Questions About "Roger and Me"?

[ralph124c]

I just saw this old movie, and found it pretty funny. I have a few questions:
-one of the most pathetic parts of the flick was the attempt by the City of Flint, Michigan, to turn Flint into a tourist attraction!
The city spend >$150 million to build a downtown hotel, a big mall, and a torist museum (“Autoworld”).
According to the film, all of these venues closed down.
Do they still exist today? Or have they all been torn down?

[In_Winnipeg]

I don’t know, but maybe Google Streetview would tell you.

[gaffa]

@ralph124c

I just saw this old movie, and found it pretty funny. I have a few questions:
-one of the most pathetic parts of the flick was the attempt by the City of Flint, Michigan, to turn Flint into a tourist attraction!
The city spend >$150 million to build a downtown hotel, a big mall, and a torist museum (“Autoworld”).
According to the film, all of these venues closed down.
Do they still exist today? Or have they all been torn down?

I believe the sequel Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint showed Autoworld being blown up. It follows up on people and events of the first film.

[aceplace57]

They still raise rabbits inside the city and eat them?

Tough being a cute fuzzy bunny in Flint.

[Quercus_alba]

@aceplace57

They still raise rabbits inside the city and eat them?

Tough being a cute fuzzy bunny in Flint.

Tough being anyone in Flint.

[aceplace57]

It’s not inconceivable that a large city could die off.

There were a lot of mining towns in the West that were abandoned after the mines closed. Here in Arkansas there’s several towns in trouble. Their entire economy depended on one industry. For example a paper mill. It was the only major employer and the town is desperately trying to find another company that wants to move in.

It doesn’t pay to stay in a town where the major employer is gone. Trying to replace a monster gorilla like Ford is nearly impossible.

[RealityChuck]

It can be done – Schenectady is managing with GE moving from major employer to a minor presence. But it takes a lot of work and good luck.

[Kent_Clark]

Autoworld was torn downin 1997. The land it sat on is now part of the University of Michigan-Flint.

[TBG]

Aw man, I loved going to Autoworld as a kid. It wasn’t like Disney World, or even Cedar Point level fun, but still, it was fun enough to do for the day.

[ralph124c]

Thanks for the replies.
I still can’t understand how anybody thought that Flint would become a tourist destination!
Seriously, why didn’t the city slash taxes and offer incentives to bring in business? Why wouldn’t a firm like Hyundai want to open a factory there-or was it the UAW scaring people away?:mad:

[GrandWino]

@ralph124c

Thanks for the replies.
I still can’t understand how anybody thought that Flint would become a tourist destination!
Seriously, why didn’t the city slash taxes and offer incentives to bring in business? Why wouldn’t a firm like Hyundai want to open a factory there-or was it the UAW scaring people away?:mad:

I doubt they anticipated people coming from more than a few hundred miles away. They probably weren’t planning on people from Chicago saying “Hey, let’s throw the kids in the car and drive five hours to AUTOWORLD!.” But tourism can be more locally focused and if they were able to pull in people from Saginaw, Bay City, Lansing, etc - they might have done ok. Also, Northern MI is a big tourism area, especially in the warmer months, and it’s not unlikely that they could have grabbed some of those people as they drove through.

[StusBlues]

@ralph124c

Thanks for the replies.
I still can’t understand how anybody thought that Flint would become a tourist destination!
Seriously, why didn’t the city slash taxes and offer incentives to bring in business? Why wouldn’t a firm like Hyundai want to open a factory there-or was it the UAW scaring people away?:mad:

Excellent questions. Back when I played Sim City 2000, Flint was by far the easiest scenario to win–just take industrial taxes to zero and jack them up for residential. People grumbled, but they still came in droves because of the jobs. Unfortunately, SC2K isn’t reality

[Zsofia]

@ralph124c

Thanks for the replies.
I still can’t understand how anybody thought that Flint would become a tourist destination!
Seriously, why didn’t the city slash taxes and offer incentives to bring in business? Why wouldn’t a firm like Hyundai want to open a factory there-or was it the UAW scaring people away?:mad:

Unions, I’d imagine. Plenty of foreign car companies have built factories in America - in right to work states.

[BrainGlutton]

From Wikipedia:

Redevelopment

In the last decade, local efforts to counter deindustrialization have centered around diversifying the economy, either by attracting small parts manufacturers with vacant industrial space and tax incentives, or steering the city toward a more commercially driven economy.

Industrially, the vacated Buick City site is currently the United States’ largest brownfield. Its accessibility to the Flint River and major rail networks has made it potentially attractive to shipping interests. A local shipping company has considered turning Buick City into a large shipping center.[citation needed]This center could provide 600 jobs and spur many small businesses. In the new GM-UAW deal, an agreement was reached to build a new engine plant on a portion of the Buick City site. This plant is expected to provide 800 new jobs.

Commercially, local organizations have attempted to pool their resources in the central business district and to expand and bolster higher education at four local institutions. Landmarks such as the First National Bank building have been extensively renovated, often to create lofts or office space, and filming for the Will Ferrell movie Semi-Pro resulted in renovations to the Capitol Theatre. In 2004 the first planned residential community in Flint in over 30 years, University Park, was built north of Fifth Avenue off Saginaw Street, Flint’s main thoroughfare. Local foundations have also funded the renovation and redecoration of Saginaw Street, and have begun work turning University Avenue (formerly known as Third Avenue) into a mile-long “University Corridor” connecting University of Michigan–Flint with Kettering University. Atwood Stadium, located on University Avenue, has already received extensive renovations and the Cultivating Our Community project is landscaping 16 different locations from in Flint as a part of a $415,600 beautification project. Wade Trim and Rowe Incorporated have done major renovations to transform empty downtown Flint blocks into business, entertainment, and housing centers.[7] WNEM, a local television station, has signed a ten year lease on space in the Wade Trim building facing Saginaw Street. [8] Also, plans have been recently passed to turn the long-vacant Durant Hotel into a mixture of commercial space and apartments attractive to young professionals or college students, with 93 units. Work has already begun and the project is expected to be complete by fall 2009.[9] In March 2008, the Crim Race Foundation put up an offer to buy the vacant Character Inn and turn it into a fitness center and do a multimillion dollar renovation.[10]

In 2008, the University of Michigan–Flint opened its first 310-person dormitory on their Downtown Flint campus.[11] The University of Michigan-Flint has acquired the Riverfront Character Inn and plans to turn the former hotel into a 550-person dormitory called the Riverfront Residence Hall. Kettering University and Baker College - Flint have both expanded on-campus living in recent years. While Mott Community College does not offer on-campus housing, they have initiated their own expansion with the construction of a Regional Technology Center.

Additionally, the city is in the process of tearing down abandoned homes in some of the outlying areas in order to reduce the city to a level where the population can support it. As of June 2009, approximately 1100 homes have been demolished, with one official estimating another 3000 more will have to be torn down.[12]

[Mahaloth]

By the way, wasn’t this movie known for being deceptive? I mean, didn’t he re-arrange the chronological order of things to make Flint look more foolish?

[TheBoltEater]

Either my Google-Fu is badly out of practice or there is simply nothing left online about this; either way, the late Pauline Kael’s famous review of this film is probably the definitive “Case for the Prosecution” against Roger and Me. I, for one, am an unabashed Michael Moore hater, and it has nothing to do with his politics at all - it is entirely due to how much I despised what he did with this film. The only thing left I can find of Kael’s review is this chunk from a cached page on an old GeoCities site (note that the film is available on LaserDisc!)-

Roger & Me
US (1989): Documentary/Comedy
87 min, Rated R, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc

Michael Moore’s widely praised muckraking documentary is about his 2-year pursuit of Roger Smith, the chairman of General Motors, who, according to the film, is directly responsible for closing 11 plants and bringing about the destruction of Flint, Michigan-GM’s birthplace and Moore’s home town. The film purports to show what was happening in Flint from February, 1987, to August, 1989, but what happens is that Moore, a big shambling joker who’s the director, producer, writer, and star, deadpans his way through interviews with an assortment of unlikely people, who are used as stooges. He chases gags and improvises his version of history: in his account of the plant closings, the worker layoffs, and the construction of tourist attractions, he compresses the events of many years and fiddles with the time sequence. He comes on in a give-'em-hell style, but he breaks faith with the audience. And he does something that is humanly very offensive: ROGER & ME uses its leftism as a superior attitude. Members of the audience can laugh at ordinary working people and still feel that they’re taking a politically correct position. Released by Warners.
For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael’s book Movie Love.

If you can find the full review in one of her books (at your nearest library or bookstore) you should really read the whole thing. The short version is just as she mentions in the above paragraph: Moore pretends that this film is about Flint in 1989, but all the most damning things he has to say about it are taken far, far out of their actual chronology. The OP specifically mentions AutoWorld. Well, guess what - AutoWorld was built in 1984 and closed in its first year of operation, well before the dramatic downturn in Flint’s economy that the film purports to represent.

That’s the most dramatic lie that Moore tells in that movie (and since it’s a “documentary”, keep in mind that the person he’s lying to is YOU), but hardly the only one. Any time his story wasn’t provocative enough, he just pretended that things happened more interestingly than they really did. He’ll tell you it wasn’t a lie because all these things DID happen. And he never explicitly says that AutoWorld was built in 1989 at the height of Flint’s economic disaster - but if all you know about it is what he shows you in the film, you can’t help but come to that conclusion, which is exactly what he wants.

I could rant about that film for hours, but I’ll shut up now. If you’re truly interested, go find Pauline Kael’s excellent review (I believe it’s from 1/8/1990).

[puddleglum]

One of the more shocking lies in the movie is that Moore actually talked to Smith during the time period he was making the movie. No one should trust Moore farther than you could throw him.