certain earnestness in his work, but in his eagerness to get his message across, he’s more than happy to mistreat people — remember the scene in Bowling for Columbine where he ambushes a semi-coherent Charlton Heston in his own home? — and ignore annoying little concepts like “truth” and “journalistic integrity”. He and his fans are merely the other side of the Bill O’Reilly/Sean Hannity/FOX News coin.
Apparently I’m not the only non-right-winger who feels that way about Moore. Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine, two documentary filmmakers based here in Accordion City and the creators of Manufacturing Dissent (they also made the documentary Citizen Black, about former-media-magnate-soon-to-be-jailbird Conrad Black), share my opinion. They didn’t start out that way, however. Here’s a snippet from an article about the film in the International Herald Tribune:
…during the course of making an unauthorized film about Moore, they wound up somewhere in between. In the process, their experience has added a twist to the long-running story of an abrasive social critic who has frequently been criticized from the right, but far less often, as is the case with Melnyk and Caine, from his own end of the political spectrum.
“What he’s done for documentaries is amazing,” said Melnyk, 48, a native of Toronto and a freelance TV producer, who even now expounds on the good she says Moore has done. “People go to see documentaries now and, as documentary makers, we’re grateful.”
But according to Caine, 46, an Ohio-born journalist and cameraman, the freewheeling persona cultivated by Moore, and the free-thinking rhetoric expounded by his friends and associates were not quite what they encountered when they decided to examine his work. “As investigative documentarists we always thought we could look at anything we wanted,” Caine said. “But when we turned the cameras on one of the leading figures in our own industry, the people we wanted to talk to were like: ‘What are you doing? Why are you throwing stones at the parade leader?'”
Melnyk added, “We were very lonely.”
Their film “Manufacturing Dissent” will have its premiere on March 10 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. To say it sheds an unflattering light on Moore — whose work includes the hit “Fahrenheit 9/11” and the Oscar-winning “Bowling for Columbine” — would be an understatement.
For the curious, here’s Manufacturing Dissent’s trailer:
I’m looking forward to catching this film at Hot Docs. And well done with the poster, Robot Johnny!
4 replies on “John "Robot Johnny" Martz’s Poster for “Manufacturing Dissent””
I’m confused.
I like Michael Moore’s stuff; I’m glad he’s there. I’ve been disappointed by him (the Heston stuff is a prime example) but generally I take the pragmatic/optimistic view on him. He’s not a saint in my eyes, so I watched the trailer prepared for the worst.
Maybe I blinked, but I didn’t see anything in that video that seemed particularly damning. That he doesn’t want to be interviewed doesn’t seem to justify a whole movie.
What about the clip really turned you on?
Moore, in his approach to interviews, always implies that people who don’t want to to be interviewed and who set up a number of obstacles to being interviewed are dishonest, scheming, self-serving people with something to hide. That’s his stock in trade, which makes it all the more interesting that he’s not willing to swallow his own medicine.
There’s also the matter of the fact that documentary seems to encourage something that seems to be regularly discouraged on both sides of the political fence these days: a little honest, non self-aggrandizing self-examination. In fact, it’s probably that aspect of the film that really interests me.
I’m glad there’s at least a small minority of people in the world who are smart enough to recognize that his films are propaganda films are really meant for the mindless masses…anybody who gets their information from him is a compltere and utter moron.
Just telling it like it is.
A fun movie, but really weak informationally. Much second hand info and an obvious move to curtail on the fame of a political satirist. The film makers themselves used dishonest tactics with false IDs to get close to Mike Moore…then claim “journalistic Integrity!”…get off the high horse and accept it as a secont rate video done in the style of Mike Moore. No more journalism than the Enquirer or any other tabloid. Don’t waste your time or seven bucks copy it from a right wing friend.