Sicko filmmaker Michael Moore recalled an incident on his Facebook page Thursday in which American Sniper director Clint Eastwood directly threatened his life at the 2005 National Board of Review awards dinner.
After receiving a backlash for his critical comments regarding the Chris Kyle Iraq war biopic, Moore has released a nearly 1200-word statement to “set the record straight.” However, as with just about everything associated with Michael Moore, the post is laden with exaggerated claims and misconnected dots.
Moore recalls how Eastwood told him before a room full of people that if he ever showed up at his door with a camera, he would kill him:
Ten years ago this past week, Clint Eastwood stood in front of the National Board of Review awards dinner and announced to me and to the crowd that he would “kill” me if I ever came to his house with my camera for an interview.
“I’ll kill you,” he declared.
The crowd laughed nervously. As for me, having just experienced a half-dozen assaults in the previous year from crazies upset at ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ and my anti-war Oscar speech, plus the attempt by a right wing extremist to blow up my house (he was caught in time and went to prison), I was a bit stunned to hear Eastwood, out of the blue, make such a violent statement.
But I instantly decided he was just trying to be funny, so I laughed the same nervous laugh everyone else did. Clint, though, didn’t seem to like all that laughter.
“I mean it,” he barked, and the audience grew more quiet. “I’ll shoot you.”
A terrified Moore then recollects his attempt to nervously laugh off the threat: “I tried to keep that fake smile on my face so as to appear as if he hadn’t ‘gotten’ to me. But he had,” he says.
Additionally, so as not to step on a limb and be bold enough to share his own opinions of Eastwood, the director used quotes from an article written by Sophia McClennen to assist him in assessing the incident:
Sophia McClennen in the Salon article wrote that she believes the first sign of his loopiness began that night at the awards dinner at Tavern on the Green in Central Park where he randomly went after me.
Then came the (IMHO) awful (and weirdly racist) “Gran Torino” where he got to cast himself as a bigoted retired autoworker in Detroit. Two years later he was on the stage at the Republican National Convention carrying on a berating and confused conversation with an invisible Obama in an empty chair.
Leaving out that, in Gran Torino, Eastwood’s character ends up befriending a minority neighborhood kid (and gives him his nearly mint car after giving away his life), Moore goes on to state that American Sniper “is a mess of a film that rewrites history” and “perpetuates a racist sentiment to Arabs.”
His statement seems to convey both a message that Eastwood is losing his marbles and that dissenters of the left’s narrative are “American Isis.” However, it actually demonstrates the anger incited on the far left by anyone who has the audacity to openly discuss war in a way that doesn’t portray American soldiers as evil.
More than anything, Moore’s post appears to be an illustration of two filmmakers from different origins, moving in opposite directions.
One has just released a record-breaking film that provokes thought with its candid depiction of the life and struggles of America’s heroes, and the other is, well… just an irrelevant sicko.
You can view Moore’s entire post here.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.