Leffler grew up in the same part of Michigan as Moore, attending the same Catholic Church and even working together on a local youth hotline. So when Leffler calls out Moore, it means something.

“Shooting Michael Moore” lets Leffler deconstruct the Moore myth. It’s a project with a tiny budget and little Hollywood razzmatazz – Leffler is a CPA and college professor, not a slick documentarian.

But he digs deep enough into Moore’s activities to reveal a more complicated, and damning portrait of the Oscar winner.

Leffler starts at the beginning, describing his own humble roots and inserting himself into the narrative. His voice sounds like Moore’s, a reedy, sing-song cadence that’s oddly appropriate for the task at hand. The CPA even wears a ball cap a la Mike.

Moore promised at the start of his career to help Flint, Mich. rebound from the job losses tallied in his 1989 debut “Roger & Me.”

But Moore treated those who worked on that film poorly, and eventually set up a movie office in the Big Apple instead. This “Everyman” rails against white people in his books and owns a $1.8 million home in Michigan (in a town bereft of African-Americans) as well as a posh Manhattan dwelling complete with security personnel. And he doesn’t want to be interviewed by the likes of Leffler, even though the CPA hounds him down, “Roger & Me” style, for much of the movie.

Moore routinely uses tax loopholes to pay less to the federal government, something Leffler alleges using slow pans of the director’s tax documents as proof. He also invests heavily, via a foundation, in many of the evil corporations he assaults in his films.

Big Oil. Big Pharma.

Moore’s documentaries are built on equally dodgy foundations. Leffler interviews some of the people featured in Moore’s movies, and their families members too.

Turns out Moore’s camera crews often deceive their subjects to trick them into appearing in his propaganda films. It’s the same mischief pulled by the makers of “Borat,” but when you’re dealing with Marines putting their lives on the line in Iraq, the stakes are much higher.

Parts of “Moore” are drier than a prairie, befitting perhaps Leffler’s CPA credentials. And when the film attempts humor it doesn’t always succeed. Having someone dress up as a mini Michael Moore to show how he cheated as a Boy Scout years ago seem more petty than riotous.

But when Leffler gets serious, the documentary finds its focus.

That’s certainly the case when Leffler debunks the mythos behind “Sicko,” Moore’s attack on the U.S. health care system and glorification of those run in Great Britain – and Cuba.

“Moore” uses a series of news snippets to show England’s health care system is far from perfect. In fact, it sounds downright broken. It isn’t Moore’s biggest sin of omission in the film.

“The whitewash Mike does of the British health care system is nothing compared to the downright fabrication of glory he heaps on the Cuban system,” Leffler says in the film.

Leffler interviews Cuban doctors with firsthand experience working in the Communist country’s medical units. They describe a two-tiered system in which government officials and cash-waving tourists get quality care and regular Cubans get … something far, far less.

He uses a hidden camera to capture some horrifying images from a Cuban hospital, a dilapidated building with blood stained beds and other images usually reserved for a horror movie.

“Sicko,” Leffler says, was propaganda created along with former President Fidel Castro’s help, he alleges. Yet the film wasn’t shown in Cuba.

Leffler’s sources say the Cuban people would see right through the charade.

Powerful stuff, and something audiences wouldn’t expect from a CPA turned filmmaker.

“Shooting Michael Moore” isn’t the first documentary assailing Moore’s carefully calculated persona. But the personal connection between Leffler and his subject, combined with the harrowing footage snuck out of Cuba, makes this the one Moore bashing doc to see.

One of Moore’s supporters argued recently that the film’s title is a call to arms, an attempt by Leffler to incite people to violence against the filmmaker. The argument rings hollow in an age when artists routinely create works far more likely to create violence, like a feature length film depicting the death of a sitting president.

It’s understandable that Moore’s proponents would prefer to focus on drummed up controversies than addressing the meat of Leffler’s film.

Don’t get me wrong. Moore came up with a clever shtick that can be amusing, but he doesn’t make real documentaries. He makes sophomoric  agitprop that violates the Oscar’s rule against fiction in that form which other documentary makers must apparently follow — a double standard point I’ve made to the Academy awarders twice. Only the first of those letters is listed below because of space limitations, but a key point made in that second note is that there should be a separate category for Moore’s type of fabricated political schlock if such stuff is going to be receiving awards .  Sans that, “anything goes with documentary film … there are no standards … it’s all a game,” as University of Texas film professor and indie producer John Pierson put it.

The Academy’s silence was and remains deafening. Disquieting as that is, the worst silence is that of the news media that has known about Moore’s lies and kept mum. Such has been the case ever since this baseball capped faux populist schlub allegedly chased General Motors Chairman Roger Smith around for an interview to no avail in “Roger & Me.”

The entire premise of that Warner Brothers distributed film was that Smith would not meet with Moore to explain why the cruel GM capitalists annihilated Michael’s Flint, Michigan home town with plant closings and loyal employee firings. But according to the makers of two separate real documentary films who researched Moore’s methods and fidelity to his socialist political message, it’s all baloney.

Roger Smith never did an interview with Moore?

Kevin Leffler, a Flint CPA who grew up with Moore and made “Shooting Michael Moore” confirmed to me that a member of the “Roger & Me” crew told him he was present when Moore did interviews with Smith. Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine, makers of “Manufacturing Dissent,” corroborated that in their film research.  “Anyone who says that is a fucking liar,” responded Moore.

Michael doth protest too much.

How about those fired General Motors workers Moore shows?

According to Leffler, two of the film’s main characters, Flint locals Rhonda Britton and James Bond, are presented as fired GM employees when, in fact, neither worked for GM. They told Leffler that Moore coached them on what to say, how to say it with the most drama, edited their comments out of context and even promised money to the illiterate Britton if she’d sign a paper Moore gave her. The paper was a trick forfeiting any right to money from the film.

How about Fred Ross, the Flint hard heart presented as evicting fired
GM employees from their homes?

Ross told Leffler those he was evicting were not GM employees either.

The bottom line is that there are no limits to the outright lies Moore has embraced in all his his films to create false realities that can be exploited for leftist political causes, including the fabrication of quotes. That’s what he did to the late Charlton Heston by editing two speeches he made a year apart in order to make him say something on screen he never said in person. He hid the cut with a cut-away shot. Notice that Heston is wearing different suits, but the viewer doesn’t catch the deception in real time and Moore wants to keep it that way.

Kevin Leffler’s well-researched film has so upset Moore that he is trying to block it from being shown. Leffler told me Moore intimidated Carmike Cinema, the fourth largest movie house chain, into pulling it from its Traverse City, Michigan theater, a bully he may try elsewhere. One reason among many Moore probably does not want “Shooting Michael Moore” seen is that Leffler snuck into Fidel’s Cuban hospitals with a hidden camera to show what socialized Castro care is really like and it ain’t pretty.

That’s a sharp contrast to the Cuban hospital Moore showed in “Sicko” which was exclusively for rich foreigners and top communist party officials in Fidel’s regime.  But Moore never mentioned that and neither have government health care advocates here who have shamelessly used that Cuban hospital as an example of the utopian system Americans are being denied.

Leffler says he does have a distribution deals in Europe and America and that “Shooting Michael Moore” is likely to be on its way to a screen near you.

***

April 21, 2003

Bruce Davis
Executive Director
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
8949 Wilshire Boulevard
Beverly Hills, CA 90211

RE:  “BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE” INVESTIGATION REQUEST

Dear Mr. Davis:

This is a letter I had hoped not to write. However, the disturbing amount of credible evidence published in reputable venues such as “The Wall Street Journal” and “Forbes” that “Bowling for Columbine” violates the Academy rules which define a documentary feature can no longer be ignored.

Therefore, as a prior Academy Award nominee who is concerned about the integrity of the Oscar, I hereby respectfully request a fair and complete formal Academy investigation as to the eligibility of this year’s winner.

Should that investigation determine that “Bowling for Columbine” contains, as claimed, fabricated scenes and video of real people that has been edited to manufacture a fictional reality intended to mislead viewers, then the director and producer of this film should be stripped of their award.  That Oscar should then be awarded to the runner up.

Failure to conduct such an investigation and act according to its findings will diminish the stature of the Oscar, establish an exploitable precedent for future rule violators and be grossly unfair to the other nominees who did follow the rules. That unfairness will be particularly bitter to those whose film would have been nominated in place of “Bowling for Columbine.”

Even the accusation of such rule violations taints the Academy Award with implications of politics and favoritism that are most damaging. So, I again respectfully ask that you not delay your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Dan Gifford
Producer, “Waco: The Rules of Engagement”

Moore has made plenty of claims that “Capitalism” is the summation of two full decades of work, harking back to the 1989 release of his seminal “Roger & Me,” and that this film is lobbing bombs at the figures involved.  Yet much of the time, the film has a mournful, yearning approach in showing Moore’s desire that America return to the capitalism of the pre-Jimmy Carter years: he shows that the system’s promises worked out splendidly throughout most of the nation’s history, and in particular from the boom years after WWII all the way through Ford before the nation hit Carter’s infamous assessment of “malaise” in the late ‘70s. 

He blames Carter’s disastrous turn as president for the emergence of Ronald Reagan as a president who in his eyes was fully bought and paid for by corporate America to sell an aggressively greedy reinvention of capitalism. The allegations he presents in this segment of the film fly past fast and furious, and it appears that Moore is up to the old tricks his critics accuse him of: barraging viewers with so many claims amid other funny or heartbreaking footage that half-truths and heavy-handed interpretations slip by as facts. 

Yet this time, Moore takes almost as direct a slap at Barack Obama and the men running his economic policies. In fact, one of the film’s most damning scenes comes when Moore sends one corporate logo after another flying onto the screen, spotlighting the numerous financial investment firms and major corporations that donated millions to Obama’s campaign. His strongest attack comes when he shows that Goldman Sachs – widely criticized as the firm that made off with almost as much malfeasance as individual swindler Bernie Madoff – holds particular sway in the Obama camp. 

At another point, a source says that current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is utterly hopeless for the job, and shows that highly questionable figures from the Clinton era, including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and former Harvard president Larry Summers, are still heavily involved in the policies of today. Yet other strong segments show companies that manage to succeed while treating workers exceptionally well, including a bread factory where even assembly-line workers make $60,000 while the company’s bottom line thrives. 

Moore is expressly not asking for socialism or communism, but rather a return to letting genuine morality and concern for others play a major part in corporate decision-making. 

However, his use of Catholic priests from his stomping grounds in Michigan and the Bishop of Detroit as stern critics of capitalism who term it as literally immoral is sure to spark extensive religious debate among the faithful. 

Mixing tragic tales of foreclosed homeowners from the heartland with his usual pranks such as storming corporate headquarters in search of their executives, much of “Capitalism: A Love Story” treads well-worn ground for Moore. But his crack team of editors are sharper than ever with their hilarious contrasts between new footage and industrial films of the 1950s, and combined with Moore’s attacking both sides of the fence and showing of fascinating long-lost footage of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, make the film well worth seeing and sure to stir discussion no matter what side of the political divide you’re on.