Some of my previous posts where mostly on marketing techniques to create brand awareness, film awareness and what kind of PR stunts were and are successful; when writing about the latter, I started thinking about what is to be considered a PR stunt exactly and that's how a name dawned on me: the controversial documentary director Michael Moore. Some people consider him the master of revealing the truth behind modern social controversies while others despise him for his ''straight in the face'' ways and attempts of establishing his point of views as objectified facts; I consider him the modern master of successful PR.For all the people who are not too familiar with Moore's work, i will summarize for you why exactly the man got to be world-wide famous. Moore is a film maker and author, who explored, mainly by shooting documentaries, the social issues of globalisation, corporations, Iraqi war, gun ownership, George W. Bush, and the American health care system; Time magazine included him in the 2005 100 most influential people in the world, and in the same year he even started his own film festival, the Traverse city film festival in Michigan. Since then, he's been living and working in Traverse city on his new projects.
Michael Moore's most famous documentaries are ''Bowling fr Columbine'', ''Fahrenheit 9/11'', and ''Sicko''. I'm not going to waste any time buy describing you what the documentaries about as you can read about it just clicking on the names of the documentaries above, but what I want to focus on is the way Moore made these documentaries world-wide known, as whether you hate it or loved it, almost every person who has heard of Moore and his work either love him or hate him, and isn't that the goal of any successful PR: making the public know what you're doing in order to get them to come and see your work. As ''Bowling for Columbine'' won an Oscar for Documentary Feature in 2002, and became the highest-grossing mainstream-released documentary, a record later held by ''Fahrenheit 9/11'', we can say that Moore was more than just successful in getting the audiences to see his work as all his documentaries enjoyed and enjoy both commercial and critical success.
Starting with ''Bowling for Columbine'', I will just give you a few examples of how Moore cleverly used some elements in his documentary in order to create controversy, which attracted media attention, which attracted public attention. In this documentary, Moore explores the subject of gun ownership among American citizens; also, he related the issue with the Columbine high school tragedy, as the 2 teenage murderers in Columbine owned guns easily purchased, and bullets they came across in a K-Mart store; apart from making the whole documentary sort of a PR stunt as he interviews Marilyn Manson, a controversial singer linked to the massacre by the media when it came out that the 2 killers were big fans of this guy's music, and it is well-known that the appearance of Marilyn Manson anywhere raises many issues in itself, he then went on to meet up and and attack Charlton Heston, the notorious actor, as back at the time he was the president of the American National Rifle Association. But what really got Moore plenty of publicity, was taking 2 teenage survivors from Columbine, and getting them to K-Mart to return the bullets they were wounded with, a very clever move which certainly wasn't meant to help psychologically the 2 kids, but it ended up being very useful in getting plenty of media coverage as the event drew the attention of virtually everyone. Here you have 2 short videos which aren't meant to refer to the Columbine massacre or the issue of guns, but just to give you an insight of Moore's style and the way he used these 2 celebs in his documentary.
So here we got a delicate subject as gun ownership and the Columbine high school massacre, an interview with one of the most controversial celebrities of our time, Marilyn Manson, Charlton Heston in the role of the bad guy of the documentary, and a PR stunt involving 2 real victims of a terrible tragedy; all elements very useful in creating big buzz.
Passing on to ''Fahrenheit 9/11'', which explores the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and heavily criticizes the American president Bush by linking his family to some prominent Saudis, and already we have a good element to provoke plenty of controversy and attention; this 2005 documentary was put in the centre of attention even before being released. Disney, the owner of Miramax pictures which is the company that produced the documentary, was accused by Michael Moore to have blocked the release of his film 1 day ahead of it's official release date. A long dispute, through the media, took place between Moore and Disney, just until it was proved that Disney warned Moore a whole year ahead of the time that Moore even started shooting Fahrenheit 9/11, that they wouldn't distribute the documentary as they didn't want to get into political controversies.
Here's a video where Moore gets the People's choice best movie awards for ''Fahrenheit 9/11'', and I'm asking you, is it really people's choice best movie awards of 2005, or is it just the film that got the most attention movie awards of 2005?
Sicko, on the other side, which was released in 2007, takes Mr. More to a whole new level as not only he stages a perfect PR stunt, but as he already did in ''Bowling for Columbine'', he uses very smartly real tragedy victims in promoting his views about the American health care system.
This time Moore makes real propaganda against American pharmaceutical giants and health care insurance company and he does it by taking a few Ground Zero survivors to Cuba for medical treatment; smart move but what for? To prove that Cuba has an excellent health care system? Does it? Or to help people in need of assistance like the Ground Zero survivors? Or to prove how the U.S. health care system is broken by taking a tragedy victims to an American antagonist country like Cuba to get proper health care? Or is it just that Michael Moore knows publicity, PR stunts and how to get his projects on cover pages of newspapers and in the evening news by shaking up things just a tiny little bit?
I do admit leaving out a few more controversies and PR stunts concerning Moore and his documentaries but there's just not enough space for it, so I want to leave you with a final thought; as I already stated, Michael Moore is a persona you either love or despise and that might depend on someone's personal sensibility, political views, social role and status, religion, nationality and plenty other factors that influences us in forming opinions, but what I really want to say is that in the end of the day, almost all of us know who Michael Moore is and almost all of us have an opinion on the man's work. Is it just good PR? I leave the answer to you.
Here's a Michael Moore appearance on CNN regarding his troubled relations with the media.
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