A pressure group is trying to get theaters to refuse to show Fahrenheit 9/11. I think it’s a bad idea, as most gadflies thrive on the attention of protestors. It’s worth debating. Is there a connection between attention and sales?

Consider Al Franken. In the mid-90s he published “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Liar,” hoping that Rush would spend his three hours a day every day excoriating the book and debating it…and thus publicizing it. Instead, Limbaugh has to date never even mentioned the book. Contrast this with Franken’s “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” which targeted Bill O’Reilly, and O’Reilly responded with ranting and lawsuits. Again, that’s exactly what Franken wants. But in the final analysis, I don’t know that giving or withholding attention to the books affected their sales. Both sold well, since their audience was not the audience of Rush and O’Reilly.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is the same sort of creation. Moore wants the controversy, and protesting him just feeds the beast.

However, the comparison in this article to “The Passion” is a false one. Mel Gibson never set out to be offensive.

A better comparison might be “The Last Temptation of Christ”…and that’s where everything I’ve said up til now gets disproven, because in that case the protesting got results. The protest was so loud that the movie got a limited release and was a box office bomb. Unless you have read Michael Medved’s excellent “Hollywood vs. America” you may not be aware of that, as the popular perception was that people were valiantly crossing picket lines in droves and the movie was going gangbusters because of the protest.

There’s one more consideration in the case of “Fahrenheit 9/11”: the movie is not about making money, it’s entirely a political tract aimed at affecting the election. (I’m not making an aspersion; Moore would tell you the same thing.) Thus, any protest is just going to give more attention to the subject.

I have a better idea for those protestors. This isn’t really a free speech issue (we aren’t all guaranteed a good distribution of our filmed opinions), but instead of trying to squelch Moore’s film, the group should try to bolster a film like Michael Moore Hates America.