Michael Moore biography

Michael Moore's Voice

Moore followed up Roger & Me with a sequel, Pets or Meat: A Return to Flint (1992) a short film shown on PBS. The second film repeated the narrated style of the first and seemed more of a continuation than a sequel. In it, Moore caught up on the lives of people from the first film, including "the Rabbit Lady," who sold rabbits as pets or meat. The film was also an update on Moore himself, containing snippets from his appearances on television talk shows such as Donahue. He made an unlikely movie "star"—he is heavyset with a goofy grin, a fondness for baseball caps, and a preference untucked shirts—yet there is no doubt that the "star" of all of Moore's films is Michael Moore.

His next project was a narrative film, Canadian Bacon (1994), starring John Candy, Rhea Perlman, Kevin Pollack, Alan Alda, and Rip Torn. Alda plays a liberal U.S. president who decides to invade Canada in order to boost his popularity in the polls. A cross between Dr. Strangelove (there's a similar Doomsday device) and Wag the Dog (the invasion of a foreign country for shabby domestic reasons), the film never received wide release, nor were the reviews particularly enthusiastic.

Television and Books

Moore's next move was to take the basic Roger & Me idea—good guy Mike harasses evil corporate America—to television. His political comedy show, TV Nation, was a summer replacement on NBC in 1994. The show featured weekly, off-the-wall polls like 16% of Perot voters believe that "if dolphins are really that smart they could get out of those nets," and showcased memorable events such as a day of picnicking with "Doctor Death" Jack Kevorkian. The first episode featured the "CEO Challenge" in which he asked executives to perform menial tasks, such as getting the head of IBM to format a disk. While not all the stories had a political bent, TV Nation was an eclectic mix of news magazine, sketch comedy, and David Letterman-style comedy of the banal. Only on TV Nation would you see a guy in a Detroit Tigers baseball cap attempting to end the conflict in Bosnia by getting leaders from the warring factions to share a pizza together.

NBC passed on TV Nation, but Fox picked it up for eight episodes in the summer of 1995. It was more of the same, including a segment featuring Moore performing maneuvers with the Michigan Militia. He also introduced Crackers, the corporate crime-fighting chicken, alongside featured guests such as Merrill Markoe (David Letterman's former chief writer), actress and stand-up comedian Janeane Garofalo, former MTV VJ Karen Duffy, and filmmaker Rusty Cundieff, who wrote and directed a comedy movie, Fear of a Black Hat. Moore chronicled his experiences with the show in a book, Adventures in TV Nation (1998), written with wife Kathleen Glynn.

The book was not his first. He had published Downsize This: Random Threats from an Unarmed American, an unlikely best seller, in 1994. The book began with two photos: one of the bombed out Federal building in Oklahoma City, the other of a pile of rubble which used to be an auto factory in Flint.