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.”
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It’s more difficult to be convincing as a real person when acting on film than on the stage. The camera can get closer and your image ends up projected many times larger than life size. So, despite giving a Tony Award-winning performance as Richard Nixon in the theater version of Frost/Nixon, Frank Langella was not initially thought of as worthy to reprise the role in Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of the play. Part of it was that he’s not a big name, but another reason was that he looks nothing like Tricky Dick.
Ultimately, Langella did get the part, and while he doesn’t resemble the former president, he apparently does a bang up job in the role. But the transition could easily have been as awkward as Ralph Bellamy’s reprisal of his Tony-winning portrayal of Franklin Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello. In the film version of that play, Bellamy’s vocal impersonation comes off more like a Scottish brogue (he sounds exactly like Sean Connery, in fact) than FDR’s signature “Locust Valley lockjaw.” Instead, Langella is on track for an Oscar nomination, and is sure to join the following actors who also gave convincing performances as world leaders.
As a handicap, SpoutBlog has limited the selections to modern era leaders whose real persona exists on film/tape and are therefore more easily comparable to actors’ representations.
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