| Blogging the annual interactive, film and music festival |
#x2022; A session in which Austinite Robert Rodriguez will discuss the upcoming Grindhouse, the epic genre movie he crafted with Quentin Tarantino.
The film from directors Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk, playing March 10 at the Austin festival, follows Moore during the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 and questions many of his tactics.
Among its revelations: that the confrontational documentarian did interview former General Motors Chairman Roger Smith, the elusive subject of his 1989 debut Roger Me, and simply chose to leave it out of the finished cut.
Moore, who won an Academy Award for 2002's Bowling for Columbine, has not responded to e-mail and phone requests for comment.
"The people who can attest to this are extremely credible and do attest to this in the film," said John Pierson, the independent film veteran who helped sell Roger Me to Warner Bros. and now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. "I've always loved Roger Me.
I loved working on it. I really believed in it, and that's really bad. The fundamental core of the film is how his mission to get Roger Smith fails and, P.
S., Michael spent 18 years since then swearing he never interviewed Roger Smith."
South by Southwest producer Matt Dentler said there was a similar buzz at the festival in 2002 when Alexandra Pelosi showed her documentary Journeys With George, in which she followed President Bush during his first run for the White House.
"I think on the surface people have a certain conception about what (Manufacturing Dissent) is that for the most part is probably false. The film is for the most part critical of Michael Moore but it's not a political film, there's no partisanship," he said. "It's an issue of questioning the media, deciphering who's the architect of what we consider fact and fiction and reality.
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But first, the festival opened March 9 with the world premiere of The Lookout, a thriller from Oscar-nominated Out of Sight screenwriter Scott Frank, making his directing debut. The movie stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt (3rd Rock From the Sun) as a once great high school athlete who suffers a head injury in a car crash and ends up working as a janitor at a small-town bank, where a group of criminals ask him to help them pull off a robbery.
"I was bored as a writer and I really just wanted to learn something, I wanted to have a completely different creative experience," Frank said of directing for the first time.
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