This hasn’t been a good week for radical filmmaker Michael Moore. The Hollywood Reporter revealed that he recently lost a re-election bid for his position as a governor on the Academy Award’s documentary board.

Gerald Molen, the producer of Schindler’s List and many other Hollywood films, says Moore’s loss will restore a level of balance in the consideration of political documentaries. This week he wrote a letter to Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, stating:

On behalf of my fellow filmmakers and the vast American Heartland which, on occasion, has felt disenfranchised by the Academy, I want to personally thank you and the Academy for removing Mr. Moore and restoring a fair and impartial voting process to the documentary category of the Oscars. . . . Foxes shouldn’t guard hen houses and Michael Moore shouldn’t have been in charge of the documentary nominating process at the Academy.”


Molen has long believed that Moore’s presence on the Academy’s documentary committee has tainted the nominating process. Back in May, Molen wrote a letter to then-president of the Academy Hawk Koch, insinuating that 2016, the critical film about President Obama that he and author Dinesh D’Souza produced last year, had been blackballed by the committee because of its message. 2016 became the second highest-grossing political documentary in history, coming in just behind Moore’s 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11, a screed against then-president George W. Bush.

“We’ve already experienced a time in Hollywood where an atmosphere of oppression and fear was prevalent and people were punished for their political views. Let us make sure that never happens again,” Molen wrote in his letter to Koch in May.

Molen and D’Souza report their next film will be called America and will be released on July 4 of next year. The two filmmakers say “it will uphold all the things that Michael Moore detests, and expose all of the foolish ideals that this man and his fellow members of the vocal super-minority stand for.”

It’s too much to expect that Hollywood will fully reject the reckless and truth-challenged Moore, but at least someone is finally challenging his anti-American world view by making their own films.