"Premiere" Coverage

[July 11th, 2007]

Think of Hollywood movie premieres and images of red carpets, glamorous celebrities and paparazzi will likely come to mind. Michael Moore had an entirely different idea in mind for the Hollywood debut of his new film, Sicko.

The rabble-rousing populist documentarian, who previously took on automaker General Motors over massive corporate layoffs in Roger & Me and exposed the horrific handling of the "War on Terror" by the Bush administration in the 2004 smash hit Fahrenheit 9/11, actually did have a fancy premiere June 26 in Hollywood.

But the day before, he took his movie to the streets of downtown Los Angeles—literally.

In one of the more surreal movie events ever to hit L.A., Moore arranged for a full-sized movie screen to be set up on a Skid Row street in back of the Union Rescue Mission and unspooled the film before a raucously appreciative audience of hundreds of homeless people, complete with popcorn and Pepsis paid for by the film's distributor, the Weinstein Company.

With LAPD officers posted near the screen, the roar of police helicopters occasionally scanning from the skies and the sound of sirens passing rapidly in the night, it was an occasion vastly different from the staid critics' screening the week before at a movie theater on Los Angeles' West Side.

As Moore strode from behind the screen toward the crowd in his trademark baseball cap and sneakers, dozens of people in the audience leapt to their feet spontaneously. They pumped their fists in the air and screamed his name while others ran toward him to shake his hand or try to hug him.

It was clear that this was no mere publicity stunt. The only press around was a cable movie channel and a crew from Noticias television.

"I said to Michael I want people who are in the street and in the movie to see the movie, and asked if he could do a premiere on the streets of Skid Row. He loved the idea and made it all happen," said Andy Bales, CEO of the Union Rescue Mission. "I've seen the film four times at other cities' events, and I think it will get people talking—and hopefully it's his goal, too, to move us from me-centered to we-centered society and make sure everyone has health care."

Indeed, Sicko is a film that speaks squarely to the concerns of society's poorest members, as when Moore tells the story of a 63-year-old homeless and disoriented woman named Carol Reyes. She was dumped off by a taxicab in front of Union Rescue Mission in March 2006 after officials at Kaiser Permanente's Bellflower hospital decided that caring for her had become too costly.

Moore shows the incredibly sad footage, taken by the Mission's security cameras, of Reyes pacing lost and alone and wearing only a thin hospital gown on the street.

She had long lived in a public park in far-away Gardena and had no idea she would be dumped in downtown's Skid Row, leaving her in danger until Mission staff went out to see what was wrong.

Initially, it was impossible to determine which hospital she had come from because the names of two different hospitals had been rubbed out from her patient wristbands.

But eventually the Bellflower hospital was pegged as the culprit, and public outrage forced officials to do their jobs.

"These corporate hospitals like Kaiser take patients who can't afford to pay their own hospital bill in cabs and dump them like they're garbage in front of these buildings, when they're human beings created by God," says Moore, speaking from behind the giant movie screen as Sicko was shown. "It's a travesty, and I'm so grateful to the people here at the Rescue Mission and Andy Bales because day after day, week after week, they saw sick people dumped here and one day they said 'enough is enough' and they called the police on the hospital, and the police and city attorney filed criminal charges. It was a rare moment when the rich faced arrest for their treatment of the poor.

"When somebody is left to die in an ER or on the streets of L.A., you should call 911 and report an attempted murder: murder by the hospital, murder by the health insurance company, murder by the pharmaceutical company, because that's exactly what they're doing."