Here Comes Trouble

by Michael Moore

  Yours,

  Michael Moore

  #999126

  I sat and stared at this letter for the longest time. That night I had a bad dream. I was at the execution of Michael Moore—and, needless to say, I didn’t want to be there. I tried to get out of the room but they had locked the door. Michael Moore started laughing. “Hey! You’re next, good buddy!” I froze in place, and as they administered the lethal injection, he would not take his dying eyes off me as his life expired.

  The following day I called the anti–death penalty advocates who were helping him. I offered to do whatever I could. They told me that things seemed pretty hopeless—after all, this was Texas, and no one gets a stay or a pardon from the governor here—but they were filing one last appeal nonetheless. They said I could write a letter to the governor or the Court of Criminal Appeals.

  I did more than that. I began a letter-writing drive on my website and appealed to the half-million people on my e-mail list to help me. I spoke out publicly against Michael Moore’s execution. I told people the story of a young man, a Navy veteran of nine years, who was severely abused as a child and never mentally recovered from the abuse. Now at the age of thirty, he kept a notebook of the high school girls in town he liked to stalk. One night he thought he would sneak into one of the girls’ homes and steal what he could. She wasn’t home. Her mother was. He was drunk and he freaked out and killed her. Pulled over an hour later for a traffic violation, he volunteered to the police (who were unaware a murder had been committed) that he had just done something bad. And that was that. He got a lousy lawyer (who, to his credit, filed a statement on behalf of his appeal, admitting he didn’t do a good job for Michael) and a quick trial. Michael Moore was found guilty and given the maximum sentence: death.

  Thousands responded to my appeal to stop the execution of Michael Moore. The Texas governor and prison board were deluged with letters and calls from people protesting his killing.

  And then something unusual happened: on the day before he was to be put to death, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals granted a stay of execution for Michael Moore. Michael Moore to live! In Texas! Unbelievable. No, really, unbelievable.

  I can’t describe the relief I felt. Michael Moore wrote me another letter, thanking me. But now the hard work of the real appeal would begin.

  And then 9/11 happened. You know the cliché “9/11 changed everything”? This was one of those things. Compassion for killers went way out the window. It was killing time in America, and if an innocent man could be killed while eating a danish during a business meeting 106 floors above Manhattan, then a murderer in Texas certainly could not expect to be kept alive. Kill or be killed was all that mattered to us; we were now a people ready to go to war, anywhere, one war after another, if need be. You would soon be able to sum us up the way D. H. Lawrence once did: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”

  Plans for the execution of Michael Moore were placed on the fast track. All appeals were rejected. Michael put me on the list to attend his execution—if I so chose to come. I could not. I could not go to Texas and watch Michael Moore die. I wanted to be there for him, but I simply couldn’t do it.

  At 6:34 p.m. on January 17, 2002, Michael Moore became the first execution of the year in the state of Texas.

  And yes, the headline read: MICHAEL MOORE EXECUTED.

  The hate mail after the Oscar speech was so voluminous, it almost seemed as if Hallmark had opened a new division where greeting card writers were assigned the task of penning odes to my passing. (“For a Special Motherfucker…” “Get Well Soon from Your Mysterious Car Accident!” “Here’s to a Happy Stroke!”)

  The phone calls to my house were actually creepier. It’s a whole different fright machine when a human voice is attached to the madness and you think, This person literally risked arrest to say this over a phone line! You had to admire the balls—or insanity—of that.

  But the worst moments were when people came on to our property. At that time we had no fence, no infrared cameras, no dogs with titanium teeth, no electrocution devices. So these individuals would just walk down the driveway, always looking like rejects from the cast of Night of the Living Dead, never moving very fast, but always advancing with single-minded purposefulness. Few were actual haters; most were just crazy. We kept the sheriff’s deputies busy until they finally suggested we might want to get our own security, or perhaps our own police force. Which we did.

  We met with the head of the top security agency in the country, an elite, no-fucking-around outfit that did not hire ex-cops (“Why are they ex-cops? Exactly.”), nor any “tough guys” or bouncer-types. They preferred to use only Navy SEALs and other ex–Special Forces, like Army Rangers. Guys who had a cool head and who could take you out with a piece of dental floss in a matter of nanoseconds. They had to go through an additional nine-week boot camp with the agency to work for them. They already knew how to kill quietly and quickly with perfection; now they would also learn how to save a life.

  I started by having the agency send me one of their ex-SEALs. By the end of the year, due to the alarming increase of threats and attempts on me, I had nine of them surrounding me, round-the-clock. They were mostly black and Hispanic (you had to volunteer to be on my detail, thus the lopsided but much-appreciated demographic). I got to know them well and, suffice it to say, when you live with nine hardcore SEALs who also happen to like you and what you do, you learn a lot about how to “floss.”

  After the Oscar riot and the resulting persona-non-grata status I held as the most hated man in America, I decided to do what anyone in my position would do: make a movie suggesting the president of the United States is a war criminal. I mean, why take the easy road? It was already over for me, anyway. The studio that had promised to fund my next film had called up after the Oscar speech and said that they were backing out of their signed contract with me—and if I didn’t like it, I could go fuck myself. Fortunately, another studio picked up the deal but cautioned that perhaps I should be careful not to piss off the ticket-buying public. The owner of the studio had backed the invasion of Iraq. I told him I had already pissed off the ticket-buying public, so why don’t we just make the best movie possible, straight from the heart—and, well, if nobody liked that, there was always straight-to-video.

  In the midst of all this turmoil I began shooting Fahrenheit 9/11. My crew found Bush White House footage that the networks wouldn’t run. I lifted it from their news departments because I thought the people had a right to see the truth.1 I told everyone on my crew to operate as if this was going to be the last job we were ever going to have in the movie business. This wasn’t meant to be an inspirational speech—I really believed that this was going to be it, that we were lucky to even be making Fahrenheit considering all that had rained down on me. So let’s just make the movie we want to make and not worry about our “careers.” Careers are overrated anyway! And so we spent the next eleven months putting together our cinematic indictment of an administration and a country gone mad.

  The release of the film in 2004, just a little over a year after the start of the war, came at a time when the vast majority of Americans still backed the war. We premiered it at the Cannes Film Festival after the Walt Disney Company had done everything it could to stop the film’s release (our distributor, Miramax Films, was owned by Disney). We went to the New York Times with the story of how they were silencing the movie, and the Times, still smarting from the revelation that their pre–Iraq invasion stories were false, put the whole sordid affair on the front page. That saved us and the film, and we got to Cannes—where the movie received the longest standing ovation in the festival’s history. We were awarded the top prize, the Palme d’Or, by an international jury headed by Quentin Tarantino. It was the first time in nearly fifty years a documentary had won the prize.2

  This initial overwhelming response to Fahrenheit 9/11 spooked the Bush White House, convincing those in charge of his reelection campaign
that a movie could be the tipping point that might bring them down. They hired a pollster to find out the effect the film would have on voters. After screening the movie with three different audiences in three separate cities, the news Karl Rove received was not good.

  The movie was not only giving a much-needed boost to the Democratic base (who were wild about the film), it was, oddly, having a distinct effect also on female Republican voters.

  The studio’s own polling had already confirmed that an amazing one-third of Republican voters—after watching the movie—said they would recommend the film to other people. The film had tiptoed across the partisan line. But the White House pollster reported something even more dangerous: 10 percent of Republican females said that after watching Fahrenheit 9/11, they had decided to either vote for John Kerry or to just stay home.

  In an election that could be decided by only a few percentage points, this was devastating news.

  The Bush campaign was strongly advised to get out ahead of the movie and make sure their base never even thought about checking it out. “You must stop them from entering the theater. Republicans and independents must not see this movie.” Because if they did, a certain, small percentage of them would not be able to overcome their “emotional” reaction to the death and destruction the movie attributed to George W. Bush. Although they knew most Republicans would dismiss the movie sight unseen, nothing could be left to chance. The pollster himself sat in the back at the screenings and saw firsthand what he called “the fatal blows” the film delivered, especially when it went to a scene with the mother of a deceased American soldier. It was too devastating for a small but significant part of the audience. “If we lose the November election,” he told me shortly after the film’s release, “this movie will be one of the top three reasons why.”

  I had crossed the Rubicon into mainstream America with Fahrenheit 9/11. But now that I had crossed it, I didn’t realize there would be no return to the semiquiet life of quasi-anonymity. (I had had a strong, but respectfully small, cult following that had made my life pleasant and functional up to that point.) I had now entered dangerous territory, and while it meant that I would never have to worry about a roof over my head again, it also meant that my family and I would pay a high price for this “success.”

  This was now no longer just some little documentary we had made—and I was no longer seen as some “gadfly” that could be ignored like a nettlesome pest. This was now cover of Time magazine territory. This was now me being seated in the presidential box next to President Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Convention. There would be a record four appearances in six months on The Tonight Show. The movie would open at #1 all across North America (the first time ever for a documentary). And, to make matters worse for the White House, it opened at #1 in all fifty states, even in the Deep South. Even Wyoming. Yes, even Idaho. It opened at #1 in military towns like Fort Bragg. Soldiers and their families were going to see it and, by many accounts, it became the top bootleg among the troops in Iraq. It broke the box office record long held by the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi for the largest opening weekend ever for a film that opened on a thousand screens or less. It was, in the verbiage of Variety, major boffo, a juggernaut.

  And in doing all of that, it had made me a target. Not just a target of the Right or of the press. This movie was now affecting a sitting president of the United States and his chances for a second term.

  So, the film—and especially its director—had to be portrayed as so repulsively anti-American that to buy a ticket to this movie would be akin to an act of treason.

  The attacks on me were like mad works of fiction, crazy, made-up stuff that I refused to respond to because I didn’t want to dignify the noise. On TV, on the radio, in op-eds, on the Internet—everywhere—it was suggested that Michael Moore hates America, he’s a liar, a conspiracy nut, and a croissant-eater. The campaign against me was meant to stop too many Republicans from seeing the film.

  And it worked. Of course, it also didn’t help that Kerry was a lousy candidate. Bush won the election by one state, Ohio.

  There was a residual damage from all the hate speech generated toward me by the Republican pundits. It had the sad and tragic side effect of unhinging the already slightly unglued. And so my life went from receiving scribbly little hate notes (think of them as anti-Valentines) to full-out attempted physical assaults—and worse.

  The ex–Navy SEALs moved in with us. When I walked down a public sidewalk they would literally have to form a circle around me. At night they wore night-vision goggles and other special equipment that I’m convinced few people outside Langley have ever seen.

  The agency protecting me had a Threat Assessment Division. Their job was to investigate anyone who had made a credible threat against me. One day, I asked to see the file. The man in charge began reading me the list of names and the threats they’d made and the level of threat that the agency believed each one posed. After he went through the first dozen, he stopped and asked, “Do you really want to keep going? There are four hundred and twenty-nine more.”

  Four hundred and twenty-nine more? Four hundred and twenty-nine files of people who wanted to harm me, even kill me? Each file contained minute details of these people’s lives and what they might be capable of. I really didn’t want to hear any more. My sister was surprised at the number.

  “I thought it would be around fifty,” she said, as if “fifty” was a doable number we could handle.

  I could no longer go out in public without an incident happening. It started with small stuff, like people in a restaurant asking to be moved to a different table when I was seated next to them, or a cab driver who would stop his cab in mid-traffic to scream at me. There were often people who would just start yelling at me, no matter where the location: on a highway, in a theater, in an elevator. I was often asked by bystanders, “Does this happen to you a lot?” as they would be shocked at the intensity and randomness of it. One hater decided to let me have it at Mass on Christmas Day. “Really?” I said to her. “On Christmas? You can’t even give it a rest on this day?”

  The verbal abuse soon turned physical, and the SEALs were now on high alert. For security reasons, I will not go into too much detail here, partly on the advice of the agency and partly because I don’t want to give these criminals any more of the attention they were seeking:

  In Nashville, a man with a knife leapt up on the stage and started coming toward me. The SEAL grabbed him from behind by his belt loop and collar and slung him off the front of the stage to the cement floor below. Someone had to mop up the blood after the SEALs took him away.

  In Portland, a guy got on the outdoor stage and started coming at me with a blunt object that he apparently was going to use over my head. My assistant blocked him momentarily, and that gave the SEALs the jump they needed to grab him and take him away.

  In Fort Lauderdale, a man in a nice suit saw me on the sidewalk and went crazy. He took the lid off his hot, scalding coffee and threw it at my face. The SEAL saw this happening but did not have the extra half-second needed to grab the guy, so he put his own face in front of mine and took the hit. The coffee burned his face so badly, we had to take him to the hospital (he had second-degree burns)—but not before the SEAL took the man face down to the pavement, placing his knee painfully in the man’s back, and putting him in cuffs.

  In New York City, while I was holding a press conference outside one of the theaters showing Fahrenheit, a man walking by saw me, became inflamed, and pulled the only weapon he had on him out of his pocket—a very sharp and pointed #2 graphite pencil. As he lunged to stab me with it, the SEAL saw him and, in the last split second, put his hand up between me and the oncoming pencil. The pencil went right into the SEAL’s hand. You ever see a Navy SEAL get stabbed? The look on their face is the one we have when we discover we’re out of shampoo. The pencil stabber probably became a convert to the paperless society that day, once the SEAL was done with him and his sixteenth-century
writing device.

  In Denver, I appeared at a screening of my movie. Security found a man carrying a gun and had him removed. There were often guns found on people—always legal, of course, thanks to the new laws that let people carry handguns into public events.

  More than once, some white guy just wanted to punch me. One time it was a group of skinheads. Another time it was a realtor. Each time, the SEALs stepped in and put their bodies between mine and the assailant’s. Most times we did not involve the police as we didn’t want it to become public, thinking that would only encourage copycats.

  And then there was Lee James Headley. Sitting alone at his home in Ohio, Lee had big plans. The world, according to his diary, was a place dominated and being ruined by liberals. His comments read like the talking points of any given day’s episode of The Rush Limbaugh Show.

  And so Lee made a list. It was a short list, but a list nonetheless of the people who had to go. The names on it were former attorney general Janet Reno, Senator Tom Harkin, Senator Tom Daschle, Rosie O’Donnell, and Sarah Brady. But at the top of the list was his number one target: “Michael Moore.” Beside my name he wrote, “MARKED” (as in “marked for death,” he would later explain).

  Throughout the spring of 2004, Lee accumulated a huge amount of assault weapons, a cache of thousands of rounds of ammunition, and various bomb-making materials. He bought The Anarchist’s Cookbook and the race-war novel The Turner Diaries. His notebooks contained diagrams of rocket launchers and bombs, and he would write over and over: “Fight, fight, fight, kill, kill, kill!” He also had drawings of various federal buildings in Ohio.