Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, July 16, 1994                   TAG: 9407190024
SECTION: SPECTATOR                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By PATRICIA BRENNAN THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

'TV NATION' PRESENTS MICHAEL MOORE'S VIEW OF THE WORLD

He was surprised to find the network receptive. The result is "TV Nation," premiering Tuesday night (at 8 on WSLS-Channel 10).

Moore put his hometown, Flint, Mich., on the cinematic map with "Roger & Me," an award-winning 1989 documentary relating the impact of General Motors' layoffs on the residents of a one-industry town and his attempts to find and confront then-GM chairman Roger Smith.

Moore had no training in filmmaking and dropped out of college after less than a year, but he has intelligence, self-confidence and an almost obsessive interest in the way political issues impact the working class from which he came. In short, he has a bit of an attitude, maybe even an agenda.

Moore's highly personal "TV Nation" is a collection of offbeat, often funny and usually irreverent reports. On the segments he hosts, the bespectacled Moore is attired - as always, it seems - in jeans, baseball cap and sports-type jacket. At 6-foot-3 and well over 200 pounds, he is almost defiantly non-yuppie. He desperately needs a good haircut.

Moore is creator, executive producer, director, co-writer and on-camera reporter; his wife, Kathleen Glynn, is a producer.

The show opens to find Moore, 40, outside NBC's Rockefeller Center headquarters inquiring of passersby (including Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, R-N.Y.) whether he shouldn't have been given an office while he made the series. This is an unimpressive beginning. But it sets up the first segment, an attack on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

On the pretext of shifting his show to Mexico, where salaries are lower, Moore goes off to Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from McAllen, Texas. In Reynosa he talks to several American factory managers who show him around.

One, who had seen "Roger & Me," makes the factory's back room off limits and seems wary of Moore. The Whirlpool manager looks uncomfortable when Moore asks him, "Where do you dump the PCBs?"

"People know who I am, and they still talk to me," said Moore. "There's something about being on TV and in the movies that's attractive to everybody."

One manager tells Moore that workers at his factory make 75 cents an hour, and Moore says that a television cameraman there would earn $15 a day. His own cameraman, presumably an American, earns $1,500 a day. The lesson here is obvious: Become a cameraman.

Although Moore said this segment is "the one I feel strongest about on a political level," he said he "isn't out to get the individual, unlike other magazine shows. To me, that is the easy and cheap thing to do. That plant manager in Mexico, he's not really what I'm there for. I'm after larger fish to fry here. I'm after a larger issue, NAFTA, which is about corporate America throwing people out of work."

The second report deals with the difficulty one black man (Emmy-nominated actor Yaphet Kotto) is having catching a cab in New York City. Cabbies routinely pass him by and pick up a white man (Louis Bruno), who, we are told, was indicted for murder. Still, the cabbies' excuses are worth catching.

In another story, former "David Letterman" writer Merrill Markoe visits the new Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, Minn., where the local folks hope prison jobs will help alleviate the town's unemployment problem. The staff wants other areas of the country to send overflow prison population to Appleton.

It may be a good idea, but it's unclear why after more than a year the place still has had no inmates. (After Markoe finished her report, Puerto Rico sent 309 prisoners to Appleton.)

"The piece from Appleton was like a farm version of Flint," said Moore. "Instead of building a convention center or a theme park [to generate new jobs], Appleton built a prison."

Then Jane Morris and Jeff Michalski visit Love Canal, near Niagara Falls, the site of a mess wrought by Hooker Chemicals & Plastics Corp., which buried 22,000 tons of toxic waste there from 1942 to 1953. The state has hired a salesman to sell 236 houses, and all but 60 have been sold, according to Moore.

The salesman tells Morris and Michalski, who say they are thinking about buying, that the residents of the town are "just as healthy as I am. Well, I had cancer three years ago, but it's gone."

The hour also includes Moore's visit to Russia in search of the missile that he believes was aimed at Flint. He eventually ends up at the home of a man said to have been a missile-site manager.

The man, who obviously has a sense of humor and finds Moore amusing, shares vodka and cakes and wonders why Americans were so afraid of the former Soviets. Moore offers a toast to peace with the missile-shaped Twinkies he brought to share with his hosts.

"I had a great time with them," said Moore. "Once you meet people from other places, you wonder what [the Cold War] was all about."