I am just in from the 1:15 p.m. PDT showing of Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Fox Tower theater in downtown Portland.  As I stood on a long line to buy tickets for the last showing of the day that wasn't sold out, a Kerry supporter was signing up people to work on his Oregon campaign.  And a Nader supporter was handing out announcements of the nominating convention to get Nader on the ballot.  People I saw were wadding or tearing them and stuffing them in their pockets when they realized what they were looking at.  I was at the third showing of the day, and the auditorium quickly filled.

Just as the commercials were about to end (is everyone subjected to them now, as we are?) the film stopped, lights started flashing and a spectral voice began ordering us to clear the building.  All the theater's nine or 10 cinemas emptied onto the street, including one that was in the middle of a Fahrenheit showing.  After 10 minutes or so, we were permitted to re-enter the building.  "Something was tripped," a worker told me when I asked what was up.

Back in the auditorium, most people successfully found their ways back to their old seats, as you would expect of an audience for this film.  One exception was a woman to tried to steal a seat from a blind girl, but she was promptly berated by surrounding audience members into finding another seat, down in the neckache section.

The film was an extremely moving polemic.  Michael Moore is not fair to George W. Bush, but you quickly conclude he is as fair as he needs to be, maybe more so.  Bush indicts himself sufficiently without Moore's doing a thing except showing us film clips of him doing it.  Moore's exaggerations, low blows and hilarious moments are earned by the film's successful argument of its major themes.  This audience, in contrast to one in another auditorium, got to see the film uninterrupted from start to finish.  We laughed, we cried, we got angry - yeah, I know it's a cliché, but this film does it to you.

As the audience left, it came upon a large Nader demonstration in front of the building.  Guys were waving "Help Stop Bush!" signs and trying to recruit audience members for the nominating convention.  The Kerry volunteer recruiter may have been there, but she was swallowed up in the crowd.  TV news reporters and videographers were there, and naturally they were focusing on the Nader demonstration, and on a couple of arguments going on, rather than asking audience members what they thought of the film.  Whatever else the Nader folks accomplish, they have made certain that the thrust of tonight's news coverage will include Nader, and will not be solely about Moore's wonderful film.