Wal-Martgate

San Francisco Chronicle — Most of the 4 million people who saw director Robert Greenwald's last movie, a critique of Fox News called "Outfoxed," caught it at a house party. The independent film ignited liberal audiences last year without the benefit of a Hollywood distributor, major studio or much of a theatrical release.

Labor and faith groups are shooting higher with this week's premiere of Greenwald's "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price": They hope to use the film to coalesce a social movement around criticism of the world's largest retailer.

Wal-Mart is countering with a campaign worthy of the final days before an election -- even circulating a review panning Greenwald's directorial efforts in a 1980 Olivia Newton-John vehicle. And Wal-Mart officials haven't even seen the new film yet. That will change after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom presides over Wednesday's West Coast premiere -- at a Fort Mason benefit screening.

"Wal-Mart" DVDs will screen at more than 6,800 locales, including house parties, churches and labor halls. There will be plenty of opportunities to see the film in politically blue parts of the country such as New York and San Francisco, a city with no Wal-Marts but 11 scheduled screenings. However, there will also be a dozen showings in both deep-red Kansas and Georgia, and others in rural areas where Wal-Marts dominate the landscape.

Many of the screenings will happen during a "Wal-Mart Week of Action" starting Nov. 13. More than 400 groups, including the Sierra Club and Service Employees International Union, will use the film's premiere to publicize their anger at the nation's largest private employer.

Their grievances are the ones labor and liberal groups have been pushing for several years -- that nearly half Wal-Mart's employees have no private health insurance or are on Medicaid, that most of its stock is produced by cheap overseas labor, and that by building stores on the fringes of towns, it contributes to sprawl and destruction of the environment.

"Our goal isn't to close Wal-Mart down," said Greenwald, who paid for half the film's $2 million production costs himself. The rest was paid for by two private liberal donors. "It is to make it a better, more humane company toward its employees and the communities it is in."

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