Pete Von Sholly, "Capitol Hell" artist: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1

Pete Von Sholly’s day job would be enough excitement for most of us. He creates storyboards for big budget Hollywood movies, and if you’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption or Mars Attacks!, for example, the finished product was based on his early drawings.

But being a respected, behind-the-scenes craftsman isn’t satisfying Von Sholly’s fertile mind. For several years, he’s been meshing a unique form of comics and cartoons that combine hand-drawn images with real life. Sometimes he displays an EC Comics style of horror. Sometimes his dinosaur fetish is on display for all to see.

Lately though, Von Sholly has turned his attention to politics, and the result is hilarious - Capitol Hell, a collection of postcards published in book form, by Denis Kitchen Publishing.

PETE VON SHOLLY AUDIO!

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Pete, tell me a little bit about Capitol Hell. Why are you so mean to America’s beloved political leaders?

PETE VON SHOLLY: Well, how many people did Freddy Krueger kill?

ANDELMAN: I lost track.

VON SHOLLY: Or Godzilla? All the movie monsters you can think of, roll them all together, how many people did they kill?

ANDELMAN: Well…

VON SHOLLY: They didn’t kill anybody because they’re made up, but how many people did Pol Pot kill? And Adolf Hitler? Not that our leaders are anything like them, but people that do really bad things are the real monsters, I think. And some of the things going on in the world just screamed out for some comment, hopefully in an entertaining way.

ANDELMAN: Do you think the last couple years we’ve been afraid to make fun of political leaders? Has the environment changed?

VON SHOLLY: I don’t know. It seems like your patriotism is suspect if you make fun of anybody.

ANDELMAN: So should we be suspect of your patriotism, Pete?





VON SHOLLY: It depends how you define patriotism, I guess. I actually just was noticing that Dick Cheney kind of looks like a mean guy in certain pictures, and Rudy Giuliani looks like Nosferatu whenever I see him. And that’s just a visual observation, bad pictures maybe, I don’t know, but every time I see these guys I think, "Man!" So I made up a couple joke images of them as monsters and sent them to Denis Kitchen, mostly as, “Isn’t this funny?”, sort of a throw-away gag kind of thing, and Denis jumped on the idea and said this might make a great political postcard book if I could come up with 24 of them. So that’s all I needed to hear.

ANDELMAN: And you’ve got Dick Cheney who becomes a version of Dracula as “Dickula.”

VON SHOLLY: He’s “Dickula,” yeah, sucking the life out of Colin Powell.

ANDELMAN: Rudy Giuliani is “Nosferudy” from Nosferatu. One of my favorites, of course, and it’s not because it’s necessarily the best image, but “Doctor Jerkyll.” That would be our current president. John Murtha became “Murthra” like in a Godzilla movie.

VON SHOLLY: Right.

ANDELMAN: What were some of your favorites to do?

VON SHOLLY: Well, “The Creature from the Black Community” just made me laugh -- Al Sharpton. And I knew there was a picture of the Creature from the Black Lagoon in chains, and I thought that would be just a great image to put Al Sharpton in. He’s such an opportunist. A lot of the people that we started out mentioning happened to be Republicans, but they’re not the only ones to blame. And I think that if you look at the book, you will see Bill and Hillary and Barack Obama and everybody else. So actually, it’s an even-handed…Melvin Van Peebles said I was an equal-opportunity offender.

ANDELMAN: I think that’s fair to say. The Clintons get their fair share, and they become the “Clintonsteins” as in Frankenstein and The Bride.

VON SHOLLY: Kind of interchangeable.

ANDELMAN: And actually, you get Hillary in there twice. What is the second one that Hillary is?

VON SHOLLY: Actually, the still is from 20 Million Miles to Earth. It’s a Ray Harryhausen movie. But Denis was talking about Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and I thought that…First of all, there’s a tricky process if anybody looks at the book. I had to find pictures of monsters and pictures of politicians that worked together, and I didn’t want to change the people’s faces too much. Dick Cheney has to look like Dick Cheney even if he’s dressed up as Dracula. You still have to know who they are so finding the right pictures was tricky. And there are no great stills from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and so I thought a giant woman picture will do, and so I ended up using a different image to work from with her.

ANDELMAN: I think it’s one of the best ones in there. There’s some that harken back. You have Ronald Reagan as “Ron Zombie.”

VON SHOLLY: Yes, I like that one.

ANDELMAN: I can’t make up my mind if that is supposed to be him as he would be today or if that’s him while he was in office. I think either one could really kind of fit.

VON SHOLLY: Yeah, you decide.

ANDELMAN: Let me pause for a second while we’re talking about this. I want to tell people that they can see some of these images online at either of your websites – www.capitol-hell.com or vonshollywood.com. And there’s also a video on YouTube. I believe if you search Capitol Hell you will see a video for this.

VON SHOLLY: I made a little animated film to augment the book. Also, I recorded the music for it. It’s a minor key version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” replete with gunfire and screams and explosions and things. It’s kind of a pithy little tune.




ANDELMAN: Who is the toughest politician to capture in this format?

VON SHOLLY: There wasn’t anybody especially tough. You reminded me of something, if I may digress just a little. There are a lot of images that aren’t in the book. One of my favorites was Larry King as “The Hunchback,” and I’ve got him up on the parapet of the castle with this great still from The Hunchback with Larry King’s face on it, and it’s “King of the Castle.” And also, Tony Blair in England. We’ve got “The Blairwolf of London” with him as The Werewolf of London and with a British Petroleum lab he’s got going there. So not all of the pictures made it into the book, but the hardest thing sometimes was simply going through pictures. I didn’t want to steal people’s pictures. I wanted to use pictures that I was pretty sure were up for grabs and also modified them enough so I wouldn’t really be just taking somebody else’s work. The hardest part was finding them sometimes. The lighting had to match. And you’d be surprised; you search a certain politician looking for images, and you find the same image a thousand times. It’s like no, I need the light on this side. I need this kind of an expression. So I don’t recall anybody special, but the hardest part was getting something where the two pictures would blend seamlessly.

ANDELMAN: Is it a Photoshop process you used? Tell me about the mechanical side.

VON SHOLLY: Yes, it’s Photoshop. I learned Photoshop. I was at Disney Feature Animation for a couple years, and that was a mixed experience. It started out great, and it turned absolutely horrible. But while we were there, this was during the making of the movie Dinosaur. I love dinosaurs, as you mentioned, and as you will notice, if you look at anything about me, you’ll see a dinosaur pop up whenever I get the chance. Working on this dinosaur movie, they had Doug Henderson, Ricardo Delgado, David Krantz and Tom Enriquez, William Stout, Mark Hallet, and Brian Franczak. These are all names that people who are into dinosaurs would know. All great artists and me, for what I’m worth. We had all this talent applied to this project, and it was so sad to see it turn into such a lousy movie.

But anyway, while I was there, this was all hand-drawn artwork, of course. They gave classes in Photoshop, and then I kind of asked for a transfer to another film because I felt so useless. I never had that on a job before where I felt like I’m not helping. I can’t help. And I love dinosaurs, and this is killing me. So they didn’t like me because of that, and so they tried to lay me off, but I had time on my contract. I know this is a long story here, but we’ve got time, right?

ANDELMAN: That’s alright.

VON SHOLLY: So I had about nine months sitting home getting paid, which was the best job ever because they wouldn’t pay me off and I had a contract, and we offered. We said, “Give me 50 cents on the dollar for what’s left of my contract, and we’ll call it a day.” And they go, “Oh, no, we can’t do that.” So weeks turned into months, and I kept getting paid every week, and there was nothing to do cause I wasn’t assigned on a film. And so I stayed home and learned Photoshop. I figured having been exposed to it at Disney and watching other people use it was intriguing, but it’s really hard to learn something watching other people do it. And I suddenly got this brilliant idea that if I stayed home and bought a computer and bought Photoshop and learned what I wanted to do with it, I could. And so that was what I did. And a friend of mine, Mike Van Cleave, a great cartoonist/musician/good pal, he suggested that I try comics using the Photoshop technique that I’d been working on for other things, and so I did. And I found that it was really, really fun doing comics that way.

ANDELMAN: So that was kind of a late career development for you, to get into comics.

VON SHOLLY: Well, I always wanted to do comics, and I did comics for years including some underground comics, one with Timothy Leary, which has popped up lately which suddenly people are interested in, which is surprising to me cause I did it so long ago. I always loved comics when I was a kid, and I always wanted to do comics. But it’s hard to make money, at least it was for me, in comics. So the movie/storyboarding thing kind of became my career, but the love for comics was always there so it sort of became natural to put the two things together. In the comics, I work with people too, and so it’s like casting for a movie, and it’s like directing your actors, and there’s a lot of interaction, and it’s a lot of fun working with people. This would be like Morbid and Extremely Weird Stories, the Dark Horse Books.

ANDELMAN: We’ll come to that. Let me come back to Capitol Hell a little bit. Do you at all wish you had foreseen the rise of Mike Huckabee and included him?

VON SHOLLY: Sure. If we’d known he was going to become such a highly visible figure, he would’ve been in there for sure. It’s really hard to predict what’s gonna happen, but we have a special “Screed of Huckie” card prepared, which is Huckabee as Chuckie, and it’s pretty funny. So Denis is considering rushing out a special card, because these are postcards, so this can be done as an individual card.

ANDELMAN: Well, I wondered about that. Now the book is a collection of postcards, and you can actually tear them out and mail them to people. But I have to say, I guess it’s the old comic collector in me, it’s hard for me to bring myself to tear something out of a book.

VON SHOLLY: Oh, you have to buy two.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, right! Are you and Denis going to release these as individual postcards this year?






VON SHOLLY: Yes. They are available as individual cards.

ANDELMAN: A-ha! And how would one order that?

VON SHOLLY: Through Denis Kitchen’s site. I don’t know if they’re set up for the individual card orders yet or not. I haven’t been involved in that, but I’m sure he offers them as individual cards. That would be deniskitchenpublishing.com, I think, or maybe through the capitol-hell.com site, there’s a link to individual cards.

ANDELMAN: Well, hopefully, they’re setting up to take those orders now. Are the Clintons just too easy to make fun of?

VON SHOLLY: Well, I don’t hate the Clintons as much as most people, but I guess I wasn’t as mean to them as I was to some people, but they’re fair game.

ANDELMAN: Obviously, you have to work on a book like this ahead, and obviously, you didn’t know that Mike Huckabee would be the rising star on the eve of Iowa. Of course, in a couple weeks, he may be history. Were you anticipating that Barack Obama would continue to be a player by the time the book reached publication?

VON SHOLLY: I think so, yeah. I think we figured that he and Hillary were probably the most likely Democrats. You take your best guess ahead of time.

ANDELMAN: Who is the toughest to find just the right monster or scenario for? Who did you really lose sleep over?

VON SHOLLY: People I didn’t know that much about. Fred Thompson, for instance. I think Denis thought we should get Fred Thompson in there because he was making a lot of noise, and I didn’t know much about Fred Thompson. I’m not really a politically savvy person. So it’s like, figure out a monster that seems appropriate. People that are less well known were the harder.

ANDELMAN: Thompson, I would think that would be a little tough although he’s well-known. I don’t know any monsters that are like asleep at the wheel. I’m with you. I am just as happy to make fun of one side as the other, frankly.





VON SHOLLY: And we got Bill Maher and Steve Colbert and Jon Stewart and Ann Coulter and O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. We got all those kind of people in the mix, too. Sean Hannity.

ANDELMAN: Right. And what was the gag from Hannity and Stewart?

VON SHOLLY: Oh. Well, the still is from The Manster, and it also helps if you know your monster movies. There’s a Japanese monster movie called The Manster, which was about a guy who grew an extra head and there is a famous still of this two-headed monster wrestling with a guy. And so I made the two-headed monster into Colbert and Jon Stewart and Hannity into the guy that they’re fighting with because I figured he has a big enough mouth to fight two people.

ANDELMAN: The two-headed, was that the Rosie Grier?

VON SHOLLY: No, that was The Manster. The Rosie Grier was in The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant with Ray Milland.

ANDELMAN: Oh, okay. Alright. And then the other one I want to point out is “The Wicked Witch of the West Wing”: Condoleezza Rice as the Wicked Witch and George Bush as her pet monkey.

VON SHOLLY: Yeah, that’s a famous picture of George Bush where he’s making a goofy face.

ANDELMAN: As you’re looking into the crystal ball with Nancy Pelosi…





VON SHOLLY: …and Harry Reid.

ANDELMAN: And Harry Reid, yeah. I just love that one.

VON SHOLLY: My son came up with the name of that one, “The Wicked Witch of the West Wing.” He’s a helpful lad.

ANDELMAN: This is great. Barack Obama as Hellraiser and “Fundraiser.” I don’t know. Folks, you’ve gotta go look at this. Again, it’s www.capitol-hell.com. You can see some examples of this. Another great one is John McCain as Doctor Strangelove in “Doctor McCainlove.”

VON SHOLLY: Yeah. Going down with the bomb.

ANDELMAN: Yeah. You will laugh at those. Some of them I don’t want to quite give away, but let’s just say that Donald Rumsfeld is in there in a familiar pose. Let’s see. Who else should I mention here? Now Michael Moore. You slipped Michael Moore in there.

VON SHOLLY: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: And Karl Rove and Valerie Plame.

VON SHOLLY: And to my mind, it’s an election year so it is tied in inextricably to the election, but it’s also a picture of American politics at a certain time. And that’s why I wanted Larry King and other people in it, and that’s why some of the other people are in it, too, because they may not be Presidential candidates per se, but it’s more than that to me. It’s not just about the election. And the situation is fluid. There are two pictures of Barack Obama. There’s actually one called “The Empire Strikes Black” where Jesse Jackson is blasting Obama like the Emperor did to Darth Vader because in the news, there was an item that Jesse Jackson was criticizing Obama for being too white, and so that was the inspiration for that card. But it would be fun to do an ongoing series. You could just go on with this stuff because the news never stops and the surprises and the outrages never stop.

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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.