Filmmaker takes on Heston, NRA, gun culture

LOS ANGELES -- Ask filmmaker Michael Moore how long the ideas in "Bowling for Columbine" have percolated and he recites a poem he wrote as a boy in Flint, Mich., amid the 1960s race riots and Vietnam:

"Oh, what a wonderful world this would be,

"If we all loved one another,

"The riots would stop and the wars would end,

"And we would all be brothers."

During the Detroit riots, Moore saw footage of people from white neighborhoods packing up their station wagons and fleeing. Coming out of Holy Thursday Mass on April 4, 1968, Moore heard someone call out that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, and a cheer went up from those leaving the church, he said.

"Now, when you are 13 and observing all this, it burned a hole right through my head, and it's never left me," Moore said in an interview. "So this has been with me a long time."

Moore calls "Bowling for Columbine" a comedy about a tragedy, that being the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. The film has made Moore's biggest splash since 1989's "Roger & Me," recounting his effort to confront General Motors boss Roger Smith over the collapse of the auto industry in Moore's home town.

After playing to acclaim at the Cannes and Toronto film festivals, "Bowling for Columbine" has packed commercial theaters since its mid-October debut. This week it will be in more than 100 U.S. cities, an unusually broad release for a documentary.

The title comes from the bowling class the two Columbine High School shooters attended the morning of their 1999 attack. Moore touches periodically on the Columbine tragedy, incorporating horrific security-camera footage of students hiding from the shooters and taking two Columbine survivors to the headquarters of Kmart, where the assailants obtained their ammunition, to ask the company to stop selling bullets.

But Moore takes a broader path, examining American history and imperialism, government's treatment of the poor and what he calls our culture of fear and anger.

The film relates Moore's upbringing as a National Rifle Association champion marksman. The story climaxes with Moore's bizarre audience with NRA leader Charlton Heston at the actor's home, an encounter Moore stumbled into after unsuccessfully seeking an interview through official channels.

Moore and his crew bought a Hollywood star map and went to the address listed for Heston. Figuring such maps were phony, Moore approached the intercom buzzer at the gate skeptically.

"Then ding-dong, and out of the box comes the voice of Moses," Moore said. "You can literally hear my voice shaking. I can't believe he's answering his own door. And I felt kind of bad about it, too. I don't really think you should go to somebody's home. I've never done that before. I didn't go to Roger Smith's home."

At Heston's request, Moore returned the next day. Their interview ends with Heston, flustered and annoyed, turning his back on Moore and walking away.

Considering the guerrilla approach and left-wing principles of "Roger & Me" and Moore's television shows "TV Nation" and "The Awful Truth," it's surprising more people don't decline his interview requests. But Moore says that even as his style and politics have become better known, it's gotten easier to secure interviews.

"I wouldn't talk to me. Because I would think, if Michael Moore's coming to see me, it is not because I've just called 1-800-FLOWERS. He's not here to deliver roses," Moore said. "But people want to be on TV. You go up to Charlton Heston and say, 'I'm making a movie. I want you in my movie.' The seductive lure of that outweighs the negative possibilities."

Moore's methods often draw disapproval from intellectuals who consider his work frivolous and self-centered. The liberal-minded New Republic's review of Moore's best seller "Stupid White Men," an irreverent diatribe against the Bush administration, said Moore "does not write to inform. Attitude is all," and concludes that "if this book is what passes for a political manifesto, then Tom Paine is truly dead."

"What's strange is the liberals who go after me," Moore said. "There's this old cliche that liberals are the cops of the right. It's their job to police the political discourse, to make sure it doesn't go too far out on a limb. So they define the left as being just a little bit this side of center. Then everybody else is a lunatic out on some tree limb."

While Moore's left-wing politics are central to his work, he considers himself a filmmaker and storyteller more than an activist.

"The reason why so much political art doesn't work is because the artist puts the politics first and the art second. To me, it's the other way around. You'll never get people to think about the politics if your art sucks," Moore said.

"If I just wanted to make a political statement, I'd run for office. If I wanted to give a sermon, I'd go back to the seminary and be a priest. I'm here first and foremost to make sure I make a really good, funny, tragic movie."