CANNES, France--On his way to the next film-festival interview, movie maker Michael Moore, self-declared champion of the downtrodden, lent his support to protesting show-biz workers on the Croisette, Cannes's beachwalk. He took a megaphone, screaming "a job is a human right, a living wage is a human right." Never mind that the protests were about neither jobs nor wages but small cuts to France's generous welfare checks for artists. He hasn't become a millionaire filmmaker by being too fussy with the facts.

Mr. Moore has yet to express his support, though, for another strike here, that of the staff at some of Cannes's finest luxury hotels. Apparently Mr. Moore's solidarity with labor ends when it affects his ability to get first-rate room service.

His latest "docu-fiction," "Fahrenheit 9/11," instantly became a hot candidate for the Palme d'Or, even before anybody had seen it. Until a day before the official screening on Monday, Mr. Moore was very secretive about the film, simply claiming it was so explosive, it will cost George W. Bush the elections.

But all Mr. Moore's "undercover" crew could produce was footage of some soldiers putting hoods on Iraqi detainees, mocking a drunk Iraqi's erection and saying they like to listen to some stupid rock song to fire themselves up before battle. The rest of the movie is equally anticlimactic, mostly a rehash of the conspiracy theories in his book "Dude, Where's My Country," which have been exposed as inaccurate, contradictory and confused.

He uses the manipulations he so successfully employed in earlier movies. In one such scene, the voice of President Bush announces the beginning of the Iraq war as footage supposedly shows prewar Baghdad sometime in March. The viewer sees a happy couple at a wedding, children at a playground and other urban bliss. Ah, life must have been idyllic under the butcher of Baghdad. Just when the president announces the bombardment of "selective targets," a little girl is going down a slide. In case the audience didn't get it, Mr. Moore shows gruesome pictures of injured and dead Iraqis. Elsewhere he shows the charred bodies of U.S. soldiers being further mutilated by an angry mob. Yes, war is terrible, these pictures tell us, but they add nothing to the dispute over whether this war was justified.

That didn't stop the audience in the official screening from giving Mr. Moore a 20-minute standing ovation. Outside, the crowd gave Mr. Moore rock-star adulation. At the press conference, journalists applauded when Mr. Moore entered the room, before he started speaking and at the end. The questions were often prefaced with statements expressing admiration for his work and not one challenged any of the film's wild allegations.

Mr. Moore has cleverly used Disney's refusal to distribute the film in the U.S. to get the sort of press that major studios normally budget millions of dollars for. And he did come up with a fresh conspiracy theory here that the American public will be somehow prevented from seeing his movie. The film, Mr. Moore explains, was originally to be produced by Icon, Mel Gibson's company. But only a couple of months after signing the contract, Mr. Moore's people supposedly received a call from Icon, saying they wanted out. Why? According to Mr. Moore, Mr. Gibson had received a call from some "top Republicans with close ties to the White House," saying he would never be invited to another White House dinner if he went ahead. Icon denies this.

Of course, in the same breath that Mr. Moore spun his conspiracy theory about censorship, he cockily predicted he'd soon find a distributor. He plans to release the movie in the U.S. on Independence Day. The DVD is to hit the stores in October to have maximum impact on the elections, or so he hopes. But even the most devoted audience has its limits. When he expressed his resentment about suggestions that his film's distribution saga is great publicity, he lost the crowd for a moment.

It was ready to believe that George W. Bush stole the elections, that he started the war in Afghanistan to build a gas pipeline, that the war in Iraq is just about oil and big business. But tell these film industry experts that all this publicity is "not good for the box office," and there was just silent disbelief.

>Mr. Schwammenthal is an editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal Europe.