Film Fest Follies & More

July 19, 2006

What would the Traverse City Film Festival be without controversy? This year it involves Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth.
Not that the film is controversial. There’s been near-unanimous praise for Gore’s warning on the perils global warming. The film is a shoo-in to win the Oscar next year. Roger Ebert gave it a four-star review.
But members of the local Sierra Club are irritated with the film fest camp for having An Inconvenient Truth pulled from a special showing at Horizon Cinema in TC so that it could debut at the festival instead.
A Sierra Club member says that Horizon had plans to show An Inconvenient Truth for a five-day run to be kicked off with a special night with the conservation club. “Horizon Cinema was so excited about it and they were going to sell us tickets for $5.50 each,” says the club member.
The Sierra Club sold 65 tickets for the event and then -- poof -- they got a call from Horizon saying that someone had pulled strings to yank the film so it could debut at the film fest instead. The theater owners were reportedly P-O’ed and so were members of the Sierra Club.
“So many people could have seen it rather than a few elites at the film festival,” says our source.
Whodunnit? No one seems to know, but festival organizer Michael Moore is said to have been very irritated when local rabble-rouser Bruce Peterson saddled him with the blame in an email to area progressives.
Imagine the squawk there would have been if someone had tried to suppress Fahrenheit 911 at Horizon Cinema. Yet now (justified or not) Moore‘s peeps find themselves cast in that same dastardly role.

Jason Learns a Lesson
No doubt, State Senator Jason Allen has learned a valuable lesson from being the focus of many newspaper articles for his ethical boo-boos.
The lesson? You can get away with just about anything (short of declaring yourself gay) as long as your constituents are happy to turn a blind eye.
Things like receiving kickbacks from a tobacco company for strangling anti-smoking legislation in its crib. Or receiving a $32,000 contribution from a developer after intervening to scuttle a competing parking deck plan in Traverse City.
If we were living in a movie -- say, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington -- and the local newspaper reported that a state senator had pulled these stunts, the good citizens in that film would put forth a competing candidate (played by Jimmy Stewart) who would win in a landslide to show that voters won’t stand for back-room shenanighens.
But in real-life Northern Michigan, none of that happens. Instead, the local press is bombarded with letters demanding that they stop pickin’ on Jason. After all, he’s only trying to raise funds so he can buy the votes of other Republican senators who will elect him Senate majority leader.
Let’s assume that Sen. Allen simply made some really dumb errors in judgment by accepting these and other dubious contributions (such as funds from Canadian trash haulers who bring Toronto’s garbage to Michigan). Not intentionally immoral or unethical -- just dumb. As in dumb & dumberer.
Either way, are those the qualities we need at the head of the State Senate?
Hopefully, Sen. Allen will learn a better lesson than the one his supporters are sending him. That lesson is to keep yourself clean in all your doings -- free of taint -- free of harm. Elected representatives who forget that lesson may get their day in the sun, but eventually they end up in the mud. That’s what happened to congressmen Tom Delay and William Jefferson. In a way Sen. Allen is lucky: he‘s been to the mudbath early in his career and still has time to clean up his reputation.

The Parking Deck Blahs
Speaking of “back-room shenanighens,” I’ve been wrestling with my conscience on how to vote on Traverse City’s parking deck on Aug. 8.
Personally, I believe we need another parking deck downtown and most of the merchants there feel the same. The current site is an eyesore and if the deck is voted down, it could cost millions more to build another one a few years hence.
And opponents of the parking deck plan are playing a bit loose with the facts, making it seem like $16 million is going to come out of the taxpayers’ pockets, when in fact we’re really just guaranteeing some bonds with relatively little risk. They‘ll be paid back.
But considering that a proposal for a less expensive parking deck was concealed from the Traverse City Commission, and there was a kickback from the developer for a state senator’s intervention... well, it sort of drains the feel-good factor from my joy balloon for this project.
Can you vote for something you believe in when it‘s this slimy? Tough question.
If I vote yes on the parking deck, it will be while holding my nose. What about you?