Playboy's 20Q: Michael Moore

corporate america's most vocal critic on foreign shoes, private schools and owning stock

Michael Moore has made himself less welcome in America's corporate boardrooms than a hostile takeover offer.

General Motors was among the first targets of Moore's sharp left jab. In his 1989 film Roger and Me, Moore pursued Roger Smith, then GM's chairman, for an explanation of why he was shutting down plants in Moore's hometown of Flint, Michigan.

The son of a GM employee, Moore veered off the path to the assembly line, first to a Catholic seminary when he was 14. But he didn't remain there long. "The hormones kicked in," he recalls.

After high school, Moore edited an alternative newspaper known as the Michigan Voice and was later lured to San Francisco for a short, unhappy stint as editor of Mother Jones. His return to Michigan set the stage for his career in film and television.

He has continued to wage class warfare through his Emmy Award--winning TV Nation and his best-selling book, Downsize This. On his latest television venture, The Awful Truth, Moore again pursues titans of business and industry.

Contributing Editor Warren Kalbacker caught up with the man in the ball cap who travels in the left lane. Kalbacker reports: "Moore manages to be opinionated and congenial at the same time. He's capable of producing a belly laugh while referring to The Wall Street Journal as 'the enemy's tip sheet.'

"Moore insists he's uneasy with his New York residency but lives there because the city is the center of the media business. 'I've had to get adjusted to such a conservative redneck place,' he says. 'I've never lived in a city with a Republican mayor.'

"And, of course, the man remains a firm believer in the benefits of government intervention in the economy. He contrasts Michigan's ten-cent bottle deposit with New York's nickel. 'You don't see any litter in Michigan,' says Moore. 'It's all picked up.'"

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[Q] Playboy: Your breakthrough film, Roger and Me, presented a jaundiced view of Flint's relationship with the auto industry. How close did you come to having a career on the assembly line?

[A] Moore: I quit the first day. The dad of my best friend in high school worked in the personnel department at Buick. He told my friend and me that he could get us jobs for the summer after our senior year. We said, "Great money. Save for college." But we had seen a lot of people who took that summer job and didn't leave it because the money was so good. They never went to college. The day I was supposed to go in, the alarm clock went off and I lay there in bed. My dad was downstairs getting up to go to his job at the AC spark plug factory. He worked hard for us so our lives could be better--so we wouldn't have to get up at 4:30 in the morning to go to work at the factory. And I decided at that moment that I wanted to do something else with my life.

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[Q] Playboy: The New York Times recently reported that Ford workers who are assembling sport utility vehicles at the plant in Wayne, Michigan are earning a hundred grand a year with overtime. Doesn't that sound like a job worth getting up early for?

[A] Moore: The workers deserve every penny that they get. They make a good living and they should because it's hard work. Besides, people believe they'll get out to the Hamptons quicker in a bigger truck. Henry Ford understood something important--if you don't pay workers enough money to buy the product, the product will eventually die. You've got to create the consumer class to make your profit. The founders of General Motors--Mott and Durant--realized that if they did not give this vast working class some of the accoutrements of wealth, sooner or later those people would revolt. In Flint, back in the Thirties, GM built five public golf courses, most of them next to the factories. The company set it up so our dads would leave the factories at three in the afternoon and go play a round of golf.

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[Q] Playboy: So the United Automobile Workers sometimes can be a better bet than the media industry unions you belong to?

[A] Moore: The Directors Guild is a great union. Its primary concern is for the creative rights of the artist. It stopped movie colorization. No studio executive can enter the editing room until ten weeks into the editing process. It's completely your film and you have the right to deliver a cut. But we also have great health care. No co-pay! Your neck's stiff? "Go get a massage. We'll pay for it." The Writers Guild is weak, it's ineffective, it doesn't support its members and it'll always back down in the face of adversity. The one good thing that it has done is get the writer a better credit than the producer. The UAW is better. No union I belong to can match it. If you are a UAW member you get the real deal--100 percent Blue Cross, not an HMO. One hundred percent coverage for dental and eye care. If you need a lawyer for any kind of civil case, from a divorce to your will, it's free. Four weeks paid vacation. You usually have a paid week or two off in the summer during model changeover. There's maternity leave and day care. The UAW will help you pay for college. These are things that were fought for over decades.

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[Q] Playboy: Were you born to conduct ambush interviews or did you work hard to develop your style?

[A] Moore: Being raised in an Irish Catholic household, you're instilled with a sense of right and wrong, socially and morally--a (continued on page 152)Michael Moore(continued from page 125) sense of fair play. I'm actually shy and introverted. I dread going in to do a shoot in some corporate office. I'm a bundle of nerves. But if nobody's going to do it, that means I have to.

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[Q] Playboy: Putting labor and management issues aside, do you feel any nostalgia for tail fins?

[A] Moore: Tail fins scared me as a child. I never thought something that could hurl toward you at 80 miles an hour should have anything so sharp on it. I always had this vision of being impaled by somebody going in reverse.

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[Q] Playboy: If you were sitting in a class at the Harvard Business School, you'd raise your hand and say what?

[A] Moore: When the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard asked me to give a lecture, a lot of business school students showed up because they wanted to debate me. A student got up and said, "This is a business, and its responsibility is to its shareholders." I said, "If you keep repeating that line, then you have lost your moral compass. I really believe what it says in the Bible about a camel having an easier time passing through the eye of a needle than a rich man does getting into heaven." It was awfully quiet. Then I said, "I'm ready to support higher wages, full employment, day care and health care. And I want you to support them, but not for my liberal do-good bleeding-heart reasons. I want you to support them because it's best for you. If everyone is working and making $40,000 or $50,000 a year, what are the chances that he's going to break into your luxury home and steal your entertainment system?" It was a great evening, and I think many of the students were affected by what I said.

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[Q] Playboy: As a keen observer of the labor movement, compare the Fifties Jimmy Hoffa with the current model, the son who has just taken over as head of the Teamsters.

[A] Moore: It's sad what's happening with the Teamsters. I remember Teamsters setting fire to a dry cleaning store in Flint in the early Sixties when the owner would not use Teamster truck drivers. A dry cleaner, man--that's a dangerous fucking place to light a match. All that fluid. The guy who set the fire caught on fire and went stumbling into the hospital with all these burns. But that was typical Hoffa style. If you're in a war, sometimes you don't really care about the weapons you choose. The UAW chose not to use those weapons and became just as strong. And it's much more democratic. I feel bad that the Teamsters Union has elected Hoffa Jr.--a lawyer, not a worker. I have a lot of friends who are Teamsters and Hoffa supporters. They don't see their real income going up. And when you're up against the ropes like that, you feel like you need a fighter. To them, the Hoffa name represents "Up against the wall, motherfucker, here I come." I understand that. But I don't support him, his slate or his policies.

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[Q] Playboy: Ball caps. Headgear of choice for the working-class hero?

[A] Moore: There's no statement I'm trying to make. People send them to me all the time. And I don't wear them because I'm bald. I'm 44, not a hair missing. Virtually no gray. I went to my 25-year high school reunion and all the guys were bald. They were all saying, "Come on, man. You're going Hollywood. This is fake, right?" And they're all pulling my hair. I said, "Hey, that's the only part of my body that's working."

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[Q] Playboy: If you look under the tongue of the right shoe in a pair, you can usually find the country of its origin. As a champion of the American worker, do you care?

[A] Moore: That's a dead issue. You can't buy anything that's 100 percent American made. These companies do not consider themselves American. They're global corporations. "Buy American" is an illusion. I wear New Balance. I have Converse on today because I had to wear them for a shoot. I wear New Balance because they fit. I have a wide foot, and Nike and others don't make a wide size. If you wear anything more than a D width, you're screwed. No American car is made with American parts. If General Motors can get the average worker to think it's the Mexicans or the Japanese who are taking their jobs from them instead of General Motors, it deflects from the corporation the anger and the political response.

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[Q] Playboy: Rush Limbaugh has slimmed down over there in the right corner. Is Michael Moore aiming to get into fighting trim here in the left?

[A] Moore: I lost 50 pounds this year. When I edited Mother Jones, I weighed 175. I ran in 5K and 10K races. Then when I lost that job in 1986, I didn't get out of bed for a month. I just sat around and made calls. If you're unemployed for a period of time, your weight goes up because you eat those 39-cent hamburgers at McDonald's and fill up on starch because it's cheap. Fortunately, I don't drink. I prefer chocolate and sugar. I've got to get back to the old me. I recently started eating a little differently--not really a big change--and I drink a lot of water. I started out losing like three pounds a week, and now I'm losing a pound a week. I'm in my fourth pants size this year.

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[Q] Playboy: Would Michael Moore buy a bleacher ticket in a publicly financed stadium?

[A] Moore: I don't think people's tax dollars should be spent on a huge profit-making enterprise. It's extortion. It's like somebody asking you to chip in on a movie they're making. I would not go to the New York City Council and say, "I want $20 million to make this movie on the Upper West Side and if you don't give it to me, I'm going to move the film out of New York City." But I love sports, so I'll always go regardless of who paid for the stadium. One's politics can never overtake one's primal urges. I'm a strong Tigers fan and a strong Pistons fan.

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[Q] Playboy: Does the expression "Take this job and shove it" resonate with you?

[A] Moore: I haven't had positive experiences being someone's employee. It's best when I'm my own boss. Because I know the feeling, I try to make sure my employees are treated in a way that I would want to be treated. I would say the average paycheck for those working on my TV show is $2000 a week. These days, it's difficult to get anything but an HMO for a small company. But our policies are extremely liberal. Unlimited sick days. If you're sick, I believe you and I want you to get better. For family issues you take as many days as you want--when the kids are sick, for bereavement, whatever. You have a right to criticize me without getting fired. I said to everybody the first day, "I want you out of here at a decent hour. I want you to go out and have a life, have relationships, get married, have babies."

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[Q] Playboy: Critique a few automobile production movies: The Betsy, Gung Ho, Tucker and Blue Collar.

[A] Moore: Blue Collar is as close to the truth as you will see in a Hollywood movie. When you live in a factory town like Flint, you are living on the edge. It's amazing more people don't go over the edge, considering the work and the lifestyle it creates. All you need to do is listen to the music that comes out of Michigan, whether it's the MC5 or Ted Nugent. Tucker is a good film in terms of its representation of how the monopolies of that time prevented independent people from building a better car. Gung Ho's heart was in the right place, but it was misdirected because the enemy isn't the Japanese. I remember going to see The Betsy in Flint and walking out of the movie thinking, Damn. I want to work for that car company. Get me some ass. The film that will be probably the best depiction of an auto worker's life is one that I hope will be made in the next year, from my friend Ben Hamper's book. It's called Rivethead.

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[Q] Playboy: You drive a minivan. Did you base your purchasing decision on a high level of domestic parts, good fit and finish or maybe because you have a relative at a dealership who was able to give you a good deal?

[A] Moore: I bought the new Chrysler minivan. It's red. I bought it for the only reason anybody should buy any product. It gave me the best value for my dollar. Only the dilettante liberal who has money sits around thinking about the political implications of what they're purchasing. The average working-class person works hard for his money and wants to spend it on something that isn't going to fall apart and that's going to protect him and his family. I purchased a minivan with a good fit and finish and a comfortable ride. It's relatively safe, and the gas mileage is good. It has a CD player and air-conditioning. If it were loaded it would have rich Corinthian leather seats and four-wheel drive, which I regret not having because I got stuck a couple of weeks ago.

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[Q] Playboy: Like many liberals, you send your child to a private school. Do you feel any guilt that she's benefiting from an expensive education?

[A] Moore: She goes to a school that has values we believe in. My friends at work would not call themselves liberals, yet everything they believe in and say and do is beyond liberal. When you grow up working class, your dream is to be able to make enough money to send your kid to the best schools. My child is not a social experiment, and my child is not the one who's going to be used to undo the damage that the rich have done to this society. Liberals who say, "I'm going to send her to the inner-city school to make things better," are so misguided politically. Your little five-year-old did not create the racist, segregated, class-based society we live in. I didn't go to public school. My parents busted their butts so we could go to Catholic school.

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[Q] Playboy: Ever worry that security guards and PR people lose their jobs as a result of a visit from Michael Moore and his camera crew?

[A] Moore: No one has ever lost a job as a result of me. I'm careful to check back. I just did something for the TV show that made me worry about a guy who was too nice to me. Security guys are great. We are always filming them doing their job, which is to throw me out. They do it well. PR people are different. Most people who work in public relations went to college to be journalists because they wanted to tell the truth. Then they got out of school and went to work at a paper for a few years and found they could make three times as much money not telling the truth. Their job is to come out and lie to the camera. They made a choice. I have little respect for that.

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[Q] Playboy: We recently heard of a young girl in a choir practice at an Episcopal church in Greenwich, Connecticut who asked if it would be appropriate to pray for a rising stock market. As a former Roman Catholic seminarian, what's your comment?

[A] Moore: It's appropriate to pray for the child who wants to pray for the stock market. They're always just a little off, those Episcopalians. They go to Mass, they take communion, but their priests can have sex. All that sex makes them have these weird ideas. The Pope has been saying that capitalism is an evil system. The economic system that we live in is unfair, it's unjust, and it's not democratic. It's not a moral system. Like I said at the end of my last film, "One evil empire down, one to go." I'm hoping someone will invent an economic system that takes the best parts of socialism, which says that everyone should get a fair shake and have a safety net, and the best parts of capitalism, which respects the will of the individual to create and invent and doesn't lump you together as part of a large, faceless mass.

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[Q] Playboy: Should there be one, will you be working for Hillary Rodham Clinton's New York Senate campaign?

[A] Moore: I will be doing more than just working for her. I'll be holding her hand the entire way. Give her a neck rub now and then on the campaign trail. She's one hot, shit-kicking feminist babe, and I don't understand why a lot of guys are threatened by her. I met her at a White House dinner. I went through the reception line where the Marine announces your name, and then you have five seconds to say hello. There are 300 people behind you. I shake Clinton's hand, and he says, "I'm such a fan of yours. I love Roger and Me." Hillary hears this and she says, "I'm a bigger fan." Then she takes me by the hand and she keeps her hand on mine. Her other hand goes on my forearm, and she says, "I've seen all your stuff. I really want to thank you for that chapter you wrote about me in your book." My face goes red. I'm having the only physical reaction that the Roman Catholic Church allows me to have. She goes on and on, and I'm so embarrassed that she actually read the chapter where I listed some Internet jokes about her. Like the one about the new Hillary combo at Kentucky Fried Chicken: two small breasts, two large thighs and two left wings. My response: If you can get those three things in a woman, you're smoking. I'm into my second minute with her. The line is being held up. Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin is standing behind me. I tell her she should run for the Senate. She spends another minute talking to me. If she needs any help after she's out of the White House, I'm there for her 100 percent. Well, 99 percent.

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[Q] Playboy: Where have you and your wife invested your 401(k)?

[A] Moore: My wife and I have some kind of retirement thing. We don't own stock. But not for political reasons. Part of it is just our upbringing. Our parents never owned stock, though they do now, because as GM employees they've been given stock. My wife and I weren't raised in homes where our dads were sitting at the table figuring out their assets. It's a foreign concept. We'd be wealthy beyond belief had we invested in the stock market eight years ago.

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[Q] Playboy: Tell us something wonderful about Michigan.

[A] Moore: People do not normally think of Michigan as one of the most beautiful states in the country. It is. You would never go into Michigan unless you were definitely planning to go to Michigan. There are no laws against sodomy in Michigan. It's a state of sodomites--in the upper and lower peninsulas, all over the place. There's more tolerance there than in New York.