Roger & Me (1989) on Netflix

Name: Roger & Me
Genre: Documentary
Released: 1989-12-20
Duration: 91 min
Rating: 7.5
Cast: Michael Moore, Rhonda Britton, Fred Ross, Roger B. Smith, Bob Eubanks

R19891h 31mDocumentary

General Motors announces layoffs in Flint, Michigan, and a former magazine editor goes home. He wants GM chairman Roger B. Smith to talk about the closings, but security keeps him out.

Netflix3.6/5
IMDb7.5/1028,326 votes
Rotten Tomatoes100%

Trailer

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Plot summary

In Flint, Michigan, General Motors is the main employer, and the filmmaker grew up there as the son of a GM employee. He leaves for San Francisco to edit a magazine, loses that job, and comes home to find General Motors cutting thousands of jobs and moving the work to Mexico while reporting record profits. Auto workers he interviews are bitter at GM chairman Roger B. Smith. He decides to get Smith to sit for an interview about the plant closings. At the company's Detroit headquarters, guards block him from the lobby, and a spokesman takes his details, promises to discuss an interview, and then refuses. The Grosse Pointe Yacht Club and the Detroit Athletic Club give him the same answer. In Flint, a sheriff's deputy carries out evictions on families who cannot pay their rent.

Cast

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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Roger & Me (1989)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

To fund the documentary, Michael Moore filed a successful wrongful termination lawsuit against Mother Jones for $160,000, then mortgaged his house, sold most of his belongings and ran weekly bingo games for three years to raise the rest of the film's $200,000 budget.
Warner Bros. paid $3 million for the distribution license, a sum the article calls unprecedented for any documentary at the time, and the deal required the studio to pay $25,000 in rent for two years for the families evicted in the film.
Despite its success, Roger & Me was not nominated for the 1990 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature; three years later an anonymous Academy member told the Los Angeles Times the documentary committee deliberately excluded it, believing it was "dishonest and unfair to its subjects".
Larry Stecco, a Flint personal injury lawyer, sued Moore and Warner Bros. after Moore told him he was making a booster film for Flint's PBS affiliate; a jury sided with Stecco and ordered Moore to pay $6,250, though Moore said he was satisfied because the slander charges were dismissed.
General Motors refused to let its car advertisements run during television programs promoting the film, including episodes of The Phil Donahue Show and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and its media relations chief Bill Ott later mailed Jay Leno articles challenging Moore's claims.
Two donors asked for their money back: the Mackinac Center wanted its $5,000 refunded, and Ralph Nader requested the return of the $30,000 he gave, saying the nonprofit had donated on the understanding that Moore would start a newsletter that never operated.
Moore got his interviews by pretending to be filming University of Michigan videos about poverty, or booster films promoting Flint.
After watching a 15-minute bumper from the film, Moore and his crew decided the depiction of mass unemployment would be too depressing for mainstream audiences and gave the documentary a humorous slant.