Filmmakers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine think left-wing, shit-disturbing director Michael Moore is on the right side of the major issues facing the United States. The question they ask is could he be more truthful in addressing them in his films.

Their documentary Manufacturing Dissent has been screening for the past few days at the Royal Theatre here in Toronto (the run ends Thursday, July 26). The Royal is on College Street. Just to the east sits South Side Louie's bar, where Moore interviewed some people on its patio for the Oscar Award-winning Bowling for Columbine. Between South Side Louie's and the Royal sits Clinton Street. Moore worked his way up this street, asking people if they locked their doors at night. Oddly enough, he got the answers he sought.

Moore used this to help illustrate his claim that Canada is the peaceful kingdom, with none of that nasty gun violence take takes tens of thousands of American lives every year. Had he gone up to Martin Grove and Albion in Rexdale (where the 2005 funeral shooting happened), he might have gotten much different responses about unlocked doors and fear of gun violence than he did in the increasingly yuppified Little Italy nabe.*

* In the last two years, someone was shot to death at Plaza Flamingo, a Bathurst/College restaurant about a six-minute walk east of South Side Louie's, and at May's, a Vietnamese karaoke bar on Dundas a six-minute walk almost due south.

This particular anecdote isn't in the film (it's just a good example of a major bug up my ass about Moore's style), but it easily could have been.

The film walks you through Moore's life, starting with the fact that he was born in Davison, Michigan, not Flint. He did edit an alternative newspaper based in Flint before moving to a big-time job editing the left-wing magazine Mother Jones in San Francisco in 1985. He lasted five months there. Moore has painted the firing as the white-wine socialists not wanting a blue-collar Midwesterner in their midst. The movie gives Mother Jones's side, which is that Moore might not have been ready for the structure of a major magazine. The tipping point was a story that was negative towards Nicaragua's Sandinistas. Moore felt it was the same attack on the Sandinistas as you would find in the mainstream media of the time. MJ's defenders say it's possible one could be against U.S. machinations in Nicaragua and be critical of the Sandinistas -- a nuance they say was lost on Moore.

Anyway, Moore got punted, he got a gig with Ralph Nader, then helped out in a small documentary called Blood in the Face, a look at American neo-Nazis -- and a sad bunch they were! However, it was the first showcase of Moore's ability to be witty on camera.

Moore worked with filmmaker Kevin Rafferty on that project, and then told him about his idea for a documentary about Flint, Michigan and the devastation wrought by General Motor's pullout from the community. Rafferty told Moore to not put himself in his own movie, along with other sage advice.

Moore didn't listen. Roger and Me became a smash success, with Moore's pursuit of an interview with then-GM chairman Roger Smith a major driver of the plot.

There's no question that GM's pullout devastated Flint. One local radio personality takes Melnyk and Caine on a drive, showing a huge abandoned lot where the Buick plant used to be.

But Manufacturing Dissent finds some serious errors in the film's chronology of events. For example, the city created something called Auto World to showcase the history of the auto industry in Flint. Moore paints this as a hamhanded effort to diversify the economy, but in reality, Auto World died before the GM pullout, not created afterwards.

Most disturbingly, the film's main story line -- that Smith refused to talk to Moore -- may be false. The filmmakers say there's evidence that Smith did give Moore an interview.

Throughout the film, we see Moore playing coy with the filmmakers, who never did get a sit-down interview with him. Moore has said in subsequent interviews that whoever claims he got an interview with Smith and left it out of the film is a "fucking liar."

Could be, but Moore demonstrates a propensity for self-mythologizing throughout his career and is touchy when challenged about it -- a characteristic that he shares with many successful people. He may have also done some slimy things over his career -- again, something common to many successful people.

Anyways, Moore had more hits -- Bowling for Columbine's 2002 attack on gun culture; 2004's Fahrenheit 9/11, which is mainly about the Gulf War; and now Sicko, an indictment of the U.S. health system.

In each film's wake, questions about Moore's tactics arose. Some of those questions were about accuracy, and others were about the near-total absence of context.*

* Here's a 2004 commentary I wrote for CTV.ca: Missing Fahrenheit 9/11's forest for the trees

A famous scene in F-9/11 has Dubya addressing a black-tie dinner: "This is quite a crowd: The haves ... and the have-mores!" he quipped. "Some call you the elite; I call you my base."

M-D said Bush was speaking at the Al Smith Memorial Foundation dinner, and the speech was meant to be self-deprecating. Neither F-9/11 or M-D mentions that Al Gore spoke before Bush. Gore told the crowd: "I did think it was effective when I weaved in stories of real people in the audience and their everyday challenges. Like the woman here tonight whose husband is about to lose his job. She's struggling to get out of public housing and get a job of her own. Hillary Clinton, I want to fight for you.''

Several Moore critics cited in M-D noted that F-9/11 failed in its ultimate goal of preventing Dubya's re-election. Actually, one person suggested that without Bush gaining office in the first place, Moore's career would have gone nowhere.

Personally, I think it's unfair to say Moore failed  with F-9/11 because Bush won. There were much bigger forces in play during the 2004 U.S. presidential election campaign than Michael Moore.

Frankly, it would be tough to dissuade me from my belief that history will show Moore to be on the right side of major issues: The Iraq war has been a disaster launched on lies, U.S. gun culture is bizarre and leads to thousands of unnecessary deaths, and it's ridiculous that 45 million people in the U.S. have no health insurance.

If nothing else, Moore has put major issues out for discussion. Through his force of personality and ruthless editing* , Moore has made documentaries entertaining and commercially successful. As an experiment, name the second and third-most important -- and successful -- left-wing U.S. documentarians.

* Moore says in the film that movie-making is all about editing. He also thinks that if someone said it, then it's true, which shows a remarkable disregard for context.

The big question is whether Moore could still do all that he's and be more journalistically rigorous without losing the entertainment value that has made his films successful.

Another question, one not addressed in the film, is a favourite theme of mine; namely that we're in an era where faith trumps reason in public discourse. Read Stephen Colbert's remarks on "truthiness" in this Wikipedia article -- a word that could sum up Moore's approach quite nicely -- for more on this.

While not perfect, Caine and Melnyk have produced a solid film that documents some of the contradictions, hypocrisies and compromises that lie behind the persona of the most influential and controversial documentarian of our time.

Rafferty ruefully noted that had Moore listened to him about how to make Roger and Me, the two of them would both still be scratching in the dirt for $5,000 grants. As it is, Moore now lives in a swank Manhattan condo and owns a multi-million-dollar log home on an island near Traverse City, Michigan -- the city that hosts his film festival and a notably Republican part of Michigan.

By all accounts, Moore wanted to become rich and successful. As he said after his Oscar acceptance speech for Bowling for Columbine, he's an American! :)