By Stephanie Simon
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 27, 2004
DES PERES, Mo. — Before the movie started, Leslie Hanser prayed.
"I prayed the Lord would open my eyes," she said.
For months,
her son Joshua, a college student, had been drawing her into political debate.
He'd tell her she shouldn't trust President Bush. He'd tell her the Iraq war
was wrong. Hanser, a 41-year-old homemaker, pushed back. She defended the
president, supported him fiercely
But Joshua kept at her, until she
prayed for help understanding her son's fervor.
Emerging from Michael
Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," her eyes wet, Hanser said she at last understood.
"My emotions are just…. " She trailed off, waving her hands to show
confusion. "I feel like we haven't seen the whole truth before."
That's
the reaction Moore hopes to provoke with his film, which explores the ties
between the Bush family and Osama bin Laden's relatives, the president's
response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq. Moore has said
he aims to shake the apathetic, m ove the undecided — and inspire voters
to deny President Bush a second term.
Riding a week of enormous
publicity, and controversy, "Fahrenheit 9/11" was a hit at the box office.
Opening Friday on 868 screens, the movie grossed more than the farces "White
Chicks" and "DodgeBall," even though those films showed on far more
screens.
Industry sources estimated that the weekend gross for
"Fahrenheit 9/11" could approach $20 million. That's close to the $21.6 million
that Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" — until now, the highest-grossing
documentary ever — took in during its entire run.
"Fahrenheit
9/11" got a shot of free publicity when Walt Disney Co., concerned about the
movie's partisan edge, barred its subsidiary from releasing it. The buzz only
grew last month when the film won the top prize at the Cannes Film
Festival.
Yet its appeal seemed to take some by surprise: In the
heavily Latino and Asian community of Downey, theater manager William Vasquez
was surpri sed at the line — which was so long, he decided to show the
film on two screens simultaneously Friday night. "I don't know of any
documentary that has created this kind of stir," he said, noting that even
teenagers seemed "glued to the screen."
In many cities, and even in
conservative suburbs, the crowds were predictably (and loudly) liberal, hissing
and hooting their reactions to Bush on screen.
Here in suburban St.
Louis — in a multiplex catering to well-off neighborhoods that were
flocked with Bush/Cheney signs in 2000 — the rowdy throng cheered when a
man in back stood to shout an appeal for Democratic Party volunteers. "Anyone
here for [Ralph] Nader?" another man called out. He was booed.
Across the country, in another conservative neighborhood, the audience at an
Orange County multiplex chanted: "Throw Bush out! Throw Bush out!" as the
lights came on.
College student Jebodiah Beard, 25, summed up the crowd
this way: "I think we're preaching to th e choir."
Moore acknowledged
as much — but saw no need to apologize.
"It's good to give the
choir something to sing," he said at a politician-packed premiere in Washington
last week. "The choir has been demoralized."
If so, the movie was an
electric wake-up call.
Outside a sold-out screening Friday on Santa
Monica's Third Street Promenade, activists stamped hands with peace signs and
passed around petitions calling for universal healthcare, gay rights and the
repeal of the Patriot Act.
"I can't imagine anyone coming out of
[the movie] and not working their brains out to get rid of this
administration," said Mimi Adams, 70, who was holding a sign that said: "No One
Died When Clinton Lied."
In theaters nationwide, many viewers said they
couldn't imagine loyal Republicans coming to see a movie the Bush administration
had dismissed as a twisted montage of misleading innuendo and outright
falsehoods. But for all the partisan hooting, the movie did appea r to draw at
least a strong smattering of the Republican and the undecided voters that Moore
most desperately hopes to reach.
And some of them said they were
deeply moved.
Moved enough, perhaps, to consider voting for Kerry in
November.
For Richard Hagen, 56, it was the footage from Iraq: the raw
cries of bombed civilians, the clenched-teeth agony of wounded American troops.
A retired insurance agent from the wealthy River Oaks neighborhood in central
Houston, Hagen described himself as a lifelong Republican. But then, standing
by his silver Mercedes, he amended that: A former lifelong
Republican.
"Seeing [the war] brings it home in a way you don't
get from reading about it," he said. "I won't be voting for a Republican
presidential candidate this time."
Mary Butler, too, may not bring
herself to punch the ballot for Bush.
She didn't vote for him in 2000.
But Butler, 48, said until this weekend, she was leaning strongly toward
supporting him this year. "In a war situation, I figured it was too hard to
switch horses midstream. I thought the country would be too vulnerable," she
said.
Butler, a librarian from suburban St. Louis, said one sentence in
Moore's film made her rethink.
After showing faces of the men and women
of America's military, Moore reminds his audience that they have volunteered to
sacrifice their futures for our country. We owe them just one obligation, he
says: to send them into harm's way only when we absolutely must.
That
got Butler. She doesn't feel the war in Iraq fits into that category. And that
one sentence — a filmmaker's accusing voice-over — might cost Bush
her vote in the pivotal swing state of Missouri: "This is probably the
strongest I've ever felt about voting against him," she said.
Their
tears reflected in the bluish light of the movie screen, many viewers here and
elsewhere seemed especially moved by the story of Lila Lipscomb, the mother at
the heart of "Fahrenheit 9/11." When Moore first encounters her in Flint,
Mich., she speaks with pride of her children's military service, of all the
opportunities the armed forces can give them. Then her son was killed in Iraq.
Appearing with Moore at the film's premiere in Washington, Lipscomb
received a standing ovation.
"President Bush said he was a president of
war," Lipscomb said. "Well, I stand before you tonight as a mother that is now
a mother of war. I urge all of America to stop being ignorant. Open your eyes
to see. Open your ears to hear. Open your mouth to speak."
Many who
watched "Fahrenheit 9/11" over the weekend vowed the movie would spur them to do
just that — to look deeper, listen closer, to speak out with
conviction.
In the end, however, some doubted whether a summer movie,
however pointed, could really affect the outcome of November's election.
"It will have an impact of some sort," said Rep. Jim McDermott, (D-Wash.), who
is interviewed by Moore in the film, "but I'm not s ure what."
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