Moore gets his points across

Michael Moore isn’t into gloating or vindication. But some might not blame him if he were.

When “Bowling For Columbine” won the Academy Award for best documentary last year, Moore took tons of heat for abandoning the traditional air-kiss acceptance speech, instead lambasting a “fictitious president” for conducting a “fictitious war.”

Five days after the opening of the Iraqi war, Moore’s caustic comments (“Shame on you, Mr. Bush!”) were viewed as anti-American, even treasonous. The ensuing backlash left him abandoned by skittish Hollywood liberals, vilified by angry conservatives and victimized by hate mail and death threats.

“It was rough,” says Moore, the self-professed champion of the little guy whose films and best-selling books have brought him wealth, fame and increasingly rabid scorn. “I just kept thinking how much easier my life would be had I just thanked my agent.”

Fast-forward 15 months. “Fahrenheit 9/11,” his Bush-bashing documentary, opens in theaters on Friday and is stirring incendiary sentiment. Conservatives mobilized to block theater chains from showing it. Talk show host Bill O’Reilly is comparing Moore to Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels.

Yet when Moore hits the streets these days, he’s often mobbed by well-wishers thanking him for his early anti-war comments. Celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Tony Bennett fawn over him.

Moreover, the swelling hype surrounding “Fahrenheit 9/11” almost guarantees ticket sales well above “Columbine“‘s $21.6 million — which was a record for a non-concert documentary.

Moore’s most polished, sophisticated and slickly produced effort, “Fahrenheit 9/11” — which examines purported links between the Bush family, the House of Saud, Osama bin Laden and U.S. corporate interests in Afghanistan and Iraq — is alternatively shocking, manipulative, draining, humorous and entertaining.

“Someone told me that this is the first movie ever made to justify an Oscar speech,” says Moore, scruffy in his ubiquitous uniform; blue jeans, no socks, New Balance sneakers, T-shirt, baseball jacket and Michigan State University baseball cap.

“In essence, it’s true. When I gave that speech, it wasn’t embraced by majority opinion. Maybe I needed to clarify myself. That probably had a lot to do with making the film.”

Moore’s political beliefs have transformed him from the sarcastic social commentator of 1989’s “Roger & Me” to the fire-breathing, left-leaning flamethrower behind “Fahrenheit 9/11” and the best-selling books “Stupid White Men” and “Dude, Where’s My Country?”

“Every day, a kid is dying over (in Iraq). For what? To secure Fallujah?” Moore says testily. “The (media) all drank the soup. They were all cheerleaders for this war. Not one asked the serious question that needed to be asked before we went to war. Why does a high school graduate in a baseball hat have to be the one to have to show you this?”

Moore, 50, is listed as an independent in Michigan and isn’t publicly endorsing a presidential candidate. Despite lukewarm interest in John Kerry, he makes no bones about his hope that “Fahrenheit 9/11” will help oust Bush.

“I may be preaching to the choir,” Moore says. “But the choir needs a good song.”

Neither politics nor controversy is new to Moore, a pot stirrer as a teen in his hometown of Davison, Mich., a suburb of Flint, where his dad worked 30 years in a General Motors factory.

After brashly winning election to the Davison school board as a long-haired 18-year-old in 1972, “he pushed people’s buttons,” says Jim Shepherd, a Davison High instructor. “He asked questions nobody wanted to ask and was willing to take the heat. He was an advocate for the kids.”

That theme continued after Moore, who briefly attended college, launched the Flint Voice, an alternative weekly. He later moved to San Francisco to edit counter-culture magazine Mother Jones. After a dispute with the publisher, Moore wound up in Washington, D.C., where he briefly edited newsletters for activist Ralph Nader.

While wealth from films and books has allowed Moore to donate substantial sums to charitable and political groups, some question whether his money and celebrity status have transformed him from a champion of the common man into a self-righteous shrew.

Moore-basher David Hardy, who created the mooreexposed.com Web site, plans to show how Moore manipulates facts and his editing tricks in the soon-to-be-released book “Michael Moore Is A Big Fat Stupid White Man.”

“He’s the master of the crockumentary, not the documentary,” says Hardy, a Tucson-based lawyer with NRA ties.

Also on the way is “Michael Moore Hates America,” a documentary by Michael Wilson, who says he wants to counter Moore’s political agenda.

“People who know him have seen him devolve from someone who cared about people to someone who became obsessed with a socialistic viewpoint,” Wilson says. “I just don’t like what Moore says about my nation.”

Ever-present on screen in “Roger & Me “and in big chunks of “Bowling for Columbine,” Moore appears sporadically in “Fahrenheit.”

“It was a conscious decision,” he says. “The material was so strong that a little bit of me goes a long way.”

When he isn’t promoting films or books or making speeches, Moore lives a largely quiet, unassuming life with his wife, producer Kathleen Glynn.

They considered quitting film following “Columbine,” but decided to make “Fahrenheit,” whose premise is largely blueprinted in 2003’s “Dude, Where’s My Country?” Next up is “Sicko,” a look at America’s malfunctioning health care system, likely out in 2006.

There’s talk that “Fahrenheit” could be nominated for best picture, a first for a documentary. And director Steven Spielberg has said the film could reap $100 million.

“Having America’s greatest living filmmaker say that, I’m honored,” Moore says. “We’ve made an important film that seems to have transcended cinema. That’s something you could only wish for.”