Michael Francis Moore is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and author. Moore's work frequently addresses various social, political, and economic topics. He first became publicly known for his award-winning debut documentary Roger & Me, a scathing look at the downfall of the automotive industry in 1980s Flint and Detroit.
Flint is the largest city and seat of Genesee County, Michigan, United States. Located along the Flint River, 66 miles (106 km) northwest of Detroit, it is a principal city within the region known as Mid Michigan. At the 2020 census, Flint had a population of 81,252, making it the twelfth-most populous city in Michigan. The Flint metropolitan area is located entirely within Genesee County. It is the fourth-largest metropolitan area in Michigan with a population of 406,892 in 2020. The city was incorporated in 1855.
Roger & Me is a 1989 American documentary film written, produced, directed by, and starring Michael Moore, in his directorial debut. Moore portrays the regional economic impact of General Motors CEO Roger Smith's action of closing several auto plants in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, reducing GM's employees in that area from 80,000 in 1978 to about 50,000 in 1992. As of August 2015, GM employs approximately 7,200 workers in the Flint area, according to The Detroit News, and 5,000 workers according to MSNBC.
The 1936–1937 Flint sit-down strike, also known as the General Motors sit-down strike, or the great GM sit-down strike, was a sitdown strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, United States. It changed the United Automobile Workers (UAW) from a collection of isolated local unions on the fringes of the industry into a major labor union, and led to the unionization of the domestic automobile industry.
Eddie Asner was an American actor. He is most notable for portraying Lou Grant during the 1970s and early 1980s, on both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-off series Lou Grant, making him one of the few television actors to portray the same character in both a comedy and a drama.
Sanjay Gupta is an American neurosurgeon, medical reporter, and writer. He serves as associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, associate professor of neurosurgery at the Emory University School of Medicine, member of the National Academy of Medicine and American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the chief medical correspondent for CNN.
Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint is a 1992 American short PBS documentary film written, co-produced and directed by Michael Moore, featuring the director returning to his hometown of Flint, Michigan, to catch-up with some of the characters featured in his previous film Roger & Me (1989). The film's title refers to Rhonda Britton, a Flint resident featured in both films, who sells rabbits as either pets or meat.
A rivethead or rivet head is a person associated with the industrial dance music scene. In stark contrast to the original industrial culture, whose performers and heterogeneous audience were sometimes referred to as "industrialists", the rivethead scene is a coherent youth culture closely linked to a discernible fashion style. The scene emerged in the late 1980s on the basis of electro-industrial, EBM, and industrial rock music. The associated dress style draws on military fashion and punk aesthetics with hints of fetish wear, mainly inspired by the scene's musical protagonists.
Robert William Corddry is an American actor and comedian. He is known for his work as a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (2002–2006) and for his starring role in the film Hot Tub Time Machine. He is the creator and star of Adult Swim's Childrens Hospital and has been awarded four Primetime Emmy Awards. He previously starred in the HBO series Ballers and the CBS comedy The Unicorn.
Buick City was a massive, vertically-integrated automobile manufacturing complex in northeast Flint, Michigan, which served the Buick home plant between 1904 and 1999. In the early 1980s, after major renovations were completed to better compete with Japanese producers, the plant was renamed to "Buick City".
Jerome Charles Minor Jr. is an American actor, comedian and writer known for his comedic roles in numerous television programs such as Mr. Show, Saturday Night Live, Trigger Happy TV, Delocated, Brickleberry, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Crossballs, The Hotwives of Orlando, Carpoolers, Community, Lucky Louie, and Dr. Ken.
WNMC-FM is a public radio station in Traverse City, Michigan, and is licensed to the trustees of Northwestern Michigan College (NMC). The station has block programming, mostly jazz and blues during the daytime, Americana in the late afternoon, and rock programming at night, but also playing alternative country, world music, and electronica.
Mark Ryan is an English actor, author, singer, and action director. He portrayed Mr. Gates in the Michael Bay/Starz production of the pirate show Black Sails, Nasir in the British TV series Robin of Sherwood, and is known for his work for the Transformers film franchise.
Flint, Michigan is a city which previously relied on its automotive industry, and still does to an extent. Over the past several decades, General Motors plants in Genesee County have experienced re-namings, management shifts, openings, closures, reopenings, and spinoffs.
Jerry Taff is an American former television anchorman for WISN-TV in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The Flint water crisis is a public health crisis that started in 2014 after the drinking water for the city of Flint, Michigan was contaminated with lead and possibly Legionella bacteria. In April 2014, during a financial crisis, state-appointed emergency manager Darnell Earley changed Flint's water source from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River. Residents complained about the taste, smell, and appearance of the water. Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water, which resulted in lead from aging pipes leaching into the water supply, exposing around 100,000 residents to elevated lead levels. A pair of scientific studies confirmed that lead contamination was present in the water supply. The city switched back to the Detroit water system on October 16, 2015. It later signed a 30-year contract with the new Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) on November 22, 2017.
Economics film is a film genre that features economics and its social implications as a central theme. The genre contains fiction, non-fiction, documentary and educational films. It is a broad category, with some films explicitly focussing on economic theory while others explore the broader impacts of it. Films often centre around a historical event like the global financial crisis or a famous businessperson such as William Randolph Hearst or Michael Burry. Classification of films into the genre was unclear for many years, as they either were purely educational, or the inclusion of economic content was overshadowed by other genre-defining features.
Gordon Young is an American journalist and educator based in San Francisco, California, who writes about urban planning issues and the problems facing deindustrialized cities and towns, especially his hometown of Flint, Michigan. He is a senior lecturer in the Communication Department at Santa Clara University and has lived in San Francisco since 1996.
