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Michael Moore's 'art house' draws filmgoers
Jay Stone
TORONTO - We all know Michael Moore, filmmaker (or at least we think we do; Moore himself says that Fox News has created a character named "Michael Moore," whom even he doesn't recognize.) But we don't really know Michael Moore, exhibitor.
"At some film here in the future, I'm going to announce there will be no home video of this movie," Moore said this morning. He wasn't talking about his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, a documentary about the excesses of greed and the abuses of America's favourite economic system. He was talking about the relationship between movies and video in general. "I made this as a movie and I made it to be seen on a big screen, in the dark, with 200 strangers."
As it turns out, Moore has a vested interest in the idea of, "Go to the movies, it's the best place to be." A year and a half ago, he bought the historic 600-seat State Theatre in Traverse City, Mich., where he lives, and refurbished it into a classic film palace. He installed seats from 1999 Ford Mustangs - the most comfortable seats you can have, he says - and started a program of 25-cent children's' Saturday morning shows, 25-cent seniors' matinees on Wednesdays, and a program of mostly independent films. (Adam is playing there now; the morning matinee was The Lion King.) He calls it a popular art house; it is consistently one of the highest-grossing theatres in the country.
Being an exhibitor has inspired a few thoughts about what filmmakers need to do to protect their art.
"If we were any other kind of artist, we would never just ship our art in a FedEx box or a can to a theatre and just let it go up in any way, shape or form. If I was a painter and I was going to have an exhibit in a gallery, I'd be lighting it, I'd be choosing the frames, I'd do the positioning, everything."
Filmmakers, on the other hand, finish the sound mix and send off their works to be projected with "crappy sound, crappy projection, wrong ratio, s--- on the floor, people on their Blackberries." In Moore's theatre, anyone caught on a cellphone is banned for life.
That's the sort of thing you can do when you own the theatre. Capitalism, it turns out, has its uses, after all.
