From Michael Moore's biographer, Roger Rapaport:

During more than 250 interviews with insiders central to his career, I discovered that many film-makers had never actually seen a Moore movie. Neither had close friends in Flint, nor the monsignor who was one of his seminary instructors (not many people realise that Moore is a practising Catholic). Radio talk-show presenters, including some here in London, admitted that they had never made it to one of the Moore's films.

One reason that people skip his work are rumours about his rough handling of co-workers. For example, one London talk-show presenter told me recently that she skipped Moore's films because she'd heard that he was hard on members of staff at London's Roundhouse Theatre during his One and a Half Man Show in 2002.

But a more likely reason ties in to the most-asked question I've been hearing from audiences and interviewers: "Are his films documentaries, or are they fictional comedies?" Since Moore gets the credit for making documentaries as popular as dramatic films, let's turn to the first cameraman Michael that ever hired, Kevin Rafferty, for the answer. This famed cinema-verite film-maker, who is also George W Bush's first cousin, gave Moore his film debut in Blood in the Face, an expose of the "racialist right". The then Flint journalist Moore scored a major coup when he helped Rafferty's team film a Michigan Ku Klux Klan rally where two lovebirds said their marital vows in a ceremony illuminated by the glow of a burning cross.

Rafferty says that he was stunned when he arrived in Flint and Moore handed him a terrific shot-list for Roger & Me. This was simply not the way cinema verité documentaries were made: a director would create the storyline after shooting was finished. Two-and-a-half years later, Rafferty was even more astonished when he saw that the shot-list had become the movie. Instead of shooting first and editing afterwards, in the traditional manner of documentaries, Michael had scripted Roger & Me like a dramatic feature.

Another problem is a lack of trust. There are nagging questions about well-documented omissions. Moore's decision to leave two filmed interviews with the General Motors chief executive Roger Smith on the Roger & Me cutting-room floor raises questions he has not answered. The ethics of launching his career by falsely claiming that he couldn't get an interview with the head of General Motors creates a credibility gap. Is it a good idea to rewrite history so that it creates the storyline and publicity necessary to reach an audience that normally skips documentaries?

After years of dodging the subject, Moore confirmed my story that he did, in fact, film an interview with Smith. Then he made the mistake of arguing that this event took place before he began working on Roger & Me. According to his commentary on the documentary's DVD, shooting began in February 1987, three months before the first filmed interview at a GM annual meeting in Detroit. The second deleted interview, a "home run" according to the soundman, also Moore's friend and Ralph Nader's attorney, Jim Musselman, took place in January 1988.