Michael Moore Biography

Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger & Me made him rich and famous and put him in the spotlight as a champion of the common folk against corporate greed.

Michael Moore was raised near Flint, and was an Eagle Scout as a teen. He attended the University of Michigan-Flint for a year before dropping out; he founded an alternative weekly, The Flint Voice, and later was briefly editor of Mother Jones magazine.  After being fired from that job, he turned to film.

Comically rumpled and notoriously liberal, Michael Moore appears in his own films as narrator and interviewer and has made a career out of being funny and provocative in print as well as on screen. In Roger & Me, his first documentary, he blended scenes of down-and-out Flint workers with scenes of himself trying to get a meeting with Roger Smith, the president of General Motors, the major employer which was abandoning Flint.

Moore has since hosted television shows (TV Nation and The Awful Truth in the mid-1990s) and authored the best-selling books Downsize This! (1996) and Stupid White Men…and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation (2002). Bowling for Columbine (2002), his documentary about gun-related violence in the United States, won the 2003 Oscar for Best Documentary.

His 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, a harsh analysis of the Saudi Arabian ties of George W. Bush, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. 12 years later he predicted the shock election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, saying before the 2016 election that supporters saw Trump as “the human Molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.”