Date Posted: Thursday, June 24, 2004

Los Angeles - Even ahead of its debut on Friday, polemical filmmaker Michael Moore's new movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" is sending US political temperatures to the boiling point in a tense electoral year.

The Oscar-winning director is fuelling the gulf between the Republican and Democratic electoral campaigns ahead of the premiere of his documentary that slams President George W. Bush and his government's policy on Iraq.

His movie, which won the coveted Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival but has received mixed critical reviews, is set to open on 868 US and Canadian screens Friday, the widest ever opening for a documentary.

A highly-publicized political firestorm is helping to generate interest in the film that cost just six million dollars to make but which is expected to shatter the 24-million-dollar box office record set by Moore's Oscar-winning documentary "Bowling for Columbine."

The row has become the focus of a pitched battle between political activists, with rival conservative and liberal grass-roots groups desperately rallying their troops to either boycott or support the film.

"Michael Moore is an agent provocateur and like all provocateurs he knows how to create a scene," said University of California at Los Angeles film expert Howard Suber.

"He is a genius at making a scene, both within the film itself as well as through its marketing," he said.

In "Fahrenheit 9/11," Moore exposes alleged links between Bush's family and that of al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, who claimed responsibility for the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Outraged by its red-hot content, which prompted the Walt Disney Co. to refuse in May to distribute the film, conservative Move America Forward is leading a last-ditch campaign to persuade US theatres not to screen it.

The group has branded the film, the distribution rights of which were bought from Disney by moguls Harvey and Bob Weinstein, as "un-American" and "unpatriotic" and threatened to use all means at its disposal, including economic and public pressure, to keep it off screens.

"It's time to take action to stop Michael Moore's 'Bash America' film, 'Fahrenheit 9/11'," the group said on its website.

"Michael Moore has attacked our troops, attacked our commander-in-chief and attacked the victims of 9/11 saying: The passengers on September 11 were scaredy-cats, because they were mostly white."

But a rival liberal group, MoveOn.org, is using the Internet to rally its troops to see the movie in droves as Republican Bush is under growing fire for leading America into the spiraling violence and chaos in Iraq.

"It is an incredibly powerful movie that lays bare the cynicism and greed behind Bush's war policy," said the group's spokesman Eli Pariser, urging supporters to turn out en masse for Friday's national opening.

"The astonishing and revealing footage in it has the power to change the course of the 2004 election," he said.

The controversy has kept the film in the news headlines and made its online trailer the most watched of the season after that of "Spider-Man 2."

And the film will open on more than triple the number of screens than Moore's Oscar-winning gun control movie "Bowling for Columbine" (2001).

The Motion Picture Association of America joined the fray Tuesday by slapping the film with an "R" rating requiring minors under 17 to be accompanied by an adult, a move Moore has slammed saying that Washington deems teenage soldiers old enough to die in Iraq.

Political pundit Professor Marty Kaplan of the University of Southern California described Moore's use of politics to promote the film as "the greatest pitch since P.T. Barnum," the famed US circus owner.

"The controversy has been essential in the publicity of the movie. He knew how to use it in the midst of an election campaign, in an increasingly polarized nation," Kaplan told AFP.

"Right-wing groups accusing the film of being anti-American propaganda is the best promotion and gives people in a divided nation a chance to participate in this strange political convention," he said.

"The film will be very successful. Moore is funny, he is colorful and his attacks on the right wing have given him an active fan base."

News Agencies