Shin is a film director of legendary stature in his native country — the Orson Welles of South Korea. He modernized movies at a time when people hungered for art, for escape, following the Korean War. He and his wife, the well-known actress Choi Eun Hee, were among Seoul’s celebrity set. But in 1978, he ran afoul of the frequently repressive government of Gen. Park Chung Hee, who closed his studio. After making at least 60 movies in 20 years, Shin’s career appeared to be over.

What soon followed, according to Shin’s memoir, “Kingdom of Kim,” was an experience that revived his career in a most unbelievable way. Shin and his wife were both kidnapped by North Korea’s despot-in-training, Kim Jong Il, who sought to create a film industry that would allow him to sway a world audience to the righteousness of the Korea Workers’ Party. Shin would be his propagandist, Choi his star.

Shin, reticent to talk about his experiences to an American reporter, instead allowed a representative to give Salon an English translation of “Kingdom of Kim,” which has only been released in his own country in Korean. North Korean apparatchiks have tried to cast doubt on Shin’s story, claiming he willingly defected to North Korea and absconded with millions. But Korea experts find Shin’s story believable. Eric Heginbotham, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is one of many Kim-watchers who say it’s consistent with what is known about the regime. Pyongyang now admits it captured 11 Japanese citizens in the late ’70s and ’80s to act as cultural advisors. Several died in captivity, some in suicides. “The abduction cases from Japan were a real eye-opener,” Heginbotham says.

And one of the reporters who has met with the couple also says he has no reason to doubt Shin. Don Oberdorfer, formerly of the Washington Post and now a respected Korea scholar, says that of the many “questionable” defectors he has interviewed over the years, these two seemed very trustworthy. “I made it a practice not to repeat the various yarns about Kim unless I felt confident from reliable sources they were true,” he said. “This one I believed.”

But it’s certainly as fantastical as many of his movies. Shin writes of being caught trying to escape, and spending four years in an all-male prison camp as a result, left to assume his wife was dead. Then, just as suddenly, he was brought into the inner sanctum of Kim Jong Il, the would-be successor to his father, Kim Il Sung, who ruled the country for nearly 50 years. Shin’s talents would then officially fall to the service of North Korea, and he would make seven movies before he and his wife made a breathtaking escape in Vienna in 1986.

Not many have escaped to tell of the habits of the man who is now the most dangerous dictator in the world — armed with nuclear and chemical weapons, and seemingly touched by madness. Shin’s stories offer revealing glimpses of the man now threatening to “destroy the world.” In fact, there is more than a passing resemblance between Kim and the insatiable Pulgasari, the communist Godzilla rip-off that Shin, at Kim’s request, created for North Korean audiences, and which has become a camp curiosity for monster movie aficionados.

Shin says that shortly after arriving in Pyongyang he made several attempts to escape, and was punished with four years at Prison No. 6, where he lived on a diet of grass, salt, rice and party indoctrination — “tasting bile all the time,” he writes. “I experienced the limits of human beings.” All the while, he received no word about his wife (who was held under house arrest) and so assumed the worst.

Then, in 1983, they were both released, and before long, reunited at a reception thrown by Kim Jong Il. Over soft drinks, the top party official finally, incredibly, explained why they were there.

“The North’s filmmakers are just doing perfunctory work. They don’t have any new ideas,” Kim told the couple. “Their works have the same expressions, redundancies, the same old plots. All our movies are filled with crying and sobbing. I didn’t order them to portray that kind of thing.” The couple was stunned.

By 1978, Kim had become disgusted with his Mt. Paektu Creative Group, a studio that, as explained in Kim’s 1973 instruction manual, “On the Art of the Cinema,” was run on the “monolithic guidance” of party groupthink and named after the mountain where, according to state myth, a shooting star soared overhead, giving the universe’s fiery approval to the soil of Kim’s birth. (Actually, he was born in Siberia.) Kim told Shin he felt a “profound disappointment” with their work.

In the 1960s, Kim Il Sung’s propaganda machine had created “Sea of Blood” and “The Flower Girl,” films that while regarded as tedious and crude by South Koreans were products the North was quite proud of, and were based on revolutionary operas. “Sea of Blood” is a war hagiography that gives Kim Il Sung exaggerated credit for victories over Japan in the 1930s. Recently it was still being shown widely, says Columbia University professor Charles Armstrong, who calls it a tool for reducing citizen unhappiness in the face of starvation. And like “Titanic” and its schmaltzy “My Heart Will Go On,” “Sea of Blood” produced a hit song: “My Heart Will Remain Faithful.”

“Films should contain musical masterpieces like these,” Kim Jong Il writes in his book: “the fusion of noble ideas and burning passion.” He spends most of the book entreating actors and directors, whom he compares to generals, to master their craft. How? Sheer party loyalty.

“Actors must be ideologically prepared before acquiring high level skills,” he writes, recommending a kind of Communist method acting. “No revolutionary actor has ever actually been a Japanese policeman or capitalist … To effectively embody the hateful enemy, the actor requires an ardent love of his class and a burning hostility towards the enemy.”

Kim’s book also suggests that filmmakers draw from real life, avoid creating unrealistic movies about “the colourful lives of flamboyant characters,” and reveals: “In the final analysis, a director who pins his hopes on finding a ‘suitable actor’ is taking a gamble in his creative work. And no director who relies on luck in creative work has ever achieved real success.”

During the same period, in South Korea, Shin Sang-Ok’s studio, Shin Films, had produced a number of box-office hits. He is best known for a 1968 historical drama called “The Eunuch,” about concubines and emasculated servants unable to consummate their secret love. A popular theme in Shin’s films — not unlike the Hollywood weepies of the 1950s — concerns the plight of women chaffing under the limits of society’s expectations, such as “The Evergreen Tree” (1961), in which Choi played a reform-minded woman struggling against provincialism to teach rural children how to read and write. “Though this film does not directly express class consciousness, the dedication and faith in the people might be the reason this movie was praised and used as a textbook for acting in North Korea,” writes Korean film critic Kwak Hyun-Ja. At 17, Choi had run away from home to pursue her dream of acting, eventually achieving renown in her country as the “Jewel of Actresses.”

Ten years after writing that book, the playboy author of “On the Art of the Cinema” sat across the glass table from Shin and Choi, two real filmmakers. He blamed misunderstandings by thoughtless officials for their unfriendly four-year North Korean welcome. He also apologized for taking so long to get back to them personally, saying it had been busy at the office.

The idea came to Kim, he said, when he heard that Seoul’s repressive, militaristic Park regime had closed down Shin Films. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to bring him here,’” he said. Infiltrating Shin Films with agents posing as business partners, Kim explained how he lured the two to Repulse Bay, Hong Kong. First Choi disappeared on a trip to discuss an acting job. Then, on the way to dinner one night, Shin had a sack filled with a chloroform-like substance pulled over his head. With that, Kim had imported the best film talent the peninsula had to offer.

But Choi had come to the meeting with Kim prepared, according to her husband’s memoir. She had purchased a cassette recorder at a nearby market for the party inner circle, and smuggled it past the guards of Kim’s lair. It lay in her handbag, and before it came to a stop, it taped 45 minutes of the dictator laying out his plans for the two: to serve as role models for his industry, and claim they came to the North for the creative freedom. “It goes without saying,” the leader said, “that you must say your defection to the North was of your own free will, and that the South’s democracy is bogus.”

To both Shin and Choi, the cassette of Kim’s 45-minute talk was the key to a safe return home — but posed severe dangers as well. “It was a matter of life or death,” Shin said later, in an interview with a South Korean magazine. They faced execution if the tape was found. In North Korea, there are strict rules against recording or filming the top leaders of the party. After the couple had been released, the tapes were eventually broadcast and discussed in South Korea.

And without the tape, Shin said, “I could not dare to return to [South Korea] without evidence that I had been kidnapped to the North. If [the Seoul government] charged me with entering the North on my own and cooperating with the North Koreans, I would have had no evidence to deny it.”

But coming home was a long way away. For now, Shin Films was back open for business — this time in Pyongyang.

“The capitalist cinema, which promotes a few ‘popular stars’ to curry favor with the audience, is in essence a reactionary art form which reduces the stars to puppets and the film to a commodity. There cannot be a genuine creative spirit, and the beautiful flower of art cannot bloom …” – “On the Art of the Cinema”

“Shall we make Mr. Shin one of our regular guests?” Kim asked the crowd at a birthday party for one of his generals, after Shin’s career, and life, was given its new lease. A lot of cognac was being drunk. The general in question was boasting that he could take Pusan in a week, tops. Military men marched in a circular review, saluting Kim. On stage, a bevy of young women jumped up and down screaming, “Long live the Great Leader!” Most jarring of all was when Kim shook his arm and made this aside, pointing at the display of fawning: “Mr. Shin, all that is bogus. It’s just pretense.”

This puzzling confession, Shin writes, lingered in his mind as he drove in a Mercedes to the new office of Shin Films. Soon he’d be entrusted with an annual paycheck of $3 million for personal or professional use, even as he formulated an escape plan. By following the advice for directors in “On the Art of the Cinema” — “BE LOYAL TO THE PARTY AND PROVE YOURSELVES WORTHY OF THE TRUST IT PLACES IN YOURSELF” — he would hope for some opportunity to escape, maybe during a trip to an Eastern Bloc film festival.

Sometimes resigned to his stay, Shin took comfort in his increasing material well-being, and in making movies again. When it came to choosing subject matter, he told the Seoul Times in 2001 that there were “fewer restrictions than is commonly believed.” He said he even introduced the first kiss to the military-centric North Korean cinema.

All ideas, however, were approved by Kim Jong Il as arms of his ideology, and were developed in story conferences with him. The dictator wanted to make crossover movies that would simultaneously project a fearsome image to the world while somehow improving how North Korea was perceived. He wouldn’t listen when Shin told him that shrill, anti-Japanese movies would not find widespread appeal.

Shin was free to fly to East Berlin for location shots — though shadowed by ever-present escorts. He recalls walking past the U.S. Embassy with his wife, who tugged at his sleeve and made a face suggesting they run for it.

“What’s the matter with you?” he hissed. “I will not make an attempt unless it’s one hundred percent certain. If they caught us, we’d be dead.”

Besides, he was taking his new career seriously, and was eager to get work done. He even claims that in 1984 he was able to produce the finest film of his career: “Runaway,” the tragic story of a wandering Korean family of 1920s Manchuria, coping with Japanese oppression and the dishonesty of their neighbors.

After that, however, came a very different kind of movie. Loosely based on a legend of the 14th century Koryo monarchy, “Pulgasari” owes much to “Godzilla.” He invited some monster-movie veterans from Japan to come to his studio, which had swelled to 700 employees, to help with the picture. When Kim guaranteed their safety, they came to work on “Pulgasari,” including Kempachiro Satsuma, the second actor to wear the Godzilla suit, who soon dressed up as the lumbering, google-eyed Pulgasari, who scatters imperialists to the winds but also finds time to help carry the people’s firewood.

[To view a 45 second video clip of "Pulgasari," please click here. It is available through ADV Films.]

Pulgasari, in fact, is definitely a monster of the people. When the wicked king oppresses the people, a jailed blacksmith molds a tiny character out of rice, declaring he will use the last spark of his creative power to bring the doll to life.

As the farmers are starving under the king’s rule, the doll, Pulgasari, eats iron and grows. The cherubic toddler Pulgasari soon grows into a horned beast whose clawed foot is the size of a person. And since this is a movie made under the guidelines of “On the Art of the Cinema,” there are seemingly endless shots of the peoples’ folk dances. During these, Pulgasari can be seen brooding on the outskirts of the festivities, relaxing against a hill and looking ridiculous.

Finally, Pulgasari leads the farmers’ army in an assault on the king’s fortress — and against thousands of North Korean military troops who were mobilized and dressed up as extras. Ultimately, the king uses his experimental anti-Pulgasari weapon, the Lion Gun. (It’s hard not to think “nuke” when the hammy villain delights in his new acquisition.) But the enterprising Pulgasari swallows the missile and shoots it back at his oppressors. Finally, the king is crushed beneath a huge falling column.

Then the movie becomes curiously ambiguous. The beloved Pulgasari turns on his own people. Still hungry for iron after his victory, Pulgasari begins eating the people’s tools. The confusing conclusion seems to find salvation in the spirit of the people. When the blacksmith’s daughter tearfully pleads with Pulgasari to “go on a diet,” he seems to find his conscience, and puzzlingly shatters into a million slow-motion rocks. Then, inexplicably, a glowing blue Pulgasari child is born, waddling out of the ocean. It’s a terrifically bad movie.

The movie can be read in two ways. On one hand, it is a cautionary tale about what happens when the people leave their fate in the hands of the monster, a capitalist by dint of his insatiable consumption of iron. But it is also tempting to read the monster as a metaphor for Kim Il Sung, hijacking the “people’s revolution” to ultimately serve his purposes. Wondered a fan at StompTokyo.com, “Were these, as some commentators have speculated, Shin’s attempt at subversive editorializing on the conditions in the country?” Now, of course, “Pulgasari,” approved and funded by North Korea’s even more dangerously unstable current leader, seems eerily prophetic.

Nonetheless, when the movie was delivered to Kim, he saw it as a great victory. Trucks pulled up to Shin Films to unload pheasants, deer and wild geese for the movie crew to feast on. Word came from Pyongyang — “The Dear Comrade Leader was delighted with Pulgasari” — and many of the workers were moved to tears at the praise.

“The feelings must be continually built up into the decisive moment for action is reached, and they can be brought to a head. Only in this way is it possible to generate powerful dramatic tension and emotional excitement. If the emotions … do not come to a head at the right moment, they will fail to make any impression on the audience, because they will lack credibility.” – “On the Art of the Cinema”

Genghis Khan, or more specifically, John Wayne as Genghis Khan in the notoriously awful “The Conqueror,” was the inspiration for Shin’s last collaboration with Kim. (“The Conqueror,” meanwhile, had its own grim nuclear coda: During filming in Utah, winds blew radiation onto the set from nearby nuclear bomb testing grounds. Many of the cast and crew — including Wayne — may have contracted cancer as a result.)

“I was sickened at seeing that movie,” Shin Sang-Ok said in 1999. “I did not like American actors appearing in the movie with mustaches attached beneath their big noses.” He had long wanted to make an authentically Mongolian or at least Asian version. In Kim Jong Il he found a producer who shared his enthusiasm for the subject of invading hordes. They agreed that this follow-up to “Pulgasari” would make a good export, even if it didn’t meet with the approval of Kim’s father as a tool for thought control. As Heginbotham puts it: “By all accounts, [Kim] enjoys movies that his people certainly would never be allowed to watch.”

Shin convinced Kim that the film would have more marketability if distributed by a European country, rather than unfashionable North Korea. So plans were made for a joint venture with a company in Austria. Soon, Kim would trust the director to travel to Western Europe for a business meeting.

As a trip to Vienna approached, Shin writes, a plan began to form. They had no doubts about wanting to leave their comfortable lifestyle. “To be in Korea living a good life ourselves and enjoying movies while everyone else was not free was not happiness, but agony,” he writes. Then they boarded a plane for Vienna, never to return.

The next month, the New York Times reported that two South Korean film legends had emerged in Baltimore to meet with American reporters, relating “a story they found more bizarre than a screenplay.” Shin and Choi first turned up at an American Embassy in Vienna. During a business trip, they’d been able to escape with the help of a Japanese movie critic friend of theirs — who has only been identified in his report by a codename, “K.” Meeting him for lunch, they fled by taxi to the American Embassy, shaking off one of Kim’s agents in another taxi.

After the embarrassing escape of his star propagandists, Kim Jong Il shelved “Pulgasari” and every other Shin film. The monster movie was not seen outside the country until 1998, when, amid a dawning feeling of openness in North Korean relations with the rest of Asia, another Japanese critic campaigned for its release — as an important work deserving of more attention, and a source of box-office dollars for the North’s disastrous economy. It bombed. In Seoul, a total of about 1,000 people saw it during its limited release.

Shin Sang-Ok remains controversial. At the Pusan International Film Festival in 2001, a screening was planned for his favorite work, “Runaway.” But the public prosecutor of Seoul halted the showing by invoking South Korea’s harsh National Security Law, which bans any action that could benefit the North.

Shin has worked hard to dispel any impression that he remains friends with his ex-executive producer. In an open letter to the South Korean president following the Sept. 11 attacks, he wrote that his first reaction to the World Trade Center collapse was that it was in Kim Jong Il’s nature to do the same to Seoul. Protesting a thawing in relations, and contending that Kim had not changed, he warned against being fooled by the North Korean leader. “It is inevitable that North Korea will collapse,” he wrote. “Then how will it end? In a suicidal explosion.”

Kim Jong Il continues to issue bold words of guidance to his filmmakers. His words are reprinted on a gigantic placard outside the Revolutionary Museum of the Ministry of Culture on the outskirts of Pyongyang. One says, “MAKE MORE CARTOONS.” Nearby is an enormous statue of Kim’s father, surrounded by filmmakers and a gargantuan movie camera.

His export hopes continually dashed, Kim Jong Il still finds a way to make about 60 films a year. He invites potential distributors to screenings in Pyongyang, the BBC reports, only to be told that the material he’s pitched just won’t appeal to Western sensibilities. Now, having kicked weapons inspectors out of his country, and engaging in a dangerous game of chicken with the West, he seems to have given up hope that he can sway anyone through the art of cinema. And that, ultimately, might prove an ominous sign of things to come.

The real spectacle, instead, came from the media charged with covering the case — especially the pundits who were eager to exploit it for whatever contorted political opinion could be wrenched from it. It’s been a real doozy, and trying to capture all of the Jackson trial lowlights would require a research team larger (and a lot more competent) than prosecutor Tom Sneddon’s. Still, we’ll give you just a few of the moments that caused our jaws to drop — and made us pull the blinds, lock the door and turn off the lights.

Guilty until proven … guilty!
Ian Drew, Us magazine: “I am going to get both sides of the story…”

Bill O’Reilly: “Would you tell both sides of the story for Hitler? I mean, would you say, ‘Oh gee, he had a bad childhood …’? Come on. A monster!”

– “The O’Reilly Factor,” Fox News, Nov. 19, 2003

“First of all, I think Michael Jackson did it. I think the guy is guilty … I just — every day, I wonder, can people look at this guy and be fair? I mean, you know Michael Jackson. Does he get even creepier the closer you get to him?”

– Joe Scarborough, MSNBC, “Scarborough Country,” March 15, 2005

“Are you guys blind? … But I’m telling you, this boy, two-thirds of this can be corroborated by other people. So why would he lie about the molestation part? It is in graphic detail. It just seems true … I think Michael Jackson walks. And I think it’s a disgrace. He’s guilty.”

– CNN’s Nancy Grace on “Larry King,” Feb. 21, 2003

“Oh, come on! Michael Jackson is — is a pervert pedophile. If you can’t joke about Michael Jackson, I mean, who can you joke about? Is — what is he? Mother Teresa?”

– Bernard McGuirk, “Don Imus” sidekick, on “60 Minutes” (CBS)

It’s the porn’s fault!
“Men who constantly feed their minds with porn quickly lose respect for women. Pornography depicts women not only as sleazy and vulgar, but as greedy and parasitical … When I was close to Michael, I wished greatly for him to marry … He was very concerned that most women would marry him for his money. No doubt the pornographic images of women he was consuming helped to solidify that impression.”

– Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, on WorldNetDaily, March 25, 2005

It’s the ACLU’s fault!
“But don’t we speak with forked tongues? The American Civil Liberties Union stays up all night worrying lest anyone should get in the way of Angelo’s sating himself, on radio and on television, in movies and in books, with the sap of degeneracy. But if Michael Jackson did it with Angelo at age 12, he is damned and we are prepared to lead him into prison. If the lawyer could prove that notwithstanding his young appearance, Angelo actually had turned 18 the week before Neverland, Michael Jackson would be protected by the engines of license in whatever he did.”

– William F. Buckley, National Review, Jan. 22, 2004.
Note: The ACLU has never been involved in the Jackson trial.

The everyone knows molested children are sweet and polite and will only eat nutritious foods defense
Jackson’s attorneys called upon former chef’s assistant Angel Vivancio, who alleged that Jackson’s chief accuser, while hanging out at Neverland, had demanded imperiously: “Give me the fucking Cheetos.”

The most honest man in court
Dwayne Swingler, who was head supervisor of Neverland Ranch, is shopping around his book proposal for “Entering Neverland: Secrets Behind the Gate,” according to E!. “I wanted to cash in like everyone else was,” he said during the trial. He worked at Jackson’s ranch for roughly six weeks in 2003.

The ladies’ man defense
Neverland Ranch manager Joe Marcus, put on the stand and asked to name women Michael Jackson was close to, struggled to think of anyone besides Elizabeth Taylor.

“I’m drawing a blank on a few of the names … There’s other women …” he said.

Upon cross-examination, he thought of a second one: “Liza Minnelli has been there [to Neverland] and they seem to be good friends.”

“So we’re up to two,” the prosecutor said. “Any others?”

There weren’t, but Marcus was able to name several boys.

Degrading moment for all involved
‘N Sync choreographer Wade Robson, 22, who’d stayed at Jackson’s house as a boy, was asked by both sides in the case to assess the thrust of the singer’s porn collection, from “Double-Dicking Caroline” and “Stiff Dick for Lynn” to “Boys Will Be Boys” and “A Sexual Study of Man.” Referring to the latter book, prosecutor Ronald Zonen asked Robson to “Just take a second to strum through the balance of the book.”

Dumbest Jackson joke
From Jay Leno: “Michael Jackson showed up to court late today wearing his pajama bottoms. You know what? You find the kid wearing the pajama top and we have another court case on our hands.”

As Judge Rodney Melville told the Washington Post: “I would not have expected [Leno] to not continue telling jokes … I’d like him to make good jokes.” Leno had to use stand-in comedians to tell jokes on the “Tonight Show,” because as a potential witness, he was under a gag order. (Leno later testified that he had received a voice-mail message from the alleged victim and that he thought he sounded “a little scripted.”)

Best Jackson joke
“Jay Leno has been subpoenaed as a witness in the Michael Jackson trial, so Leno may be banned from doing Michael Jackson jokes. As a result, Jay Leno has been put on suicide watch.”

– Conan O’Brien on “Late Night,” as reported by Entertainment Weekly

The child molestation is a god-given right defense (which never happened, except in Cal Thomas’ dark, damp fantasies)!
“If Michael Jackson did, in fact, as it is alleged, have sex with a minor boy, what’s wrong with that? The question is not meant to be cute; I am serious. If a male child was fondled or sodomized by Michael Jackson, why shouldn’t he and the boy be allowed the orientation of their choice? If you disagree, who are you to impose your morality on them? … Yesterday’s unacceptable mores (divorce, premarital sex, abortion, homosexuality, group sex, domestic partnerships and, soon, same-sex marriage) are today’s acceptable. It’s just a matter of conditioning. Groups exist that promote adult-child sex. Expect an alliance — composed of academics, theologians and cultural commentators — to ram this home through the media, crushing whatever resistance remains … For some, Michael Jackson is not a pervert but a pioneer.”

– Cal Thomas’ syndicated column, November 25, 2003

Macauley’s not working much either, friend, but that didn’t turn him into a media-desperate rat fink
“I started looking at each piece of information,” child star/Jackson “friend” Corey Feldman told ABC’s “20/20.” “And with that came this sickening realization that there have been many occurrences in my life and in my relationship to Michael that have created a question of doubt.”

After the appearance, Feldman was subpoenaed, but never appeared in court. Maybe prosecutors found him an unreliable witness, considering his November 2003 appearance on “Larry King Live,” in which Feldman insisted that “I have to be completely honest, because I couldn’t do it any other way … I’ve never seen him act in any inappropriate way to a child,” including him. A decade earlier, he was an outspoken defender of Jackson.

Jackson wanted to kill Social Security reform!
Always on the lookout for a fresh, google-eyed media conspiracy theory, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto decided that the media’s obsession with Michael Jackson was taking too much attention away from George W. Bush — attention that would’ve convinced the American public to support the president’s plan to privatize social security:

Neil Cavuto: “I know this is a little outlandish, Mr. President …”

Bush: “No, that’s all right, Neil.”

Cavuto: “Do you think that the focus on Michael Jackson has hurt you?”

Bush: “I have no idea. I’m not — I don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out, you know, the viewing patterns of American TV audiences.

– Fox News, June 8, 2005

Breaking through the media filter
Cavuto later took credit as the sole voice letting Bush in on the curse holding back his coast-to-coast Social Security roadshow. “He’s had a tough sell. I tried to relate that the intense coverage of the Michael Jackson trial was being a bit of a distraction for him.”

– “Your World With Neil Cavuto,” Fox News, June 8, 2005

When I called to interview him for Salon, listed on his site as an “apparatchik far-left” publication practically in league with Islamists, the former Salon columnist was strangely eager to appease me. Famous for breathing fire in public before admiring college Republicans, he scampered when I confronted him about his site’s claims, even promising to rewrite some of them.

Purportedly a serious counterbalance to liberal sites that track conservatives, Horowitz’s online “Guide to the Political Left” lays out what he considers the extensive connections between liberals and terrorists. Its controversial picture gallery of “leftists” runs the gamut from movie critic Roger Ebert and Omar Abdel Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to crushed Holy Land protester Rachel Corrie and even Sen. John Kerry.

You just can’t separate Ebert from a terrorist like the blind sheik Rahman, Horowitz told me. Chalk it up to the limits of presenting information on a two-dimensional computer screen. “It’s a limitation of — what? Of language? The human mind?” mused Horowitz. “The two-dimensional, three-dimensional, four-dimensional universe?”

The human minds with limitations, of course, belong to his critics. But Horowitz’s latest venture has his critics asking if the right-wing provocateur has finally flipped in his long-running battle with the left.

Columbia journalism professor and longtime liberal activist Todd Gitlin calls the site the “venomous” product of Horowitz’s 1950s childhood as the son of Stalinists, and of his lasting guilt over the killing of a friend by his former allies, the Black Panthers. “The psychodynamics here are not pretty” says Gitlin, whose squashed face appears on the site. As No. 376 on the list, he’s accused of “harboring the belief that his country is ultimately unworthy of his respect and even allegiance.” The Web site, Gitlin says, reflects “a demonology that’s about as unsubtle as the one [Horowitz] pursued when he was a Marxist in the ’60s, except the terms are inverted.”

The Horowitz files at Discover the Network, at last count, span 948 people and 552 organizations, from America Coming Together to the Pearl Jam fan club to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. Horowitz says that his critics have fixated excessively on his Web site’s “picture grid” — Paul Begala diagnosed it as “stark raving mad” — and refuse to answer the weightier accusation implicit in Horowitz’s database: that the political left has forged an “unholy alliance” with terrorists. His critics, Horowitz wrote on FrontPageMag.com, “squeal about putting radical Islamists in the same database … as Michael Moore, Ward Churchill and Barbra Streisand.”

“It may seem extreme to some people to have John Kerry in the same database as [Sept. 11 hijacker] Mohammed Atta,” he told me, yet he was at a loss for a way to separate them on his site. It was “an infinite regress,” he said: Toss out Stanley Cohen, lawyer for Hamas, and he’d have to remove the allegedly similarly minded ACLU. Take out the ACLU, and the next thing you know you have to delete Democrats from the “network.”

The searchable site, with a staff of two, opened to the public in February after about two years in development, at a cost of about $500,000 by Horowitz’s estimate. It has met with scattered applause from the right as an educational tool. Conservative blogger “Jeff Blogworthy” declared that the “leftist attack strategy” has been laid bare by Horowitz’s site. “Few people understand the Left like David,” he wrote.

Horowitz offers his A-to-Z master list of leftists as a gift of wisdom through experience — i.e., his transformation from a radical to a repentant, hard-line anti-Communist. But is he the right man to build a cool-headed research database that uses accuracy as a weapon?

Horowitz hopes to outdo progressive watchdog sites like the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which tracks white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and Horowitz himself (whom it labels a bearer of “radical ideas”); Media Matters for America, a site run by Republican turned liberal David Brock (whom Horowitz calls a “snake and liar and a backstabber”); and Media Transparency, a handy database that links Horowitz’s college groups to hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from the conservative coffers of Richard Mellon Scaife and the Bradley Foundation.

Media Transparency’s Rob Levine calls Horowitz’s site a “comic cartoon imitation” of the Minnesota-based liberal site, which Horowitz acknowledged was an inspiration for Discover the Network. “One reason,” Levine says, “is that there just isn’t the same kind of progressive infrastructure and coordination on the left as there is on the right, so in some sense he’s swatting at a chimera.”

The mission statement of Horowitz’s site is to “identify the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it.” For instance, Discover the Network identifies the Ford Foundation as a supporter of “communist front groups” and the Tides Foundation as the “nerve center of the left,” asserting that Teresa Heinz Kerry has funneled $8 million through the foundation “to further her radical environmentalist agenda” (a claim that’s debunked at Snopes.com).

In 1989 Horowitz confessed to Sun Myung Moon’s Insight magazine that fate had bound him, like Ahab, to pursue his “white whale” forever — a quest “to stigmatize the Left and separate it.” But he presents his new project as a fountain of data, not stigma. “I want to make it clear at the outset that I have striven to make an informational database, and not … a ‘tar and feather the left’ database,” he told Salon.

He’s sick of what the other side does, he says, surfing the Web while we talk for examples of anti-Horowitz rants. “It’s like, ‘Is Horowitz a lunatic?’” he says. He ends up at Media Transparency and points to a headline: “David Horowitz’s imagined supporters speak out.” In comparison to that language, Horowitz says, “I feel I set a standard here … I don’t think there’s another site that’s as responsible” as Discover the Network.

Adds staffer Genesio Zenone, the site is an “electronically overdue other side of the argument.”

But many Discover the Network entries run hotter than the ones on Media Transparency. Hillary Clinton’s dossier soars into a many-paragraphed rumination on Clinton loyalists, explaining what one can learn from their “sordid, criminal means” about the evil nature of progressives, whose idealism is skin-deep: “They hate you because you are killers of their dream … Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them.”

Confronted with this vitriolic passage, Horowitz concedes it was excerpted from a 2000 piece of his published on FrontPageMag.com, “Progressive Narcissism,” but says his overly reverent staff improperly cut-and-pasted a polemic as an entry in a strictly nonpolemical data source. “I have this problem with my staff,” Horowitz says, “and that is, they won’t touch my words.” He says that while his writings have formed the basis for many entries, they’re supposed to be edited down to just the facts. His editor is going to have to fix that one, he says.

One man who won’t be removed from the database is Ebert, No. 298. “I was surprised to find myself linked to a terrorist I have never heard of,” Ebert said, facetiously. “I was not curious enough about him to Google him, but perhaps he will Google me and, having discovered my wonderful reviews, will renounce terrorism and spend more time at the movies.” (What earned Ebert his spot, the site says, was his criticizing “runaway corporations,” accusing the U.S. death penalty system of inequity, and making an unflattering reference to former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.)

“The one link Discover the Network seems to be missing is ‘David Horowitz and Sen. Joseph McCarthy,’” Ebert says. “David was a respected journalist. He could be a respected conservative commentator. Why does he lower himself to rabble-rousing?”

Told of Ebert’s criticism, Horowitz began to call the movie critic “an a — ,” but stopped and settled for calling him “probably ignorant of everything I’ve ever written.”

In fact, it’s Horowitz’s past work that explains his method of lumping together the individuals and organizations on his site into one vast left-wing conspiracy — including last year’s book, “Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left,” praised by former CIA director James Woolsey for revealing the enemy within. “This is the left that I see,” Horowitz says. “The background for this, for 20 years I’ve had in my head.” With a burning fuse on its cover, “Unholy Alliance” argues that groups who despise one another might actually be working closely together, maybe without even knowing it. This philosophy forms the backbone of Discover the Network, which digitizes theories of Horowitz’s that are long in the making.

You can’t simply connect the dots from Ebert to, say, Marwan Barghouti, leader of the Palestinian faction Fatah, on Horowitz’s site. His precariously programmed Java engine puts an interactive graphic on the screen that ostensibly links isolated conspiracies of the “political left,” but a recent attempt to find the link between Ebert and terrorists came to an early dead end at the listing for the International Association of Democratic Lawyers in Brussels, Belgium. Then the program crashed.

Horowitz initially defended the organization of his database, saying that seemingly disparate people are all linked by anti-Americanism. “They [would] probably say that 9/11 or the [Iraq] beheadings were the wrong way to carry out a right cause,” he says. “They come together when it comes to opposing America’s wars, America” — he laughs — “and seeing America as the Great Satan.” And he says “they,” including Michael Moore, must be purged from the Democratic Party for the good of the country.

But later Horowitz announced some revisions to his site. Some of the members of the picture grid, he wrote on FrontPageMag.com, are “patriotic Americans.” So are the editors of Salon, he added. “If you visit the individuals search page [of the site], you will see that we have separated the individuals into five columns, which we identify as ‘totalitarian radicals,’ ‘anti-American radicals,’ ‘leftists,’ ‘moderate leftists’ and ‘affective leftists’ … We have arranged the grid this way, even though we think it feeds certain illusions, to accommodate those who expressed anguish over the grid in its original format.”

He also fixed the description for No. 819, media critic Norman Solomon. He was listed not only as an “anti-American writer” but as a University of California at Berkeley professor, when he isn’t, in fact, a professor of any kind. Recently checking his entry, Solomon said of Horowitz: “Imagine Joe McCarthy with a Web site, proudly stuck in a time warp … Horowitz strains to throw as much mud as he can, evidently with the fervent belief that some of it is bound to harm his targets. Along the way, his material is riddled with demagogic smears, weird leaps of semi-logic and factual errors.”

Days later, the clarifications and changes kept coming. “I’ve modified the descriptive text on the Individuals search page to make clearer that the [database] obviously includes moderates who don’t think America is an imperialist power or the Great Satan,” Horowitz wrote in an e-mail subsequent to our interview.

Still not off the hook, however, are his eternal enemies — college professors — whom he considers the most closely enmeshed with terror. As he explained it to Salon, Washington Democrats are products of the university “feeder system,” an underworld where “40,000 professors have signed antiwar letters.” And that’s the impetus for his “Academic Bill of Rights” crusade in various state Senates, which among other things would outlaw “indoctrination” by liberal professors in classrooms. Defeated in Colorado last year, a similar law is resurfacing in the California Senate this month and is making some progress in the Florida Assembly.

But Horowitz’s crusade is clearly driven by more than a push for diversity; he believes those he disagrees with not only are overrepresented in academia but represent threats to national security. For him, much anti-Bush rhetoric seems to be interchangeable with collaboration with the enemy. He likens Islamic fervor to “Western radicals’ efforts to purify their tainted souls of ‘racism, sexism and homophobia,” saying that the two movements “reflect parallel inclinations … Both are exacting in the justice they administer and the loyalty they demand.”

Is Horowitz concerned that people might read his site the wrong way and believe that Mohammed Atta and a local college professor are literally co-workers? “I can’t be accountable for people who misread what’s here,” he says. The professors he has criticized, he says, complain, “‘I’m getting death threats or whatever.’ I get death threats all the time. The level of our political rhetoric is horrible, and I don’t think very much can be done about it.” He adds: “I treat people the way they treat me.”

But the film — buoyed by a slew of stories in regional and national outlets (including Salon) about its supposed grassroots success — has largely avoided much skepticism. And as the distributors launched a national advertising campaign, on NPR’s “All Things Considered” among other outlets, and earned respectable reviews from a number of critics (the San Francisco Examiner calls it a “smart film,” and Roger Ebert, while not thrilled, gave it a thoughtful two and a half stars), their movie has managed to avoid much scrutiny of what, exactly, it’s really about — and who is behind it.

That has meant little attention has been given to either the film’s agenda, or its questionable use of supposed experts. At least one scientist prominently interviewed in the film now says his words were taken out of context. And two other key subjects in the film are not fully identified: a theologian who, the film fails to divulge, is a former priest who left the Catholic Church after allegations of sexual abuse; and a mysterious woman identified only as Judy “JZ” Knight, who is actually a sect leader claiming to channel a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit named Ramtha. The film’s three co-directors are among those who follow Ramtha and look to Knight’s channeled maxims to decipher the mysteries of life. These Ramtha followers reportedly number in the thousands. But critics call the sect a cult.

In the movie, the 58-year-old Knight, whose accent is as thick as her mascara, makes the boldest statements — pronounced with long, rolling R’s — about particles and God. “We have grrreat technology. But we still have this ugly, superrrstitious, backwahds cohncept of Gahd,” she says, adding that “the height of arrrrrrogance is the belief of those who would see Gahd in their own image.” Musing on the unity of consciousness and matter, she reminds us that “it only takes a fantasy for a man to have a harrrd-on.” In her normal mode, Knight speaks the plain talk of her native Roswell, N.M., but in the manly presence of Ramtha, said to have conquered the continent neighboring Atlantis, Knight’s jaw juts and her voice deepens into something magisterial and brash (view her here). Her Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment, on a $2 million compound based in Yelm, Wash., boasts followers — including celebrities like actress Shirley MacLaine (who attended Knight’s seminars in the late ’80s) and “Dynasty” star Linda Evans — willing to pay up to $1,600 for a seminar.

Reached by Salon, Meyer Gottlieb, president of Samuel Goldwyn Films, says he’s seen “Bleep” about eight times. Its fledgling distribution company Roadside Attractions had its first real hit earlier this year when it launched festival favorite documentary “Super Size Me” and is hoping for a similar sleeper hit with ” Bleep.” Asked what he thought of the expressed desire by filmmaker Mark Vicente (on a Ramtha Web site, BeyondTheOrdinary.net) for his viewers to emerge from his movie in an “almost trance-like state,” Gottlieb only laughed.

“The question is, Is this movie promoting a cult?” he said. “The only thing we’re interested in from a marketing perspective is creating a cult status for the film … cults, from my perspective, they deal with groups and leaders and that stuff. This movie is about individual thinking. Individual control over your future — and your own reality.”

But not everyone involved in the movie has good things to say about that message.

David Albert, a professor at the Columbia University physics department, has accused the filmmakers of warping his ideas to fit a spiritual agenda. “I don’t think it’s quite right to say I was ‘tricked’ into appearing,” he said in a statement reposted by a critic on “What the Bleep’s” Internet forum, “but it is certainly the case that I was edited in such a way as to completely suppress my actual views about the matters the movie discusses. I am, indeed, profoundly unsympathetic to attempts at linking quantum mechanics with consciousness. Moreover, I explained all that, at great length, on camera, to the producers of the film … Had I known that I would have been so radically misrepresented in the movie, I would certainly not have agreed to be filmed.”

“I certainly do not subscribe to the ‘Ramtha School on Enlightenment,’ whatever that is!” he finished. Albert provided Salon with an excerpt from a piece he’s writing on the subject, in which he says, in part, “I’m unwittingly made to sound as if (maybe) I endorse its thesis.”

When told of Albert’s complaints, Gottlieb said, “I certainly don’t see it,” but acknowledged he’s “not into the science 100 percent.” At press time, the filmmakers issued an angry “Open Letter to the U.S. Media” in which it attacked the “intellectual smugness and superiority” of its critics. (You can download the PDF file here.)

Knight’s role as the voice of Ramtha is the most striking — but hardly the only — omission of the film, which could easily be interpreted as a full-blown infomercial for Ramtha. Two other on-screen experts are not identified as Ramtha associates: Dr. Joe Dispenza, chiropractor and mystic, listed as a student on the Ramtha Web site; and a man identified only as “Dr. Miceal Ledwith.”

Ledwith (at one time Monsignor Michael Ledwith) was once on track to be the next archbishop of Dublin, but the theologian stepped down as president of Maynooth College in 1994, after a complaint that he had sexually harassed a young seminarian. It was later revealed that Ledwith had allegedly paid an six-figure sum to a man who accused him of sexual abuse. Ledwith has maintained his innocence but left Ireland for the more placid confines of Monterey, Calif. On the “Bleep” Web site, Ledwith’s relationship with the Catholic Church is only alluded to in a claim that he was once “charged with advising the Holy See on theological matters,” but he is not identified as ever having been a priest, or even as a lecturer at the Ramtha school. According to a Ramtha Web site, Ledwith has joined “Ramtha’s core of appointed teachers.” (The Ramtha school and Ledwith have not responded to requests for interviews. The “Bleep” Web site recommends that journalists contact an independent publicist, but the movie previously listed as its P.R. contact Pavel Mikoloski, also director of public affairs for Ramtha’s school.)

Later in the film, a “scientist” explains that, thanks to the strangeness quivering below the subatomic level, meditating monks have lowered the crime rate in Washington, D.C. But not until the end of the film do we learn that the scientist making this claim, John Hagelin — who once ran for president — conducted the research while teaching (until 1999) at Maharishi University, the school named for the Beatles’ guru. In JZ Knight’s own publications, Ramtha’s existence, too, is frequently explained in terms of quantum mechanics.

Funding for the $5 million “Bleep,” according to various published interviews with the film’s creators, comes not from Ramtha but the software fortunes of director Arntz, who designed the job-management application AutoSys. Now popular in Unix environments, the program sold for more than $14 million in 1995. (Eerily, the startup money for AutoSys was also of Atlantean origin, or so the original investor claimed. A 1999 piece in Wired by David Diamond described the life and suicide of Frederick Lenz III, a guru in his own right, who called himself not Ramtha but Rama. The software mogul told those who rendezvoused with Rama that he’d taught meditation classes on Atlantis. Later, Lenz said his students were bent on his murder, and he plunged himself into the waters of Long Island Sound with a $30,000 watch on his wrist and 150 tabs of Valium in his bloodstream.)

On the film’s Web site FAQ, the filmmakers answer the question of whether “Bleep” is a recruitment film coyly, stating that “the short answer is no. During the making of the film [originally to be titled 'Sacred Science'] it was decided that what was important was the message, not the messenger — whoever that may be. Some people may be inspired to check out RSE, and some people may be inspired to major at MIT in quantum teleportation.” (At press time, MIT was not yet offering such a major.)

Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment had previously promoted itself in its own films, but those had a lower budget. One was “Bleep” director Mark Vicente’s 2002 “Where Angels Fear to Thread.” Its trailer (available here) introduces Ramtha in the fashion of “Lord of the Rings,” swinging a blade and raising a goblet to “the challenge of being an individual.”

“Bleep” is a much slicker introduction. Its success relies heavily on word of mouth, accelerated by the use of “Bleep Teams” organized by Captured Light Industries, the production house set up by Arntz to create “Bleep.” (The film’s other production house, Lord of the Wind, is named for Ramtha himself.)

Heading the Bay Area street team is Kathy Vaquilar, who organized regular “Bleep” events in at least two cities a week during August. On Saturday, Aug. 14, she helped organize a discussion in Berkeley that featured a Ramtha representative, Cindy, “who told us more about the film’s background, how it got started, and about the school,” she posted on the “What the Bleep” forum the next day, when the movement was spreading to nearby Walnut Creek. The next night, a meeting was slated for San Francisco.

Vaquilar told Salon that she coordinates the “Bleep” campaign with a representative of Captured Light. “I don’t know that much about the Ramtha school,” she wrote in an e-mail to Salon, and hastens to defend its role. Knight, she writes, “was only used as an interview subject. What is taught at the school might seem weird to most mainstream people, but for those who study or read the same materials on their own without any connection to the school or to JZ Knight, their stuff is not considered unusual, but rather part of what’s already cutting edge.”

That edge is something Vaquilar is familiar with. In August she promoted the film at the Bay Area’s UFO expo in Santa Clara, serving double duty with the International Contact Support Network, which comforts those who say they’ve encountered extraterrestrials. Vaquilar herself has written about meeting insectoids, who treated her fairly well; but Knight, speaking in the voice of Ramtha, has warned her own followers of the “Gray Men,” a clique of hostile off-worlders controlling Earth’s banks.

On the surface, the movie doesn’t seem to be targeting the E.T.-obsessed; in fact, it seems to follow in the footsteps of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” by asking us to thrill to the tapestry of space-time. But it has very little patience for Enlightenment concepts like measurable results and scientific proof. In the new science of “Bleep,” symbolized by disembodied equations and CG bubbles flying at us like stars at warp speed, we’re past all that.

We’re also told that when Columbus came to America, the natives literally couldn’t see his ships. They couldn’t think outside the box of Indian life. And in a subway that seems like one of many conceits borrowed from the “Matrix” movies (whose metaphor has similarly been borrowed by David Icke, the British author who says the world is controlled by lizard men), the heroine learns that you can see chi energy particles of love, that they’ve been captured in photographs of water blessed by Buddhists. At this juncture Matlin hears a voice in her ear: “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” It’s Quark, the greedy alien from “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”! Actually, it’s the guy who plays him, Armin Shimerman, as one of several mysterious strangers guiding her to the truth.

The impression left from sitting through a screening of “What the Bleep” is that a lot of people enjoy hearing their griping about religious fundamentalists reflected back to them, backed by science. There’s also plenty of stroking of lefty values; Ramtha has declared that all world religions have in common “the suppression of women,” adding, with the brashness surely fashionable in the 33rd century B.C., “No woman who had an abortion has sinned against God. Fuck all those assholes who tell you that.” On the other hand, papers from Knight’s 1992 divorce case with Jeffrey Knight hint that Ramtha is an ancient homophobe, who allegedly declared that AIDS was Mother Nature’s way of “getting rid of” homosexuality and told Jeffrey Knight he should reject modern medicine and overcome the disease using the school’s breathing techniques, according to court testimony. Tom Szimhart, a “deprogrammer” who testified on behalf of Knight’s husband (who eventually died of the disease) called the Ramtha school a cult with an anti-scientific bent.

The “backward” religion of Christianity, Ramtha explains in the movie, doesn’t appreciate how the parables of Jesus are explained by photon waves and probability — just as creationists suggest that the latest archaeological science can explain Noah’s Ark and a very young Grand Canyon. The cumulative effect of “What the Bleep” — whose co-director, Betsy Chasse, produced the evangelical teen comedy “Extreme Days” (2000) — makes you wonder if it isn’t as fundamentalist as the Christianity and Islam that Ramtha inveighs against.

Even the father of the Isn’t the Universe Amazing genre, the late Sagan, called Ramtha out. He opened his 1997 book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” by asking why, if Ramtha is 35,000 years old, he gives us only “banal homilies” (sample: “I have come to help you over the ditch … It is called the ditch of limitation”) instead of telling us, say, about the currency, technology, social order and use of birth control in prehistoric Lemuria — a country popularized by Madame Blavatsky, the turn-of-the-20th-century psychic. Sagan’s argument, which couldn’t be further from the movie’s, is that science has exposed so many natural wonders, there’s no need to gild the lily with gray aliens, telepaths and the spirits of Cro-Magnon shoguns roaming the Evergreen State.

Needless to say the book isn’t on the film’s reading list, which instead suggests reading the works of Ramtha.

The convergence between the anti-Clinton and anti-Moore movements is personified by the tireless David Bossie, whose Citizens United made headlines savaging the president in the late 1990s. It’s been a big week for Bossie and Citizens United. First they were busy producing anti-Clinton ads to run during the former president’s star turn Sunday night on “60 Minutes,” while Bossie was scurrying to cable studios to denounce the memoir “My Life” and promote his new book, “Intelligence Failure: How Clinton’s National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11.” Then Bossie scheduled a Wednesday press event in front of the Federal Election Commission, where he will demand that the commission take some sort of unspecified action to regulate the screening of “Fahrenheit 9/11″ — presumably because of the anti-Bush documentary’s power to influence the coming presidential election. “Documents will be hand delivered to several government agencies immediately following the media briefing,” the group’s press release soberly states.

Anyone still wondering whether “Fahrenheit 9/11″ has the far right squirming about the documentary’s possible effect on the November presidential election?

Over the past week, attacks on the film reached fever pitch. They involved right-wing-conspiracy veterans like Bossie, but also some relative newcomers. (And Moore felt obliged to hire a war room led by Democratic political consultants Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani.) So far the campaign doesn’t seem to have hurt Moore. The real question is whether “Fahrenheit 9/11″ can be anywhere as entertaining as the sometimes surreal campaign to derail it.

The Moore bashers include former California assemblyman Howard Kaloogian, whose Move America Forward launched a letter-writing campaign last week against a select number of theaters that planned to show “Fahrenheit.” Kaloogian was part of a cabal that takes credit for recalling Gov. Gray Davis. Now they’ve set their sights on Moore.

“We’ve sent out probably well over 200,000 e-mails,” says Melanie Morgan, a talk radio host, of the MAF campaign. With no small dose of glee, Morgan says of the cinemas targeted by MAF’s letter-writing campaign: “We’ve been causing them an enormous amount of aggravation.”

Such aggravation is hard to measure. No theaters have canceled showings of “Fahrenheit” at this point. And the MAF group doesn’t seem to have had the most useful intelligence in its campaign. A lowly theater payroll employee inexplicably listed on MAF’s e-mail list of “leading movie executives” is confused about how he became a central front in the War on Moore (he did not wish to be identified). As he sat in his office Friday, messages pinged into his in box. Dryly, he read aloud his favorites: “‘I will never see a movie again’ … ‘I will not support a business that aids a piece of crap sub-human like Moore in spreading his anti-american bullshit …’”

More important, though, after the grass-roots political group MoveOn launched a counteroffensive, letters of support for the film’s release began outpacing negative letters (according to an unscientific survey of five theater owners) at roughly 3-to-1. Jennifer Caleshu of the Little Theatre, in Rochester, N.Y., says she’s received on the order of 3,000 e-mails. For every letter accusing her of soothing terrorists by showing the film, she says, seven are encouraging. Caleshu says that to every negative e-mail she’s received she replies by quoting the First Amendment. “I’ve gotten some real personal hate mail back about that,” she says.

MAF vice-chair Morgan blames the deep pockets and international tentacles of financier George Soros for backing MoveOn to support the movie. (The group says it has secured pledges from 109,000 people to see the movie when it opens.) But MAF itself has been dogged by reporting on its ties to conservative power brokers. An investigation by the Web site Whatreallyhappened.com, which snooped around MAF’s domain registration info, revealed that it is no ordinary citizen’s movement.

The webmasters were careless enough to leave the contact information for the Sacramento public relations firm Russo, Marsh and Rogers. That gave away the fact that the supposedly grass-roots Web site was the creation of one Douglas Lorenz. A Russo employee, Lorenz was the information-technology guy for Bill Simon, the candidate too conservative to beat ultra-unpopular then-Gov. Gray Davis in 2000. He’s listed on the DefendReagan.org Web site (which rallied the fight against CBS’s Reagan movie last year) as the “grassroots coordinator,” apparently foreshadowing his role in creating the faux-grass-roots Move America Forward Web site. “Doug has been very active in developing volunteer political organizations,” his bio says, “and utilizing advanced technologies to extend their reach.” (Lorenz did not reply to Salon’s request for an interview.) The P.R. firm’s namesake, Sal Russo, was chief strategist of the Recall Gray Davis committee, and the firm itself has Republican ties that run far and deep.

For Kaloogian (who did not return calls from Salon for this story) the failure of Move America Forward represents a reversal. Seven months ago, Kaloogian spearheaded a nationwide campaign to have CBS’s movie “The Reagans” yanked, calling for advertiser and audience boycotts. The movie was eventually ghettoized on the network’s sister channel, Showtime (though CBS executives insisted, unconvincingly, they were unaffected by boycott threats). But other Kaloogian stunts have fizzled. His threatened recall of California’s moderate attorney general over gay marriage went nowhere, and an accusation that Asian-American state assemblymen were violating their oaths of office for supporting Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist falsely accused of being a spy, was widely dismissed. (“He’s a mosquito on an elephant’s back,” says longtime California Democratic Party strategist Bob Mulholland of Kaloogian.)

It now seems that MAF is doing little more than providing free publicity for “Fahrenheit 9/11,” whose tag line now smirks, “Controversy? What controversy?” But there have been a few bad breaks this week for “Fahrenheit.” Moore wanted a PG-13 rating for the movie; the Motion Picture Association of America claims that certain “bad words” require it receive an R-rating. For one thing the word “motherfucker” is used more than once in the film, in the context of troops quoting the Bloodhound Gang radio single “The Roof Is on Fire.” On Monday, writing on behalf of backers IFC Films and Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s Fellowship Adventure Group, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo released a letter questioning the MPAA’s reasoning. Asked Cuomo: “[Why] should the film not be rated a PG-13 as was ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ a film that is saturated with slaughter, butchery and corpses — human and extraterrestrial?” On Tuesday, the MPAA denied the appeal.

Then this week Newsweek published a report by reporter Michael Isikoff that accuses Moore, and author Craig Unger (author of “House of Bush, House of Saud,” which was excerpted in Salon), of something close to “fanaticism” in a portion of the movie discussing how Osama bin Laden’s family members were mysteriously spirited out of the country in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Unger, writes Isikoff, “appears, claiming that bin Laden family members were never interviewed by the FBI. Not true, according to a recent report from the 9/11 panel,” and the Newsweek author points out that the FBI found “[n]one had any links to terrorism.”

But Unger says the article missed the point. “As I made clear to Isikoff on the phone, and should be clear in the movie, and is clear in my book,” Unger says, “what did not take place was a serious criminal investigation into the murder of 3,000 people … if you have a criminal investigation, you talk to innocent people.” And there’s no evidence, he says, that the FBI checked its own terror watch list before letting the bin Ladens depart.

Still, the film’s opponents haven’t given up. Most recently the MAF is promoting a report reprinted in the Guardian that the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah has endorsed “Fahrenheit.” Gianluca Chacra, the managing director of Front Row Entertainment, the movie’s distributor in the United Arab Emirates, confirms that Lebanese student members of Hezbollah “have asked us if there’s any way they could support the film.” While Hezbollah is considered a legitimate political party in many parts of the world, the U.S. State Department classifies the group as a terrorist organization. Chacra was unfazed, even excited, about their offer. “Having the support of such an entity in Lebanon is quite significant for that market and not at all controversial. I think it’s quite natural.” (Lions Gate did not return calls asking for comment.) Adam Rubin, a spokesman for MoveOn, calls it “an utterly ridiculous distraction from the actual substance of the film.”

Of course, you can always find an unpopular leader in the Middle East to fuel buzz about a movie someone doesn’t want you to see. After all, Yasser Arafat loved Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” which was so popular with right-wing Arafat haters and so unpopular among many Jews (Arafat’s blurb-ready review of Gibson’s movie: “Moving”). In the end, Moore’s movie will be judged by how many Americans turn out to see his film. And after the attacks and counterattacks of the last week, that number only grew.