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Previous page | The campaign doesn't seem to have hurt Moore.
MAF vice-chair Morgan blames the deep pockets and international tentacles of financier George Soros for backing MoveOn to support the movie. (The group says it has secured pledges from 109,000 people to see the movie when it opens.) But MAF itself has been dogged by reporting on its ties to conservative power brokers. An investigation by the Web site Whatreallyhappened.com, which snooped around MAF's domain registration info, revealed that it is no ordinary citizen's movement.
The webmasters were careless enough to leave the contact information for the Sacramento public relations firm Russo, Marsh and Rogers. That gave away the fact that the supposedly grass-roots Web site was the creation of one Douglas Lorenz. A Russo employee, Lorenz was the information-technology guy for Bill Simon, the candidate too conservative to beat ultra-unpopular then-Gov. Gray Davis in 2000. He's listed on the DefendReagan.org Web site (which rallied the fight against CBS's Reagan movie last year) as the "grassroots coordinator," apparently foreshadowing his role in creating the faux-grass-roots Move America Forward Web site. "Doug has been very active in developing volunteer political organizations," his bio says, "and utilizing advanced technologies to extend their reach." (Lorenz did not reply to Salon's request for an interview.) The P.R. firm's namesake, Sal Russo, was chief strategist of the Recall Gray Davis committee, and the firm itself has Republican ties that run far and deep.
For Kaloogian (who did not return calls from Salon for this story) the failure of Move America Forward represents a reversal. Seven months ago, Kaloogian spearheaded a nationwide campaign to have CBS's movie "The Reagans" yanked, calling for advertiser and audience boycotts. The movie was eventually ghettoized on the network's sister channel, Showtime (though CBS executives insisted, unconvincingly, they were unaffected by boycott threats). But other Kaloogian stunts have fizzled. His threatened recall of California's moderate attorney general over gay marriage went nowhere, and an accusation that Asian-American state assemblymen were violating their oaths of office for supporting Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist falsely accused of being a spy, was widely dismissed. ("He's a mosquito on an elephant's back," says longtime California Democratic Party strategist Bob Mulholland of Kaloogian.)
It now seems that MAF is doing little more than providing free publicity for "Fahrenheit 9/11," whose tag line now smirks, "Controversy? What controversy?" But there have been a few bad breaks this week for "Fahrenheit." Moore wanted a PG-13 rating for the movie; the Motion Picture Association of America claims that certain "bad words" require it receive an R-rating. For one thing the word "motherfucker" is used more than once in the film, in the context of troops quoting the Bloodhound Gang radio single "The Roof Is on Fire." On Monday, writing on behalf of backers IFC Films and Bob and Harvey Weinstein's Fellowship Adventure Group, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo released a letter questioning the MPAA's reasoning. Asked Cuomo: "[Why] should the film not be rated a PG-13 as was 'The Lord of the Rings,' a film that is saturated with slaughter, butchery and corpses -- human and extraterrestrial?" On Tuesday, the MPAA denied the appeal.
Then this week Newsweek published a report by reporter Michael Isikoff that accuses Moore, and author Craig Unger (author of "House of Bush, House of Saud," which was excerpted in Salon), of something close to "fanaticism" in a portion of the movie discussing how Osama bin Laden's family members were mysteriously spirited out of the country in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Unger, writes Isikoff, "appears, claiming that bin Laden family members were never interviewed by the FBI. Not true, according to a recent report from the 9/11 panel," and the Newsweek author points out that the FBI found "[n]one had any links to terrorism."
But Unger says the article missed the point. "As I made clear to Isikoff on the phone, and should be clear in the movie, and is clear in my book," Unger says, "what did not take place was a serious criminal investigation into the murder of 3,000 people ... if you have a criminal investigation, you talk to innocent people." And there's no evidence, he says, that the FBI checked its own terror watch list before letting the bin Ladens depart.
Still, the film's opponents haven't given up. Most recently the MAF is promoting a report reprinted in the Guardian that the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah has endorsed "Fahrenheit." Gianluca Chacra, the managing director of Front Row Entertainment, the movie's distributor in the United Arab Emirates, confirms that Lebanese student members of Hezbollah "have asked us if there's any way they could support the film." While Hezbollah is considered a legitimate political party in many parts of the world, the U.S. State Department classifies the group as a terrorist organization. Chacra was unfazed, even excited, about their offer. "Having the support of such an entity in Lebanon is quite significant for that market and not at all controversial. I think it's quite natural." (Lions Gate did not return calls asking for comment.) Adam Rubin, a spokesman for MoveOn, calls it "an utterly ridiculous distraction from the actual substance of the film."
Of course, you can always find an unpopular leader in the Middle East to fuel buzz about a movie someone doesn't want you to see. After all, Yasser Arafat loved Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," which was so popular with right-wing Arafat haters and so unpopular among many Jews (Arafat's blurb-ready review of Gibson's movie: "Moving"). In the end, Moore's movie will be judged by how many Americans turn out to see his film. And after the attacks and counterattacks of the last week, that number only grew.
