'Fahrenheit' luring TV viewers into theaters

NEW YORK — Time was, you had to go to the movies to see the news. Then came television, which brought newsreels right into your home.

Now, in this election year a half-century later, people in huge numbers have found that getting news about the war in Iraq and the politics behind it makes a trip to the multiplex well worth the bother.

Who could have forecast such a relapse?

Could be, neither fans nor detractors of Michael Moore, whose “Fahrenheit 9/11” has uprooted couch potatoes by the carload since premiering three weeks ago.

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Moore, of course, knows how to make a splash. Last year a billion viewers saw him accept his “Bowling for Columbine” best-documentary Academy Award by denouncing the war of a “fictitious president ... Shame on you, Mr. Bush!”

But then he elaborated on that theme with “Fahrenheit 9/11,” and the public response has been greater than anyone could have imagined, setting off shock waves even beyond its record-busting $80 million box office. His is a film that is firing up the public, both pro and con — even people who haven’t seen it.

And it’s done something else. In the way the film frames the presidency of George W. Bush (“Was it all just a dream?” Moore muses over images of Al Gore celebrating his short-lived win) “Fahrenheit 9/11” has managed to upstage mainstream TV journalism.

Moore's version of made-for-TV journalism
Along with his previous documentaries, a feature-film satire and political best sellers, Moore has engaged in made-for-TV journalism — his version of it, anyway. He headed up the prankishly muckraking “Awful Truth” on Bravo, and, before that, masterminded “TV Nation” for NBC, which billed the 1994-95 series as an “investigative comedic magazine show.”

Stories on “TV Nation” included a report about Avon ladies selling makeup to natives in the Amazon wilderness and an effort by Moore to broker peace in Bosnia by getting the ambassadors of Serbia and Croatia to serenade each other with the “Barney” song.

Needless to say, “TV Nation” wasn’t hatched at NBC News (MSNBC is a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft).

Odds are Moore could never fit the TV news mold. For instance, it’s hard to picture him pinch-hitting for Stone Phillips as anchor of “Dateline NBC.” Moore is somewhat of a niche personality.

Granted, a signature personal style hasn’t hurt veteran swashbuckler Geraldo Rivera of Fox News Channel, or John Stossel, the libertarian pamphleteer of ABC News.

But bulky, bluejeans-clad Moore is a committed outsider with a scruffy look and a liberal agenda. Long ago he staked his claim as a reporter-provocateur well apart from the manicured journalistic mainstream.

All the more surprising, then, that the TV-news establishment, issuing free content around the clock, could be eclipsed by an independent film that costs good money to see, and, until just weeks ago, hadn’t even landed a theatrical distributor.

So what does “Fahrenheit 9/11” give its audience that newscasts thus far don’t?

Secret to 'Fahrenheit's' success
For starters: the video footage of recuperating U.S. soldiers, Iraqi casualties, President Bush in that classroom paralyzed for seven minutes after learning of the terrorist attacks. This is video you have likely seen nowhere else, and you emerge from the theater wondering, “Why the heck not?”

“Fahrenheit 9/11,” which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, tackles grand themes with humor, fury and naked partisanship that insists upon a response from the viewer.

And it provides a bracing alternative to the claims for objectivity that reign at TV news outlets (including, naturally, the “fair-and-balanced”-boasting Fox News Channel, whose lack of objectivity is probably its greatest asset). These Big Media news providers have served as Bush administration facilitators ever since his disputed election, declares Moore, a little guy whose message is unmistakably his own.

Moore has been in the public eye since his first theatrical film, “Roger & Me,” became an out-of-nowhere hit in 1989.

In the meantime, the companies that owned ABC, CBS and CNN have been swallowed up by even larger conglomerates. NBC News and its cable-news outlet MSNBC, launched in 1996, remain under the wing of mammoth General Electric, while Fox News Channel was created in 1996 by global media giant News Corp.

Unshaken by this media upheaval, Moore remains a known quantity, a media force who charts his own path. Maybe that’s another reason so many people have left their easy chairs to go see his new film. And why even people who don’t go can’t leave it alone.