Top 10 Film Industry Stories of 2004: #5: Disney Refuses to Distribute Fahrenheit 9/11
By David Mumpower
December 29, 2004
Walt Disney World, EPCOT Center, and Disney's Animal Kingdom all share the commonality of being Disney-owned theme parks in the greater Orlando area. Orlando, as those of you who don't suck at geography know, is located in Florida. The state of Florida, as those of you who don't suck at American politics know, is governed by one Jeb Bush, brother to George Walker Bush aka Mr. President aka POTUS.
Jeb Bush, like all of the past Florida governors before him, appreciates the tremendous volume of tourist commerce generated for his state by the good people of Disney. Due to this fact, the various theme parks created by Walt Disney, Michael Eisner, and their minions receive significant tax breaks in the state of Florida. It's a logical aspect of big business and local politics for each side to agree to mutually beneficial financial terms, and, until 2004, there were no problems with the agreement.
This May, a relatively unknown documentarian became the proverbial fly in the ointment.
Michael Moore is appropriately described as slothful in appearance, possessing unusual girth while demonstrating a not-so-keen fashion sense best described as denim-intensive. Mr. Moore had previously been a relative unknown in Hollywood until the day he was awarded the Academy Award for Best Documentary. At this somewhat unexpected moment, the hefty, opinionated man offered a rather aggressive stance on the presidency of one George Walker Bush. On the surface, this speech seemed to have no impact on Disney, but that's the funny thing about history. Even the smallest spark can turn into a massive firestorm.
Miramax is a smallish film studio with a reputation for championing underdog independent features. The studio led by the brothers Weinstein had previously worked with the largely unknown man named Michael Moore to distribute his prior feature, Bowling for Columbine. The production was a lucrative endeavor, as the cheaply produced documentary was the most financially successful in the genre's history. The film had domestic box office receipts in the neighborhood of $20 million. For Miramax, Michael Moore was a cash cow.
By Disney standards, $20 million is the type of pocket change one would put in the vending machine. When a company executive finally screened Michael Moore's latest project, Fahrenheit 9/11, a revelation occurred. The documentary was *ahem* opinionated. Opinionated and inflammatory. The various corporate decision makers began to take more detailed notice of their latest film commodity, and what they realized made them very, very nervous.
Disney was a company that wanted very much to stay on the good side of Florida governor Jeb Bush. Disney had a movie that made Jeb's brother out to be the bad guy in a film which also co-starred Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Disney had concerns. The company's logical consideration as a business was that a cheaply made movie with little in the way of box office prospects was small potatoes. They had buried films before, so offering up a death sentence here seemed like business as usual. The studio quietly decided they would refuse to let Miramax, Michael Moore and the Weinstein brothers distribute the movie. The assumption was that there would be a minimal amount of fallout from the decision. Oops.
The miscalculation Disney made was in the players involved. Michael Moore, muckraker extraordinaire, quickly launched a tirade on his site describing the manner in which Disney was quieting his voice during an election year. Offering boisterous threats against the company, he hatched a plan of his own to exhibit the film at the Cannes Film Festival, a place where the Bush family was less popular than regular bathing and deodorant combined. The film's reception is by now legendary. Fahrenheit 9/11 received the longest ovation in the history of the festival.
The real impact, though, was not the fact that Moore's film went on to make a historically unprecedented amount of money, nor was it the fact that Moore became an icon of the politically disenfranchised in the divided America of 2004. No, what matters most about this story is that the men behind Miramax, the Weinstein brothers, saw this attempt at censorship as the last straw in their dealings with Disney. The duo appear poised to walk away from the company they founded in order to escape from under the thumb of Michael Eisner. Miramax as we know it is likely to cease to exist in the coming months.
The irony in all of this is that Fahrenheit 9/11 would have been the most financially rewarding film on the 2004 release schedule for Disney. The studio suffered any number of bloody opening weekends (King Arthur), vicious second weekend declines (The Village) and animation humiliation (Home on the Range), while Moore's film shattered the previous domestic box office performance for a documentary by a factor of six.
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