Michael Moore's planning to keep the heat on the White House.
A week after President George W. Bush was reelected--despite Moore's best efforts--the firebrand filmmaker says he's forging ahead with a sequel to his controversial documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.
Moore tells Daily Variety that his new project, tentatively titled Fahrenheit 9/11 1/2, will pick up where Fahrenheit left off, addressing what the filmmaker sees as the administration's failures in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
"Fifty-one percent of the American people lacked information [on election day] and we want to educate and enlighten them," the lefty writer-director told Variety. "They weren't told the truth. We're communicators and it's up to us to start doing it now."
To that end, Moore says his team will begin rolling cameras now to sway voters for the next presidential go-round.
Until then, Moore says, "the official mourning period is over today and there is a silver lining--George W. Bush is prohibited by law from running again."
Fahrenheit 9/11 1/2 will once again be produced by Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein through the Fellowship Adventure Group, the company Weinstein set up with brother Bob, Lions Gate Films and IFC Films to distribute the original film after Disney balked.
Neither Moore nor the Fellowship Adventure Group could be reached for comment Thursday.
As for the box-office-bursting Fahrenheit 9/11, the hard-charging documentary got some bad news this week when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced the film would be frozen out of the Golden Globes. The awards don't have any categories for documentaries. "We're not a musical/comedy or dramatic feature," Moore said.
But he still is hopeful he will add another Oscar to his mantle, joining his 2002 Best Documentary Academy Award for Bowling for Columbine.
This time around, though, he and Weinstein are hoping to persuade Academy voters to make Fahrenheit the first doc in Oscar history to be nominated for Best Picture. The film wasn't submitted in the Best Documentary category because Moore decided to air it on pay-per-view the night before the election, rendering it ineligible under Academy rules.
"I don't know if people want to see me on the stage of the Kodak again," Moore joked in Variety. "However, since my wife [Kathleen] was the producer, if I win--she speaks!"
He's referring to his infamous Oscar speech of two years ago in which he called President Bush "a fictitious president" on the verge of launching what he considered to be a "fictitious war."
Fahrenheit 9/11 has tallied more than $119 million at the domestic box office and nearly $100 million abroad to become the highest grossing documentary ever. The DVD and video versions were released last month and did more than $10 million in first week combined rental and retail revenue, another record for a doc.
Aside from Fahrenheit 9/11 1/2, which should hit theaters in time for the 2008 elections, Moore is finishing up Sicko, an exposé of the health care industry. That film will most likely hit theaters in 2006.