Michael Moore says before he became famous as a filmmaker and author, he often felt like a real-life Forrest Gump. "I'm just a guy from Flint, Michigan," he explains, "but I've always had this uncanny knack for crossing paths with people or events that I never intended to happen." For instance, there's the time, when he was 11 years old, that he found himself trapped on a U.S. Senate elevator with Sen. Robert Kennedy. Seven years later, Moore became the youngest person elected to public office in the U.S. when he won a seat on Flint's board of education. While touring a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, in 1985, Moore encountered a "dazed and confused" President Ronald Reagan. Then there's the time, while changing planes in Vienna, when his "star aligned, unfortunately, with the star" of the Palestinian terrorist leader Abu Nidal. During a visit to Berlin in 1989, Moore joined up with "some crazies" who'd begun chiseling on a huge wall dividing the city in two.
"I've not told any of these stories before," Moore insists, explaining that the time is right for him to move in a new direction after filming 10 critically acclaimed documentary movies and writing seven bestselling books, all of them highly controversial takes on hot-button political or cultural issues.
"With the election of Barack Obama, I'm no longer in the minority," Moore notes. "The country has changed direction. It was time to take a break and write the book I've always wanted to write." Moore's as-yet-untitled "antimemoir," will be published by Grand Central in September as a collection of 20 nonfiction short stories recounting specific incidents in Moore's past that he swears are absolutely true. In fact, Moore explains, with every book he's written, he's hired professional fact-checkers who've never worked for him before to "challenge everything" in the manuscript. "My work, when I turn it in, is airtight," he claims, although, he admits, this book reminds him somewhat of the Japanese film Rashomon, as some memories of his childhood differ from those of his two sisters.
Not all of the vignettes in Moore's memoir involve chance encounters with celebrities or being swept up in historic events, Moore tells Show Daily. One of his favorite vignettes is the tale of how a priest at St. Paul's Seminary in Saginaw, Mich., taught a teenage Moore how to perform an exorcism. Laughing as he recalls the incident, Moore declares, "I could write a whole book of how I trained to be a Roman Catholic priest and why it didn't work out." Moore will talk about his life and times at the Uptown Insight Stage today, 10 a.m.–11:30 am.
