Michael Moore funded his first documentary partly with bingo nights and a lawsuit settlement
Fired from Mother Jones after four months, Michael Moore sued, settled for $58,000 and poured it into a film about General Motors abandoning his hometown of Flint. Roger & Me launched a career that later produced the highest-earning documentary in American box-office history and a Palme d'Or.
Moore was born in Flint, Michigan, on April 23, 1954, and raised in nearby Davison by a family bound to the car industry: his father and grandfather worked in General Motors plants, and an uncle helped found the United Automobile Workers and joined the Flint sit-down strike. After Catholic schooling and a year at a seminary in Saginaw, he threw himself into drama and debate at high school. At 18 he won a seat on the Davison school board, then the youngest person elected to office anywhere in the country, since the minimum age had just dropped to 18.
He left the University of Michigan–Flint in his second year and at 22 started an alternative paper that became The Flint Voice and later The Michigan Voice. Singer Harry Chapin, whom Moore talked into a benefit gig after sneaking backstage, bankrolled it with concerts and kept playing Flint every year. The paper closed in April 1986 when Moore went to San Francisco to edit Mother Jones.
His exit there is disputed. One account says he refused to print a piece critical of the Sandinistas, which he considered inaccurate; the magazine's owners said he performed poorly; Moore says the real issue was their refusal to let him cover plant closures in Flint. Roger & Me, released in 1989, followed that story, named after GM chief Roger B. Smith, as factories moved to Mexico for cheaper labour.
Bowling for Columbine, on American gun culture, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2002. Fahrenheit 9/11, a critique of George W. Bush's early presidency, took the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2004 and earned $119,194,771, a record for a documentary in the United States. Sicko tackled health care, and Fahrenheit 11/9 in 2018 looked at Donald Trump's first term. Time listed him among its 100 most influential people in 2005, while right-wing critics dismiss his work as propaganda.
Source: Michael Moore
