It Isn't Pretty, But `Pets Or Meat' Tells It Like It Is

You may remember Flint, Mich. The land where men (and women) are jobless, and bunnies are nervous.

And getting nervouser.

Welcome to "Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint," Michael Moore's darkly humorous homecoming to the depressed city he never really left.

"I'm one of those Flint-New York commuters," jokes Moore, who has moved to the Big Apple but still tries to get back to visit family and friends for a week every month. "Monday morning, the Flint to La Guardia shuttle is packed."

"Pets or Meat" is a 23-minute postcard to catch us up on what's happened to Moore's home town since his acclaimed 1989 docu-comedy "Roger & Me," which makes its Seattle-area free broadcast debut tomorrow at 11 p.m. on PBS station KCTS/9. "Pets or Meat" airs immediately after.

In "Roger & Me," Moore tracked General Motors then-chairman Roger B. Smith, hoping to bring him to Flint for a day to see for himself the devastation wreaked by the company's layoffs.

With the sputtering state of the whole country's economy, the movie's message has worn well.

Movie critics put "Roger & Me" on more of their Top 10 lists than any other film released that year. The achievement was all the more remarkable considering it was Moore's first film, shot for about $160,000 and financed in part by weekly Bingo games. Moore could afford to pay off his debts when Warner Bros. bought the distribution rights for $3 million, and the movie became the

largest-grossing documentary of all time.

It premiered on all 14 screens of a multiplex in nearby Burton, Mich. Moore would have liked to have shown it in Flint, but all the theaters had shut down.

Good old Flint. The more things change . . .

"Pets or Meat" re-introduces us to Deputy Fred, last seen in "Roger & Me" evicting families from their homes on Christmas Eve. Deputy Fred has diversified. Now he also repossesses cars.

Local growth industries remain Taco Bells, soup kitchens and the unemployment office. Moore, whose father worked in a GM spark-plug plant, says another 10,000 laid-off workers have joined the ranks of the 30,000 Flint workers GM turned out in the 1980s.

And what of the Bunny Lady? She's still making a few bucks off her furry friends, who appear to be more popular than ever. The sign in her front yard should now read: Pets, meat or snake chow.

Moore has outdone himself. The scene in "Roger & Me" of the Bunny Lady clubbing and skinning a rabbit is surpassed in creepiness by the moment in "Pets or Meat" where Mister Bunny meets Mister Python.

"Animal rights people and the ASPCA are hounding me, everybody's going nuts," says Moore, who considered leaving the footage out.

"Then I thought, it really is the perfect metaphor. It's essentially what GM and other corporations have done to America."

One reviewer called "Roger & Me" "one part home movie, one part editorial, one part letter bomb." "Pets or Meat" follows the same formula. It's equally touching, and maybe even funnier.

"I was not interested in making a traditional documentary. I wouldn't know how to do it," says the 38-year-old Moore, who was a muckraking journalist who founded a weekly alternative newspaper in Flint and, briefly, edited Mother Jones magazine before trying filmmaking. "I didn't grow up on this stuff. Flint was the last city in the country to get a PBS station, so my mind is uncluttered."

Some critics questioned whether Moore had played fast and loose with the facts in "Roger & Me," rearranging the chronology of certain events to suit his purpose.

"Everything I said was true," Moore bristles. "The documentary police, people who read The New Yorker, were concerned about that. Not real people."

Moore took about half his $2 million after-tax profit from "Roger & Me" and started a foundation to help independent filmmakers and social action groups. It has already disbursed about $250,000. At a free premiere of "Pets or Meat" last week at a Flint auditorium, another $15,000 was handed out to local groups, including a soup kitchen.

Moore also dipped into the film's profits to give two years' rent to each of Flint residents evicted by Deputy Fred in "Roger & Me."

The filmmaker, meanwhile, has relocated to New York in order to make more movies. Moore signed a development deal with Warner Bros. and recently completed the script for a feature, "Canadian Bacon." It's a political satire about the U.S. invading Canada. Moore will also play the president's press secretary, and direct.

"It's easier," says Moore. "You're in complete control. You get to pick your actors and they'll say your lines. With a documentary you've got to go with whatever happens then write the story in the editing room."