Title shoots down film about Moore

Filmmaker Kevin Leffler’s first movie, “Shooting Michael Moore,” was set to open in Traverse City, Mich., last month, but the screening got canceled at the last minute.

Was it politically motivated censorship?

Or simply a prudent safeguard against the possibility of violence against one of Michigan’s own incited by a provocative documentary with an incendiary title?

Mr. Leffler, a Michigan native like his subject, isn’t a director by trade, but he has seen enough of Mr. Moore’s movies to know how a cinematic David can sock it to Goliath.

So when Mr. Leffler, a certified public accountant and assistant professor at Baker College, saw inconsistencies between Mr. Moore’s public persona and his actions, he did what the Oscar-winning director himself might do.

He picked up a camera and got to work.

“The perception of Mike is that he fights the good fight, stands up for the little guy,” Mr. Leffler says. “But Mike is out for Mike, and that’s OK, but don’t pretend.”

“Shooting Michael Moore” contends that the filmmaker treats cast members poorly, rails against corporations such as Halliburton while gobbling up their stock and used his latest film, “Sicko,” to paint a highly inaccurate picture of Cuba’s health care system.

The movie was shown in Detroit and Miami late last year, but its scheduled Jan. 9 screening at Carmike Cinemas’ Horizon Outlet theater in Traverse City never happened.

The cancellation came before a planned Jan. 7 press conference organized by Jeff Gibbs, a longtime friend of Mr. Moore’s, to urge that the screening be stopped.

Mr. Gibbs, co-producer of Mr. Moore’s Oscar-winning smash “Fahrenheit 9/11,” says via e-mail that Mr. Leffler “admits that the title of his film implies shooting my friend with both film and a gun, had the sound of a bullet on his Web site, and gives direction to Michael’s bedroom window in his film.”

“If it wasn’t Michael Moore, what Leffler had done would be called a crime, not a movie,” Mr. Gibbs says, adding he wouldn’t mind having the film shown without “the implied shooting threat and the way to carry [it] out.”

The Traverse City Record-Eagle applauded the decision to suspend the screening, saying in an editorial that the title “is an obvious and irresponsible reference to something some crackpots might think of as a patriotic act.”

Mr. Leffler, however, says a viewer would have to invent the last 20 minutes or so of the trip to find the filmmaker’s home if all he had was the film as a guide. Also, he counters, Mr. Moore’s address is on public record. Anyone could find it.

Mr. Leffler says he never said the title implies violence toward Mr. Moore but that people can interpret it as they please. He also points out that in Mr. Moore’s book “Downsize This!” he calls for an anniversary riot to mark the 1992 Los Angeles riots, going so far as to include a hand-drawn map to the affluent Beverly Hills neighborhood intended as the riot’s starting point. Mr. Moore does advise readers to burn the neighborhood, not the neighbors.

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