Michael Moore's Roger & Me

Also known by the title: "Roger and Me: A Humorous Look at How General Motors Destroyed Flint, Michigan." Filmed on location in Flint and Detroit, Michigan, in 16mm. Released in Flint, Michigan December 19, 1989; released in New York City and Los Angeles December 20, 1989. Released on video June 20, 1990. Shown at the 1989 Toronto Festival of Festival September 9 & 11; the Independent Feature Film Market (IFFM) in New York City October 7, 9, & 15; the Greater Fort Lauderdale Film Festival October 28; the London Film Festival in November; the United States Film Festival, Park City, Utah January 20-28; the Berlin Film Festival in February, and the New York Film Festival. The film also showed on PBS, along with a brief sequel, "Pets or Food?" Winner of the 1989 New York Film Critics Award for Best Documentary. Personalities featured in the movie included head of General Motors Roger Smith, ex-president Ronald Reagan, Deputy Fred Ross, Rhonda Britto (the "Bunny Lady"), Flint Tourism Chief Steve Wilson, and the now-former Miss America Kaye Lani Rae Rafko (who represented Michigan in the pageant). Michael Moore is a former journalist for the left-wing San Francisco publication "Mother Jones." This was his first film. Warner Bros. bought "Roger and Me" for an estimated $3 million. $25,000 of it went to families in Flint left homeless by the closing of General Motors. "Roger and Me" opened to great critical and popular acclaim. Soon after its release, however, the documentary came under fire when director Michael Moore admitted that he had rearranged the chronology of events for his own narrative purposes. Many people considered this an unethical bending of the truth that they felt a documentary should represent. Rated BBFC 15 by the British Board of Film Censors.

Ex-journalist Michael Moore's blistering, satirical documentary about the closing of the General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan in the mid-1980s. This move, which eliminated 33,000 jobs and left the one-industry town destitute, was a particularly bitter tragedy, considering that Flint was the town that gave birth to General Motors during post-war boom era of the 1950s. The film revolves around Moore's dogged attempts to gain an interview with Roger Smith, the elusive and well-insulated head of GM and the man responsible for the layoffs. While tracking the eponymous Roger, Moore takes time out to record the devastation of Flint and the desperate, often unintentionally hilarious attempts of the citizens and the city fathers to deal with the catastrophe.

"...A savagely witty documentary....Moore proves himself a gifted satirist...[He] gives complex issues a startling clarity..."

"...America has an irrepressible new humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain and Artemus Ward....In social criticism, anything goes, as it goes triumphantly in ROGER AND ME..."

Included in the New York Times "10 Best Films of 1989" List