In the days leading up to Mike’s Surprise, the screening traditionally held on the last day of the Traverse City Film Festival of a film selected by Michael Moore kept secret before its unveiling to everyone but he and his closest staffers, the hope had been that the controversial documentarian was going to show his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, which is slated to premiere at the Venice Film Festival at the end of August before opening in theaters at the end of September. Well aware of his packed crowd’s hopes and dreams, Moore wasted no time in bursting our collective bubble. Within moments of taking the stage at Traverse City’s State Theater, he said, “I’m not going to show you my new film.”

According to Moore, his expose of the collapse of the American financial system, which he and 52 staff members in a Traverse City office were scrambling to finish as the festival was underway, could find itself in legal limbo if some of its subjects get wind of some of its footage before its official premiere. “Certain things in this film must not be seen by the large banks and Wall Street before the movie comes out. The invention of YouTube and blogs make it way too risky to show these things [now] that I’m going to reveal in eight weeks.”

So instead of showing his latest film (and reportedly possibly maybe his last project definable as nonfiction), Moore showed his first film — and not Roger & Me, Moore’s breakout as a muckraker/comedian/documentary star and first official credit as a filmmaker (that he showed on Saturday night, in honor of the film’s 20th anniversary). Mike’s actual Surprise was a film about racists co-directed by a cousin of George W. Bush, which the director credited as sparking his career. “Roger & Me wouldn’t have happened if this hadn’t hadn’t happened,” Moore said after the screening. “I would not be a filmmaker if it wasn’t for the Bushes.”

Blood in the Face, co-directed by Kevin Rafferty (his mother is Barbara Bush’s sister), Anne Bohlen and James Ridgeway), was released in 1991; you can now rent and/or stream it on Netflix or watch it on Google Video. The experience convinced Moore, then a journalist and radio personality, that he wanted to get into filmmaking, and the following summer Rafferty and Bohlen came back to Flint to give Moore a one-week crash course in cinematic craft. Rafferty went on to serve as a cinematographer on Roger & Me, and eventually taught Moore how to edit it on a Steenbeck

Several years earlier, the filmmakers had contacted Moore and asked for his help getting touch with a group of Michigan-based Neo-Nazis, who Moore had interviewed on the radio. Moore greased the wheels for the directors to attend a White Power conference held on a remote farm in his home state. The three co-directors of the film flew out to Michigan, and promptly got cold feet — fearful that their subjects would retaliate violently if they didn’t like their portrayal, none of the three wanted to appear on camera interviewing the hardcore racists.

So Moore offered to step in. “I’m not afraid of these people,” he recalled saying last night. “I’ll do the interviews if you want.”

Today, Blood in the Face plays almost like a Christopher Guest movie — its subjects are so earnest in their ignorance that their hate becomes comic, and thanks to Moore’s “baiting”, as he calls it, the subjects reveal the laughable extremes of their Holocaust-denying idiocy. The Michael Moore seen on screen in Blood is a long way off from the self-conscious performance artist that dominates his current films. He doesn’t appear much on camera, though his voice can be heard off camera several times, and he doesn’t really insert himself and his own personality in the film’s main conflict. Still, he shows a ballsiness in his questioning right from the get-go (such as when he essentially asks a young woman who looks like Farrah Fawcett in an SS uniform what a girl like her is doing in a place like this), and over the course of the film his talent for bullying bullies increasingly emerges. In the film’s final moments, Moore harshly questions a member of the clan’s ambitions for funneling his racist rhetoric into mainstream politics. “I’d been there three days, and just couldn’t take listening to them anymore,” Moore says.

Robert Stone, who recorded sound on Blood, was in Traverse City to present his own documentary Earth Days. “We were going to spend all this time with these people, but we weren’t sure how much we were supposed to reveal of ourselves,” Stone recalled. The crew quickly came to the realization that cinema verite  “wasn’t going to work” in this situation. Moore was approaching the subjects more casually, and “really getting them to open up.” It was on the Blood set, says Stone, that “The Michael Moore we all know and love was born.”

Based on a trailer shown at the festival for Capitalism: A Love Story, the Moore we know (whether you love him or not) is up to his old tricks with the new film — driving a Brinks truck on Wall Street, standing outside AIG headquarters with a bullhorn threatening to make a citizen’s arrest — but according to Moore there’s at least one portion of this Love Story that we’ve never seen before.

“Our archivists found some footage of Franklin Roosevelt that no one knew existed,” he said. In 1944, the year of his death, FDR had arranged for a camera crew to film him giving a radio address, in which he he revealed a utopian domestic policy plan that he hoped to put into effect after the end of the second World War, which would have included the establishment of universal health care and an amendment guaranteeing women’s rights. FDR had apparently hoped that the footage would be shown as a newsreel in movie theaters, but when he died it went unseen.

“You look at this and go, ‘We could have had this for the last 65 years,’” Moore marvels. “It’s like he’s channeling Obama, or Obama is channeling him. It’s like you’re watching Roosevelt, but you’re hearing Obama.”