Saturday, January 05, 2008

Milo Ventimiglia, "Heroes" actor: Mr. Media Interview



Milo Ventimiglia is not your average save-the-world superhero, although he does play one, Peter Petrelli, on NBC’s hit series “Heroes.”



In real life, he’s an ambitious actor and producer whose company, Divide Pictures, just completed a series of five animated holiday shorts available exclusively on the American Eagle Outfitters website. Milo narrated the first episode, “Home for the Holidays”; others feature the voices of Kristen Bell, Lil Jon, Adrianne Palicki, and Pete Wentz, the Fall Out Boy.



DOWNLOAD THE MP3; LISTEN RIGHT NOW!



ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.





BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I hate to pimp for American Eagle Outfitters, but it seems appropriate here. I have to think that any fan of yours -- and “Gilmore Girls” for that matter -- is going to love “Home for the Holidays” because you play yourself. How much fun was that?



MILO VENTIMIGLIA: It was a lot of fun. The “Home for the Holidays” tale was kind of a combination of stories between myself and Adam Green, the writer/director of “Winter Tales.” I was just thinking about different situations I’d find myself in, or that he’d find himself in, and came up with the tale of a guy who’s taking a really miserable plane ride home.



ANDELMAN: Now, that’s never happened to you, has it?



VENTIMIGLIA: Not exactly. Like I said, it was a combination of stories between myself and Adam Green.



ANDELMAN: How weird was it, though, to find yourself playing yourself and have this kid, I don’t want to give it too much away, but the kid has a little problem with reality, I guess?



VENTIMIGLIA: Yeah, I guess, a little bit, a little problem. All he wants to do is relax, but he can’t do that.



ANDELMAN: What’s a guy like you doing in the realm of animated holiday shorts? How did that come about?



VENTIMIGLIA: It was just another opportunity to work with American Eagle Outfitters. We did one series of shorts with them earlier called “It’s a Mall World,” which I produced, and we just found a great partnership with them. And we pitched the idea of Claymation, and they’re really into it, so we developed a bunch of stories and made these classic tales our own. And what you get is five great shorts.



ANDELMAN: It’s a lot of fun. How did you get people like Pete Wentz and Kristen Bell to come on board?



VENTIMIGLIA: We called up their agents, had excellent relationships, and once you pitched them the idea, they were into it. Kristen Bell, I called myself and said, “I’ve got this thing I’d love for you to work on,” and she was just like, “I’m in. Whatever you want to do, I’m in.” And then the same thing with Lil Jon, Adrianne, and we just kind of threw it out, and they were more than happy, more than excited, to be a part of it.



ANDELMAN: What do you want to do next? If you’re kind of playing with this now, I’m guessing you want to go on to bigger and better in production…



VENTIMIGLIA: I enjoy it all. I enjoy directing. I enjoy producing. I enjoy acting. And I take the opportunities that are presented to me when they come up. Of course, I’d love to direct a longer format; I’d love to produce a longer format. And there are a bunch of things that I am circling around, but anytime I’m involved in any one of those three, I can direct and you’re producing for my job, I’ll take it.



ANDELMAN: We have to talk about “Heroes,” of course, don’t we? We can’t take live calls today, so I did the next best thing, and I solicited questions from friends of mine and fans of yours.



VENTIMIGLIA: Alright.



ANDELMAN: So these are coming from a few places here. Let’s start with this question from DigDog: “Did the writers’ strike hobble the show by forcing producers to end any of the storylines prematurely?”



VENTIMIGLIA: I don’t think it hobbled us so much as it cut us short. The writers’ strike was one of those unfortunate things that stops production. Beyond the strike, you can’t write anything new. You can only produce what’s been written. We basically ran out of material. I think the producers, it was their intent to give some kind of a wrap-up to what became a very short season just so that people weren’t left with too many questions. In my opinion, it was a good thing to do to, hopefully, tie up a couple loose ends, and we leave people wanting a little bit more.



ANDELMAN: This second season got hit by some criticism early on that it was taking too long to get to the meat. And then it seemed like those last couple weeks, the critics and the fans may have come around a little bit.



VENTIMIGLIA: Yeah, they did. We had some problems early on, still working out problems toward the end, but I know the show started to get back to that same feeling, that same sentiment that we all worked very hard for. But it’s one of those things. You just gotta understand that a season is long. You’re making usually 24 episodes, so I think when there’s a little bit of a delay, there’s not that instant, rewarding scene or moment or episode, and people get impatient. So it’s finding that balance between giving and getting.



Mr. MEDIA: It must be hard for both the writers and the actors to be on a show where the expectations are so high. You almost reach a point where, no matter what you do, you’re going to let people down. Is that the case?



VENTIMIGLIA: Yeah. You’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t. You just gotta know that, ultimately, the work that you’re doing, the work that you’re putting in, it’s your best efforts, and it’s everybody’s best effort. That being said, though, all those best efforts have to come together in sync. Otherwise, the show doesn’t have a heart.



ANDELMAN: Before the writers’ strike set in, how much did you know of plot lines for your character going in? And how much do you think that may change going forward with the delay in getting back into production?



VENTIMIGLIA: I knew quite a bit. I knew where we were headed, but I also had the luxury of not really having to follow too closely because Peter had amnesia. I went in for a meeting with Tim Kring before we started filming, and he said, “Peter can’t remember anything.” I said, “Okay, great. Let me know as I need to know stuff.” I just kind of waited around. Usually, you’re pretty eager to know where you’re headed. I had no idea where Peter was going to go, and it didn’t really matter at that point. Where we’re going to be going after, again, that’s all up in the air. I think the production team was taking into consideration the criticism we got and hopefully, wanting to get back on track to the same feel we had the first season. So I think things are going to switch up a little bit.



ANDELMAN: Is there any question whether you’ll stay with the show? Eric, who wrote in, said that he had heard rumors that you didn’t necessarily want to continue.



VENTIMIGLIA: Who said that?



ANDELMAN: Eric. He’s one of the people who sent in some questions for you.



VENTIMIGLIA: Really? I’m a real guy, and I also have a contract that I hope to honor. So I’ll be on the show, I think, as long as they would have me and as long as I’m obligated to it and put my best work forward, and I’ll leave everything else up to time. I’ve got other ambitions, but when it comes to the show, and when we’re in production, that’s what I’m doing.



ANDELMAN: Dr. Blogstein, who has a show on BlogTalkRadio, wanted to know this: “Are there considerations in taking a few episodes this coming season or next to go deeper into the back story and focus on your character’s parents as well as George Takei’s character and some of the older heroes?”



VENTIMIGLIA: I think that was our intent -- to understand a little bit more. That’s always been the question. People want to know how did these abilities come about? The way the show’s been going -- the storyline -- it seems that there was a greater mystery as to why these people, how these people have these abilities. Again, that’s a lot up to the writers about what they’re looking to explore. And, of course, the actors, we can give our two cents in what we’d like to see, what we’d like to get into, but it’s ultimately up to the writers.



ANDELMAN: Sharon wants to know -- and remember, I didn’t write these questions -- if you’re not dating Hayden Panettiere, who are you dating?



VENTIMIGLIA: Is my what?



ANDELMAN: If you’re not dating Hayden…



VENTIMIGLIA: My phone broke up.



ANDELMAN: I’m sorry?



VENTIMIGLIA: I said my phone had a little glitch for a second.



ANDELMAN: Oh. Okay. Sharon’s question is, “If you’re not dating Hayden Panettiere, who are you dating?”



VENTIMIGLIA: It’s one of those funny questions that…



ANDELMAN: I’m glad I didn’t ask.



VENTIMIGLIA: I think when you’re young and in this industry, and you work as much as I do, you try to spend time with people that want to spend time with you. That’s about all you can do.



ANDELMAN: Alright. Last question: Mimi asks, “What powers would you want in real life?”



VENTIMIGLIA: I think in a world where there are people with abilities, I’d take my character’s. He’s a sponge. He can soak up anything. But if I just had any ability, I’d want to be able to teleport. I could go have coffee in Paris if I wanted to and lunch in Italy, then be right back at home in the flash of an eye.



© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Mort Walker, "Beetle Bailey," "Hi & Lois" cartoonist: Mr. Media Interview


Mort Walker is the dean and -- in some ways -- the curator of American cartoonists.

Best known for his long-running strips “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi & Lois,” Walker, 84, is also a bedrock member of the National Cartoonists Society, and he’s the founder and energy behind the National Cartoon Museum.

This is the third time I’ve had the pleasure of Mort’s company over the last 20 years. I enjoy interviewing him because he says what’s on his mind, and what’s on his mind is never dull.

But just in case my questions aren’t sharp enough for this American comic strip master, I’ve called in reinforcements.

Ray Billingsley, creator of the “Curtis” strip and an old friend of Walker’s, kindly contributed questions today. So did a newer member of the fraternity, Mark Tatulli, creator of “Heart of the City” and America’s fastest-growing new strip, “LIO.”

DOWNLOAD THE MP3; LISTEN RIGHT NOW!

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.


Mr. MEDIA/BOB ANDELMAN: Mort, welcome to Mr. Media.

MORT WALKER: Good morning.

ANDELMAN: Did I get your age right?

WALKER: Yeah, very good.

ANDELMAN: Sorry. Should I not have brought that up?

WALKER: It always sounds old to me, but like I say, I’ll have to get used to it.

ANDELMAN: No, I don’t think you ever have to get used to it as long as you don’t act that way. I don’t think it’s an issue.

WALKER: They call me the Energizer Bunny around here. You wake up in the morning and say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” and they say, “Oh God, not another idea.”

ANDELMAN: The boys are probably waiting for you to slow down a little bit.

WALKER: Yeah, well, I hope I never do.

ANDELMAN: Well, I want to ask you about that. Before we get to the questions from Mark and Ray, I’d like to hear about how you spend your days at the studio. What’s your level of involvement with your strips alongside your sons and, of course, your late partner Dik Browne’s boys?

WALKER: Well, one thing, you have to start with an idea so I’m always doing ideas. At breakfast, I usually get two or three gags. I have to have my pad with me, my clipboard with me all the time. Yesterday, my wife had to go to the doctor, and I went with her, and I was sitting in the waiting room, and she was in getting an MRI for an hour. I got 19 gags while I was waiting for her. So you never really waste any time. Then I get back and start doing my strips. I do all the penciling on the strips, and my son Greg does the inking. I usually can get those done in the morning. My work doesn’t take me an awful lot of time so that gets me involved in a lot of other things. I got a brand-new business I started.

ANDELMAN: What’s that?

WALKER: It’s a magazine. It’s called Mort Walker’s The Best of Times. And I got started because we have a lot of weekly magazines and newspapers around here, and I usually pick them up. They’re at the exits of the grocery store, the delicatessen, or wherever you’re in, and they’re piled up in a corner somewhere. And I looked at them, and I said, “They really don’t have much in them that’s very interesting.” Most of it is a repeat of what’s in the daily newspaper. So all of a sudden I thought my paper here in Stamford, Connecticut only uses about 10 of the King Features. King Features is the largest syndicate in the world. It’s syndicated all over the world. They have 140 features that they syndicate, and my local paper, as I said, only uses ten of them. That leaves 130 features that are available, and they’re all famous writers and cartoonists and puzzle writers and so forth. I thought, I could put out a great newspaper using all the excess that the local paper doesn’t use. And so I started this newspaper, this magazine. It started as a newspaper. Now it’s a magazine. And it’s full-color, 40 pages, and we sell advertising to make money.

ANDELMAN: Wow.

WALKER: Each issue brings in about $20,000. Well, that’s not bad.

ANDELMAN: Sounds like something you could spread out around the country, too.

WALKER: King Features puts it all together for me. I just tell them where the ads go.

ANDELMAN: Now, you don’t sound like a guy who has any intention of slowing down.

WALKER: No. I thought of a new comic strip yesterday morning, and I haven’t even got anybody to look at it yet so it’s not doing us any good.

ANDELMAN: Oh my goodness.

WALKER: I did about 15 gags of it for us, and I’m still waiting for my editors. I have a son that works with me here in the office. His name is Neal. He also does all my drawings for the foreign markets. I give him the gags, and he does the drawing. They print them. Beetle’s the number one comic book in Scandinavia, and they just can’t get enough work. They reprint everything I’ve got, and they need at least that much more to fill up the comic books. So I have to have somebody working on those things all the time.

ANDELMAN: You came up with a new strip idea. How different would a strip by you be today than it was 40 or 50 years ago?

WALKER: I don’t know. I just sort of do what I like and wait and see if anybody else likes it. I don’t know that this is ever going to come to fruition because it seems like I’m always thinking. I’ve got about 10 comic strip ideas in my drawer right now that have either been rejected by me or rejected by the syndicates.

ANDELMAN: The young guys who are gonna hear this interview are gonna be shocked that a guy with your experience still gets rejections from the syndicate.

WALKER: Yeah. I took some stuff in to the syndicate a few years ago, and the editor says, “Mort, we got enough of your stuff.” And I said, “But my stuff is the stuff that’s selling!” “Beetle,” “Hi & Lois,” you take “Blondie” and “Hagar the Horrible,” which I worked on. Those are the top-selling strips they’ve got. And all the new ones that they try last for maybe a year or two, and then they die. I said, “Why don’t you get along with my stuff?” Well, they look at my age, and they think How many more years do we have for you? So I don’t know. I can’t stop it, though.

ANDELMAN: Well, what hope is there for a new cartoonist coming up if an experienced veteran like yourself can’t get a new strip going?

WALKER: Well, look at the strip called “Zits.” That’s a brand-new strip and boy, it’s going great guns. I like it very much. Very well drawn, gags are good, everything. If you got the stuff, you’ll make it.

ANDELMAN: I wasn’t gonna go that way right now, but that was something Ray wanted me to ask you about. What do you think of the direction that present-day cartoonists are headed? Are there any particular strips that you like right now?

WALKER: There are a lot of them I like, but I guess about half of them I don’t. And usually, it’s because they’re hard to read, I don’t get the gags, the drawing is confusing, or it’s something that I’m not that interested in. I think a lot of them make the mistake of doing gags about animals or robots or something like that, or bugs. People are interested in people. And I try to create characters that everybody can relate to. Everybody knows a Beetle Bailey. Everybody knows a Sarge. Everybody knows a General Halftrack or Miss Buxley. And it’s funny how often in my fan mail, like yesterday, I got a letter, and somebody said, “Your favorite character is Cosmo. Can you send me a picture of Cosmo?” And I’m thinking, Cosmo, I only use him maybe once a month. I don’t know. It’s interesting.

ANDELMAN: You mention “Zits.” Are there others that you like particularly?

WALKER: Well, of course, “Hagar” is one of my favorites. And “Mother Goose and Grimm,” I always get a laugh out of that. Boy, I’d hate to start on all my favorites cause I got a lot of them.

ANDELMAN: Let me ask you about a couple of them specifically. What about “Get Fuzzy?” Is that one of the ones…you mention animals. I’m guessing maybe that’s one that you’re not so crazy about.

WALKER: I read it about half the time, and I don’t get that much out of it. I know a lot of people like it. Then I argue with people about it while they just say you just don’t get it. So I think that there’s an appeal level that some people have for certain strips that I don’t have or other people don’t have. It’s an individual thing.

ANDELMAN: What about “Pearls Before Swine”? That’s a very different strip, generationally speaking.

WALKER: I read it. A lot of times I get a laugh out of it. I find it a little confusing, and I don’t relate to it as well as I do a strip like “Zits.” Altogether we have 10 children. It’s a second marriage for both of us, and we have 15 grandchildren. I can see all my children in that strip. That’s the way they act, and it’s amusing to me the way they treat their parents and everything. I can relate to it.

ANDELMAN: Does it bother you in “Pearls” that sometimes the attacks on like “Family Circus,” for example, or other strips? Does that bother you, or does that amuse you?

WALKER: I don’t think it’s an attack cause he’s used Beetle Bailey in his strip. I always write him and thank him.

ANDELMAN: Mark Tatulli, this is one of the things he had wanted me to ask you. He wondered if you had ever read “LIO” and what you thought of it.

WALKER: I don’t see it.

ANDELMAN: Oh, you don’t?

WALKER: I get three papers everyday, and it’s not in any one of those. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it.

ANDELMAN: Mark will be disappointed, but I appreciate you being honest about it.

WALKER: Well, I’ll look for it. I just got back from Ohio, and it wasn’t in that paper. So I just don’t know.

ANDELMAN: Let me ask you about something that’s pretty close to your heart, and then we’ll move on to some of the questions that Ray had for you. Since the Cartoon Museum closed in Boca Raton a few years ago, I know you’ve devoted a great deal of time and energy and money, for that matter, to finding a new home. The last time we spoke, which was probably about three years ago, maybe four, it looked like you were heading toward the Empire State Building. And I was wondering if you could update us on what the status of the project is.

WALKER: We got killed there, and it was very unfair. We had a contract to go to the Empire State Building, and as a result of the contract, we went out, and we hired a staff of people and fundraisers. And we spent about half a million dollars preparing to move in there. Suddenly, we got a notice from the owner, who I’d been dealing with, that they had to cancel the contract because they have another attraction on the second floor called “Skyride,” which is a simulated helicopter ride over Manhattan. They sell their tickets. They were gonna sell our tickets. Instead of rent, we would split the profits. They figured that each one of us, they’d make three and a half million, and we’d make three and a half million. I said, “No more fundraising for me!” It was a perfect deal, I thought. And the Skyride people said, “We don’t want the competition. If you sell the museum tickets, we’ll sue you.” And so they cancelled our contract. They said, “But we’ll give you a cut rate in rent, and we’ll only charge you $850,000 a year in rent.” They just killed all of our sponsors, all of the people that were gonna give us money. They just figured we’d never make it, and so we’re out of business. Not only that, but they kept our $185,000 in security deposit.

ANDELMAN: You must’ve been crushed when that fell apart.

WALKER: It just killed us. We had no more people who were gonna give us money and no place to go. I had lent the museum $400,000, and I just couldn’t go on doing that.

ANDELMAN: Wow. And so where does the project stand now? Is there anything you can tell us?

WALKER: We have a new home for it, but I can’t announce it yet.

ANDELMAN: Okay. But there is something in the works.

WALKER: Yes.

ANDELMAN: Do you know when you might have something to reveal?

WALKER: They’re supposed to have a meeting on the 15th to discuss it. We’ve looked at the new headquarters, which are beautiful, and we haven’t had a board meeting on it yet. So that’s the reason they told me not to announce it yet.

ANDELMAN: Let’s go to some of the questions that Ray Billingsley had. You guys have known each other a long time.

WALKER: He used to hang out. When he was a kid, he used to hang out at the museum.

ANDELMAN: Is that right?

WALKER: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Oh, so you do go back a ways with him.

WALKER: Oh yeah. He was just a teenager, and he was a very talented young man and very nice and everything. We formed a friendship, and we’ve been together. I’ve made speeches in his behalf and so forth. He’s a very nice guy.

ANDELMAN: Ray sent me an email and said, “You’ve got to talk to Mort for Mr. Media.” Ray’s interview was one of the most popular that’s ever run on the Mr. Media site so I have to bow to his advice on this. One of the things that Ray wanted to know was who was your first influence as a cartoonist?

WALKER: I think that it was probably “Moon Mullins.” Frank Willard was the cartoonist. We used to get the Sunday paper on the front porch, and my father would ask me to go down and get it. And I’d bring it back, and I’d get in bed with him, and he’d read the funnies to me. And when he read “Moon Mullins,” he started to laugh until tears came down his cheeks, and I just got the biggest kick out of that, seeing somebody laugh like that. And I can even remember specific strips that he read to me. And I think it influenced me and influenced my style of humor and characterizations and everything. I think that was my earliest influence.

ANDELMAN: Do you think you’ve always been trying to make your dad laugh?

WALKER: Yeah. Well, it’s a nice thing to do for people. In fact, I do it all the time anyway. I go to the grocery store, for instance, and Cathy goes down one aisle, I go down another aisle. Then I can’t find her again. I’m looking around, and the manager comes up and says, “Can I help you? What are you looking for?” And I go, “I’m looking for my wife. What aisle do you keep wives in?” And my wife says, “Can’t you ever go out without trying to make everybody laugh?”

ANDELMAN: Or trying to develop material for a strip?

WALKER: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Would we recognize your dad as a character in any of your work over the years or other family members for that matter?

WALKER: I don’t think my father was in there, but a lot of my friends were. Beetle Bailey’s based on my old high school buddy and college roommate, and his name was David Hornaday. And he was a big, lanky, lazy kind of guy, and everybody liked him and everything like that. And he was just goofing off all the time. I remember I went by to pick him up to play golf one day, and his mother said, “David’s still in bed. You gotta go wake him up.” I went up, and I shook him in bed, and I said, “David, David, wake up! We’ve got a tee-off time at nine.” He just grabbed his pillow, turned his back to me, and went on sleeping. I took his bed, and I turned it upside down. He fell out on the floor and just reached out and got his pillow and went on to sleep. I said, “David, you ought to be in a comic strip.”

ANDELMAN: So does he collect residuals on that?

WALKER: Well, he’s dead now.

ANDELMAN: Oh.

WALKER: They used to play him up in his paper back in St. Joseph, Missouri, all the time on the front page. And I said, “Does it bother you?” He said, “A little bit, but I like it okay.” I don’t know that you’d really like being compared to Beetle, but…

ANDELMAN: Well, he’s gonna live on in some way, right? Did I read that Lt. Fuzz was actually closest to you at the time?

WALKER: I based it on my experiences when I first became a lieutenant in the Army. And I was so impressed with myself being an officer, and I was only 19 years old at the time. So using my official status, I walked into our sergeant’s office, and it was all cluttered with used coffee cups and papers and litter on the floor. And I said, “Sergeant let’s get this place cleaned up,” and he looked at me. Instead of saluting, he said, “Oh, knock it off, Lieutenant.” So I based some of my experiences of trying to be an officer on Lieutenant Fuzz.

ANDELMAN: Did you have formal art training?

MORT WALKER: I used to take art courses until I suddenly got the idea when I was in high school that if I was gonna do a comic strip, which was my lifelong ambition to do, that was what I was preparing for, and I thought, If I just am an artist, I’m gonna have to pay somebody to write my ideas for me. And that means I’ll only make half as much money. I started taking writing courses instead of art courses. I took a couple because they were usually snap courses. I’d always get an ‘A,’ and I didn’t have to do any homework or anything like that. But after I came to New York and started doing cartoons, I was a top-selling magazine cartoonist in the country in 1948, a year after I got out of college. My art teacher in Missouri University used to hang up my drawings and say, “An example of fine art in cartooning.” They were trying to get some credit for me.

ANDELMAN: Oh, I see. They want the credit.

WALKER: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, I see.

WALKER: “We trained that guy.”

ANDELMAN: I wonder how many people that they churned through there as a result of that.

WALKER: As opposed to that, my journalism school claimed me as a star student in journalism.

ANDELMAN: People living off of you all over the place.

WALKER: I remember I was taking this writing course, and I was getting straight A’s. I was the top student in the writing course. The teacher asked me one day, “I’d like for you to come home and have dinner with me and my wife,” and I said okay. So I go to dinner, and we talked about writing all through dinner, the great writers that we were. After dinner, he shoved his chair back, and he says, “I guess you’d like to write the great American novel.” I said, “No, sir.” He said, “No?” I said, “No. I want to write the great American comic strip.” And you never saw such a look on a guy’s face. He was like I’d hit him with a brick.

ANDELMAN: Do you feel like guys that do what you do are held in more esteem today than they were 50 years ago?

WALKER: No. It’s just the opposite.

ANDELMAN: Really?

WALKER: When I grew up, cartoonists were national heroes. Boy, they were famous. I remember going into a restaurant with Al Capp and Milton Caniff, and everybody turned around, and they said, “There’s Milton Caniff! And he’s with Al Capp!” They were on the cover of Time magazine and written about all the time. And they were revered, and they were rich and famous. They used to drive around in Mercedes and expensive cars and everything. They were well respected. But you’ve got so many other things going on for people today -- a lot of television, movies, and things that we didn’t have in those days.

ANDELMAN: We’ve talked about Will Eisner before. I remember Will Eisner had said that he wanted to rise to the level of the comic strip artist from the comic book artist because there were comic strip artists, then there were pornographers, and then there were comic book artists. That was about the way he thought that the pecking order worked.

WALKER: There was a time there when comic books were just about out of business.

ANDELMAN: Yep.

WALKER: And then suddenly, I guess it was the movies that came out with Spiderman and Superman and everything like that that revitalized the comic book business. But they were almost dead at one time.

ANDELMAN: Well, speaking of almost dead, let’s talk about the newspaper business and the effect of the Internet and other things. Where do you see it going? Do you think there will be a newspaper business for cartoonists to sell their wares in five, ten years?

WALKER: Boy, you just don’t know. I’ve seen so many businesses and things go out of business because of changes. Everything’s changing so rapidly these days. I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t know how you can get along without newspapers. Maybe people aren’t reading them as much as they used to, but I find I can’t move along without them. I’ve got all my computers all around here and television sets and DVDs and all that kind of stuff, but I depend on the paper to find out what’s going on.

ANDELMAN: I know there were circulation numbers just this past week for the major newspapers around the country. I think only three of them were up in circulation, and even that, none of them were up more than two percent, and the rest were all down. That’s gotta be a little frightening.

WALKER: It is, and I know that the papers are cutting back on their comics. They go from two pages to one page. They’re trying to cut the costs because the owners of the papers always want to make more money. And while they’re still making as much money as they did 10 years ago, just about, the owners want to make more. They think by cutting back on their expenses… Our local paper here just fired 15 of its top editors and combined its operations with another paper in the town next to us, cutting back on their comics and everything like that. And I’m thinking if they want to appeal to people, they ought to keep their most popular features. Comics are the best-read part of the newspaper and usually right after the headlines, the favorite part of the paper. A lot of editors don’t see it. They think their editorials are the big stars.

ANDELMAN: Little do they know. You know when they find out, of course…My wife’s an editor at a newspaper. They find out when they drop a strip, and the phone starts ringing off the hook. Then they realize, “Oh, people do care about that stuff.”

WALKER: I know, but it takes something like that to tell them. I don’t know why they don’t realize it before. While I don’t think comic strips run the newspaper or anything like that, they’re very popular with people so don’t cut them out. They’re the things that people look for.

ANDELMAN: I should give credit where credit is due, by the way. This is the line of questioning that Mark Tatulli, creator of “LIO,” had in mind, which I actually found interesting that he was concerned, as a guy who’s sold his strip into more than 300 papers in about a year and a half, but he, nonetheless, is concerned. I guess he’s wondering…He’s been on a fast rise, but I guess even he is concerned about how much further it can go if they’re all cutting back.

WALKER: I think that somebody starting out is probably going to be having a more difficult time because the editors are not adding the strips as fast as they used to. And they’re just trying to hold onto the ones that they’ve got and hold onto the price of the thing. I’m not making any more money now than I made 30 years ago. They’re just not raising their prices anymore. But still, “Beetle” is in 52 different countries and 1,800 newspapers, and it has a readership of 200 million everyday. That’s the kind of readership that I think any writer would love to have.

ANDELMAN: Sure. One of the other things that Mark was wondering is if, along that same line, is if you see a future for new comic artists being able to make a living as comic strippers?

WALKER: It’s going to be more and more difficult. Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Do they need to look for other media like the Internet, for example? Do you think that publishing your strips directly to the web is going to be a way of the future?

WALKER: I haven’t found anybody that’s been able yet to figure out how to make money at it. You can put yourself on the Internet and hope people are going to see it, but how are you going to get them to pay for it? That’s the big problem.

ANDELMAN: Speaking of strips that kind of mix the old and the new, I wondered what you made of the hybridization of Lynn Johnston’s “For Better or For Worse.”

WALKER: You mean that she’s going back to re-doing her old strips?

ANDELMAN: Yeah, but you can’t tell from day to day if it’s a new strip or a reprint. You can, but you don’t know from day to day what you’re getting. I don’t even think some of the newspapers have caught on to that yet.

WALKER: I don’t know how that’s gonna work out. I was reading it this morning, and I was trying to figure out when that strip first appeared, probably, what, 30 years ago or something like that?

ANDELMAN: Yes.

WALKER: She’s always been an experimenter. I read an editorial yesterday from, I think, the Cleveland Plain Dealer where the author said what’s going on with comic strips. You’ve got “Doonesbury” writing stories about a guy who lost his leg in battle, and Tom Batiuk (“Funky Winkerbean”) has a main character die of cancer. Lynn Johnston, she’s got dogs dying, and she’s got the old man with Alzheimer’s…Where’s the funny stuff? So many strips now are dealing with emotional problems and things like that rather than making you laugh everyday.

ANDELMAN: It’s probably not unusual to find that in “Doonesbury” over the years, but “Funky Winkerbean,” which I hadn’t seen in years. It’s not carried near us. I read about the character dying of cancer, and I thought that must be kind of shocking in that strip. I’ve always equated that strip more along the lines of a “Hi & Lois” or a “Blondie” in that it’s about people, and it’s a gag-a-day kind of a thing. And then what? A comic strip character is dying of cancer? Wow. That’s a wake-up call for people reading that strip.

WALKER: It’s not the traditional thing that you see in comic strips. I like to make everybody laugh and maybe enjoy the day a little bit better or something like that. Laughter is a great healing conduit for enjoying life more.

ANDELMAN: You’ve gradually brought family, as did Dik Browne, into your strips and kind of pass it along, although obviously you’re still involved. In the case of Lynn Johnston, though -- and I know she has staff -- but if she’s tired of doing the strip, shouldn’t she just stop doing it? Or financially, is it just too hard to walk away from that kind of thing?

WALKER: I’ve heard some rumors about her getting a divorce, and her husband leaving her penniless. I don’t know. I guess he took the money or something. I don’t know. So maybe she still needs the money.

ANDELMAN: Oh, so the motivation might be a little different. Yeah. It’s sad. It’s such a great strip for so long, but it just seems kind of lackluster now. There are times when Garry Trudeau has taken a couple weeks or a few months off, and you’ll see older strips run. You can just see the difference in the quality of the art and the gags. And you know what’s happening, I think, with “For Better or For Worse.” I think it’s unfortunate because it doesn’t add to the legacy of the strip.

WALKER: I don’t know. Sometimes it’s interesting. They’ve been re-running the “Peanuts” strips for a long time, and it’s like I’m reading them for the first time. He and I started at the same time in 1950.

ANDELMAN: Right.

WALKER: I started one month before he did, and we became friends and had a lot of experiences together over the years. It was interesting to me to go back and see his early work. And while I think he learned how to draw a little bit better than the early years, it’s still interesting.

ANDELMAN: It’s funny. You’ve done a wonderful thing here. You’ve set me up for the last couple questions I wanted to ask you, which actually were about Charles Schulz, cause I know that you’ve been friends, and of course, he’s the subject of this new book, Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis. You go back, obviously, a long time. You nominated Schulz to be a member of the National Cartoonists Society. He was rejected at first because nobody knew him. I remember that it’s a great story that you told me, and I know you told Michaelis. What do you think of Michaelis’ belief that Schulz was largely an unhappy, perhaps clinically depressed, man?

WALKER: I don’t think it showed up that much as far as I’m concerned. He was always a little shy, and that’s how I got to know him. Somebody said, “There’s a cartoonist that just started a strip out in Minneapolis, but he doesn’t know any other cartoonists. Could you write him?” So I said sure. So I started writing him, and we began to correspond. Then I invited him to come up to New York and meet some of the cartoonists. He came up, and I put him up and gave him a place to stay. I threw some parties for him, and he met everybody. He wandered around New York looking at the big buildings. I called him a “Hayseed,” which he didn’t like.

ANDELMAN: I think you called him “A hayseed’s hayseed.”

WALKER: I didn’t think it was derogatory, but he took a little offense at it. But anyway, we still remained friends. And then we began to sit together at the National Cartoonists meetings. He’d come up here, and we’d sit at the same table. And I got him into the Cartoonists Society. They said, “You don’t know him. He doesn’t have any other friends so you can’t really nominate him.” That’s one of the reasons I invited him to come up here. I said, “You can’t keep him out. He’s got a comic strip that’s in the paper. He’s a cartoonist!” And so they finally let him in. And we used to sit together at all the cartoonists meetings, and then later on, he and I were invited to hand out the yearly Reuben Awards, Cartoonist of the Year. He and I were on the stage together for many years. He gave us a million dollars to help start the museum. And anyway, he was just a good friend, and we were always related along the way.

ANDELMAN: Have you read the book?

WALKER: I started it, but I haven’t had the time really to get really engrossed in it. It’s right in front of me.

ANDELMAN: It’s funny, same here. It really is a fascinating book, but I also wonder if it gives you pause as someone who’s had a very long, very successful career to think about what might be written when your time comes if there’s someone out there thinking I’m going to write a posthumous biography of Mort. Are there things that you worry about being written or said about you at that time?

WALKER: You reminded me of a biographer, and somebody was asking him one day, all these books he’s written about people, and he said, “Why don’t you write a book about this guy?” And he named somebody, and the writer said, “I can’t write a book about him. I don’t know anything against him.” I would think that I’ve always been such a happy-go-lucky type of cheerful person and everything like that. It isn’t interesting.

ANDELMAN: Is there anything that you hope will be written about you when that time comes? Playboy liked to end its interviews over the years with what would you like to see on a tombstone, final words kind of thing. Do you have any thoughts about that?

WALKER: Only that I probably enjoyed life more than anybody I know, and I always like to leave them laughing, even on the street. I’m always saying funny things to people as they walk down the street. I like little kids. In the grocery store, I’m always talking to little kids: “Are you really a New York Yankee? You’ve got their T-shirt on there. Do you play baseball for them?” I’m always having fun.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

David Michaelis, "Schulz and Peanuts" author: Mr. Media Interview


Peanuts Treasury was the first hardcover book I remember getting as a kid, somewhere around 1968, 1969. I spent hours reading and re-reading it, losing myself in the comic misadventures of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, wishing I could be like Charles Schulz, the strip’s writer and artist. My first dog, acquired around that same time, was not coincidentally a beagle, like Snoopy, whom we named Peppy, and I loved that crazy dog. I was so fond of Peanuts Treasury that it’s one of the few prized possessions from my misspent youth that followed me through college, half a dozen adult relocations, and is now on my daughter’s bookshelf.

It’s hard to find anyone who has anything bad to say about “Peanuts” or Schulz. The strip’s creator lived and thrived in the pre-Internet age where the world didn’t demand every detail of a celebrity’s life be preserved and shared. For the most part, we knew only his good works and the enduring cartoon series based on them. In his new book, Schulz and Peanuts, biographer David Michaelis introduces readers to the real cartoonist behind the daily strip. Michaelis’ previous biographical work includes a history of painter N. C. Wyeth.

(Incidentally, the Schulz family – led by Sparky’s widow, Jean – has aggressively come out against the book they once authorized and with which they cooperated fully.)

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BOB ANDELMAN/MR. MEDIA: You write in the book that different people called Charles Schulz by different names, depending, I guess, on their level of familiarity with him and his comfort level with them. What would you call him if you met him today?

DAVID MICHAELIS: In my dreams, and I do meet Sparky occasionally in my dreams, we’re on a first-name basis, meaning the time, as you know, you spend with a figure and you’re thinking about him and about his work and his life every day, you do occasionally meet up in a dream at night. And I’ve had a few where Sparky has called me “David” and I’ve called him “Sparky” and sometimes tried to judge his expressions. I’ve tried to make sense of what he thinks of all this, but in real life, I would call him “Mr. Schulz.” If I were opening the door of the Warm Puppy Coffee Shop at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena in Santa Rosa, I would walk in and walk up to his table and say, “Mr. Schulz, how do you do?” I think he had a certain level of formality and decency and a kind of calmness that inspired respect.

ANDELMAN: What was going on in your life professionally when this book came along, and how did it come along?

MICHAELIS: Well, I was two years away from a previous biography of an artist, N. C. Wyeth, and I felt very strongly when I saw that Charles Schulz had died that a piece of my childhood had just vanished. I was not unlike you in a very specific regard - I actually had a beagle, too. In fact, that dog came to us from the pound and was given to us as a dog named “Phooey,” and we thought that was a terrible name for a beagle, and so we renamed him “Pooey,” which is what stuck with us with this beagle.

I also had a Linus sweatshirt, and I was very much -- in that moment in 1967, 1968 -- of great self-identification with “Peanuts” characters. But actually, it was looking in these years of studying “Peanuts” as a biographer that I often came across one of Snoopy’s exclamations repeated frequently in the early years, “Phooey!” he would yell, and I figured that was probably why the previous owners had named our dog that.

I had a great, strong childhood feeling about “Peanuts”, and to find him now gone in the year 2000, which was in itself one of those years that people my age had been waiting for all our lives. The year 2000 was so far in the future and seemed so impossible that I wondered if I would even be alive. And to now find Charles Schulz gone within a month and a half of the turning of the millennium, it was a shock.

I remember thinking that when I saw “Peanuts” in its fullest accounting, in the New York Times, I remember there were small displays of the characters, small little introductions, sensing for the first time how these characters that I felt I knew so well might be connected to his work and to his life. And overall, my sense was, Gee, there is a moment here that maybe will close soon but in which Charles Schulz can be seen for the first time in the context of the times in which he grew up and in the times in which “Peanuts” was written and the times in which he himself changed and influenced through his work. I thought a big, full-length proper biography was not only due this American genius (but) I was still kind of mad at the Pulitzer Prize committee for not awarding Charles Schulz a Pulitzer Prize. He seemed not to ever have been undervalued as strongly as he felt he was, but I certainly felt he had been somehow overlooked in certain ways, and I thought if his life had been told perhaps in a more simplified way, then it might ultimately reveal greater complexity.

ANDELMAN: It’s one thing to have a thought in a vacuum that someone would make an interesting biography, and it’s another whole one to devote what, six, seven years of your life? How did you get the clearance early on to get the access to the people and the documents and everything else that you really needed to do something like this?

MICHAELIS: In thinking over Schulz, I put it aside thinking I had no business writing about Schulz, probably because I wasn’t known as or had not had adult professional training as a comics guy. I was not a writer about comics. I was a reader of comics but not a writer of them and never had written about comics in my professional life. But after I thought things over... As with some many of these things, I think the subject chooses you rather than you choosing the subject, two people came long in the next month or two after his death and said to me, apropos almost of nothing except it turned out my own inner doghouse thoughts, “Hey, did you know that Charles Schulz spent a good deal of his adult life wishing to meet Andrew Wyeth and hoping to know Andrew Wyeth or loved his work?” And I had just finished a biography of N. C. Wyeth and thought to myself, well, if there’s a connection to Andrew Wyeth, presumably there may be a connection to this whole world that I’ve just been living in of illustration, which was an undervalued art form in somewhat the same way that comics were.

I wrote to Charles Schulz’ widow, Jean Schulz and ten days later heard back, and Jean Schulz said that her husband, Sparky, she put it in the present tense, she said, “You’ll be glad to hear that my husband has your book, and it’s on the table beside the drawing table at home, and he was reading it in the last months of his life.”

It felt like not just a vote of confidence, but it almost had a “it was meant to be” feeling about it. I think Wyeth and Schulz are very different people, and there’s a very different story there, but to see this undervalued art form and relate it in some ways to comics was a starting point in some ways of understanding the comics of Schulz. But more than that, I felt strongly after looking into the images of Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, familiar images if you read those books and Scribner Illustrated Classics, and finding Wyeth’s life in them that this might be an approach to “Peanuts” and I felt strongly that there was more, there had to be more to “Peanuts” if it was as complex in nuance as it seemed to be, and it had to relate in some way to his life.

ANDELMAN: You heard back from Jean, and how much time went by before you actually got started?

MICHAELIS: I wrote to Jean in May, she wrote back, the month turned, and we were into June. We met in June, because I happened to be out in California at a wedding about two weeks later. She agreed to meet with me. We met. We spoke at length about the subject of a biography, and we both agreed to get started interviewing sooner than later, especially with the men who Schulz had known in the war. I think I learned recently from the Ken Burns documentary about WWII that now it’s up to 1,200 veterans a day dying off in 2007, so it was probably a slightly slower rate in 2000. But still, it was clear that to get to some of these men who knew him in the war, his neighborhood friends growing up, the folks who knew him at art instructioning would be a great thing for not only the book but also the archives of the Charles M. Schulz Museum, which was then pretty much still on the drawing board. I agreed that my notes and interview materials and research materials should all be placed into the research center at the Museum so that there would be a kind of nucleus in the archives there. I felt very strongly that that was a great thing to do and that it would be of some service to the whole idea of an archive.

I think that there was no question that people were still in grief about Schulz at the time, and my interviews began almost immediately. I still to this day wonder whether or not had I started a few years later, there might have emerged a different portrait. But people were really ready to talk to me about Sparky. I found in my earliest interviews that I almost couldn’t get a word in edgewise, and it’s true of interviewing, as you know; you go and see someone, and they have had a lifetime of experience with the person you are writing about, or they’ve had half a lifetime or anyway a long relationship usually, and there’s a lot to say. You really don’t need to say a thing. They want to tell their story.

Schulz had such a profound impact not only on all of us readers but those in his life, too, and that was the first awareness I had of some of Schulz’s, the nuances, the subtleties of Schulz’s character, but also, as I began to read the comic strip now in earnest, there was, to me, a whole world that was embedded and now was beginning to correspond to the things I was hearing about in his life. And then to go to his correspondence and his business papers with the syndicate, opening up those, there was a richness suddenly, a kind of three-dimensional -- I don’t know if you played it, but I remember as a kid, suddenly chess was played on Lucite on three, or checkers, in three levels at the same time. I always felt it was a little like that with the interviewing and the papers and the strip itself.

ANDELMAN: I suspect that a lot of the people that you interviewed, particularly the older people, found it easier to talk about Schulz shortly after his death than when he was alive, because he was very private, right?

MICHAELIS: Absolutely.

ANDELMAN: Did not want people talking about him, so they probably had decades of things that they wanted to tell.

MICHAELIS: Absolutely. Exactly. I think one of the complications that came up, the words I would hear about Sparky were that he was a wonderful man, as you and I would imagine, and that he was shy and that he was humble and that he was unchanged from his earlier days, usually, that he was generous and that he was fun and funny and had a sharp, edgy wit at times. There was always a moment in which someone would say, “But you know, there was more to it.” That’s all true, and there would be anecdotes and material presented along those lines and very warmly and very appreciatively.

ANDELMAN: Before we turned on the tape, we were talking, and I was telling you that I had done this biography of Will Eisner, another comics legend. And in doing that, I can still remember sitting at the dinner table with him one night when he started telling me about his children, something that he had never talked about before, and finding out -- I don’t want to make this about my book or Eisner -- at that moment that a lot of what had happened to him in the last thirty years had to do with the loss of his daughter as a teenager. I knew at that moment that that was going to be the electrifying moment of the book, and what I wondered about, was there a similar kind of an “a-ha” moment in researching Schulz and learning about Schulz, or was it a lot of things?

MICHAELIS: I think it was an accumulation, without question, but I had moment after moment where I was surprised to learn that Schulz was more complicated than I could have guessed and that I really was with everybody else, I expected a very specific kind of person, and my sympathies or my feelings about him grew and I became far more engaged with him as a man, as a person, than I had been before, because I found it fascinating. I found what I was hearing about him fascinating.

The whole theme of love, for instance. He had a very difficult time throughout his life, to hear the story told by those nearest him, to hear himself tell the story. Another great source for me was the interviews he had given to American newspapers over the years. He considered the newspaper his employer. He considered the managing editor of any newspaper who sent him a reporter to do an interview, he considered that person to be part of his job to respond to, so over the years, he made an account of his life. Sometimes it was day by day, week by week, and you could chart some of the changes in his views and his thinking as those went on.

Let me back up. I remember my first interview with Cathy GuisewGaryite (“Cathy”), the cartoonist, and I remember as I was leaving her office, she said, “You know, this is going to be fascinating for you because you are going to find out something right away. You are going to find out that Sparky is incredibly big and incredibly small at the same time.” Cathy, who had given a eulogy for Sparky some months earlier at his memorial service in Santa Rosa and clearly understood him and clearly was a trusted and beloved member of his. I’m not sure if inner circle is the right term, but she was a close friend and knew him. It wasn’t somebody looking in from the outside, she had known him, and I remember her saying to me in that first interview, “You know, he always wanted to know if he was loved. He would test you. He would test you to see whether you really loved him, and he wasn’t quite sure even then once you had made your declaration, even kiddingly, or even light-heartedly or even passionately or even with great depth of feeling, ‘I love you, Sparky.’” She wasn’t sure even then whether he could hear it.

I remember just before that seeing that last interview with Al Roker in which he, having had a stroke, in the context of his illness he was very vulnerable. The vulnerability of Charles Schulz was suddenly very much there for the whole world to see and that sense of vulnerability in which he was able to say, “I can’t believe that what I did, they loved what I did. I can’t believe that what I did, that they thought it was so good.” That even now, at the end, after all, wondering whether his work had been loved truly, whether he had been seen and understood, whether it was understood, that whole process that he had gone through in his entire life of becoming an artist, triumphing over doubts of all kinds in his background; his parents not thinking that a cartoonist would ever amount to very much; supporting him, trying to be the loving parents of an aspiring artist; his cousins being a little more cruel to him, saying, “You’re never going to make it. You’re never going to amount to anything,” but that he fulfilled expectations, that he exceeded all expectations and fulfilled himself but still could doubt whether or not what he had done was good. He would say to Gary Groth, the editor of The Comics Journal, very comprehensive interview at the end of his life, you know, “Have I had success? Do you think so?” and mean it. He wasn’t just jesting, he wasn’t being ironic, he really meant it. You hear it over and over again, Schulz doubting whether he’s loved, whether he’s seen clearly, whether he’s understood.

It goes back into some deep childhood stuff where he even said back at one point something the way Linus would be sent by Charlie Brown to talk to a little red-haired girl on the playground. I discovered that he had asked this Pudge Geduldig, stellar golfer on the St. Paul Central High golf team, to go back and talk to a girl that Charles Schulz, little Sparky Schulz, had been in love with, had a crush on on the Lake Street streetcar, and he just wanted Pudge to go back to St. Paul and ask her, “Did you notice him? Did you see him? Were you aware that there was this boy who had a crush on you?” Of course, this by then was the early 1970s, Charles Schulz, world-famous Charles Schulz could have picked up the phone and called Lila Bischoff and said “Hi, Lila, this is Charles Schulz. You probably don’t remember me. Ha, ha, ha, but gosh, I write the comic strip ‘“Peanuts”,’ and I just want to talk to you about the old days.” He would never have done that, and the whole feeling of being unseen and overlooked remained in his life. I felt very strongly, as I kept finding this out, as I kept learning, how he didn’t really want to free himself from a lifetime of yearning, longing, unfulfillment on the one hand, anxieties, fears, worries, in addition….

ANDELMAN: One of the things that struck me was that he never really matured in some ways. Sometimes, we have these feelings when we’re a kid, we have them when we’re a teenager, that we don’t belong, that we don’t fit in, that no one understands us, but most of us sort of grow out of that, and by oh, I don’t know, 47, my age, you kind of feel like you are starting to get the hang of things, but I get the sense that he never did. He had children, and I am sure he loved his children, and he certainly loved his second wife, but as a member of greater society that maybe he just never did quite get it, he never did feel a part of things.

MICHAELIS: I think he was continuously aware that he didn’t quite fit in. I remember a quote that I used as an epigraph where he said, “Cartoonists don’t live anywhere.” I think he had a sense of disconnection from the world and from the world around him, and he was in such an odd place after a certain point in his life with the kind of success that “Peanuts” had, with the kind of really quite unique place that “Peanuts” was in the culture. As a cartoonist, he almost had to explain himself after a certain point because he was so much more than a cartoonist, and he kept things real for himself by living what he felt was… Well, he would live on his own terms, and he would live in an ordinary way.

I remember Clark Gesner saying this to me very early on. Clark Gesner was the fellow who did You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, who wrote the lyrics and composed the music and eventually was part of the team that put that musical into the theater in the 1960s. He had visited with Schulz and knew him to some extent, and he said, “You know, this is going to baffle you for the entire time you are working on it, because Sparky presented himself to the world as ordinary. He resisted being treated as extraordinary even though he knew he was.” Even though he knew he had this talent, and even though he knew it could project him and his work into extraordinary stratospheres undreamt of by a boy from Snelling and Selby Avenues in St. Paul, still he kept resisting anything like fame or celebrity, and he lived a life where he had to insist on being ordinary, and it put pressure on him. It put a lot of pressure on him because at the same time he yearned for recognition.

ANDELMAN: I think once one of your characters is a balloon in the Macy’s Day Parade, I think you have pretty well established some measure of success. A lot of the early headlines related to your book have had to do with that there is this darker side of him, that he had perhaps some psychological issues. Are you uncomfortable with that emerging so quickly and maybe that defining the book?

MICHAELIS: I am hoping, as all writers do, that the book itself is read and is read as carefully as the blogs and the stories about the book, because I think that in some ways this whole debate misses the point of why biography, which is to understand Charles Schulz as Schulz understood himself, not as his children understood him or as the world understood him but as he saw his life. That’s certainly the point of view from which I was trying to approach his life, both finding it through “Peanuts”, which is a more abstracted way of understanding how Charles Schulz knew the world, but how he in his own words understood.

If you take simply the issue of his melancholy, which is the word he used to describe the daily sense or weekly sense of angst and dread and strong feeling of doubt and, in some cases, even doom, this was the language he used to describe himself. There was never a diagnosis given by a doctor that was then embraced by Schulz and others about his condition, if you want to call it that, or his situation. But he himself understood himself to be doubtful, insecure, uncertain, fearful, worried. I could keep going, but it would all be too much all of a sudden to hear all of this without saying, as well, yes, “Did he enjoy life?” Well, you know, you couldn’t be literally a victim of clinical depression and be as productive as he was. There’s not a chance. You wouldn’t have found Charles Schulz doing what Charles Schulz did, which was to live with and overcome these things. In a real sense, he was Charlie Brown because the central quality of his life was fortitude. It was getting up every day and trying again.

ANDELMAN: I was going to ask you, were there periods in his life where he could not get up and produce?

MICHAELIS: No, that’s just it. You see, this is why his children quite rightly object to a world that’s saying, “Charles Schulz was an unhappy man, universally categorically across the board.” I think my book is a very sympathetic portrait of a guy overcoming and dealing with his worries. The central story of the book is the achievement of “Peanuts”, the achievement of creating this comic strip that became the world over beloved and embraced, and he became the most popular visual artist of the 20th Century. You couldn’t do that and be a depressed person, but you also couldn’t do that and be a normal person. We’re talking about an artist. We’re talking about a complicated artist, a guy whose complications were the stuff of his art, where he made conscious and deliberate choices not to get help for his struggles but to continue to tap into them and use them as the sources of his art.

ANDELMAN: One of the great devices in the book, I hope you don’t mind the term device, but one of the great devices in the book is that as you are reading, there are “Peanuts” comic strips that are dropped in that, among other things, besides being entertaining, they start putting his life and the things that he felt and the way he did things in context. I wanted to ask you, which came first, the anecdotes or the strip? Did you tailor the strips to match up with the anecdotes or vice versa? How did that all come about, and that must have been very time-consuming in and of itself.

MICHAELIS: The uncovering of the life, the revealing of the life in the slow, steady process or actually sometimes very sudden leaps that one makes at the beginning came first. In other words, as I spoke to people, as I gained some understanding from papers and documents and records of how Schulz had lived his life, how he saw the world, how he interacted with people, how he did and didn’t change at first glance from boyhood to adulthood, it was suddenly the big themes of unrequited love, the big themes of Schroeder’s devotion to art as something that will be making absolutely oblivious to this overpowering girl at the end of the piano asking for his attention, the longing for a little red-haired girl. You begin to see the big themes emerge in broad strokes, but then some little pieces of the puzzle float up, and suddenly there I am looking into a drawer and oh, there’s a picture of a girl, an attractive girl in probably the 1940s to judge from the dress and light and quality of the photograph, and then there’s the next time I’m in Minnesota asking one of his art instruction colleagues, “You know, there was this photograph, did you know…” “Oh, that’s Naomi Cohn. Everyone was in love with her.” “Sparky probably had a crush….” “Oh yeah, Sparky did have a crush on her. I remember…” suddenly emerging a figure of Naomi Cohn, and then suddenly I’m finding Sparky talking about her in several interviews now that hadn’t been out before, and suddenly a portrait is emerging, and because of the United Media database, the comic strip library, I could now go and type in Naomi, and then suddenly up would come, oh suddenly here in 1992, here’s Charles Schulz putting Naomi Cohn into a strip, and oh, yes, in fact, this character Naomi in “Peanuts” is wearing a beret, and that turns out to have been a characteristic of Naomi, the aspiring artist in Minnesota in the 1940s. Sometimes it was as simple as that, and sometimes it added complexity and richness to find something from his life in the strip either chronologically or thematically.

ANDELMAN: I thought about this a lot, but when my dad died a few years ago, I went through his personal affects and uncovered a number of things that disturbed me in a variety of ways. As someone who also writes biography, I have to admit I would never want someone picking through the bones of my life and discovering and magnifying as we do, I mean, that’s what we do for a profession, my mistakes and idiosyncrasies. I don’t want my wife to have to read, “Oh, well, all of his friends remember that he had this unrequited affection for Andrea Passer in high school, and 30 years later, he still thought of her.” Does that kind of stuff ever cross your mind when doing this kind of work? Do you ever have that moment of a little wince, maybe Sparky wouldn’t really like me writing about this, and maybe I shouldn’t? Maybe this I should set aside.

MICHAELIS: Clearly, the choices that led to a book that’s only, and I say, really mean only, 533 pages long, it shows how much I did have to leave out. It shows how severe the selection process is when the first draft of my thorough full-length manuscript was about 1,800 pages long, so to cover a life in a thorough way is by itself a kind of trick, and it is a distortion, and it’s an imperfect instrument for re-creating a life.

But I do believe that there is a way of looking at biography in the context of an artist’s life that makes it valid to do what I did, which is to present the life and the work together. I can tell you, absolutely, that if someone wrote a book about my father and said anything critical, I’d be unhappy, too. I well understand this, but I also believe, and it just jumped into my head, I actually haven’t even thought of this before now, this country embraced a story called The Bridges of Madison County, and in that story, a love affair is related to children who discover a trunk full of the evidence of this love affair in their mother’s life after she’s gone. It enhances the discovery, painful as it is, that she had this relationship during her marriage enhances their sympathy and understanding for what she went through as a person and for who she really was, and the truth hurts. Sometimes along with the hurt that goes with truth is a greater sympathy and a greater feeling of love for someone because you now know more of who they were rather than less.

If what I’ve written about Charles Schulz makes people who love him uncomfortable, I have to believe that if you read it carefully and think it through, that there is enough there to love him the more for who he was despite himself and despite the world that he was trying to grow out of. We all have limitations, and one of the things I kept bumping up against with Schulz was the sense that he had triumphed over limitations, and his limitations were always visible to him, indeed down to the very last strip of ““Peanuts”.” The very last daily strip is Snoopy pondering a snowball while a snowball fight is going on behind him that he can’t participate in because, as the caption says -- and it’s not a thought balloon -- it was a caption, the dog realized that his father hadn’t taught him how to make a snowball. That’s the last statement of ““Peanuts”.” It’s a statement about limitations. It’s about being alone with who you really are and what you were taught and what you were given, and I think it’s very important, if you’re going to try to understand Schulz at all or you want to believe that you know who he was, to know where he came from and how he dealt with the world that he grew up in and how he brought it into his adult life and what he did and didn’t understand of his own life is very important to see.

ANDELMAN: Just a couple more minutes, David. You’ve been very patient about this, and particularly you brought up his last strip, and I wanted to ask you about that. The coincidence that his last strip appeared the day that he died is too much for some skeptics. One comic fan I spoke to in preparing to talk to you insisted that I ask you this: Is there any chance that either his passing was withheld from announcement to coincide with that last strip because the two were so close? And he insisted that I ask you this, is there any chance that Schulz either so to speak pulled the plug himself or had a family member do it so that he and the strip went out together?

MICHAELIS: It is a completely valid question, and I was asked it frequently by the reporters, such as Steve Kroft from “60 Minutes” who had seen Schulz before his death, in the year before his death. Reporters and smart, engaged thinking people who interacted with Schulz understood one of the simplest and basic facts about him, which he himself had put out there for years, which is that he always said, “When I die, the strip dies.” He also always said, “I would feel very empty without this strip.” And in one case, he had joked around saying, “If I didn’t have the strip, I’d be dead.”

He had time and time again showed how fused he believed his life and the strip were. And in the dismay and upset of the months that followed his stroke in November of 1999, in the dismay of realizing he was not going to be carrying on ““Peanuts”,” he was profoundly shaken, and you see it in the interviews he gave at the time. And there’s ample evidence to understand how completely baffled he was about how he was going to go on and what life meant now. So that to find some way to end his life as the strip ends would be logical.

I have to say that in every way I looked at this, without going into a full-scale Congressional investigation into it, I had to believe that no, he did not, or no, he was not, or no, there was no assistance. It would be inconsistent with everything I found to believe that that was true.

However, I do think that as I understand it to myself, I think he somehow witch-doctored himself to that point. One hears about it all the time, the giving up of life, the giving up. Whatever your belief system is, it can engage in this question, whether he gave himself up or whatever. However you see it. But the medical terminology given to me to understand this by his family, by his doctor, is just vague enough still to make one wonder, and there’s no question that the question is valid, but I think I would have to conclude myself from everything that I could find at the time that no, he went by natural causes.

ANDELMAN: Last question: were there any other parts of this Charles Schulz puzzle that you were unable to solve after all these years?

MICHAELIS: Well, I wished from the beginning -- and I still wish -- that the clear evidence of his relationship with his mother had been left on paper more than by the hearsay and very considered evidence left by people who knew her and given in interviews. I wish there were her letters I wish she had written to him. I wish there was on paper some way of seeing how she and Sparky had lived their life, the life of his boyhood, and whether or not there’s any chance to understand his parents remains to be seen. There may yet come some moment where out of a shoebox comes all sorts of letters from his early life. I felt that was a puzzle that I could only guess at or only become closer to understanding through the interview process and through a lot of legwork in historical societies turning out. Just seeing her death certificate and understanding that her death was a death by cervical cancer and not from colon cancer led through numerous channels of research and interviewing to new ideas about why Schulz had had the kind of experience that he had in high school during her illness and so forth.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

David Andelman, "A Shattered Peace" author, Forbes.com executive editor: Mr. Media Interview


David Andelman and I have been connected via the internet for the last few years. I frequently receive emails from people who remember me from CBS News or The New York Times, who want to reconnect via Facebook or network through LinkedIn. Unfortunately, I never worked for CBS News or The New York Times.

And on his end, I suspect David Andelman receives late-night emails intended for me from overdue bill collectors and people who want him to teach them how to become sports agents, based on a story I wrote for Gallery magazine in 1994.

We have both, I believe, handled the mistaken identity issue with good humor, eventually referring to each other as “cousin.” Today, I even introduced David to my daughter as “Uncle” David.

David is a veteran foreign affairs correspondent whose assignments took him to more than fifty countries, as Paris correspondent for CBS News and as the Southeast Asia and Eastern European bureau chief for The New York Times. He also spent time at the New York Daily News and CNBC.

He is now the author of a topical new book, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and The Price We Pay Today, as well as two earlier works, The Peacemakers and The Fourth World War.

When I learned that David, who is currently the executive editor of Forbes.com, the online identity of the esteemed business magazine, would be appearing in the new media capital of St. Petersburg, Florida for the St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading today, I had to invite my cousin for an in-person edition of Mr. Media.

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BOB ANDELMAN/MR. MEDIA: David, welcome to Mr. Media.

DAVID ANDELMAN: Thanks for having me. Great to know a new cousin.

MR. MEDIA: Let’s start on a very serious note, David. Did you bring any mail for me?

D. ANDELMAN: Email. You have it all.

MR. MEDIA: Your new book, A Shattered Peace, is an extension of your 1965 senior honors thesis at Harvard. What took you so long?

D. ANDELMAN: I got interested in that topic at that time, and in fact, a gentleman who helped me a lot on the book, Professor Ernest May, who’s the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard -- probably the leading diplomatic historian of our time -- he really inspired me about the Versailles Conference, the Paris Peace Conference, that led to the Versailles Treaty. And the reason I got interested was that there were very few real turning points in history. As I’ve explained to people, I’m not a believer so much in the single causation theory of history, but there are certain turning points.

There was a Congress of Vienna in 1814; this, Versailles, a century later, and then now we’re a century later after the Versailles Conference of 1919, so we’re coming up on another hundred years. Each of those really changed the whole direction, the kind of paths that the world has been able to take ever since then. And once you embark on these kinds of paths, it’s very hard to fight your way back into it, and often only because of millions of lives as has been the case certainly in what happened after the Versailles Conference in the past hundred years.

Also, whenever I was traveling, and I’ve been to, as you mentioned, I’ve been to over fifty countries as a foreign correspondent. I would ask people, “Where did things kind of go wrong in your country?” I thought they would say the Second World War, the Cold War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, even the first Iraq War. I thought they’d say one of those. And when they thought about it, they’d say, “I think it really has to be the First World War, and the peace came after that. And all the mistakes they made and how they rejiggered the boundaries and how they changed the world for our country -- and never for the better. So I finally decided, look, I understand the subject matter. And going back 40 years to my time at Harvard, it’s time now to actually sit down and say what does it really mean on the ground today as well. So that’s how the book came about.

MR. MEDIA: One of the things that I think that’s driving interest in the book is the straight line that you draw between the Peace Conference at Versailles following the great war, World War I, and the current conflict in Iraq and the Middle East in general. Let’s try to tackle this in pieces because I, for one, am not that smart about these things. First, what is the historical significance of Versailles in 1919 as the next 90 years have drawn out?

D. ANDELMAN: What the major powers did then, especially the Western powers, the Allies -- the British and the French -- they redrew the map of the world in their own image. What they wanted to do was they wanted to create a series of new very heterogeneous countries that were weak that they could control, therefore, as major powers. It would also give them the kinds of territorial advantage that they needed. For instance, the British needed a route across the Middle East, across Mesopotamia, and so on that would allow them to continue to deal with the Raj, as it was called, the British imperial India, their colonies in India. The French needed a territory in the Middle East, also, to be able to get to their territories in Indochina and in Southeast Asia. So each of them needed a secure region that they could control that would be dependent on them and that would not be independent in any way or develop any kind of strength of its own. They called them mandates, their mandates. So that’s what they did. They drew the map of the world, particularly the Middle East, and certainly also in the Balkans, for instance, in parts of Asia and so on, which I also deal with in the book. They drew them to their advantage and not to the advantage of the people who lived there and with little understanding of the people who lived there and certainly not to the advantage of the Americans. President Wilson, who came over with the idea of democracy as the big thing, and that was very much a buzzword, even then, for the Americans. They wanted democratic solutions. The French and the British wanted nothing of the kind.

MR. MEDIA: It didn’t work out, though. And I’m thinking, as you were saying that, that the British and the French were seeing the future would be the same as the past. They were still going to control all these colonies. In 1919, just a little too soon to be thinking that there’s going to be this technological and this communications explosion that was going to really free a lot of people. But their plans in 1990 were still pretty much that it was going to be business as usual.

D. ANDELMAN: Right. What they failed to realize was, a lot of them, was that the world had profoundly changed during the First World War. Remember, when we went into the war, the major powers were the big empires. It was the British, the French, Austria-Hungary, the enemy Germany, and the Ottoman Empire -- which was basically Turkey and all of the Middle East. Those were the major powers of the time. We came out of that war. Remember Germany was prostrate, Austria-Hungary was carved up and disintegrated, the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating.

The major powers were, when we came out of the war, really the United States and imperial Japan. The British and the French hadn’t recognized the fact that they were no longer major powers. Their economies had been prostrated by the war. Their colonies were desperate to get rid of them, get out from under their rule. So, really, the whole world had changed. And oil was suddenly becoming, suddenly rising to the level of consciousness, although the major powers still hadn’t recognized how important it would be in the future. And, certainly, as you mentioned, communications had profoundly changed, but they didn’t recognize that either. So, right, it was a whole different world after the war than before the war. The British and the French, particularly, were trying to preserve the old order, which was dead.

MR. MEDIA: The decisions at Versailles wound up creating the Middle Eastern countries. Can we blame Hitler’s rise on Versailles as well?

D. ANDELMAN: Oh, absolutely. There’s no question about it. We created Iraq. We created Israel, Palestine, and what there was of them, a Palestinian state. We created, certainly, Yugoslavia, which was an amalgam of six different countries really. We created Czechoslovakia. The Czech and the Slovak nations were slammed together. We created all of these countries, which were not really destined to be together. There’s no question about that. So, yes, that was a major problem. And in Asia, they left Japan as the overlord really over Asia and desperately weakened China, which led to the rise of the Communist party in China.

MR. MEDIA: It’s interesting in the book cause you talk about how it was like two conferences going on. There were the people who were running things and making all the decisions, and then there were all the people who showed up from all over the world and thought they were a part of it but weren’t. Is that the way the world pretty much always runs?

D. ANDELMAN: Well, it did back then. That’s for sure. This was supposed to be the peace to end all wars, and so every nation in the world was supposed to come. This was Paris, the conferees, the Allies, certainly. They constituted themselves as almost like a world government, in effect. And, right, there were a lot of countries, a lot of individuals from different countries, who really had their nose pressed against the glass and really couldn’t get anywhere. There was a busboy at the Ritz named Nguyan Ai Quoc. He wanted desperately to get independence for Indochina, Cochin China, which was actually Vietnam, and he drafted a series of Eight Principles like Wilson’s Fourteen Points and presented them to the Americans and the other Allied delegations and was basically told to go fly a kite. He turned Communist, went off to Moscow, joined the Comintern, and later he took the nom de guerre of Ho Chi Minh. And that was the rise of Communism in Vietnam.

All of these countries, you can go through them one by one, the ones who basically got the boot at Versailles, terrible things happened. And the kinds of nations that they assembled there, terrible things happened, and we’re paying the price today.

MR. MEDIA: This is a skeptic’s question. What is the value of going back to an event like that and dissecting it in such incredible detail? How can that be useful today? A lot of people only want to deal in the present. We always hear, even Tony Soprano said, those that don’t study the past will re-commit the same mistakes. I think he said it better. Why should we go back and look at things like this?

D. ANDELMAN: Because we are, again, at a crossroads, especially in many parts of the world, and we have to see how…The way I see the world going in the future is I think we’re getting back to the kinds of microstates, I call them microstates, that should’ve been created then. And Yugoslavia’s working very well. We have Slovenia. We have Croatia. In fact, I met the President of Croatia a few weeks ago. He was on a panel I was chairing in New York, and he agreed. He said, “We finally are getting a country that we should’ve had back in 1919, 1920.” All these countries are getting their independence suddenly. The Czech Republic and Slovakia are two independent countries now, and they’re prospering. This is a lesson that we can learn that these small microstates can work in the modern world. It certainly is happening in the old Soviet Union is being broken up, and now I suspect we’ll wind up with three countries or at least two or three countries in Iraq. These were the kinds of states that should’ve been created there and were not because we didn’t understand. The major powers didn’t understand the consequences of the sort of self-serving kinds of countries they were putting together back then. We’re now in a position where we can recognize that. We can right the wrongs back then, and if we don’t, we could be in for another hundred years of terrible problems in the world.

MR. MEDIA: And how does that apply to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

D. ANDELMAN: It does, it does apply because what the Jews were given, remember, in the Balfour Declaration, which actually was ratified by the countries in Paris. They were given a homeland -- which is great -- without any understanding that there were also other people living there.

MR. MEDIA: Just a minor detail.

D. ANDELMAN: Minor detail. And if they had carved up the Middle East differently, they could’ve given a real country to the Palestinians. They weren’t called Palestinians, of course, in those days but to the indigenous Arabs in that part of the world. They could’ve found a way of making them all be able to live apart but peacefully in the same region.

MR. MEDIA: Near the end of the book -- and I’m bouncing around a little bit -- but near the end of the book, you say, and I’m gonna quote here:

“In the end, Versailles proved a colossal failure for Woodrow Wilson, for the United States, and for the future of a world that had hoped it might be governed by principles of freedom and self-determination even today. Covenants of peace were not openly arrived at. Freedom of the seas was not secured. Free trade was not established in Europe. National armaments were not reduced.”

I read that, and I thought, Yikes, what a mess!” And it actually reminded me of kind of the disastrous set of international policies or non-policies that we’re living through today. Am I overstating the connection?

D. ANDELMAN: No, no. You’re saying it exactly right. That’s exactly the kind of conclusion I try to draw in there. You’ve interpreted that very accurately. What’s interesting is I think that the countries basically come, eventually people come, to get the kinds of government that they deserve, that is right for them. That may be very different from the kind of government that we have. It may be different from the kind of democracy that we have. If you look at Russia, for instance, Russia has capitalism, which is good. It also has a very strong leader, which is what they really want. They want a strong leader. They’re not looking for a very heterogeneous democracy where you have 20 parties in the parliament all fighting over each other.

MR. MEDIA: They seem like they want a paternalistic society.

D. ANDELMAN: They do. They are a paternalistic society, exactly, and they want a strong leader. Not every country does. Some countries want a real American-style democracy, but it doesn’t work for everybody. So, yes, I think countries ultimately come to achieve… it may sometimes be at the cost of enormous bloodshed and whatever, but I think they ultimately come to achieve the kind of government that they deserve and their people want, if left alone.

MR. MEDIA: If left alone. It seems like the difference between U.S. involvement in World War I and World War II and the current war in Iraq is that we were pulled kicking and screaming into those first two wars whereas we jumped, almost gleefully, into Iraq. Is that also a correct differentiation?

D. ANDELMAN: Yes, but first let me answer the one question you did ask before. I realized I didn’t answer it, which was about World War II. I think it did set up World War II. There’s no question about that. The intent of the countries, especially the French, was to so weaken Germany politically and economically that they would never rise again. Well, the result was they resulted in huge inflation in Weimar, Germany, mega-inflation. People were out of work. There was enormous unemployment. The country was prostrate so they welcomed a leader like Hitler who came along and promised them to get rid of the Versailles Treaty, which was destroying their economy and their government and their society, and he did that. And that’s what really led to, almost directly to, World War II. There’s no question about that.

MR. MEDIA: We were kind of drawn into World War I and World War II. We didn’t really want to be in either. But in Iraq, it seems like we jumped in. We were really happy to be there and go and blow some stuff up. Is that differentiation correct?

D. ANDELMAN: I think, in some respect. What I think the Presidents, successive Presidents, saw in Saddam Hussein. They saw a Tito in Yugoslavia, who got Saddam out in some fashion. The Iraqi people would find a way on their own, maybe by partition, maybe by setting up a government of their own. The goal was to get rid of Saddam. He was the evil genius like Tito was the Communist leader in Yugoslavia. He died. We didn’t have to go in and get him. There was bloodshed. There was turmoil and then freedom for a lot of these countries in Yugoslavia. They thought the same thing could happen in Iraq. There was no question about that. So I think people went into the war with the best intentions, perhaps, but with not understanding at all the consequences because without understanding, necessarily, the people who are there and what was necessary for this to work itself through. So, you’re right. We were dragged into the other two wars. There’s no question about that. But the question is, were we dragged into Iraq? Well, we certainly were in the first Iraq war. Remember, we came in to rescue Kuwait. That was a pretty good reason for going in. Also to make sure that Kuwait’s oil didn’t flow into Saddam’s hands, but that’s another issue. The second war, I don’t know. The origins of it are so murky at this point and because things have gone so terribly wrong there, it’s hard to say.

MR. MEDIA: Could a different result in Versailles have really changed the world’s make-up today for the better?

DAVID ANDELMAN: I think it could have. I think definitely. There’s no question. I think it’s very unlikely that if Saddam would’ve come to power in Iraq, if things had been done differently then, I think that…

MR. MEDIA: No Hitler?

D. ANDELMAN: Oh no. I think if they hadn’t tried to destroy Germany, Hitler might never have come to power. I think that’s entirely possible. There were people like John Maynard Keynes, a very young economist in those days. He had a solution that would’ve worked in terms of reparations, in terms of the kind of payments that Germany was going to have to make and so on. He wrote a book called The Economic Consequences of the Peace after he walked out in disgust from the deliberations in Paris in 1919. If his concepts and if the concepts of others like him who wanted to see a strong but free Germany in the middle of Europe, as an anchor in the middle of Europe, if that had been paid attention to, we might never have had World War II. That’s entirely possible.

MR. MEDIA: I have to say, this seems like one of those Star Trek time paradigms. “If this, then that. If that, then this…”

D. ANDELMAN: Sure. The path not taken. Here we have all of these paths before us after this war. We choose this one. It’s very hard to fight your way back up to start over at square one and go down another path, and that’s what happened.

MR. MEDIA: You’ve written these other two books, The Peacemakers and The Fourth World War. After those books, have you seen that they have had an impact on the debate, on the discussion, and what do you think will happen following A Shattered Peace?

D. ANDELMAN: Well, let’s take The Fourth World War, particularly. It was interesting because that was done in the early 1990s, and terrorism was only just vaguely coming into vogue. The subtitle of the book was “Diplomacy, Espionage, and Espionage in the Age of Terrorism,” and my co-author was a gentleman named the Count de Marenches, who was the long-time head of French intelligence. Our theory was that terrorism was going to be the next major war. It was going to be a North-South conflict. We suggested that the world had to take a number of actions, which they never did, of course, if this was going to be prevented. But the world that we painted as a consequence, it was so frighteningly similar to this world, that I’m kind of hoping that people will see this book as a roadmap as well and do something about it. They didn’t particularly, in the last book, partly because Marenches was a Frenchman, and you know what Americans think of the French!

MR. MEDIA: Oui, oui.

Even more than the thesis of the book, one of the most compelling elements of A Shattered Peace is the colorful details and the anecdotes that you bring to bear on the storytelling. In one place, you quote an aide to then-President Woodrow Wilson, Colonel Edward House, describing the post-war situation of Hungary and suggest -- to the reader -- replacing Hungary in the reading of it with Iraq and Bolshevism with Al Qaeda. Is it really that similar? Again, we’re drawing that parallel.

D. ANDELMAN: Oh sure. Remember, the fears at the time were colossal in having to do with Bolshevism. Lenin and his people were predicting revolutions in the streets momentarily in London and Liverpool and across France and across Germany. The Communist parties were suddenly rising. There were actually Communist cells in various cities in Germany and even in France. People were desperately afraid in those days that Bolshevism really was the new terrorism in so many ways. It was the root of terrorism. And Lenin was quite definitive that he was going to be there to destroy the Capitalist system and have the Soviets take over across the West. There was a desperate fear. The result was it motivated them into failing to deal with Russia the way they should have and trying to draw them into the international system. That’s my fear now, that we need, in some fashion, to draw the Muslims into the international system more effectively so they feel they have a voice just like Bolshevism might have had a voice in those days.

MR. MEDIA: We always seem to demonize a group whether it’s the Muslims or the North Koreans, the Communists. We have to have someone…There was that whole issue even on…I hate to bring television into this, but the show “24” had that issue over a couple years. It’s like, “Who are we fighting against anymore?” Now, okay, it’s a little more clear, but maybe we’re just demonizing people. Maybe they’re not really…

D. ANDELMAN: Exactly. There certainly are people out there who are suicide bombers and blowing things up and blowing people up. 9/11 was a reality. It was a fact of life. And these are suicide bombers, and these were Muslims. But we can’t demonize all Muslims just like we couldn’t demonize all Russians or even all Bolsheviks. Not all of them wanted to see revolutions and blood running in the streets in the West. We have to find the right people to talk to and then bring them into the system and make sure we understand them.

MR. MEDIA: You mentioned Lenin, and I want to come back to Lenin because, again, this is the storytelling of the book. But a great moment of intrigue in the book is found right up front when future American spymaster Allen Dulles declines to take an urgent call from a Russian revolutionary because he was more interested in keeping a date with a buxom Swiss lass. The caller: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Oops. When and how did you dig up that detail? I love that.

D. ANDELMAN: It’s actually a detail that Dulles loved to tell on himself and on his life. It was actually written in one of his diaries. I found it there. But it’s so emblematic of the kinds of changes in history, these little turning points that could make such enormous differences. A date on a tennis court versus a half-hour conversation at a consulate. It could’ve changed the course of history! And I tried to get across the fact that that is the case very often if we don’t pay enormous attention to detail, it’s the details that can do us in.

MR. MEDIA: Suddenly, I have this flash. I’m thinking of former President Clinton. Maybe if there were a few moments that he had not spent in this little ante room…Well, anyway. I’m getting off-topic. I’m sorry.

D. ANDELMAN: Yeah, my wife and I have discussed that as well.

MR. MEDIA: That’s funny. But I loved that. That was just wonderful color. So I have to ask. Just wrapping up on the Iraq comparisons, do we have any business in Iraq as a government, as a country? And can the adventure there be justified or grounded in history at all?

D. ANDELMAN: We got rid of Saddam Hussein. Now was it up to us to do it, or was it up to the Iraqis themselves to do it? The Iraqis weren’t very successful in doing it so we did it. What would be interesting is to say the first George Bush, did he make a colossal mistake in not finishing things by halting short of Baghdad and saying, “Oh, the Iraqis will take care of it,” or just going in and taking care of it then and then pulling out immediately? We might never have had a second Iraq War if we hadn’t had the first. So I’m not going to say that there weren’t...Huge mistakes were made at every turning point. There’s no question about that. But, again, these are mistakes that we’re now in a position, I think, to rectify in terms of how we deal with this country going forward and what kind of a country we would start to plan for as we withdraw and hope to leave behind. That’s what’s critical, I think.

MR. MEDIA: Up until 2001, I always thought we were the country where we would read books and see movies about how our CIA did these things quietly and behind-the-scenes, and then we would hear about them later. But in the last six or seven years, it seems like the kind of jobs that the CIA did, we’re just out front with them now. We don’t like this dictator. We kill this dictator. We don’t care for this country, Iran. Iran, you’re not doing things we like anymore. We’re no longer the country that talks to or that negotiates. We’re just gonna come along and bomb you. Next! Syria, are you next? It really has changed.

D. ANDELMAN: Well, it has.

MR. MEDIA: It doesn’t seem like there’s been an upswelling of saying, “Hey, we need to start attacking people.” We just started doing it.

D. ANDELMAN: The French have done that. In fact, when I was talking to Marenches, my co-author in the last book, he used to have this thing where there would sometimes be actions, especially in Africa, that he felt it was necessary to be done by the French. It may be a small invasion. It may be assassinating a national leader or whatever. And he’d go in to see the French president. He had an arrangement with every French president. He worked for about four of them. And he would say, “We have to do this and that and this and that,” and he’d say it was a question of raison d’etats. “We have to do this.” And he would then pause, and if the French leader didn’t say anything, he had a go-ahead. But he had to have that 20-second moment when he could say, “No, you can’t do that”. He said it never happened. He was always allowed to do whatever he felt was necessary, often bloody.

MR. MEDIA: Wow. As a writer, I’m always interested in where other writers find details in events that happened in the days before electronic recording and, to some degree, reliable newspaper reporting that we would consider reliable. Can you share a little bit about your research methods and how you decided what was truth and what was fiction from 1919?

D. ANDELMAN: Well, there was a lot written about that at the time, a lot of diaries that were kept. In those days, people didn’t have blogs. They didn’t have emails and whatever. They wrote diaries, and a lot of those diaries were never even published. Some were published in small editions in the early ‘20s up to the early ‘30s, and those I managed to find. Those are pretty easy to find. But a lot of them went into archives, and their papers were deposited in libraries like Columbia or Yale or Princeton or some of the presidential libraries. The Internet was an enormous tool in being able to find these resources and saying to a librarian in some distant archive without having to actually go there, “Listen, I think there’s a diary by William Westerman,” who was the chief advisor to Wilson on the Middle East in the inquiry. And he was a Columbia professor. He kept a very detailed diary. He typed it every night on a little typewriter in his hotel room. And he never published it. It was deposited in the Columbia archives with his papers, and I found that. And it was extraordinarily, extremely detailed. You could cross-reference a lot of these different diaries. People were at the same meeting, different perspectives and so on. And if you did that, you came up with a pretty good portrait of what had actually gone on there.

MR. MEDIA: Let me change gears a little bit, and then we’ll wrap up in a moment or two. You worked for CBS News, I believe, during the Dan Rather era.

D. ANDELMAN: I did.

MR. MEDIA: Part of that. Do you have any good Dan Rather stories to share? This is Mr. Media, after all.

D. ANDELMAN: I’ll never forget the first time when I was going overseas for CBS. I’d been hired from The New York Times. I’d never really done television or radio very much. I kind of learned it at CBS. So I spent about two or three months in New York before I went overseas. And the week I was leaving, I went in to see Dan, personally, cause I would be on his show a lot. And I said, “Do you have any words of advice?” Sitting there in his inner sanctum with his fish tank behind him and whatever, and he said well, he said let me think. I thought I was going to hear some grand thing about the nature of reporting or the kinds of stories he guesses I was looking for. And he said, “The one thing you should always keep in mind,” he says, “when you’re doing your sign-off, take a little beat pause between the end of what you say and your name. So if you say something and then it’s beat, pause, David Andelman, CBS News, Paris, they’ll remember your name better that way.” That’s my favorite Dan Rather story.

MR. MEDIA: That’s so off where I thought it was gonna go. Wow. Alright. And then let’s talk about Forbes before we run out of time here.

D. ANDELMAN: Okay.

MR. MEDIA: I think this is your first online…

D. ANDELMAN: Yes. I worked briefly for a company called SmallCapCenter.com. I was editor-in-chief during the height of the dotcom boom in 2000, and I saw us balloon up to about 30 editorial people and back down to two, me and another person. And that was a very rapid trajectory, but this is my first real online experience.

MR. MEDIA: How does it differ from your experience at print and broadcast outlets?

D. ANDELMAN: Not that much, believe it or not. I think if you’re a good journalist, a good communicator, you understand what makes a news story, and you can tell a good tale and tell it objectively and quickly and rapidly. If you can write well and really understand what will be interesting to people, I think you can learn to do it in almost any medium. I guess the most difficult transition is print to broadcast or broadcast to print. But the Internet really combines all of those, which is great. We have a video network. We have print and so and so. My experience in that has been perfect for along the entire spectrum. If you’re a good journalist, can tell a good story, know how to ask the right kinds of questions, and then structure it into something that’s understandable and compelling, you can do it in any medium.

MR. MEDIA: During your panel discussion earlier today, you discussed your lack of political affiliation. Why are you not registered with one party or another, and how do you square that with working at Forbes, which is pretty blatantly political in the same way that The Wall Street Journal is political?

D. ANDELMAN: Well, there are parts of Forbes that are. Certainly, Steve’s column is. And Forbes’ title is, the magazine’s title, is the capitalist tool. But one of the things I run is our opinion and op-ed section. And I like to pride ourselves on having really the entire spectrum of opinion on that site. And they’ve been very understanding in doing that. They understand that we are a global website. We are the largest business financial site in the world. We’re in virtually every country. We have a huge readership in India and China and overseas. And we need to really present the news factually and a broad spectrum of opinion, or we’ll never have that kind of a readership. We have 16.5 million readers in an average month. You can’t do that if you become a niche-player. We’re many times, many-fold larger than The Wall Street Journal and WSJ.com, who are our competitors. I don’t usually like to talk about them, and they’re fine. They do a good job, and they’re very objective, for the most part, in their news coverage. They do have an opinion site also which is not so much. It’s more geared toward the right. But we really have prided ourselves on maintaining our objectivity across the whole spectrum.

MR. MEDIA: Finally, what changes and improvements lie ahead for Forbes.com? Will you hire more reporters? Will you break more stories ahead of your print cousin? What’s the future there?

D. ANDELMAN: It’s a great relationship that we have with our print cousin. Recently, a substantial chunk of our equity was bought by Elevation Partners, which includes Bono, the rock singer. What they really want to do is they want to expand us in so many different kinds of ways. They want us to, and they’re starting to buy different kinds of…We just bought Investopedia, for instance, different kinds of websites and so on to sort of bulk up on all that. A lot of our expansion is going to be overseas. We have a Forbes.pl in Polish right now. That was our first beta site overseas. Eventually, we’re going to have Forbes China, Forbes Russia, Forbes Arabia, Forbes Israel, and all the countries with our magazines, there will be websites in that language. And that’s going to be a big part of our growth.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Oscar Isaac, "PU-239" actor: The Mr. Media Interview


Oscar Isaac, my guest today, co-stars with Paddy Considine in a riveting new HBO film, PU-239.

Based upon a short story by Ken Kalfus, PU-239 tells the story of a devoted father and husband -- Paddy Considine -- in post- Soviet Russia who labors in a deteriorating nuclear plant. After being exposed to a deadly dose of radiation while trying to avert a plant disaster, he is made a scapegoat and suspended without pay.

With just days to live and desperate to provide for his wife and young son, he impulsively steals a small amount of PU-239 -- weapons grade plutonium -- and heads to Moscow to attempt a quick sale.

In Moscow, Considine’s character gets caught up with an inept, wannabe gangster -- played by Isaac -- to help him sell the dangerous goods on the black market.


DOWNLOAD THE MP3; LISTEN HERE.

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.




BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I appreciate your time. I gave kind of a brief synopsis of the film, but the name of the film won’t mean a lot to the average person any more than it did for your character, actually. What would you like people to know about this movie?

OSCAR ISAAC: I think there are so many elements that make it such a unique film. I think it’s very unlike any film I’ve really seen in some while. The closest I can think of it is films from the 1970s that weren’t afraid to kind of experiment with tone and genre and all that, so it is a very sad, tragic film about this man that’s trying to help his family, but then at the same time, there’s this very humorous side to it when he meets this criminal and this unlikely bond, kind of buddy thing, happens with the two of them. I think it’s very exciting. It’s kind of Jacovian in that way, a lot of humor and, at the same time, the tragedy is involved just in the same intensity.

ANDELMAN: You mentioned 1970s movies, and I hadn’t thought about it until you just said that, but, of course, The China Syndrome, there’s a little bit of that here with the…

ISAAC: Right, right, exactly.

ANDELMAN: What drew you to this movie? Was it the drama? Was it the politics, the buddy….

Oscar: Honestly, it was the script, the way it was written, and the character. It’s just fantastic. I mean, I think it’s just really full of life and humor. Both the director, Scott Burns, and myself, one of our favorite movies, at least for me, my favorite movie of all time was Dog Day Afternoon. It reminded me of it in that kind of way, where you have this guy who’s way in over his head, but he’s just trying to make it work, and you end up feeling sympathy for him even though he’s kind of a screw-up. I like that a lot about him.

ANDELMAN: There are actually two guys in this movie that are way in over their heads.

ISAAC: Exactly. And you know, that’s also a great point that these two different characters really are mirrors of each other in different extremes. Paddy Considine’s character is way in over his head by deciding to go into the black market. He’s a scientist and suddenly he’s forced to do this wheel and deal, something he just doesn’t know how to do, but he’s trying to save his family. And on the other side of it, you’ve got my character, who is also trying to save his family -- whatever his definition of family is, his girlfriend that’s a prostitute and his son that he’s not sure if it’s his -- but even that, he’s trying, he’s working in this new, crazy, anything goes Wild West of capitalism in the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, and now he’s just trying to do what he can, and I think that’s ultimately what’s really great is that these two guys are trying to fight for their families.

ANDELMAN: I think when I was done watching it, the thing that struck me was -- and I’d like to go read the short story, frankly -- it’s so well-conceived, and the comparison and the contrast between the two characters, you’ve got the two men, family as each of them defines it. Paddy’s got the wife and son. We don’t know them until the incident occurs at the nuclear plant, but they seem to be happy and in love and all that kind of thing. And then Shiv, your character, defines family a whole different way.

ISAAC: That’s exactly right.

ANDELMAN: When the two of you come together, it’s kind of like oil and water, but somehow, as it does in buddy movies, it does sort of work.

Oscar: I think again, it’s this need. You don’t really hear it from Shiv until the very end where he doesn’t know how else to keep Timofey, which is Paddy’s character, in the car, and he says, “Look, I’m doing this for my child, too. This whole time you’ve been talking about your child and your family and what you need, but I’m not doing this for fun or to be cool, I’m doing this because I have a family, as well.” That’s a very strong motivator.

ANDELMAN: It’s very interesting. I’m listening to your voice, and truly, and people will get this when they see the movie, there is some strong acting going on in that film, because you don’t sound anything right now, anything like the character of Shiv.

ISAAC: No, right. Yeah. I gave a little higher register voice, and he, of course, we did it all with accents It was a tough decision: how you are going to give it an authentic feel. Either everybody does British accents, or … It was an international cast, as well. There were British people, there were French, people from all sorts of different places.

ANDELMAN: Your character has some interesting thoughts on the British and the Americans, of course.

ISAAC: Yes, he does. Very specific feelings as they concern his girlfriend. He gives her rules of who she can sleep with based on his own sociopolitical ideas of people.

ANDELMAN: Some of the best moments in the movie are the small ones. Again, it’s about you with the boy who you think is your son or you and Paddy in the car kind of connecting again through children, but you each kind of know that your life is in dire jeopardy. As an actor, that’s good stuff, isn’t it?

ISAAC: For me, that is one of my favorite moments, wow, that one moment when they’re both in the car and he just asks if you have any pictures of your son. My son, he loves to go to all the new McDonalds and try the Big Macs and see if they all taste the same. And there’s just a little moment where nothing seems to be happening, but kind of everything is there, everything is revealed about these guys with just a little bit. I think that’s really a testament to the writing. Scott Burns just has a way of creating an intense amount of empathy with humor and with putting humor and tragic elements together in one sentence even, and it ends up being something very human and specific, and I think that was really one of the great things about the film.

ANDELMAN: You have some moments in the film that are fairly brutal, mostly with you on the receiving end. Are those difficult to play?

ISAAC: It can be, because pain, usually as an actor you’re looking for the action of, what are you doing, what are you trying to do, what are you trying to change, and it’s hard to act a state of being, like cold or hurt, and so that can be challenging in its own way. But again, those are also fun, because they are very physical, and you get to put the makeup and the blood on. Those are fun. The harder ones seem to be the more emotional scenes.

ANDELMAN: What was your relationship with Paddy like during this? There’s a point where you have to threaten him rather physically. How did you two deal with that, set that up?

ISAAC: It’s funny, because I remember the first day, I think he was very surprised at my take on the character. I think a lot of people were, because the script itself, like I said, it’s fantastic, but a lot of times an actor will kind of imagine some things. Talking with Scott, we made them very specific and funny, and I think he wasn’t expecting that, so suddenly, I think he was kind of quiet a lot and a little bit dark and unsure in that place, and then with all that humor, he kind of really lightened up. After a while, we were just cracking each other up. I remember once in particular we just couldn’t get through it, and there wasn’t even anything that funny. We just couldn’t get through it. He would always laugh, and that would start to make me laugh, or I would start to laugh, and you can’t help it. It’s actually a horrible feeling, and the producers had to come over and were like, “Guys, you really need to pull it together.” I’m like, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, but it’s just so funny.” It was great. He’s a wacky man. He’s an amazing actor, and it was great to hear his stories and to feed off of him. He’s a wonderful actor, and for me, it was my first film, and to be able to spar with him on screen was amazing.

ANDELMAN: You mention that, this movie looks like it could be a significant launching pad for you. Sometimes you’re sympathetic, the reluctant gangster, sometimes violent. Are you excited to get this out in front of people?

ISAAC: Yeah. It’s been almost two years since we shot it, and I am very anxious to get it out there. Then again, it’s done, and there’s not much I can do. I have no control over it or how people are going to take it. I really do hope that they enjoy the film, because I do think the movie is really good, and like I said, it’s unlike a lot of films nowadays. I’m actually curious to see how people take this kind of mixture of tones. A lot of times, films can be very straight forward: “This is a sad movie.” “This is a funny movie.” Scott really tries to make a full picture of life.

ANDELMAN: Do you have any concerns in taking a role like this? The Russians are not exactly portrayed in the best light here. When you take a role like this, is it a job, or do you think about, “Oh, you know what, someone may not be too happy with the way I’m portraying this guy, or the way the movie is portraying this guy?”

ISAAC: I think that would maybe come into my mind if I felt that that was happening in some little way. But I think that it’s less about the Russians and more about, if anything, capitalism. I think it does in a way make the argument that plutonium in the wrong hands is just as deadly as capitalism in the wrong hands, and not to say that the Russians are the wrong hands but this idea that if unchecked, it’s kind of an anything goes mentality. And I think that, for me, the political aspects of it were, that was the strongest as opposed to Russians or crazy gangsters or even the good ones are going to sell plutonium.

ANDELMAN: That’s kind of a scary notion.

ISAAC: Again, the main sympathetic man that you feel so much empathy for is actually doing a very vile, horrible thing, which is selling plutonium on the black market to who knows, for what reason.

ANDELMAN: He knows he’s going to be dead, and he doesn’t seem to be thinking five steps, even two steps ahead of, “Well, if I’m dead and I sell this, I get the money for my family, but gee…”

ISAAC: “What about everybody else?”

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

ISAAC: Yeah, my family can fly to Costa Rica, but…. I think that’s a very real thing. I think when you’re in survival mode, I mean, look at what happened… I was just watching television, and you can see the ivory trade and they kill these elephants and all sorts of different horrible things that happen, and I think it’s just because it’s the mentality of survival.

ANDELMAN: Is this the first time you’ve had a role where you’ve had to answer questions that were political?

ISAAC: No. Nowadays, everything has a little bit of a political undertone, but no, I did a play where I played Lorka, and he obviously is considered quite a political figure, being killed by the Franco regime, and so there were those aspects in there. Yeah, I’ve done some of that already.

ANDELMAN: And then you mentioned the producers. Three of the executive producers, George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh, and Peter Berg -- pretty big names. Clooney known for political stands. Did these guys, are they just names on the film, or was there any hands-on with these guys in your part of the film?

ISAAC: In my part, no, not the actual filming of it. I know that Steven Soderbergh -- I could end up working with him as well on a film, and we talked a lot about it, and I know that he was integral in the editing process. I don’t know exactly what George Clooney and Peter Berg, exactly what their roles were.

ANDELMAN: It’s interesting. I could see, thinking back on it, I could see Clooney actually in Paddy Considine’s role.

ISAAC: Oh yeah? Yeah? Definitely. I could see that.

ANDELMAN: You could have been doing a buddy film with George Clooney.

ISAAC: That’s right.

ANDELMAN: Oscar, you were born in Guatemala?

ISAAC: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Were you surprised to be offered a role as a Russian?

ISAAC: No, not really. I was born in Guatemala. I did grow up in the States. I’ve been here all my life. I’m pretty, I guess some would say, ethnically ambiguous, so no, I actually wasn’t. My father is Cuban, and actually my grandfather worked for the government, the revolution, and he actually had quite an obsession with all things Russian, all things Soviet, I should say. I don’t know if that kind of translated into my blood somehow, but I feel somewhat similar. I love, my favorite playwright is Chekhov, I read it all the time. I just read Crime and Punishment again, and there’s something about that soul and that voice, I don’t know, I really relate to. So actually, I kind of felt quite at home.

ANDELMAN: It wouldn’t be hard to see you go in either the direction of playing like another gangster, maybe even a more serious gangster, or going and playing more in a comedy kind of thing. What would be more comfortable for you?

ISAAC: When I read something, I look for the humor in it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I want to do some sort of broad comedy. I’m really interested in being, I don’t if this will sound somewhat pretentious, but truthful but something that really has some sort of… Mike Nichols said that, “A laugh is just a really loud yes.” I think that’s great. I want to do films and plays that give the audience that feeling of saying, “Yes, yes, that’s true, that is the truth! I recognize that,” and whether that’s as a gangster or as a very comic role, that’s okay with me.

ANDELMAN: Where did you train? Where did you learn your trade?

ISAAC: I went to Julliard.

ANDELMAN: Wow.

ISAAC: I went up here in New York for four years.

ANDELMAN: That tends to open a lot of doors for people.

ISAAC: It can, it can. It’s a great school. I really learned so much. It gave me a huge love and understanding of Shakespeare. I had a great time. I really grew a lot. It’s also very difficult. It’s kind of drama boot camp. We called it “The Yard.”

ANDELMAN: Any particular uncomfortable experiences from that?

ISAAC: There were so many. I did remember finally breaking down and crying. It’s tough, because a lot of times they’ll kind of get into, “You made that choice because you are the kind of person.” It’s kind of a mind to mind game there, but it’s all in the goal of becoming a better artist, and so I forgive it all, but yeah, it’s just the name of the game. It’s very hard training.

ANDELMAN: What would a hazing at Julliard be? Would they make you re-enact Pauly Shore roles? How would that work?

ISAAC: They had all their own little weird games they do with masks and Dionysus and Greek gods and all sorts of silly things.

ANDELMAN: So you’re saying it’s like a Stanley Kubrick movie?

ISAAC: Yeah, exactly, exactly. More like that than Pauly Shore.

ANDELMAN: I suspect a lot of people will be introduced to you for the first time through this movie, and they are probably going to wonder a little bit more about your background. You talked about having kind of an ambiguous ethnic background. How old are you?

ISAAC: I’m 27.

ANDELMAN: A young guy. Are you married?

ISAAC: No.

ANDELMAN: Why acting? Why not anything else?

ISAAC: That’s funny. I was trying to think about that. A lot of people will say, “Oh, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” and in some ways, that’s true, but I was thinking back to what, something that Dostoevsky says, and actually Tolstoy says about the main character in Crime and Punishment, he says, “The mechanism of life happens in the barely imperceptible things.” It’s the tiny little shifts of consciousness, so when this main character in Crime and Punishment murders these women, that’s not real life. He’s just acting out. He’s just being a machine. The real shift happened when he was thinking about something completely other that made him become this person. So I was trying to think about that in my own regard as far as acting is concerned.

I’m doing this Ridley Scott film right now, and I actually realized that the first time that I really started to shift my mind into this world of movies and acting was I think with the film Legend. I think that’s the first time that I consciously remember thinking, “Wow, people made this. There are guys that said, ‘I want lights here. I want you to do this, there are cameras, and there’s maybe one guy that this was his vision, and I think from that point on, I started seeing movies differently and grabbing video cameras and trying to emulate that and performing in…. I think there was definitely a small shift that happened.

ANDELMAN: What it is you are working on now? You made reference.

ISAAC: It’s a film called Body of Lies. It’s Ridley Scott’s next film. It’s with Leo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.

ANDELMAN: Wow.

ISAAC: Yeah. Great film.

ANDELMAN: That’s definitely big-time stuff.

ISAAC: It’s good. It’s very exciting. We’re shooting in Morocco.

ANDELMAN: What is your role in that?

ISAAC: I play the partner to Leo’s character. We start off the movie together. I get to do some car chases, and it’s a very explosive character.

ANDELMAN: I have to ask, I didn’t know you were doing this, what’s it like working with Leonardo DiCaprio?

ISAAC: It’s great. You know, you never know when you are going into one of these situations. You are like, “I hope they’re not jerks,” or whatever, but he’s a really nice, really funny guy. We were joking around right off the bat and already starting to improvise and doing different things, and he’s a really good, solid actor. He’s a great actor and seems like a really great guy.

ANDELMAN: A guy like that’s been around a while now. Is he a little, at first when you come on the set with someone like that, he doesn’t know you, you don’t know him I’m assuming until you meet on the set. Is he a little standoffish at first?

ISAAC: You know what? No. I think that’s what was the most shocking. That’s what I would assume, but no, he was actually incredibly humble, he was really warm, seemingly excited to meet me. I was honestly taken aback with the whole thing. I kind of felt bad for even expecting otherwise. He’s a really good guy.

ANDELMAN: And what about Ridley Scott? How is he to work with?

ISAAC: To see an auteur at the top of his game and still completely passionate about it, excited about it, and also, he’s very much about the best idea wins, so strangely, again, there’s this seeming lack of ego. He’s sure, he knows what he wants. It’s a well-oiled machine. At one point, the sun was going down and people are running around with their heads cut off. There was like a whole group of hundreds of people at barricades trying to catch a glimpse of Leo, and Leo is frustrated about one thing or something else, and I mean, things are kind of going crazy. The light’s going, and I see Ridley standing in the middle of it all, looking at it, and he looks over at me, and I wink at him, and he walks over, and he’s like, “This is where I shot Black Hawk Down. Oh man, it was awesome!” I was like, “So you like this, eh? It’s like anarchy.” He’s like, “Oh yeah, I love it.”

ANDELMAN: You’ve completed another film, Guerrilla.

ISAAC: Yeah. That’s the Soderburgh film that I shot about Che Guevara, with Benicio del Toro.

ANDELMAN: What is your role in that?

ISAAC: It’s two films, and I’m in the second film. I play Che Guevara’s translator when he comes to the United Nations. The film is in Spanish, except that this section is in English where I translate all the things he says and when he goes on “Meet the Press.” He had this actually son of a diplomat who wasn’t a professional translator translating for him. It’s kind of funny, because he listened to the tape, he watched the tape, and you can tell he got a little bit lost, which is good, because I was a little bit lost myself.

ANDELMAN: What would you like to do in the future? It wouldn’t be hard to see you jumping into a buddy caper, like a Rush Hour, but you seem to be heading into kind of more serious, from what we were just talking about, more serious roles.

ISAAC: I like the idea of doing “serious roles” but finding the humor and the humanity and the every man in that. I don’t necessarily see myself doing a broad comedy or action films necessarily. I want to do things that have something to say, whether it be political or whether it be about the human condition, but something that has something to say, like those films from the 1970s. You felt that they were made for a reason, not just to satisfy some sort of budgetary need or something.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Cheryl Hines, "Curb Your Enthusiasm" actor: Mr. Media Interview


Cheryl Hines has one of the most challenging acting jobs on television: she plays Larry David’s long-suffering TV wife on the HBO comedy “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” now in its sixth season.

For years, many people have assumed she was David’s real wife, and further complicating the premise this year is the news that David and his wife Laurie have divorced. What does this development mean for the show?

Joining us today is the lovely Cheryl Hines who, hopefully, can shed some light on where all this is going -- or maybe not.

DOWNLOAD THE MP3; LISTEN HERE.

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.


BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Cheryl there’s been a lot of chatter lately about whether Larry’s real-life separation from Laurie David would be incorporated in the show. If so, that would seem to threaten your livelihood in some ways. So I wondered what your thoughts about this might be.

CHERYL HINES: Well, here’s the thing. We shot this season long before Larry and his wife got divorced. See, you have to just bear that in mind while you’re watching this season.

ANDELMAN: You’re asking a lot for people who can’t separate reality from TV.

HINES: That’s true. You got a good point, yeah. Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Now you’ve already shot the whole season.

HINES: We have, yes.

ANDELMAN: Right. Now I actually talked to Jeff Garlin a few weeks ago, and he said, to his mind, this is the last season. So it would seem that actually the discussions of whether or not the divorce is gonna be incorporated is kind of superfluous.

HINES: Yes, it really is superfluous. However, that being said, I would not be surprised if we shot another season.

ANDELMAN: Oh, really?

HINES: Yeah. I talked to Larry, and he -- it’s not out of the question, let’s just say.

ANDELMAN: Okay.

HINES: So that’s kind of exciting, but ever since the first season, Larry acts like it’s always our last.

ANDELMAN: Well, last season, I guess, was supposed to be the last.

HINES: Last season was going to be the last, but he lived.

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

HINES: He died, but he came back to life.

ANDELMAN: Now, whether or not Larry’s divorce makes it into the show, one of the storylines, at least in the early episodes this year, has involved some flirtatious behavior between you and Ted Danson. And I wondered if maybe that was reflecting reality at all or if that was just more good fun.

HINES: I think that’s more good fun. But, certainly, Larry’s very good at finding, at commenting on human nature so it’s in what we do and as a society what we do. So I think he just thought it was very funny that married people can’t really openly flirt that much so our contact with each other is just hitting each other on the shoulder and that’s how we flirt with each other. As he says, that’s as close as we can come to having sex with somebody else.

ANDELMAN: Now men are often portrayed as being flirtatious in these shows, but married women usually don’t get that opportunity unless it’s going all the way through.

HINES: That’s true.

ANDELMAN: I mentioned when we started talking about people having confusion issues between reality and TV, and I was reading in the Curb Your Enthusiasm book that Larry’s own parents were very upset and a little confused in the episode where Larry’s mother died.

HINES: We talked to Larry before he wrote the outline for that show, and he said I’ve got a funny idea. “What if my mother dies, and I don’t go to her funeral? I miss her funeral.” And I said, “That’s not funny,” and he said, “Oh, really, you watch, I’ll make it funny.” And then, of course, he writes it, and it is funny. But I’m sure his parents have had moments of confusion.

ANDELMAN: Have you had other moments over the years, now I know you work from the barest of outlines, where you’ve had something, and you said that just doesn’t seem funny to me?

HINES: Well, when he died. He died, and he said before we shot that scene, “No tears,” and I was like, “But you’re dying. I’m supposed to watch you die, and it’s not sad?” So he has a way of really finding the comedy in everything.

ANDELMAN: You make a great point because, watching that, I kept looking to you thinking, okay, she would be crying now, right?

HINES: Believe me, I had to fight my instincts because it was sad. It was sad. I forget what actually made it into the show, but when we were shooting the scene, the idea was right after Larry dies, I turn to our attorney, and I say, “Can we talk about the will?”

ANDELMAN: Right.

HINES: And I was like I don’t feel comfortable saying that. Don’t make me say it.

ANDELMAN: You would think you would at least be out of the room where the body is.

HINES: Yeah, but I think some of that did not make it to airtime, but it did make it to airtime that Jeff and I start talking about the cost of the car, haggling over the cost of the car right after Larry dies. So there are moments of this that are just like oh, I have to fight my natural instincts.

ANDELMAN: One of the most well-known developments in your character was originally, she was seen as probably going to be Jewish, but then over time, it was clear -- I guess to Larry, clear to you -- that you weren’t going to be Jewish. Were there other developments in your own character that you were particularly either proud of or found most interesting over time?

HINES: Well, certainly, my character is involved with the NRDC and the environment, which mirrored Laurie David’s involvement with the environment. So it’s been very cool for me because it’s been educational. I’ve learned a lot, and I drive a hybrid car now.

ANDELMAN: Oh, do you?

HINES: Yeah. So that’s been interesting to me. But it’s funny because I think in our first season, I’m said to have been an actor so I did “The Vagina Monologues” the first season and then we never spoke of my acting career again. So it’s interesting if you really watch the episodes like what we carry through and what we just sort of drop.

ANDELMAN: But I do remember, and I’ll get the line wrong, but as I recall, your vagina is big in Canada, right?

HINES: My vagina is huge in Canada.

ANDELMAN: That’s it. See, I knew I was gonna get it wrong.

HINES: These people enjoy asking me how my vagina is, because of the wandering bear episode. Yeah, I’m having some problems because Larry wore a long-lasting condom inside out. It made me have some problems so the Native American Indian that’s helping us get rid of poison oak comes up to me and asks me how my vagina is. Just another day at work.

ANDELMAN: The thing I thought was interesting to me the first season or two was reading that you guys shared a trailer, and I wondered if going forward from here, if you do another series or something, if you would recommend that to your castmates.

HINES: I actually loved it. We had a great time together. I loved hanging out together. You sort of have that experience when you do theater because everybody’s in the green room just hanging out because you only have one space. So I really liked it, actually. I remember when Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor did the show, and she was pumping at the time. She was still breast-feeding, and we’re all in one trailer, and she would have to go in that tiny bathroom. I was like, oh, this is probably not good for every occasion. So, yeah, it has its ups and downs.

ANDELMAN: Now you came into that situation where Jeff Garlin and Larry David and Susie Essman had known each other for some time. I imagine it was probably good for you to be in that situation of close quarters from the beginning because you probably got to know them and become part of the group a lot faster than if you were all going your separate ways after every shot.

HINES: Absolutely right. You’re so right, because sometimes you work on projects, and you really never have a chance, sometimes you don’t even see the other people in the show or in the movie. So it’s interesting that you say that because I never thought about it, but you’re right. It is a fun way to get to know each other personally, and since it’s improvised, it would probably make a good carry-over feeling that you could bring to the screen.

ANDELMAN: I would think it would be that much more valuable especially since the whole, not the whole, but one of the big aspects of the show is the improv, and so these three have dealt with each other and know each other. You’re being thrown in. I guess you can’t really overstate the importance of improv on that show.

HINES: All of the dialogue is improvised so Larry writes a story outline, and then we improvise dialogue. So, yeah, you’re right. It’s kind of a miracle to think that I was cast in this show because these guys already all knew each other. I don’t think Larry knew Susie, but Susie and Jeff had worked together and certainly Larry and Jeff, so I guess I was the odd man out. But I clicked immediately with Larry. We just got along so well from the moment I sat down next to him. So I don’t know. There was an ease to it all somehow.

ANDELMAN: Have you dealt with a character like Larry, and I mean a real-life character like Larry before? Had you ever dated someone…

HINES: No, never. Never. Most of the people I had dated or been friends with were kind of sunnyside-up people. So it was really fun to meet Larry and live in that world.

ANDELMAN: Cheryl, how different was your approach to the improv in the sixth season than it was in the first season? And, by the way, I’ll point out I do know that you have The Groundlings experience, and it was not like you hadn’t done improv before. But how did your approach and how did it all change for you over six seasons?

HINES: I would say that my approach is the same. When you’re doing an improvised show, it’s really about listening and responding to whatever someone just said so it’s still the same approach. I would say the only thing that may be different is, now that we’ve been doing the show for so many years, I feel like maybe if I said something, and I knew that there was a glitch in it somehow, like maybe I heard an airplane going over or Larry and I overlap dialogue or something, I might stop and say I’m just gonna say this again or let me just take this one more time. I feel comfortable enough to do that, but other than that, it’s pretty much the same process.

ANDELMAN: Now, do you have a particular improv moment that you’re especially proud of? I’ll give you an example while you think about that for a minute. Jeff Garlin had said that his was when he and Larry were in his daughter’s room and the shelf came down, and they just kept going.

HINES: Yeah, yeah. I remember that. Well, there was a scene with me and Larry. I don’t even remember what season it was. We thought that there was going to be a terrorist attack on Los Angeles, and I wanted to stay in town and Larry wanted to leave. And so in the outline, that’s all that was written, really. Then when we actually did the scene, it turned into this very soft-spoken scene where Larry and I were talking, and we’re having this serious conversation, but I felt very funny. I was like, “Well, if something happens, don’t you think we should be together?” And he’s like, “Actually, I think that’s a little selfish. Just because one of us perishes, does that mean the other one has to?” And so we sort of went back and forth and just asking him what he wanted to do. In one take, he said he thought he’d go to a dude ranch. And I think the take that ended up on the air, he said, “I thought I’d go to Pebble Beach.” So just getting through that scene, I don’t know, it unfolded into a scene that was never written but turned out to be very funny, I think.

ANDELMAN: Now, I’m thinking back on our conversation. And so he thought it would be selfish if you stayed together. So if you perished in the crash-something, he would go to Pebble Beach. Well, earlier, you had concerns that he died, and you immediately wanted to talk about the will. So I think it all worked out. There’s some karma there.

HINES: It’s true. None of us are that perfect, are we?

ANDELMAN: Cheryl, how has being on “Curb” affected your other job opportunities?

HINES: Well, it’s opened up a door into film and other television projects for me that I would’ve not had the opportunities otherwise. Or so it seems. I went to some event, this was pretty early on, and Ron Howard was sitting in front of me, and he turned around and said, “Hey, I love your show and you’re so great on the show,” and I thought, “Oh my God, Ron Howard knows who I am!” So it’s been sort of that experience for me. I’ve had some really great filmmakers approach or hand me opportunities because they had seen my work on the show. So it’s huge. For me, it’s changed my life.

ANDELMAN: You co-starred with Robin Williams in RV. And I wondered, again, if the improv experience on “Curb” made that, first of all, made you that much more attractive to producers on that and if it was easier for you to work with someone like Robin because you had been in that environment.

HINES: Probably. Because, certainly, Robin has a reputation for going off-script, shall we say. So when we were shooting, he would go who knows where with it, and I would just roll with it. Who knows? You’ll have to ask Barry Sonnenfeld, but Barry Sonnenfeld is another person that I hit it off with immediately, and we became friends and remain friends. I’m sure improv may’ve been an attractive component, let’s say, to that project.

ANDELMAN: I imagine there’s been actors and actresses who’ve worked with Robin Williams over the years who were not as thrilled with him going off-script.

HINES: If you’re not used to improvising, it’s a very scary place to be because when you’re studying acting, you’re taught to find all of your answers in the script because that’s what it’s all about -- the words in the script. So, to some actors, that’s where the project lives and so when somebody goes off that script and starts doing something else, it can really be jarring.

ANDELMAN: Did you have an experience with Robin where he was basically doing a performance one-on-one with you going off-script?

HINES: Oh, yeah, every take, every take. He’d do probably two takes by the book and then one take he would say, “Can we do one just for me?” And we would do one, and who knows what he’d do. You just have to be ready for anything.

ANDELMAN: Interesting. That’d be an interesting experience. It’d be very different than watching him even in concert than to have him doing a performance three feet away from you.

HINES: He’s so great. I love Robin so much, and he’s really such a nice person. But he is either on, like a 100 percent on, or he’s super quiet. And when he’s on, he’ll perform for himself. He’ll be standing in the lunch line just doing bits, but who cares who listens? But when you’re sitting there eating lunch with him, you do feel like a lot of people would pay a lot of money to hear you right now going off on your French fries or whatever.

ANDELMAN: A completely different topic, though. You’ve found a new use for your celebrity, I understand, promoting the “Quaker Heart Smart Challenge.”

HINES: Yes.

ANDELMAN: I wondered what brought you into that?

HINES: My dad had a heart attack two years ago, and he’s okay now. But he had to have surgery, and it was a very dramatic situation. And we found out he had heart disease, and so it really sort of snapped me into thinking about health and having a healthy heart and all that sort of thing. So it seemed like a good fit for me.

ANDELMAN: What kind of things will you be doing with Quaker to promote this?

HINES: Well, we did a thing with Larry King, actually. We had a breakfast here in New York where we kicked off the Heart Smart Challenge because we want people to go to quakeroatmeal.com to sign up for this challenge. And every person that signs up, Quaker will donate a dollar to the Larry King Cardiac Foundation. So I’m just sort of speaking out about it and letting people know about it.

ANDELMAN: That’s very nice. As someone who has a lot of heart disease in the family, I appreciate that.

HINES: Oh, well good. It’s scary.

ANDELMAN: It is.

HINES: Certainly, it’s definitely helpful to try to be preventative about it.

ANDELMAN: Well, when you see a parent be diagnosed with it or have a heart attack or just suddenly do the family history, then you certainly realize you were more involved in it than you think you are.

HINES: Exactly.

ANDELMAN: There is a movie listed as being in production on your Internet Movie Database listing that sounds like a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” gag, Space Chimps. Can you elaborate?

HINES: Interestingly enough, Space Chimps is being directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. So I’m teaming up with Barry again. It’s exactly what it sounds like, and it’s an animated film. So, yes, I am voicing a chimp that goes to space. Actually, I think it’s going be a really cute movie. You know what? It’ll be a family movie.

ANDELMAN: And you get that it does sound like something that Larry invented?

HINES: Oh, listen, believe me. Yes, I do know that. I can’t wait to promote that movie, by the way.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Jim McBride, "Mr. Skin" adult web site pioneer: Mr. Media Interview


Guys, Mr. Skin watches movies so you don’t have to.

Forget the days of wading through plot and dialogue just to get to the moment where Phoebe Cates pops open her bikini top in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Or when Sherilyn Fenn gets randy in Two Moon Junction.

Mr. Skin, via his website at www.mrskin.com and his just released second book Mr. Skin’s Skintastic Video Guide, The 501 Greatest Movies for Sex and Nudity on DVD, can tell you alphabetically exactly how far to fast-forward just to get to the good parts. Skin time, what body parts are exposed, size, skin color, hair color, you get the idea. Mr. Skin is nothing if not thorough.

And for those who think there must be a finite supply of these moments, let me just say that today alone Mr. Skin added seventy new pictures and twenty-one video clips to his archive. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.

DOWNLOAD THE MP3; LISTEN HERE.

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.


BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Mr. Skin, also known as Jim McBride, welcome to Mr. Media.

Mr. SKIN: Hi Mr. Media. It’s always a pleasure to meet a famous mister. You’re right up there with a Mister Clean, a Mister Peanut. This is a big thrill for me to rub elbows with another mister.

ANDELMAN: I must say I feel the exact same. Thanks for joining us today.

Mr. SKIN: Thanks for having me.

ANDELMAN: Jim, you were a guest on Howard Stern’s morning show recently on Sirius, and he called you a “grandmaster of porn.” Your parents must’ve been so proud.

Mr. SKIN: Oh yeah. As you can imagine, my parents are very proud of me. I’m very lucky. I have parents that are very cool. They are the kind of parents that, as long as I’m happy, they’re cool with what I do for a living. And it’s neat. I even have my mom works as a “skintern” for mrskin.com. My parents are retired, and she gets paid to help with data entry for the website.

ANDELMAN: Now I understand -- data entry! She’s not watching the movies with you noting the…

Mr. SKIN: No. I have a team of 10 people in our content department that go through screeners of DVDs that movie companies provide us or stuff that we tape off of satellite or things we rent at Netflix. It’s a hard job. They have to go through movies, fast-forward through movies to find the nude scenes and chronicle them, grab the pics and clips, associate the actresses to the movies. It’s tough work, but somebody has to do it.

ANDELMAN: Now, how do you interview someone for a job like that? And are they all men?

Mr. SKIN: We have, I think of our 45 employees, I’d say about 40 are guys and five are female. But I think it’s more because there’s so much tech involved with running a website that you get a lot of males. We have writers; some of our writers are female so we do have females, but it’s definitely a guys club over here at mrskin.com.

ANDELMAN: Tell us a little about how mild-mannered Jim McBride became the internet legend known as Mr. Skin.

Mr. SKIN: Well, as a kid, I had a fascination with celebrity nudity in film. In fact, I remember when I used to look at my dad’s old Playboys in the early seventies. I would immediately go to the “Sex in Cinema” section. That was my favorite part of Playboy. I, of course, loved the Playmates, but the “Sex in Cinema” feature fascinated me, that famous people, people I knew, had been naked in film.

And fast-forward, a habit of mine, to the early ‘80s, and I was a senior in high school and all of a sudden, we got cable television and a Betamax at the same time. And it was a meeting of two great technologies. And you gotta remember, as a kid, growing up, we had ABC, NBC, and CBS, and that was it. All of a sudden, now I had HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime, and to fill all that programming, they had to show Italian sex comedies, drive-in movies. So I was a kid in a candy store taping as many films as I could every night with my new Betamax and the next day, editing the nude scenes onto other tapes I was collecting. I had hours and hours and hours of nude scenes on tape, and I’d categorize them as TV stars or categorize them for movies from the ‘70s, however I chose. And I became kind of an expert on it just as a fan, and it was something I collected.

During the ‘80s and ‘90s as I continued to do it on my own, I was a fun guy at parties or wherever. The guys would always come up to me and say, “Has such and such been naked?” and I said, “Oh yeah, 42 minutes into this movie.” And they were blown away that I knew this stuff.

One day in the mid to late ‘90s, I was in a bar in my hometown of Chicago, and I just happened to be standing next to a guy who had a radio show here. The topic of female celebrity nudity came up, and some guys were asking me questions. I was nonchalant, answering the questions, and he thought, “My God, this would make for a great radio guest!” And he invited me onto his show. We agreed not to use my real name. We came up with “Mr. Skin,” and next thing you knew, I was on more shows in Chicago. Finally, it started to spread across the country. I never dreamed it would become a popular radio segment where people would call in, ask me actresses, I would tell them off the top of my head if they had been naked, but it did. And then I was thinking, “Wow.” I had nothing to promote. I didn’t have a website or anything. I just went on radio shows talking about this stuff, and, finally, someone heard me on the air in Chicago and said, “I’ll help you build a website if you want to do it.” And I said to him, “What’s a website?” In 1998, I didn’t know what a website was.

I started with me and one tech guy, and I launched mrskin.com on August 10, 1999. And then it’s grown to today we have over 40-some employees, and we get about 6 million visitors a month to mrskin.com. And it’s really one of those things where it wasn’t like, as a kid I thought, “Boy, I want to grow up and have a website and be an expert on female celebrity nudity in film.” It’s one of those things that just kind of happened, but I couldn’t be luckier. The fact that I get to do this for a living and am obviously well-paid to do it, it’s a dream come true.

ANDELMAN: Now, did you meet your wife before or after all this happened?

Mr. SKIN: Right when it was starting, I was going on a show in Chicago as a regular guest to talk about nudity in films coming up on DVD and whatnot. And he had his one-year anniversary show at a bar, and he had me there as a guest as part of the live broadcast. And I actually met a girl at my health club, and I said, “Why don’t you come to this thing, it’ll be fun.” And she brought a friend who turned out to be my future wife. The night she met me I was Mr. Skin. So she knew what she was getting into, in other words.

ANDELMAN: So you never had to resort to any subterfuge or anything…

Mr. SKIN: No, but I, prior to meeting her, I sure did, because there were times where I would go out with someone, and the topic of, “What do you do?” would come up. And I remember “computer consultant” came up a lot in the early days, until I could feel someone out, no pun intended, I really wasn’t about to just throw the Mr. Skin out there and ruin my chances until I felt a little more comfortable.

ANDELMAN: Well, as part of the challenge for me in getting ready to interview you, I had to force myself to think back to the first time I saw a woman’s breasts in a movie. And I’ve come up with, I think it was Serpico, and the reason I remember it mostly, I don’t remember whose breasts they are, and I’m sorry, sorry for the women listening…

Mr. SKIN: You don’t have to, because I do. Her name’s Cornelia Sharpe.

ANDELMAN: There we go. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mr. Skin! That was it! I remember it because I had read the book; I loved the book. My dad took me to see the movie. I must’ve been 12, 13, maybe 14. I can’t remember what year that was.

Mr. SKIN: It came out in ’73.

ANDELMAN: There we go. I was 13. Thank you, thank you. Take a bow. So I remembered being in the movie theater, and then suddenly there they are. And just as suddenly, my dad puts his hand over my face, and I’m like, “Knock it off!” Do you remember your first pair, so to speak?

Mr. SKIN: Actually, there’s different moments in my life. I remember the situation you just talked about. In 1977, I was 15 years old, and my parents took me to an R-rated movie called I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. And it was a critically-acclaimed movie, and they took me and, 52 minutes in, Kathleen Quinlan’s top loosened. I remember that awkward moment where you see breasts, and you’re sitting next to your parents and then the next day going and telling all your buddies you saw breasts in a movie. So that was one of my early memories.

Remember on PBS, you used to watch the Public Broadcasting cause they would occasionally flip in some nudity. I remember I watched “I, Claudius” in 1976, all of 13 episodes, just for the nineteen seconds of nudity. I became an expert on the Roman Empire just because I was just riveted waiting for Sheila White’s topless scene in that. Another thing, I remember when “Steambath” with Bill Bixby and Valerie Perrine was aired on public television. She had some nice nude scenes in that, and I remember catching that on public television. So those are my earliest memories of nudity, but I remember looking in Playboys I saw a ton more prior to ever seeing it on a movie screen or TV screen.

ANDELMAN: That’s funny. I’m thinking about PBS, and I think probably around the same year that I saw Serpico, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” was being broadcast in the United States for the first time. And I remember all the guys talking about how funny it was, but also oh my God, could you believe that you can see those breasts?

Mr. SKIN: Yes, exactly. And they would have Carol Cleveland would be on.

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

Mr. SKIN: She’d show her breasts. And you’re right. Well, that was the great thing about public television especially. To a kid now, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal when you have the Internet, you have all these different ways to see girls naked. But boy, when we were kids, it was tough. We could only look at National Geographic so much for your nude scenes.

ANDELMAN: Now, from a sociological point of view, and we won’t spend a lot of time on this, but as much time as you’ve spent in pursuit of seeing naked actresses in movies, any idea why we’re so attracted to that? Is it the whole forbidden fruit?

Mr. SKIN: Well, I think the biggest thing is I compare it this way. It’s just for people personally. Who are the people you most want to see naked in your life? It’s always people you know. You work at an office, you see a girl works at your office, you see her all the time. She’s beautiful. Most guys are thinking, “God, I’d love to see her naked.” It’s because she’s familiar to them. They know her, they see her all the time. You see a girl that you get coffee every morning. She works back there, and she has great breasts, let’s say, and you think, “Boy, I’d love to see her nude.” Well, think about celebrities. With the way media is and, Mr. Media, you would know this, the way things are. Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie, they almost are a part of people’s lives. They’re on every television show. You see them in the magazines. You hear about them from other people. You feel like you know these celebrities like you know people in your real life. I’m not saying it’s the same, but it’s the same type of feeling -- you feel like you know Jennifer Aniston. You feel like you know Angelina Jolie because you just are inundated with information on them. And I think because of that, it adds another level of excitement to want to see them naked just like you do someone in your personal life. I really believe that. I think that because of the familiarity. I always say that what would you rather see, Angelina Jolie naked or someone as hot as her that you don’t know and never heard of? Everyone would take Angelina Jolie.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, I guess we’ll have to wait for someone to do that off this website, thegirlsinyourofficewhoyoualwayswantedtoseenaked.com.

Mr. SKIN: Well, that would be a pretty expensive database, I can tell ya that.

ANDELMAN: Is there a difference to being, say, addicted to porn and just wanting to see celebrity women without their clothes? I was thinking about this, and I remember years ago, at least from my experience, this would be before mrskin.com started, picking up a magazine called Celebrity Sleuth.

Mr. SKIN: Oh yeah. I’m a big fan of Celebrity Sleuth magazine.

ANDELMAN: Yeah. It collected still photos and images much the way you do. But, in that situation, it was something that even my wife had to admit that she was a little curious to see who they got each month.

Mr. SKIN: Well, yeah. I’ve kind of based mrskin.com on, in a sense, the Celebrity Sleuth and Celebrity Skin magazines, magazines I grew up loving to read in the eighties. And it’s the same thing. Here’s a guy, Celebrity Sleuth, who has an incredible collection of pictures and paraphernalia and trinkets or whatever of celebrities. And he, on almost a monthly basis, would put out a magazine in which he’d talk about different topics and different celebrities, and it gets you interested. If you paint the picture, if you make the people you’re talking about sound interesting and give some background on them and some history, it makes it that much more exciting to see them nude. And Celebrity Sleuth is a master at it. I’ve always been a big fan, always given him a lot of credit as a “skinspiration” for what I do, and I learn lessons from that exact thing. It’s more than just throwing pictures up. It’s about the information that accompanies it, and we’re real big on that at mrskin.com. That’s why we have so many reviews, ratings, articles, interviews, information where you can find what’s coming up, all that kind of stuff. When it’s combined with the pictures, that’s how you have a successful venture, no question about it.

BOB ANDELMAN: In talk shows, they talk about a big “get,” like, at one time Donald Trump would’ve been a great get for a certain talk show or something, and there’s people who just won’t do those things. What has been a great get at mrskin.com? Someone that people really wanted to see that you found.

Mr. SKIN: Oh, well, like we’re always looking for rare, out-of-print stuff where we know you can’t just walk into a Netflix or a Blockbuster and find. Like some examples, Stockard Channing. Stockard Channing, not the hottest girl in the world, but she’s pretty famous. People know her from “The West Wing” and a number of other shows. She did a movie in 1977 called Sweet Revenge, and no one every heard of this movie. It’s out-of-print. It only came out for a short time on video. But she has a nude scene 17 minutes in. And I remember when I had the website I was trying to track this down in the early days of the site and, a few years later, tracked it down. And things like that are really fun for me.

Another example would be Melanie Griffith did an Israeli movie called Ha Gan, which translates into The Garden, and she’s pretty much naked throughout the whole movie, full frontal. And that’s another one out-of-print, impossible to find. We tracked that down.

Victoria Principal did a movie called The Naked Ape that was produced by Playboy, one of the few times they went into the movie production business. And the movie was made and never released or released very limited at theaters, and I was able to obtain a copy and have that.

Stuff like that’s really fun, and I could probably name some others. But to give you an idea of one of the fun things for me and for the website is we’re not only chronicling the actresses we all know, the Angelina Jolies and Pam Andersons and Jennifer Anistons, but it’s all the female celebrity nudity in the history of film. And there’s some real obscure stuff out there, and it’s fun to find it. The pursuit of it is almost as fun as actually seeing the pics.

ANDELMAN: There’s a new movie in release called Good Luck Chuck with Jessica Alba, who’s had an interesting career avoiding being caught naked. She got very upset with Playboy when they put her on the cover in a bikini. And, for this movie, the story where I had read, I guess, she was talking to someone from Newsday and said did you think I was naked in that movie? And she insisted that she was always covered up. How big a get would it be to find her?

Mr. SKIN: Let’s put this way: in this day and age, if Jessica Alba did a movie where she was naked, everyone would know about it. There’s no way that this would be an unknown movie cause, in this day and age, it just wouldn’t happen. I think finding out that Jessica Alba is gonna do a nude scene from someone on a set and before it came out, that would be huge. But it would be too difficult for her to do a nude scene. It would be sitting there, and no one noticed it. Nowadays, it’s just impossible. Yeah, that Good Luck Chuck should’ve been renamed “Good Luck Seeing Jessica in the Buff” because it just doesn’t happen, and it’s unfortunate. There’s about, I’d say, six or seven girls naked in Good Luck Chuck. There’s a ton. Nothing from Jessica Alba.

ANDELMAN: Okay. And what about this? You’re a dad. As a matter of fact, just a couple weeks ago, your wife had a baby. My daughter whispered to my wife the other day that someone had told her that there were nude pictures of Vanessa Hudgens from High School Musical on the internet.

Mr. SKIN: Yes.

ANDELMAN: How do you feel about the inadvertent release of stuff like that? Those pictures were not from a movie. And then after you think about that for a second, how will you explain to your own kids one day what you do?

Mr. SKIN: Well, first of all, as far as Vanessa Hudgens, I always say. “If you don’t want pictures of yourself naked out on the Internet, don’t take pictures of yourself naked.” That’s number one. My personal business philosophy is we only are chronicling nudity from films or television or video. I don’t sit in a tree and take pictures of actresses and post them at mrskin.com. We really stay true to the movie database aspect of it. So the Vanessa Hudgens stuff is not something you would find at mrskin.com.

To get to the question of how would I explain what I do to my children, to be honest, I’m not ashamed of what I do for a living. It’s not only a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of work. And I treat it very seriously. I have a great team of people working with me. It’s a great place to work. I would have no problem explaining it to my children when the time is right. And if I was doing something that I felt I’m ashamed of or couldn’t tell my children, then I probably shouldn’t be doing it. So that’s really my philosophy. I really wouldn’t have a problem telling my kids.

ANDELMAN: Has any actress ever asked you to remove her image or video?

Mr. SKIN: Yes. We get letters occasionally, not as many as you’d think, but occasionally, we’ll get letters from actresses. I could tell you that 99.9% of the time, they’re from no-name -- I shouldn’t use no-name -- obscure actresses which maybe search Google and find out that mrskin.com has pics and clips and a review of their nude scenes at our website. And we’ll get contacted by them, but we always point out to them that we’re a database and that our attorney gets to them right away to make sure they know what the website’s all about. And we’ve never had any -- in over eight years of running this website -- legal trouble as far as movie studios or actresses are concerned. And I think it goes back to because of how we promote the data. We’re celebrating the nudity. We’re having fun with it, and we’re sticking to stuff that actresses willingly appeared in. It’s not like the Vanessa Hudgens thing or the paparazzi pics that you would see all over the internet.

ANDELMAN: Have you ever had a Traci Lords moment where you found out that someone was underage?

Mr. SKIN: Occasionally, especially these European movies and stuff, you’ll find out that maybe an actress was 15 or 16 when she was in the movie, but it’s hard to tell right away. And we always remove that stuff. So we try to keep it so that, as best we can, that an actress is at least 18 years old when she does stuff. It’s just the smart thing to do in the political and business environment today.

ANDELMAN: You’ve had a relationship with the “Howard Stern Show” for a while, and you do the “Mr. Skin Minute.” But you made a real crossover to the mainstream this past summer with a part, not you personally, but the Mr. Skin site with a part in the movie Knocked Up. How did that come about?

Mr. SKIN: Well, I received a letter from the attorneys at Universal saying that they’re putting a movie out in a year. It was gonna be done by the guy that did 40 Year Old Virgin and would I give permission for my website to be used in the movie. And my answer was, “How quick can I get this back to you, signed?” I didn’t know how they were gonna use it originally, but they said that it was gonna be real positive. “You’ll like it.” And I said, “You know what, I don’t even care if it’s negative, let’s do it.”

Then the movie was made. I heard from people that saw it at a film festival, you’re not gonna believe the promotion for mrskin.com in this movie. And then I was able to see a screening in Chicago. I invited a bunch of friends, and there was a screening in Chicago before it came out. And I was just floored, blown away, by how just to be associated with the movie this successful and more important, the actual product placement of mrskin.com. You couldn’t ask for a better product placement in a movie.

ANDELMAN: Oh, it was amazing. And all the while, I don’t want to give away too much for people who haven’t seen the movie yet, but all the time that they’re building up to where Mr. Skin will be mentioned, anyone who has heard of or seen the site has got to be thinking they’re doing Mr. Skin.

Mr. SKIN: Right. I’ve had that from a lot of people where they didn’t know that the Mr. Skin thing was coming up, and they’re watching it thinking, “My God, they totally ripped you off! I was so angry!” and then they’re like, “Oh, my God, was that great!”

But I was able to talk to Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen. I was lucky enough to go to the L.A. movie premier of Knocked Up and then the after-party to meet those guys. And they both told me that when they based Seth Rogen’s job for the movie on what I do for a living thinking it would be a funny…Number one, it’s a funny job to have to tell people that’s what you do, but number two, they wanted a website that already existed so that the guys could be trying to duplicate it and later find out that it existed. So my site kind of fit. They wanted a funny business and something that already existed, and it kind of hit it well for them.

And I’m so lucky because now on September 25, yesterday, the DVD is in stores and pretty soon, it’s gonna be airing on cable television everyday. And as great as the bump was for us when the movie hit theaters, I truly believe that the DVD and the airings on cable and satellite television are gonna be just even better because you’re already at home watching it, and you just walk over to your computer and check out mrskin.com

ANDELMAN: That’s just an amazing thing. Any movie producers that would like to mention Mr. Media, just give us a call, okay. We’ll talk. How do the movie studios treat you? And tell me if there’s any difference between pre-Knocked Up and post. Do they discourage you, or do they actually send you the videos at this point?

Mr. SKIN: No, actually the movie companies really embrace mrskin.com. And we keep records. I have over 75 different studios send us screeners of movies before they’re out. In fact, I had Knocked Up in here on September 10, I believe it came in. It’s in stores September 25th. Its very common for a great majority of the movie studios to send us stuff. Think about it: I get to go on Howard Stern, Mr. Media, many different radio shows, to talk about their movies. We don’t talk about Disney movies or Gone With the Wind or things that have no skin. But if a movie has female nudity – like Good Luck Chuck - that’s on the front page of our site today. We get 6 million visitors a month to our site! We’re telling you there’s six different girls naked in that movie! Unfortunately, not Jessica Alba, but I’m promoting their movie. And in this day and age, of all the competition, what a great thing to get mentioned by mrskin.com for free on the radio and for free at the website. It’s a great promotion for the studios. We used TLA Video, if you’re at our web site and you want to buy Knocked Up, let’s say. You can follow a link direct from mrskin.com to TLA Video. We’re their biggest seller of movies. We move movies. We get people excited about them. And let’s face it: a lot of the movies are crummy movies. But we point out that “Alyssa Milano is nude in this movie” or “Demi Moore is nude in this movie” and it makes guys want to own the movies to check ‘em out. It’s a great vehicle for the movie studios to be able to promote their product.

ANDELMAN: You’ve said that, in deference to your mother’s preference, you don’t list the nudity in Schindler’s List.

Mr. SKIN: Well, what I meant by that is we don’t have the pics and clips from Schindler’s List. From the database standpoint, we do have Schindler’s List in our database, but we don’t have the pics and clips. I remember a few years back my mom sent me an email. She saw it at the website, and she said, “Please tell me you won’t put up pics and clips from Schindler’s List.” And I said I will not. I promise you it will not happen. And that’s the only example of one where we pulled, but I think that was the right move.

ANDELMAN: Well, I was gonna ask you if there are any other lines that you won’t cross, and I had one in mind. I was thinking of the Jodi Foster, the rape scene in The Accused.

Mr. SKIN: You think of The Accused, but if you think of these B movies and flasher movies, there’s so much more rough stuff in those. And if I have to start screening things based on what I think is wrong or right, that gets into a weird area. So what we do is, if it’s a movie that has nudity, we’ll review it, show the pics and clips, rate it, and that’s the policy. And hey, there’s stuff I have on my website I can’t even watch it because the scenes are so rough. Some of the stuff you saw in Hostel is pretty tough, but I didn’t want to get into censoring other artists’ work. And it just gets too goofy. If you don’t want to watch it, don’t go to that page to check it out is how I feel about it.

ANDELMAN: I asked you the question, but I actually saw that The Accused was on the site. But I thought it was interesting someone had a concern because it does say, “Turn down the sound.”

Mr. SKIN: Oh yeah, well yeah. We definitely have comments about it because it’s a rough scene, but that doesn’t mean that, because it’s a rough scene, I want to leave it out of the website. And, like I said, The Accused is just in the mainstream of people know about it. We have hundreds and hundreds of movies. I Spit On Your Grave, it for one, is a drive-in movie from the seventies that makes The Accused look like a Disney movie. So there’s movies out there that are very rough, but we, if it has nudity in it, that’s what we deal with, and yeah, sometimes it’s rough, but most of the time it’s enjoyable.

ANDELMAN: You’ve indicated in other interviews that you have no interest in doing a male nudity site, but the issue seems to come up more and more often. I’m kind of surprised that you haven’t considered a spin-off.

Mr. SKIN: It sounds stupid, but I don’t really do this for the money. I do it because, when I was a kid, I was so into collecting this stuff. When I was collecting it for 15 or 20 years, I didn’t make any money doing it. But I continued to collect it and chronicle it and learn about it and read about it. I didn’t do it for the money. If I have to wake up at two in the morning to tape and go through a movie because Ernest Borgnine’s gonna be in his underwear, it won’t be fun.

ANDELMAN: But you can hire people to do that.

Mr. SKIN: If anyone wants to do a guy nude site, go ahead. I won’t stop you. I won’t compete with you.

ANDELMAN: So where do you go from here? Hugh Hefner bought Jenna Jameson’s Club Jenna site awhile back. I suspect you’ve had offers. And with the publicity and the attention you’re going to get as Knocked Up goes into DVD, I’m sure that the value of the site only goes up.

Mr. SKIN: I think so. I’ve had some inquiries lately about what I would sell this website for and until someone knocks my socks off, I’m very happy doing this for a living. I don’t really have any plans to sell it.

I can say, as far as the next frontier -- or front and rear, if you will -- for us is the…I feel like, as far as radio goes, I’ve done everything I can to get the Mr. Skin brand and word out on radio. The Internet, obviously, we’ve got that covered. I have books. I have a book out in stores this month called Mr. Skin’s Skintastic Video Guide, The 501 Greatest Movies for Sex and Nudity on DVD. It’s our second book. I think we’re off to a good start in the book world.

I think the next logical step would be the television side of things, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be television in the network or cable sense. It could be television as far as maybe putting content out there that can be downloaded to your phone or downloaded to whatever device you have. I really think that’s going to be the next area that we have to get the Mr. Skin brand into. And I’ve had tons of offers I’m sifting through right now how to make that happen. It’s pretty amazing what’s out there, and it’s a learning process for me. I really think you’ll be able to download content from us, pretty cool stuff, in the coming years, and I think that’ll be a real neat thing for the future. And, hey, it may lead to a TV show, it might not, but I don’t even know if TV’s the way to go anymore. I think if you could do something that millions of people want to download via the Internet or via their phone, who’s to say that’s not better than television in the next couple years, anyway.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

A.J. Jacobs, "The Year of Living Biblically" author: Mr. Media Interview


A.J. Jacobs must have the best magazine job in America. As editor-at-large for Esquire, here are a few examples of recent stories appearing under his byline:

“My Outsourced Life,” detailing his effort to send his writing assignments to India,

“Googling A.J. Jacobs’s Brain,” about his proposed effort to catalogue his thoughts, dreams, and desires

“The Sexiest Woman Alive 2005” and “2006,” in which he spent five months teasing readers as to the identities of Jessica Biel and Scarlett Johansson. And, yes, he was required by law to spend time with each of them, passing off flirtation as research.

And then there was his equally painful interview with Eva Longoria of “Desperate Housewives” in which he described each of her body parts in languorous detail.

Oh, I could go on and on about the women in his professional life. They also include Mary Louise Parker and Rosario Dawson. But then we’d never get to the reason for this interview, which is to celebrate his hysterical, yet thought-provoking new book, The Year of Living Biblically.

DOWNLOAD THE MP3; LISTEN HERE.

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.


BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I have to start by saying I think you’re a friggin’ genius. Not only do you have an inventive new book and a magazine publisher prompting it and promoting it online and in print, but you’ve also found ways within its own text to subtly plug your last book, The Know-It-All. At least -- I counted -- 13 times directly.

A.J. JACOBS: Really? Oh, wow, I didn’t realize I was that good.

ANDELMAN: Well, it’s easy. Anyone can figure it out. You actually have an index. There’s an index, and you can go through, and you can count. So directly or indirectly, thirteen plugs, and that, to me, as a guy who’s written a few books, I have to say, I think it’s as brilliant as Nick Tosches thanking himself in the acknowledgements to one of his books because, without him, his books wouldn’t have been possible.

JACOBS: That’s true. That’s absolutely true. Yeah, well, that’s nice. Maybe I should have a coupon for the first book in The Year of Living Biblically.

ANDELMAN: I think that’s the only thing that’s missing. I think it’s great. I think it’s brilliant. How did The Year of Living Biblically come about?

JACOBS: It came about because I grew up in an incredibly secular home. As I say in the book, I am Jewish but in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. So not very Jewish at all. And I actually thought that religion was gonna wither away, and we’d all live in this sort of scientific world. But, of course, that didn’t happen, and so I became fascinated with was I missing something by not having a spiritual life? But was I missing something essential to being human like someone who’s never heard Beethoven? Or was half the world deluded? So I decided to dive in head first cause that’s what I like to do. So I dive in head first to try to understand the Bible, this most influential book in the world. And I thought the best way to do it would be try to actually get inside the minds of the ancient people and get in the sandals of my forefathers.

ANDELMAN: And you did this how?

JACOBS: Well, I read the Bible, and I compiled a list of every suggestion, every rule, every commandment in the Bible. And by the end, my list was 72 pages, over 700 rules. Everything from the Ten Commandments we all know, all the famous ones, no lying, no coveting, but it also had dozens, hundreds of obscure rules like don’t wear clothes with mixed fibers and don’t, well, stone adulterers, for instance. So I wanted to try to follow every single one of those. So just commit myself completely to this project. So that’s what I did.

ANDELMAN: Now, I’m definitely, I’m about as close to agnostic as you are, as you were at least. Moses had 613 rules that he brought down, didn’t he?

JACOBS: Right.

ANDELMAN: But you actually got over 700.

JACOBS: Well, I included sections of the Bible including the Proverbs, which have a lot to say about, for instance, laziness. So I couldn’t be lazy anymore. The Proverbs don’t like naps very much so it was unfortunate I couldn’t take naps all year. So I included other sections of the Bible in addition to the five books of Moses.

ANDELMAN: The thing that struck me reading was that this research must have affected a lot more people than just you. Particularly, your wife comes to mind.

JACOBS: My wife is a saint. That is true. I won’t deny it. Yeah, it was the most extreme makeover of my life. It affected every single part so the way I ate, the way I talked, the way I dressed, and the way I touched my wife. So she was very patient. I’m glad that we’re still married.

ANDELMAN: And you literally did change the way that you touched your wife. There were times where she was considered impure by the Bible.

JACOBS: That’s right.

ANDELMAN: Which meant not just not touching her, you couldn’t sit where she sat.

JACOBS: Right. There’s a section of the Bible, if you take it literally, that says you cannot sit where an impure woman has sat, which ruled out pretty much every chair, and in New York, you’ve got the subways, the buses. And my wife, as revenge, she didn’t like that rule so she sat on every chair in our apartment so I was reduced to doing a lot of standing.

ANDELMAN: And then you actually found a portable chair, right?

JACOBS: I did. I carried around a chair, a little pure chair for the subways.

ANDELMAN: Now, who else was affected by this project? People you work with, perhaps? Your son?

JACOBS: Yeah, people I work with. You mentioned Rosario Dawson. There was a little conflict between my work life where I work for Esquire, a men’s magazine. I like to think it’s a high-brow men’s magazine, but it’s still a men’s magazine. So interviewing Rosario Dawson while trying to obey the Bible’s rules about lusting, that was not an easy one. I had to do the interview without looking at her.

ANDELMAN: You were in the same room, though.

JACOBS: Oh, yeah. I just avoided eye contact.

ANDELMAN: Uh-huh. And how did Rosario feel about this?

JACOBS: Rosario was actually very understanding. I had a huge beard like this hedgehog on my face, and she actually said that, she was one of the few people who said she actually liked the beard.

ANDELMAN: Well, of course, at that point, wasn’t she just coming off working with Kevin Smith?

JACOBS: That’s right. Yeah. So she was used to it.

ANDELMAN: Were there other assignments that were affected by the beard and the whole practice?

JACOBS: Well, I did an assignment on the Bible for Esquire so that was one. But, yeah, it was the clash between the way we live now in the 21st century and the way they lived then. It’s all I see now. I was walking around Manhattan in a white robe and sandals carrying a staff. I didn’t have sheep with me most of the time.

ANDELMAN: Most of the time.

JACOBS: Most of the time. Well, I did go on a number of adventures because I wanted to immerse myself with people who live biblically or took the Bible literally in some way. So I did go to Israel, and I did spend the day shepherding sheep, which was one of the most, the greatest experiences of my book.

ANDELMAN: Now, there was also Uncle Gil.

JACOBS: Right. My family has an interesting religious background because most of us are very secular, but my ex-uncle, a man formerly married to my aunt, is probably the most religious person in the world. He’s been through every major religion. He was a born-again Christian. He was a Buddhist. He was a Hindu cult leader. And now he’s an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem.

ANDELMAN: In any of that time, I kept wondering, did he do Amway?

JACOBS: I didn’t see that in his autobiography, but he’d be good.

ANDELMAN: It’s a really interesting book to read, partly because it’s funny, but it’s also very thought provoking, as I said earlier. Myself, I’ve always been much less of a religious person and more of a Ten Commandments guy. I always thought, if you needed guiding principles in life, the Ten Commandments seemed to boil down pretty well to the basics of being a good person.

JACOBS: Right.

ANDELMAN: But, I wondered, now that you’ve finished the book, what elements of your year continue with you?

JACOBS: Well, it’s interesting because the book did change me in a hundred different ways, big and small. There is humor in the book, I hope, but that’s only part of it. I really was fascinated with religion, and I wanted to see what, if anything, I was missing. So there are things that I found about religion that I’ve kept even after my year. I don’t stone adulterers anymore, but I…

ANDELMAN: Thank God.

JACOBS: Yeah, thank God. I definitely, the Bible gave me a sense of gratefulness because there’s a lot of talk about thanking in the Bible, which I think it’s really important to remember the hundred things that go right in a day instead of focusing on the three or four things that go wrong. So it really helped me in that. And one of the other lessons I learned is that by acting with almost a “fake it till you make it” approach because I was acting like a moral person. I was not coveting. I was not lying. I was trying not to gossip. And, if you do that, you slowly become a slightly better person. I’m not Angelina Jolie or Gandhi, but I feel that by committing yourself to acting, pretending that you’re a good person, you actually become a better person.

ANDELMAN: Now, have you had that confirmed by other people?

JACOBS: That I’m a better person?

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

JACOBS: Well, my wife thinks I’m a better person now that I shaved my beard.

ANDELMAN: What are you especially glad to be done with from that year?

JACOBS: Well, it was a very intense year so it was hard to, for instance, completely cut out lying, to be totally honest, all the time. It’s a radical life change. And I think it’s good not to. I think I learned that I should lie less. But there were times where it was just exhausting because I have a three-year-old kid, and you can’t tell him, “Uh, sorry, the TV’s broken”. You have to say, “No, you can’t watch TV because I don’t want you to,” and so there’s screaming, there’s crying, and he gets upset too.

ANDELMAN: I think at one point he wanted a bagel, and you tried to convince him it was an English muffin. No, your wife convinced him it was an English muffin, and you just couldn’t do that.

JACOBS: Right. He wanted a bagel. We didn’t have bagels. We only had an English muffin. So she wanted me to say, “Hey, here’s a bagel,” and give him the muffin, but I felt I had to tell him the truth. And it backfired in a massive way.

ANDELMAN: Has your year of living biblically changed the way that you will raise him?

JACOBS: It has. It has. One of the interesting things is the Bible talks a lot about how the God of the Bible has mercy, but also He has sternness. So I was a pushover dad. I was no backbone, say yes to everything. But I’m trying to be a little more like the God of the Bible where I have a balance between the mercy and the toughness.

ANDELMAN: I have to tell you that, of all the things in the book, the one that stopped me dead and made me scratch my head a little bit, I hope you laugh about this, but it was that your son could only watch TV while he was eating. That just really stuck with me.

JACOBS: You like that?

ANDELMAN: I thought that was interesting. It was the thing that we used to do. We used to let my daughter watch TV while she was eating, but then we noticed that eating was taking an hour to 90 minutes.

JACOBS: That is exactly the problem I have. I know. He turns it into like a five-course French meal.

ANDELMAN: I know that’s kind of off-topic, but that was the thing that really… I’ll remember that for a while.

JACOBS: I wish the Bible had more specific commands about television and when kids should watch it.

ANDELMAN: Since you mention that, you did keep working on your Powerbook, which I don’t recall seeing mentioned in any versions of the Bible or even the Torah.

JACOBS: Some of the time I actually tried to live like they lived 3,000, 2,000 years ago with the robe, or I wrote a lot by olive oil lamp. But, much of the time, I found if I could just follow the rules strictly then I could do some modern things. There’s no commandment, “Thou shalt not use a Macbook Pro.” So that’s sort of the loophole I found for that.

ANDELMAN: Now, one of the unnerving aspects of reading your book, as a writer, again, was the thought of massaging and merging so many versions of the Bible and related texts with so many purported authorities on its content. You have this whole council of people. And then, somehow, you come out of that with expertise yourself, all in less than a year, whereas some of these people have obviously committed their whole lifetimes to this. How did you do that?

JACOBS: Well, I’m certainly not the world’s greatest expert on the Bible, but I think I’ve got a unique point of view on it. And, as you say, I had a spiritual advisory board. I had rabbis, ministers, priests, some very liberal, some extremely conservative, and they helped me navigate. But, in the end, one of the goals was to see if I could strip away all the interpretations and get back to what the Bible actually said, what it meant back then, get back to the Biblical bedrock. And I realized that this was Mission: Impossible. I could not do that. The Biblical bedrock is too slippery. You can’t find out what it meant, the original intent was. But it was a fascinating journey, and I learned thousands of things along the way. So I’m glad I did it even if I’ll never know what Moses actually meant with a certain passage.

ANDELMAN: Would I be wrong in guessing that the proofreading and copy-editing process might have been a bit of a nightmare?

JACOBS: That is true. There were a lot of names that…Methuselah and things. I thank God for the copy editors.

ANDELMAN: I was going to ask you if you encountered any editors along the process who did not appreciate the point of view in the book or the interpretation of certain things in the book.

JACOBS: Well, I actually thought I would get a lot more flak than I did, and I’m not really sure why I didn’t. Definitely, there are people who don’t approve of my project, but far more people have been accepting of it. And I think that that is because I went in there with an open mind, really trying to understand this incredibly influential book as opposed to going in with an agenda.

ANDELMAN: Now, as we’re talking, the book hasn’t officially gone on sale yet.

JACOBS: True.

ANDELMAN: There’re a few things ahead of us that you don’t know what’s going to happen. But what would surprise you in the months to come as far as the acceptance of the book goes? Would it be, if this hasn’t already happened, would it be if someone wanted to option the book as a movie, would that surprise you? Before you answer that, I’m thinking also you write about going into a Bible bookstore in Manhattan where there was a guy there who was real mellow and real calm. Would it surprise you to walk by there one day in the coming months and see the book in the window, for example?

JACOBS: As for the first question, it actually was already optioned as a screenplay by Paramount.

ANDELMAN: Good for you.

JACOBS: It was actually quite a bizarre process because we optioned the idea, and they wrote the screenplay simultaneously as I was writing the book. And the guy who wrote the screenplay actually finished his screenplay before I finished my book. So I want us to get a hold of the screenplay and see how my year ended. But it’s in development, and things are looking good, but you never know with Hollywood. And as for the bookstore, it is interesting. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback so far from evangelical Christians who, I don’t agree with a lot of what they say, but I did try to explore their point of view, and they seem to be interested. So I’m hoping the book will appeal to everyone from the Christopher Hitchens-type atheists to the Orthodox Jews, but we’ll see.

ANDELMAN: Are you now or do you see yourself becoming a regular at either temple or church at some point?

JACOBS: Well, I started the year as an agnostic and, by the end of the year, I don’t want to give away the ending. By the end of the year, I’m still agnostic, but I call myself a reverent agnostic. It’s actually a term a minister friend of mine came up with because, whether or not there’s a God, I do believe there’s something to the idea of sacredness and that rituals can be sacred and the Sabbath can be sacred, and there’s an importance to that, whether or not God exists.

ANDELMAN: So you didn’t come back and decide that you wanted to be Jewish, something you had not been really beforehand.

JACOBS: Well, I actually am a little more committed than I was. My kid is going to a Jewish school for the first couple of years. I don’t think he’ll continue in a Jewish school the whole way, but it happens to be a block away from our house so that helps. And I like some of the rituals, the Seder, and other things which I just didn’t have when I was growing up.

ANDELMAN: A.J., how did this book, the research and preparation for this book, compare to The Know-It-All in which you read the entire encyclopedia?

JACOBS: The Know-It-All was definitely an intellectual Everest because I had to read 33,000 pages and 44 million words. And not every single word was fascinating. So, nothing against the Portuguese, but the 25 pages on Portuguese literature, I could’ve done without. So it was a very challenging year, but I think that the Bible was more of a challenge because it affected every single part of my life. So it affected the way I ate, the way I talked, the way I thought, the way I touched my wife. It was a full immersion experiment.

ANDELMAN: How do you follow this? To the magazine, of course, you’ve set yourself up as the go-to guy for interviewing the hottest actresses and, with the books, you’re the go-to guy for time intensive big projects. What do you do next?

JACOBS: I know. I’m trying to think. My wife thinks I should try eating at every restaurant in New York City. My brother-in-law thinks I should become a eunuch for a year, but I don’t know if that can be a year long project. It’s sort of a lifetime commitment.

ANDELMAN: That’s the brother-in-law?

JACOBS: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, that figures, doesn’t it?

JACOBS: Yeah. He thinks that would be a good idea. He thinks I have enough kids. I have some ideas, but I haven’t settled on one yet. But I do love the genre, the immersion genre or whatever you want to call it. I just love living these things, and I love reading other people’s books about it cause I think it’s like a memoir with added value. You get to look at someone’s life, but you also get a peek at this fascinating topic.

ANDELMAN: Well, it seems like you have a pretty good gig in balancing the occasional book with the magazine visibility and obviously the hot babes. So I have to say I’m sure I’m not the only guy in the business who’s very envious of what you do. But I really enjoyed the book. I’m really glad we had time to talk today.

JACOBS: Oh, I had a great time. Thanks, Bob. And envying is a sin, of course.

ANDELMAN: Yes, but I’m not keeping to the Good Book.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Jeff Garlin, "Curb Your Enthusiasm" actor: Mr. Media Interview


Today is a great day to be Jeff Garlin. And for him, tomorrow will probably be an even better day.

The sixth season of the hugely popular and hysterically funny HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” starring Larry David and co-starring Garlin, is now underway.

But even better, I suspect, for Garlin is that his first movie as writer, director, and star, I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, opened on September 5.

The New York Times greeted Garlin’s Cheese this way: laid back and affectionate, Cheese is the movie version of a dear friend you could spend all day with.

Not bad for a guy from Chicago.

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Jeff, there’s a moment in one of the season’s new episodes where you confess to a -- I gotta get right to this -- to a moment of intimacy with a blanket in Larry’s house during Passover.

GARLIN: Oh, you saw that one?

ANDELMAN: Yes, I did. And I want to ask you the new rules of Judaism that you set forth there and will probably go over big with America’s rabbis, don’t you think?

GARLIN: Oh, I think they’re all gonna participate.

ANDELMAN: But it did kind of bring to mind, are there or have there been any lines that can’t be crossed on a show like this?

GARLIN: There’s a line. If it’s not funny, that’s the line that can’t be crossed.

ANDELMAN: Fair enough.

GARLIN: If it’s funny then it’s fine.

ANDELMAN: Judaism comes up quite a bit I guess. I don’t want to give it away obviously, but this had to be Judaism’s finest moment on the show I think.

GARLIN: One of them. We certainly did get a lot of feedback from the Orthodox episode. Yeah, so, the big vagina episode as they say.

ANDELMAN: You and Larry go back many years as stand-up comics. I wondered, though, of all the guys who could’ve been Larry’s foil on the show, how did your involvement in Curb come about?

GARLIN: Well, I approached him about it. We were having lunch, and I told him an idea that I had for an HBO special which ended up being “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” So I approached him. I wasn’t gonna be in it. He insisted I play his manager, and he insisted that I be an executive producer with him. I hadn’t planned on that.

ANDELMAN: Wow. Executive producer seems to be the least of what you should get out of that idea.

GARLIN: Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s pretty exciting.

ANDELMAN: Worked out pretty well. How are you able to mix friendship and business so well?

GARLIN: When you’re working with comedians, when we work together, that line is always crossed. With comedians, there is no sort of business/friendship thing. If you’re friendly, you got a chance. But it’s much better to work with friends to be honest with you. I enjoy it.

ANDELMAN: Now when you had the idea for the show, was the idea of the agent part of the original idea?

GARLIN: No, no. I assumed there probably would’ve been an agent or something like that. It was all part of the gist. The idea was to see the behind-the-scenes life of a comedian during the making of an HBO special.

ANDELMAN: And that was the special that essentially wound up as the pilot for the series.

GARLIN: Yes.

ANDELMAN: When did you realize that you were going to be an integral part of what was to come?

GARLIN: From the get-go. From the get-go. When we were developing it, it was clear that this was going to be something integral to the show. But we had no idea it was gonna become a TV series.

ANDELMAN: Right.

GARLIN: So that caught me by surprise, too.

ANDELMAN: Were either of you hesitant to commit to a series like that when that came up?

GARLIN: Not hesitant at all. As a matter of fact, when we were filming the first hour pilot thing, we were saying how much fun it would be if we could ever do this as a series, not thinking that that was even a possibility or gonna happen. I know HBO was after Larry to do a series, and it worked out well.

ANDELMAN: Last year, a lot of people seemed to think, and I don’t know that there was any great announcement, but a lot of people seemed to think that that was the last season of the show. Here you are back this year.

GARLIN: That was supposed to be the last season of the show, yes. I knew there was a very small chance we’d do another one, and Larry called me up and asked me, and I said, “Yeah, I’ll do another one.”

ANDELMAN: What was the reason for ending it at the time?

GARLIN: We’ve been doing it a long time. You kind of don’t want to repeat yourself. I would say the single biggest reason for “Curb” ’s success is it’s not beholden to money. We’re all professionals who want to get paid, but Larry David is so rich that he doesn’t have to keep doing the show to earn a living or pay off his lifestyle. So the only reason we continue it is out of pride in terms of, if he has a great idea, then we keep going.

ANDELMAN: You’re an executive producer. Can you say whether this show will continue past this season?

GARLIN: I don’t think it will, but there’s a chance. Who knows. When we talked about it before, he wasn’t getting divorced. So I don’t know how that’ll change things.

ANDELMAN: So maybe he’ll have more free time.

GARLIN: That’s exactly what I was thinking, but I still think it’s probably gonna be our last.

ANDELMAN: Okay. You do think it will be the last.

GARLIN: I do think it’ll be the last, yes.

ANDELMAN: Could you and Larry ever take this dynamic that we see on TV, could you ever take that on the road for a stand-up tour?

GARLIN: Well, I am doing a tour with Susie Essman who plays my wife.

ANDELMAN: Really?

GARLIN: Yeah. I’m going on the road with her and Richard Lewis. So yes is the answer, but it will not be with Larry.

ANDELMAN: When does that tour start?

GARLIN: Our first gig, I think, is September 25. We’re playing Foxwoods Resort and Casino in Mashantucket, Connecticut.

ANDELMAN: On the show, of course, you play Larry’s manager, Jeff Greene. But what is your manager like?

GARLIN: My manager is David Miner at 3 Arts Entertainment, and he’s one of the kindest, best people you could ever hope to work with. And he is just a great, great person and a great, great manager and nothing like the scumbag Jeff Greene.

ANDELMAN: Is Jeff a scumbag? I thought he was the…

GARLIN: A total scumbag. A total scumbag.

ANDELMAN: I would’ve never described him that way.

GARLIN: I play him, and I’m telling ya, he’s a scumbag.

ANDELMAN: Listen. Over the summer, I picked up, at a bookstore in Buffalo, I had one night there, and I picked up a book. It’s the Curb Your Enthusiasm book, big yellow book.

GARLIN: Okay.

ANDELMAN: I hate to tell ya what I paid for it. It was on the closeout shelf.

GARLIN: It did well when it wasn’t on the close-out shelf, and I would’ve liked to have bought some copies from the close-out shelf.

ANDELMAN: I can tell ya that this store in the Buffalo mall has some. The book is real handy because it takes that basic concept that I guess Larry wrote for each episode, and then there’re comments from cast members about the improv and the unexpected things. I wondered, as you look back on the show now into the sixth season, do you have an improv moment of your own that really stands out?

GARLIN: Yeah. One of my favorites is -- and I do one this coming season that I can’t talk about -- when Larry and I are looking in my daughter’s room for the doll’s head, and the shelf comes down. And the shelf was not supposed to come down. It just did, and I kept on going. I didn’t stop obviously, and I told my wife that I’d been having nightmares about the shelf, and I knew it would fall. And lo and behold, here I am, and it falls. I thought that was pretty funny.

ANDELMAN: It was a great moment. That episode was terrific about the dolls.

I want to talk about your movie.

GARLIN: I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With.

ANDELMAN: Yes. It’s a great title. What inspired it?

GARLIN: Actually, Larry David hates the title, by the way, because it ends in a preposition. He thinks that you can’t do that. “No, you can’t end in a preposition.” But the title came from, I was having lunch with a friend of mine’s girlfriend at the Museum of Natural History, and we’re talking about relationships and what we’re looking for. And I said what I was looking for and then I said. “What are you looking for?” And she said, “I want this, I want that, I want someone to eat cheese with.” And I went, “That’s it! That’s so great. That’s so simple. I get that, and I’m gonna use that as a title someday if you don’t mind.”

ANDELMAN: It’s a very memorable title, and I don’t know what Larry would’ve expected, “I Want Someone With Whom to Eat Cheese”?

GARLIN: Yes. That’s what he wanted to change to.

iFilm Clips:
I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

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ANDELMAN: Were you more brave or crazy to write, direct, and star in the movie?

GARLIN: I definitely wasn’t brave, maybe crazy. But write, direct, and star, that’s easy. Producing is the crazy part. Producing is the brave part because that’s the hardest job there is. Producers do all the crap that nobody else wants to do.

ANDELMAN: Well, that’s true, but producers, their faces aren’t out front there when the product comes out.

GARLIN: Yeah, but if you believe in the product... I hate calling it my independent film product. I’ve done movies that are pure product, if you will. But you just do the best you can no matter what situation. If it’s something like, for me, something I wrote and directed and I act in, I’m obviously passionate about it, and I have no fear of being out in front of the public with it because I controlled it.

ANDELMAN: Were you nervous to see those first reviews come in?

GARLIN: I actually read them by accident because I really planned and I still plan, I don’t want to really read reviews anymore. I got a rave from the New York Times, and I’m good.

ANDELMAN: Yeah, that was something, and it was kind of buried inside. And I saw it last night, and I thought, oh my God, look at that. Wow.

GARLIN: Yeah, that’s what I said. “Oh my God, look at that.” Those were my exact words.

ANDELMAN: I was very happy for you and for me that it was a good review because I don’t know how it would’ve been to bring it up if they had slammed the movie.

GARLIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I don’t think anybody’s gonna slam the movie. I think some people might not be crazy about it, think oh, it’s okay. So that’s cool. They’ll say it’s okay, or they’re gonna love it. I think it’s a good movie, and I don’t think there’s anything in there that’s false or hackneyed like you might see in other movies where it frustrates a reviewer. But they might not love it.

ANDELMAN: It looks like, from the cast, that you borrowed a couple of women from Denis Leary’s “Rescue Me” - Amy Sedaris and Gina Gershon.

GARLIN: I don’t know that I borrowed them from “Rescue Me.” They did that after I worked with them, but he borrowed them from me.

ANDELMAN: Any good Sarah Silverman stories from the set?

GARLIN: No.

ANDELMAN: Oh, come on.

GARLIN: I’d like to be able to say oh yes, this or that. No, she’s beautiful and she’s funny and she’s just a great actress and so, no, I was lucky to have her.

ANDELMAN: Did you film this before or after the first season of her TV show?

GARLIN: Before.

ANDELMAN: Oh, before.

GARLIN: I wrote the part for her, and I filmed it long before she was the Sarah Silverman we know today.

ANDELMAN: How do you think, if at all, the film will change your career? You said in the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” book that, thanks to “Curb,” you know you’ll always have a career. But do you think this will change?

GARLIN: Not the way “Curb” has. It will not change my career, no, but it helps legitimize me as a film director which is what I aspire. If you tell me the rest of my life I’d never act, never do anything but write and direct films and do stand-up, I’d be thrilled.

ANDELMAN: I have one more question for you, Jeff. I have to ask: How, how did you miss out on the Daddy Daycare sequel?

GARLIN: They didn’t offer me enough money. That’s the reason I didn’t do it. I don’t care how crappy it was, I would’ve been more than happy to do it. I love Cuba. He’s a great guy. I would’ve loved to have worked with him. Fred Savage is a great guy. So it would’ve been a nice experience even though it wasn’t the greatest movie. But they didn’t offer me enough money, and when you’re doing something that’s now that’s a piece of product, you’re doing something that’s a product. I need to be paid correctly, and I was not offered the right money. We went back and forth, and so we couldn’t agree on money. So I didn’t do it, and I’ve never gotten reviews that wonderful, ever, for anything because I was singled out in every review as being smart for not doing it.

ANDELMAN: That’s why I wanted to ask you about it. You were certainly smart to have done the first one. It was a fun…

GARLIN: I got to work with Eddie Murphy, my God. What an honor.

ANDELMAN: Yeah. Well, you lucked out on that. I think not getting the money you wanted was probably God’s way of saying, “Move on.”

GARLIN: That’s what I’m saying. I’ve got a wife and kids so if you want to pay me the money, I’ll act in any crappy movie. I don’t care. But if you’re not gonna pay me… So it worked out the way it was supposed to. My kids were disappointed because they wanted me to do it, and my wife kind of wanted me to do it. But no, no thank you.

ANDELMAN: Okay.

GARLIN: If we’re gonna do crap, I gotta be able to build a pool afterwards.

ANDELMAN: More rules. See, this is just like a moment of “Curb.” We’re learning more rules for living here.

GARLIN: Yeah. Well, that’s my rule.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Michelle Borth, "Tell Me You Love Me" actress: Mr. Media Interview



The ironic thing about Michelle Borth’s role as Jamie, a woman whose fiancé won’t commit to monogamy in the new HBO series "Tell Me You Love Me," is that she is the kind of sexy, intoxicating woman that could probably drive the best-intentioned married man to cheat on his wife.

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I was fascinated watching the show. It was very unlike anything I think I’ve ever seen, even on HBO.

MICHELLE BORTH: Well, that’s a huge compliment. Thank you.

ANDELMAN: How was this show pitched to you, and what was your first reaction to it?

BORTH: It was pitched to me about three years ago, during pilot season, and it was very much what you would think. It was proposed to me as this really graphic show, and that that was something I should know before going into it. And I was like, “Okay, well, let me read it.” And I read the pilot, and I was floored. I was really floored by it because I personally really connected with the character Jamie on a personal level that I was like, “Someone is following me around and writing my life because this is my life.” So I went into the audition for this project with wanting it moreso than I think anything I’ve ever auditioned for in the past before that.

ANDELMAN: It seemed like, looking over your resume, that it was quite different from anything you had done before.

BORTH: It is. It absolutely is. I haven’t actually done much TV work. I’ve worked quite a bit and have been in the low-budget indie/horror/sci-fi genres, which are great. But this is actually more along my speed and what I really would like to do. This kind of show, on this kind of network, specifically, is a dream come true for me and I think for any actor, but for me, specifically, it was a dream come true.

ANDELMAN: Well, you mention right at the top there that it was presented to you as a very graphic, sexual show.

BORTH: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Did you have any hesitation with that?

BORTH: Of course. Initially, I did when I had the first conversation with my agent. The way that it was presented I was like, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know how I feel about that.” Because, even in the films that I’d done, I’ve done one topless scene prior to any of this, and I was like that’s it, I did my one, I’m not doing anything more. So I was like oh, no, but after reading the pilot, it was just so smart and so beautifully written. Something, like you said, I’d never read anything like that. I haven’t read a movie script or a pilot or anything even close to what I read. It automatically then didn’t become an issue. And that’s the truth. It honestly was not an issue to me from that point on.

ANDELMAN: It’s funny. Ten years ago, I probably wouldn’t have even thought to ask you this, but here I am. I’ve got a daughter going on 11. My view of some of these things, I notice, has changed, and I think, my goodness, how would I feel if my daughter was portraying a character like that on screen? You said you did one topless scene. This is, for people who haven’t seen it yet, this is way beyond a topless scene.

BORTH: Absolutely. It’s absolutely difficult. It’s not a show that I am pushing my father or my brothers to watch because I think it might be awkward for them as family members. But, in general, I think that it’s a big deal because there hasn’t been anything that’s been this true to life on TV at all, especially primetime TV, and HBO is known for raising the bar and setting a new precedent. And I think that this goes along the lines of anything else that they’ve done. “The Sopranos” was an extremely violent show and showed things that you wouldn’t be able to show on basic cable and stuff like that. And we’re just doing the same thing with a different context. We’re now dealing with sex which, in America, I’m realizing now that we’re a little sexually repressed. So I think it rubs people the wrong way.

ANDELMAN: How do you think America will be after a season of “Tell Me You Love Me”? Will we be less repressed, or will the people who are repressed want to be more repressed and the people who aren’t want to be more exposed?

BORTH: How do I feel? Well, first off, I think people are gonna be, I hope not, but I think people might be a little disappointed when they initially watch the show and realize that it’s not a big porn fest. That it is actually a really smart, intelligent show, and sex is a part of it because we’re dealing with intimacy of relationships and all of that. So I think that the HBO audience is a smart audience, and the show is slow-paced, and there’re no bells and whistles. There’re no big booms or music or fast cuts that it’s gonna take a certain audience to watch it, but once they do, the storylines will pick up where maybe the sex drew people in. I think the storylines are gonna draw people in, and so the people who watch it just for the sex I think will be disappointed because it’s not just about that. And the people who I think maybe will get offended, just don’t watch it. Don’t watch it.

ANDELMAN: I have to say, in defense of the sex scenes, that, if you like to watch a movie or TV and check out the sex scenes, the ones in the first two episodes are pretty intense.

BORTH: We come in with a bang. We’re coming in with a bang. I would say probably the two most graphic episodes of the entire season are the first two. Absolutely. So, yes, we’re coming in with a big bang.

ANDELMAN: You mentioned other HBO shows. It kind of reminded me of the opposite of an older HBO show, “The Mind of a Married Man.” It’s not a comedy. It’s a drama, and it’s more like, except for your character, “The Mind of a Married Woman,” although when we meet you, you’re on your way to becoming a married woman.

BORTH: Right. I actually just got HBO. I needed to get HBO. So I haven’t seen that show, but viewing the lives is really voyeuristic. You feel like you’re there going through these problems with these couples. And what I think is great about the show is that it’s so universal, and it hits every demographic that pretty much, if you’ve been in a relationship and you’re an adult, you’re gonna be able to relate to one of them. There’s gonna be one of the relationships that’s gonna draw you in and say, “Ah, I know that, I know that and I have said that before.”

ANDELMAN: Are you or have you ever been married?

BORTH: No, I am not married, and I have never been married. I have not been in a relationship in four years.

ANDELMAN: So you’re even a little separated from where Jamie is.

BORTH: I am. The thing about Jamie, though, that was difficult for me and what initially drew me in, what I said earlier about the pilot, was just a lot of the pain and heartache that she has in her relationship with Hugo and the breakup with Hugo and all of that is something that I have experienced. So, for me, as an actress, what was difficult was all that baggage that you dealt with and put away, I had to pull out and open up and live it for six months so that wasn’t fun. That wasn’t great. I’m like I spent a lot of time and hard work getting over all those issues, let’s go on back out and play in it again.

ANDELMAN: Michelle, I have to ask, maybe you’ll tell me, maybe you won’t, how old are you?

BORTH: I just turned 29.

ANDELMAN: Oh, that’s amazing. I would’ve guessed 22, 23.

BORTH: Thank you very much. You know what though, I will say this much. I auditioned for this show on my birthday, on my 26th birthday. So this has been a very long process filming the show. It’s been about a year since I shot it, and it’s been two years since I shot the pilot. So the first episode you actually watch is the pilot. We shot that over two and a half years ago. So I am younger.

ANDELMAN: And do you guys know yet if you’ll be picked up for another season?

BORTH: We don’t know because the show hasn’t aired yet. So we don’t even know what the response or the ratings are gonna be like, and they haven’t told me anything specific. They can’t because there’s no guarantee.

ANDELMAN: Usually, they have a sense of this.

BORTH: Yeah, but HBO’s track record because they can, they have the ability to, they give shows a chance. I can only think of one show in the past that didn’t get past the first season, but they usually give them two or three seasons for people to start to settle into it.

ANDELMAN: Right.

BORTH: I would be really surprised if we didn’t have a second season, honestly.

ANDELMAN: Well, let me come back to the characters for a minute. Most of the married couples in the show seem likely, at this point, to stay true to one another, although perhaps, tempted by other fruit. And that kind of allows the actors in those relationships to build intimacy with one another. But Jamie and Hugo, they seem doomed from the start, leading me to think that you’ll be getting physical with, perhaps, a series of actors or, for all we know, actresses, in search of the right mate. And so I wondered, does that make the role and your job tougher than maybe some of the other actors on the show?

BORTH: Oh my God, absolutely, absolutely! The one thing that was difficult, specifically, is that throughout the entire shooting of the episodes, everyone’s got their partner. As an actor, you’re working with the same person over and over and over again. You build that trust. You build that stability. You build that chemistry with that other actor. And little things like right now, like interviews, when you do interviews, a lot of the couples get interviewed together, and so they bounce off one another. And what’s been difficult for me is that because of my storyline and Jamie going in and out of relationships to try to find what she’s looking for, I’ve had to do this journey on my own, not only as the character but as Michelle Borth. And it’s a little frightening because number one, this is my first big anything, especially my first TV show, so having to go through all of this by myself and figuring it out all myself is ironic to me because it parallels my character on screen. But it is, it’s difficult. I would like to have had Luke, say, go through all of that with me and do it as a team like the other couples and the other actors got to do. But that wasn’t the case. But it’s been a great learning experience. Had to do it trial by fire.

ANDELMAN: I have to ask you so I guess this is a man’s question, I don’t know. There’s a scene with you and the actor who plays Hugo in the car, which is pretty intense and pretty graphic. How do you start and stop where the acting and the human being begins and ends in a scene like that?

BORTH: That’s actually a really good question because I thought about it, and I don’t really know how to answer it. You have to distinguish your work from personal, absolutely, and although Luke and I did develop quite a strong relationship, and it made those scenes a lot easier to do because we had this really great chemistry in real life. So I think that just shows even more on screen. But it’s acting, and I feel like in whatever technique or however people work, I substitute people. So in that scene, I’m thinking of someone else. I’m bringing someone else into that scene in my mind.

ANDELMAN: And thank you for thinking of Mr. Media in that scene. I appreciated that. I could see that.

BORTH: I was! I was thinking about you in that scene, which is why it was so intense. But you have to. You have to distinguish, otherwise you’re gonna find yourself in really awkward, weird situations which happens a lot on sets. I kind of understand now why people who work together tend to date afterwards. Just reading magazines and watching “Extra” and stuff like that, I get it because you spend a significant amount of time with that person and, especially with what we’re dealing with on this show and that close and that intimate, you do develop that relationship off-screen. I think you have to in order to bring it on-screen, but it is all for the sake of the work and for the job, and that’s it. And then you come home and let it go.

BOB ANDELMAN: One of the things that I know people have talked about a lot about the show is the male full frontal nudity, which, even in movies, you don’t see that, and that seems to bring that other element to the show that makes it seem that much more graphic because you’re really not used to seeing that.

MICHELLE BORTH: I think that’s the whole point, though. I think it’s really interesting that that’s been like a big fuss because I almost want to say to the men, “Oh, boo hoo, are you feeling exploited? I’m sorry!” I think it’s funny that people are shocked by it because we’ve seen frontal nudity from women. We’ve seen topless scenes and all of that. I like the show. I like that we’re bringing that to the screen. I think that it wouldn’t do the show justice if we just favored one gender. The show is about the truth of relationships, and it doesn’t favor specifically to the men audience by giving you lots of T & A. I love that because that’s not what the show is about. It is not about the sex and the nudity and all of that because a lot of the sex, number one, is unsexy sex. It is not sex that turns you on. It is awkward, and it’s weird. And maybe showing male genitalia will reinforce the whole point. People are comparing it to pornography, but it’s not. It’s about showing an authentic relationship, and I’m glad that we’re doing it because I think we should be.

Michelle Borth Clips on YouTube
Video Clip #1
Video Clip #2


ANDELMAN: But, Michelle, at the same time, you’re right, fair is fair. We’re gonna see female nudity; we should see male nudity. But because we’re so unused to seeing it, it seems like seeing that penis, at times, makes the sex seem that much more real even if it’s not “happy” sex. I think that’s the part of it that makes it more surprising to people when they see it because it’s like, “Wow, that guy’s not covered up there. That doesn’t look as simulated as that movie I saw in the hotel.”

BORTH: No. You are absolutely right. And I think that the reason for that is it will pull you out of the moment and pull you out of the scene, I think, if you cut to a lamp during a sex scene. The show is very voyeuristic. You’re watching people go through all their troubles. You’re watching them in the bedroom. You’re watching them in the therapy room. We don’t cut away at the awkward moments. We don’t pan to something else when you’re not supposed to see something, so you’re right. It does make it more real, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do for the show, and that is to make you feel involved with these characters and to live and breathe with these characters. And it doesn’t take you out of the moment. So I think that it does justice for the scenes.

ANDELMAN: Now, you said that you’re 29. You’re not 22 or 23, which is what I guessed from just watching, so you seem more confident and more secure in your sexuality and who you are. That’s got to make it easier for you to do something like this.

BORTH: Absolutely. I am. I am really comfortable with sexuality and nudity. I think it’s just kind of the way that I was raised, just really liberal. And I am just comfortable with myself. My mom did a good job. I’ve got great self-esteem. This doesn’t say that it wasn’t completely nerve-wracking doing them. It absolutely was. It’s not easy. It’s not easy getting naked and being in scenes in front of a room full of people. Oh my God, it’s terrifying. I don’t care how confident or how great you think you look, you’re nervous. Once I initially got over the nerves in doing it, it’s like riding a bike, after the first one you’re just like oh alright, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s get naked. Let’s do it. Yeah, then absolutely then it’s fine. But I also thought it was really essential to really own the confidence because that is Jamie’s whole deal. She is this really sexually confident woman and individual. She uses it as a crutch for so many different things, and if I didn’t portray that, I wouldn’t be doing her character justice. I had to.

ANDELMAN: As we’re talking, the show is still a few days away from airing for the first time. Are you nervous about the potential loss of privacy that may take place if the show catches on? Even if the show becomes a minor hit, people are gonna see you in a completely different light.

BORTH: I never even thought about that. I honestly didn’t think about that. No, no I’m not. If it happens, yeah, then fine, great if people notice me. I think people are gonna have their own opinions. I know some people are gonna judge me and whether or not I’m gonna get heckled or people are gonna be mean to me, I don’t know. I think that I prepared myself for all of it because I’ve been with this project for so long and after the TCA’s and the big stir of the sex, I was like, “Alright, this is gonna be a big deal. I need to prepare myself for anything that’s gonna come because there’s gonna be good and there’s gonna be bad and, whatever it is, I’m just ready for it.” So, yeah, I think that maybe I’m ready for it. I hope so. I think I’m ready for the good and the bad.

ANDELMAN: A few weeks ago I interviewed the editor of Playboy for Mr. Media, and we were talking about how, over the years, many actresses who are looking to break out or change the world’s perception of them posed for Playboy. I wondered if this was the kind of thing that would have kind of the same effect or if that might even be the effect that you might be looking for.

BORTH: I would say no. For me personally, I don’t feel I need to have to justify. No, I don’t. I didn’t do it for any other reason than I thought it was a great show and a great character and a great job on a great network.

ANDELMAN: Let me ask a little bit about you. We’ve talked an awful lot about sex. I think I’ve talked to you more about sex this afternoon than I usually talk to my wife about it in a month. Where are you from? Why did you want to become an actress?

BORTH: I’m from New York, and I don’t really know why I wanted to become an actor. Now, in hindsight, I would’ve been like, “No, don’t do it! I don’t advise it!” I think it was because it was the only thing that, for me, it was an outlet for me that I couldn’t find anywhere else that allowed me to express myself. I was a little out of control as a teenager, and I did some bad things. I found acting to be that outlet that allowed me to express my anger and my pain and my hurt and my fears without having to do anything bad, without having to be bad, or do anything bad. It was just an outlet that I finally found. I was like, “Oh, my God. This makes me feel good. It feels right. I’m good at it, and I’m not breaking any laws.” So that’s why.

ANDELMAN: And you mentioned brothers. How many siblings do you have?

BORTH: I have two younger brothers. Two younger brothers, yeah, and they’re back in New York.

ANDELMAN: Okay. And your folks, what do they do?

BORTH: My mother owns a home improvement business. She’s like the Mrs. Bob Vila of the 21st century. She’s a hot, hot Italian woman with a lot of tools. She is. I want to get her her own show so bad. She’s like Sophia Loren with a tool belt. She’s amazing.

ANDELMAN: She sounds like a TV show waiting to happen.

BORTH: She is! I could talk about it forever. And my father works for the New York Times.

ANDELMAN: Really?

BORTH: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: What does he do with the New York Times?

BORTH: He has for about twenty years. He does all the layout and formatting and color corrections. Whatever you see physically on the page, he’s probably put there.

ANDELMAN: You’re a perfect interview for the Mr. Media space. Great. We talked earlier before the interview. I found your MySpace page kind of by accident. You allow people to see your page, but let’s warn them ahead of time, they cannot contact you directly through the page.

BORTH: No.

ANDELMAN: It looks like you have a lot of fun. It looks like you have a lot of friends, and there’re some good times on there. This comes back to the privacy issue, though. Are you a little nervous about letting people see that much of you? Will that page disappear soon?

BORTH: It’s interesting that you’ve brought this up, but I really never thought about it in the past. I’m a person who’s pretty honest, and more than anything else, I’m a really honest person. I’m really open. I don’t like secrets. I think it takes too much energy and effort to lie about stuff. So it’s a lot easier just to tell it like it is, and I’ve always been that way. I honestly couldn’t say that six months from now that page is gonna not be private. I can’t say because if I start getting flooded, it’s one thing if I’m getting flooded with positive things, but if I start getting flooded with negative things, then yeah, I will make it private because I don’t need it, and I don’t want it. There’s no point in it so I would probably make it private if that starts to happen. But otherwise, I don’t have anything to hide unless it completely inconveniences my life to a point where I can’t function on a daily basis. I don’t have a problem with it. I think that if you’re on a TV show, and you do a hit movie or something, yeah, okay, you need to expect the fact that people are gonna be interested in your life. And people are gonna want to know what you’re doing and stuff like that, and I’m like why not? I don’t care. I don’t. I don’t care. If people want to see or they’re just curious, fine. I think it’s harmless.

ANDELMAN: Then let me ask you two questions based on your MySpace page. Can you stand on your head?

BORTH: Oh, my God! I was a gymnast for thirteen years. I can! I can stand and twirl and twist on my hands and on my head.

ANDELMAN: And then explain the quote right next to your picture. It says, “Bikers n bitches, skydivers n witches.”

BORTH: That is exactly what it means. I like bikers and bitches, and I love skydivers and witches. My dad’s a big biker, and I love motorcycles. Skydiving is my biggest passion, second to acting. Yeah, I can’t say anything more than that. It just makes me feel incredible and alive. And one of my closest friends, who I actually met through skydiving, is a goddess witch, and I just really started getting into it. I’m not practicing anything. I’m not really a religious person, but it’s interesting to me. And it’s a really interesting kind of people in that whole witch world. It’s interesting to me. It’s like a big summation of me, that quote.

ANDELMAN: Is your friend a Wiccan?

BORTH: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: Okay. I don’t know that much about it, but I know enough to be dangerous.

BORTH: Yeah, yeah. She throws goddess parties, and she does, if your pet is out of whack, she can come and talk to your pet, and she cleanses houses for people. She’s like a Hollywood witch. Her name is Fiona Horn. She’s amazing. She does these great things, and she’s got a huge following, and it was just something that I never knew about. This whole world I didn’t know about. They’re really quite interesting.

ANDELMAN: I thought your page was quite interesting. It looked, like I said, it looked like you have a lot of fun, and you have friends. And it’s nice to see that. It’s obvious that a page like that was set up for you, literally, as a personal MySpace page because there’s no hint of an HBO publicist putting their stamp on it yet.

BORTH: No. I thought about it. I don’t think I’m gonna try to use that page as a tool for promoting myself. The closest thing I’ve done is probably put some photos that I use to submit myself for magazines and stuff like that because, more specifically, the photographers are friends of mine so I want to promote them, and I have their name under. But otherwise, I’d like to keep it personal. I don’t want to use it as a tool for like oh, what’s Michelle Borth doing next. It’s just more for me like, “Hey, my skydiver friends, when are we going up north? Where are we going next, and what’s happening?” I’d rather keep it to that.

ANDELMAN: Well, you’ve been very patient and generous with your time. Just a couple last things. Where would you like to see your career go alongside and beyond “Tell Me You Love Me”? What kind of things would you like to be offered?

BORTH: I would love for my career to go alongside and beyond “Tell Me.” It’s hard to say because my personal taste is definitely more towards the indie films. I’d love to work with Darren Aronofsky. I just really like those dark sort of indie films. So I’d like to go in that direction, more of like a Lili Taylor or something. But, which isn’t to say that, if Superman 3 came out, that I wouldn’t want to do it. Absolutely. I just hope to continue to do quality work more than anything. I enjoyed the work and the films that I’ve done in the past, but now having been on a show, I feel unspoiled, and I’m fucked at the same time because I’m like, “Oh, well, it doesn’t get any better than this.” So I can’t digress into anything bad. I just want to do good work whether it’s big blockbuster films or small indie films. I just want to do good work that I’m proud of.

ANDELMAN: And I was giving you an opportunity to say, “I’d really like to do a voice on ‘The Simpsons,’ or I’m a secret Trekkie, and I’m really hoping to get a cameo on a Trek film” or any of that kind of stuff.

BORTH: David Fincher, call me!

ANDELMAN: That’s good. Alright. And for the men, you brought it up early on, and I have to ask the question. You mentioned that before this, you had done one topless role, and I want to save them some time searching the internet. What movie was that in?

BORTH: I’ll save you all the time, and it’s only on a DVD. It’s not on when it’s on cable. Silent Warnings was actually one of my first films with Stephen Baldwin and Billy Zane. It’s a bunch of aliens, yeah, trying to kill us in a crop circle. Sorry to disappoint, it’s only two seconds. It’s a two second topless scene. And that’s it.

ANDELMAN: Sounds like a Mr. Skin moment.

BORTH: If you want the skin, you tune in to HBO.


© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Billy Bob Thornton, "Beautiful Door"/"Bad Santa" musician/actor: Mr. Media Interview

You just can’t pigeonhole Billy Bob Thornton.

Think about the movie roles he’s most famous for and see what, if any, connection there is: Carl in Sling Blade; Hank Grotowski in Monster’s Ball; Morris Buttermaker in Bad News Bears; Coach Gaines in Friday Night Lights, and my favorite, Willy in Bad Santa.

Who would figure that the guy who portrayed so many varied and somewhat disturbed characters had a musical soul too? But, this month, Billy Bob Thornton’s fourth CD, Beautiful Door, will be released. It’s a collection of original, contemporary songs with a touch of country, all written and sung by Thornton. He also is the drummer on the album’s tracks.

And just like his choices as an actor, no two songs on the album are easily matched and categorized. You’ll recognize his deep voice instantly on the somber opening ballad, “It’s Just Me,” but be surprised that it’s also him on the rockin’ “Hope for Glory.”


DOWNLOAD THE MP3; LISTEN HERE.

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.


BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Billy Bob, this was my first exposure to your music, and I’ve got to admit, I was a little surprised at how gentle and calm most of it is.

BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, it’s kind of a vibey record. When we play live, we’re a little bit more of a big rock show. On the records, we tend to do kind of somewhere in between J.J. Cale and Johnny Cash kind of stuff. But I’ve always been into real moody records, and that’s what we try to do. Like you said, we’ve got a couple of tunes that are a little more raucous, but for the most part, it’s a real vibey record.

ANDELMAN: It was a little against type from what I was expecting, I guess, or what I thought the type was. Obviously, I was wrong. Is this album very different from the three that preceded it?

THORNTON: Well, it’s pretty similar to the first one, Private Radio, as well as the third one, which was called Hobo. But the second record we did was called The Edge of the World and it was kind of all over the map, that record, our second one. It had everything from rock songs to country songs on it, and you can’t do that anymore. These days people want records that kind of sonically and lyrically all fit the same vibe like it used to be in 1968 or 1970. You could have a record with all types of songs on it, but I’m not sure if it’s the people or record labels, but they want to put it into a category. I suppose a lot of that is because of the radio. When I was a kid, you would hear James Taylor and Black Sabbath on the same station. There’s the contemporary country station, and then there’s the pop station, and everybody has to be in a category.


ANDELMAN: Plus, with the downloading of music, people can just pick the songs that they want, so if it’s not all of a type, they may pick one particular song that they like, but if the next one doesn’t sound like it, they’re only going to take that one song.

THORNTON: Right. Exactly.

ANDELMAN: I guess the Billy Bob I was expecting was the one in the song “I Can Tell You,” the guy who says, “I can tell you some crazy stories, I bet they’d make you run away.” Not so many of those kinds of stories in there.

THORNTON: It’s funny when people say something seems to be “a personal record” or “Is it autobiographical?” It’s always a little of both. Most things you write about, they’re stories that either you’ve observed or been involved in or are yourself. I think the best way to write is from personal experience. Like, for instance, I wouldn’t make a very good science fiction writer. I pretty much have to write about stuff that I’ve either observed or been involved in myself.

ANDELMAN: You haven’t been in outer space?

THORNTON: Well, in some ways I have.

ANDELMAN: Okay.

THORNTON: No question about it.

ANDELMAN: Thank you for clarifying that. You’ve been playing music an awful long time. You’ve got your chops, but what drives you to keep making music now? Certainly, you’re not in it for the income.

THORNTON: Well, I’m not in movies for the income, either. If I didn’t love it and want to do it, I wouldn’t. If I wasn’t having fun at it and didn’t get fulfillment from it – there are a lot of jobs you can make money at. I could have gone into the oil business or something else maybe, but I doubt they would’ve had me. It’s kind of funny. I end up answering a lot of questions about that. I guess the answer to that would be, my answer would be the same answer as Tom Petty or Fall Out Boy or Jack White or Ozzy Osbourne. I’m not sure what they would answer if you asked them that question. I would imagine it would be, “Well, what else would I do?”

ANDELMAN: Are you more likely to hang out with musicians or actors?

THORNTON: I hang out mostly with musicians. I have a few actor friends, not many, and most of the ones that I have are not very famous ones. They’re guys that I came up in the theater with mostly. Frankly, I don’t hang out with many famous people at all. I’ve got all these kids, so I kind of just stay home and don’t do much of anything. Play with kids and record music and then when I go away, it’s usually to make a movie or to go on tour with the band.

ANDELMAN: I suspect, without getting into it, that you’ve had enough exposure to being very famous and very visible, and you could certainly choose one or the other - to be famous and visible, or not to be.

THORNTON: Oh yeah. That part of it is not my favorite part, the old going out in public part. I’m still embarrassed by it, frankly.

ANDELMAN: Really.

THORNTON: Oh, yeah.

ANDELMAN: Does the musician in you make different choices than the actor?

THORNTON: No, it’s pretty much the same thing. I guess there have been choices as an actor that have been slightly different than doing music. If I were playing music to sell 5 million records, I would certainly write different kinds of music than I do. I don’t exactly write commercial music. I have, however, as an actor a couple of times, done bigger movies, Armageddon, for instance, stuff like that. I doubt you’ll ever see me making some kind of pop or hip-hop record or a contemporary country record, either.

ANDELMAN: You haven’t made the musical equivalent of Bad News Bears yet, either.

THORNTON: No, although we’ve got a few coming out pretty soon on another record that could be a little bit Bad Santa-like.

ANDELMAN: Really? Got to pause there and tell us more about that.

THORNTON: My band is called The Boxmasters, and we are making a record under just the band name, which will have my name on it, but it’s the same exact people. The record’s gonna have an explicit lyrics sticker on it, but it’s kind of a hillbilly/punk record which is something we do live a lot.

ANDELMAN: That should be very interesting.

THORNTON: In fact, we’re opening for ourselves on tour.

ANDELMAN: Is that right?

THORNTON: Oh yeah.

ANDELMAN: Do you get paid double when you do that? How does that work?

THORNTON: The Boxmasters only get like $200 bucks a night for the whole band, and they have to ride another bus. Even though it’s the same band, we still treat ourselves really bad when we’re The Boxmasters.

ANDELMAN: I was gonna say…

THORNTON: We treat ourselves as an opening act.

ANDELMAN: My old days of covering music years ago, I think the attitude was you always had an opening band that was never as good as the headliner?

THORNTON: Right. Exactly. We try to be just as good, but we still treat ourselves like crap when we’re the headliner.

ANDELMAN: Have your music and film careers ever met? Has any of your music accompanied a film, for example?

THORNTON: Well, actually, I’ve cut a couple of songs for TV shows that are not out yet that are coming out. I was asked to do a Hank Williams cover for a Canadian television show that’s gonna be on this coming year, and then there’s another show on Showtime that we did an opening credit song for. So I’ve done that, but I haven’t done anything for my own movies. I tend to be more willing to do music for a movie that I don’t have anything to do with really. I try to keep the two as separate as possible.

ANDELMAN: I understand. Let me ask you this: could you pick out a song or two from Beautiful Door and maybe tell us a little about them?

THORNTON: Well, the song “Beautiful Door,” the title song, is an anti-war song, really. Normally, I haven’t put real political songs on my records. This whole record, really, the theme of it, is life and death and how important life is and how we need to treat it and about having to face death. It’s both on a personal level and a global level. There is a song on there that’s about not judging a book by its cover. There’s three sort of anti-war songs as well as a couple of songs about suicide and how that affects the people you leave behind because of your choice. So it’s really a record about life and death. The song “Beautiful Door” is about religion being mixed with war and politics so much and how it seems that the people that die are the people who don’t really care. It’s like the people who aren’t involved in it are the people that usually get it, and the big chiefs are the ones that live except for in a couple instances recently. It doesn’t point fingers at any particular group. It points a finger at everybody, the East as well as the West and everything. So the song is as much about our system as it is anybody else’s. It’s just saying, “If you think there’s some magical answer on the other side of some door into the heavens or whatever, and if you kill to get there, that’s okay. Well, you can believe that if you want, but don’t take any of the rest of us with you.” That’s not what everybody believes.

ANDELMAN: Do you feel as you get a little older -- you’ve got kids, early teens and a young daughter -- are you more prone to speak out about politics and things like that at this point because of your kids or your maturity?

THORNTON: Well, they definitely affect the way I think and what I do, but I don’t really speak out that much sort of publicly about politics. I’m not that educated about it. I tend to more do it as a character in a movie or in a song or something. I don’t go to many rallies because I don’t know what I would say. I’m not really a politician. Now, there are some actors and musicians and a lot of people who are real educated on politics and can speak about it way better than I can. I just kind of say what I feel personally in these songs, but I certainly wouldn’t be able to go before Congress or anything like that because I’m not educated enough.

ANDELMAN: Sounds like you might actually be a little shy about doing that even if…

THORNTON: Probably.

ANDELMAN: Now, on the lighter side of things, I see that Graham Nash sings background vocals on a couple of tracks. I was wondering how that came about?

THORNTON: Graham and I had a lot of mutual friends over the years, and we always tried to hook up and do something together. We were asked by a company to do a Surround Sound mix of one of his songs, one of my songs, and then do one together for this thing up in Vegas that they had, this sort of a techie conference to demonstrate this equipment. And so, during the process, we fell in love with each other’s songs that we’d just written, and he really loved the song “Beautiful Door” as well as “Hope for Glory,” and I can tell you, on those three songs he does the background vocal part. So it was pretty nice to be able to harmonize with a Graham Nash, let me tell you.

ANDELMAN: I would say that would probably be a career highlight.

THORNTON: Oh, it was really great. He’s such a terrific guy, and I’ve always been a huge fan of his. He’s really the only guest star on the record.

ANDELMAN: Good one to have.

THORNTON: This record is made by just me and Brad Davis, who’s my co-writer and guitar player and Teddy Andreadis who plays organ and piano for us. They’re both in my touring band, too. And then on bass is Lee Sklar who, if you’re gonna have a bass player, that’s the guy to have. He plays predominately these days with Phil Collins, but Lee and I are old friends.

Billy Bob Thornton at the Movies
Clip #1: Sling Blade
Clip #2: Bad Santa 1
Clip #3: Bad Santa 2
Clip #4: School for Scoundrels
(Karl meets Napoleon Dynamite)
Clip #5: The Last Real Cowboys

ANDELMAN: Let’s talk about movies for a moment or two before we wrap up. I’m very curious about this. If you were getting together with your own buddies and were gonna share a favorite story from the making of a movie, what would it be?

THORNTON: I guess I would have to say, actually, there are probably more stories from Bad Santa than anything else. I made a movie in San Quentin years ago and so for about two months, we were shooting in San Quentin. That alone was a pretty big deal. Every day was kind of a, well, you can imagine, you’re shooting in one of the heaviest prisons in the country. It was pretty odd. The thing is, to tell anecdotes about what happened on the set, like sometimes you’ll be asked, “You got any funny stories about what happened on the set one day or whatever?” There’s so many of them you can never think of one. It’s like when somebody comes to visit, and you’re supposed to take them out to a restaurant in your own town, you can’t think of one. So, yeah, mostly it’s just like a general vibe on a movie, and yeah, crazy things happen every day. I don’t know.

Probably the funniest story that ever happened on any movie was on a movie called Pushing Tin that I did with John Cusack up in Canada. The story is way too long to tell here, but let’s just put it this way: we played a pretty decent practical joke on John, who has a weak stomach, and we got him good. It was a very elaborate plan, and about two weeks later, he got me back. We’ll just say it involved a sheep, a real live sheep, and some lingerie.

ANDELMAN: All right. I think for those who are listening to this as audio, that will give them something to think about. What is it that you might see in a script that would get your attention as an actor? And are there any roles you’d like to be able to erase from your IMDB listing?

THORNTON: Well, maybe some stuff early on. Since I was a well-known actor, I don’t think so. I’ve been pretty satisfied with everything. Some I like better than others but certainly nothing I’m ashamed of. Early on in my career, there are a few, but that’s back when you can’t say no. And the thing that attracts me is really the story and the characters. I’m not that big on tricky stuff. I usually don’t look for a movie that has the surprise, it was the butler kind of ending or whatever. Like really tricky stories don’t interest me. I like simple stories with complex characters.

ANDELMAN: I think that my favorite Christmas movies of all time would have to be National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase, and Bad Santa. It just never fails to entertain and make you fall down laughing. But I wondered, what movies would a guest see at your house during the holidays?

THORNTON: The usuals, Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, and then it’s not easy for me to sit and watch my own movie, but I have to say I actually can watch Bad Santa. It gives me a kick, so I don’t mind watching Bad Santa.

ANDELMAN: And do you watch Bad Santa or Badder Santa?

THORNTON: We usually watch Badder Santa.

ANDELMAN: Finally, what’s coming up next? I see you’ve completed something called Mr. Woodcock, but I don’t know anything about that.

THORNTON: Mr. Woodcock is a New Line movie starring myself and Susan Sarandon and Seann William Scott. It’s a comedy, a pretty dark comedy about a gym teacher, sort of the gym teacher from hell.

ANDELMAN: That wouldn’t be you, would it?

THORNTON: Actually, it is: Bad Santa in gym shorts. It’s coming out in September. I think it’s September 21st. I’m not positive on that date, but that’s from New Line Cinema, and it’s definitely out in September. And then I’m attached to seven movies over the next two years.

ANDELMAN: Wow.

THORNTON: There’s no start dates on them all. They’re trying to figure this out after my tour. We’re touring August 1st through the first week of September, mostly hitting the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, the West Coast, and then down South.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Well, it’s good to know that you won’t be bored in the months to come.

THORNTON: No. With all these kids and tours and movies, I’m pretty busy.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Stacy Collins and Breann McGregor, "Playboy Special Editions" editor and model: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1


Guys, Stacy Collins has your dream job.

As a managing editor of Playboy special editions, she spends day after day looking at the world’s most beautiful, mostly naked women. Some are in photographs, but many meet her discriminating eye in the flesh.

And now that I say that out loud, it’s not hard to understand why she’s in the job and you’re not.

Breann McGregor is one of the beauties Stacy works with. They actually spent a lot of time together this past year and will probably be just as inseparable in the coming year considering that Breann was named “Playboy Special Editions Model of the Year” and “Playboy’s Cyber Girl of the Year.” She is featured on her own website www.breannmcgregor.net. I’ll say it again cause I know you guys are pre-occupied – www.breannmcgregor.net.

DOWNLOAD THE MP3; LISTEN RIGHT NOW!

ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.



BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Stacy, let’s start with you right now. What exactly are Playboy Special Editions, and how are they different from the monthly Playboy magazine?

STACY COLLINS: Sure. This question comes up quite a bit. And what happened was back in the eighties when Playboy magazine spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on pictorials and photographs, and they only used a select number in Playboy magazine, an archive of material became available. And the powers that be in Playboy said well, we should really be doing something with these amazing images, and viola, the idea of Playboy Special Editions, actually they were called newsstand specials or newsstand flats back in the day, and it was literally just a place to showcase all these beautiful photographs. Not a lot of editorial content, really just a lot of pretty pictures. That’s how it started back in like ’84. Now we actually have 25 issues a year. We do 2 issues every month. They’re thematic in nature so there’s Lingerie, College Girls, and Vixens. We do themed playmate titles. And now, instead of just re-using content that was available from the Playboy library, we actually commission our own images, and we have our own models. And we’ve sort of built our own little business here and have become a content provider for not only our special editions but for Playboy magazine, for playboy.com, for our cyber club, and we’ve got our own little business unit happening here. And we’ve become sort of a brand within or underneath the Playboy umbrella.

ANDELMAN: So I want to make sure I understand cause I’m a little slow. Special editions are for the guys who hadn’t been reading the articles anyway.

COLLINS: That’s correct. That is correct. There’s not a lot of copy to get in the way, no fussy ads and articles to compete with the beautiful women. So, again, it’s really just a way to showcase the beautiful young ladies that we find all around the country. There is a little bit of information about the girls inside of each of the issues, but it’s really meant to showcase the beauty and glamour of our girls.











ANDELMAN: Now don’t tell my wife, but I have a copy of Playboy’s Lingerie in front of me which, of course, has Breann on the cover. And I think after you get past the necessary information, well, there is about four paragraphs of information about Breann right up front, but then I don’t think there’s another word other than the name of the model until maybe the inside back page.

COLLINS: Right, and that is on purpose. And that particular issue is a little bit unique in that we do showcase the “Model of the Year,” which was clearly Breann. But for the most part, some of the other issues we do don’t have any copy whatsoever. And we’ve heard a little bit from our consumers. They do love the photographs, but they’d like to know a little nugget, a little tidbit about the young lady. They like to know is she 5’4”? Is she 5’10”? Is she curvaceous? What’s her cup size? So we’re trying to incorporate a little bit of information in there without detracting from the photographs.

ANDELMAN: Guys want to know the model’s cup size? I’m shocked at that.

COLLINS: Yes, they do.

ANDELMAN: And, Breann, I just can’t imagine, in conversation, that that comes up very often.

McGREGOR: I’m sorry?

ANDELMAN: I can’t imagine that when you’re in conversation with someone that someone is going to ask you what your cup size is.

McGREGOR: No, it doesn’t happen often.

ANDELMAN: One more thing, Stacy, before we actually bring Breann more into this, but what have been some of the bigger sellers over the years for special editions?

COLLINS: Well, there are a couple things here. We actually publish Lingerie six times a year so that is the only special edition that is available by subscription, and we make it available in print subscription and also via Zinio, which is a downloadable version of the magazine which is becoming incredibly popular. So Lingerie is sort of our staple. It’s sort of our cornerstone of our publishing program. We will continue to publish 6 issues for the foreseeable future. And then we sort of mix and match other titles. Guys have their favorites. Vixens sort of focuses on girls who have a little more…

ANDELMAN: Cup size?

COLLINS: …ample assets, if you will. Curvaceous, bodacious, that type of thing. We have an issue entitled Natural Beauties where only girls who are completely natural, have no enhancements, are featured in that type of a magazine. And then we have College Girls which is, College Girls and Lingerie, are really pretty much our 2 major titles. And I think College Girls just because of the young, fresh coeds and sometimes there are girls from the conferences that Playboy does their searches so it might be the SEC or the Big Ten or the Pac 10 or Big 12, whatever those conferences are. And then we take that film and take it a little bit further because, again, the magazine can only use so much of the images. But, again, Lingerie, College Girls, Vixens, and then a lot of our Playmate titles are pretty popular. They’re all popular, Bob.

ANDELMAN: Well, as a Gator, I can’t imagine that once you’ve seen an SEC girl that you ever go back to any other conferences, but I guess you do.

COLLINS: Yeah. I’m a Big Ten girl, Bob. Be careful.











ANDELMAN: Breann, I did not forget about you. Did I read where you had wanted to pose since you were a little girl?

McGREGOR: Yeah, I have since I was 5.

ANDELMAN: Why, pray tell?

McGREGOR: Well, my dad would…I’d go get the mail, and I just remember asking my dad, “Why was this magazine in plastic?” And he’s like, “Oh, honey, don’t touch that. That’s for daddy.” Well, when you tell a kid “No,” it brings the curiosity out in them. The next month I just remember getting the mail and that one happened to be there so I snuck into the closet and opened it and was just like stunned by all the beautiful women. I was just like, “I want to be one of them.” I was like, “Wow, they’re gorgeous.” I’ve always wanted to do it.

ANDELMAN: This is why when, as my daughter was getting a little older, my wife made me start hiding the Playboys. So when my daughter said to me at one point, she said, dad, I want to be a baseball player, I said well, why is that? She said cause you’ll come and see me play. But it never occurred to me that she would see a Playboy and think I want to be one of those girls. But that’s okay. What was the first modeling that you ever did? Was it for Playboy, or was it for something else?

McGREGOR: No, it was for Playboy.

ANDELMAN: Really? How did you get in the door to do this?

McGREGOR: I went onto playboy.com, and they have their address there. And I sent in four Polaroids and from there got a call back, and then we communicated back and forth. And I sent in some other photos and then they called me to come in in August for a photo shoot.

ANDELMAN: And what was it like to actually do the photo shoot because I imagine thinking about it for years is one thing, but to go in and I don’t know, maybe it’s my own hang-up, but to go in and take your clothes off for strangers, be in a studio setting, that’s a little different?

McGREGOR: I was so comfortable. They made me feel very comfortable. It was surreal. I brought my mom up there with me. She was kind of like, “How do you know this is real? Are you sure?” I’m like, “Yes, mom.” She was a little scared about it. She was like, “I’m not gonna believe until I see the issue.” But when I was there, I remember the first photographer I shot with. The first scene that we did he was like, “Could you show a little bit of your shoulder?” So I dropped my slip down a little bit. He was like, “Okay, show a little bit of your breasts,” and I just dropped the dress down. He’s like, “Okay, we’ll get started there.” I had a good time. It was great. It was a lot of fun.

ANDELMAN: So, Stacy, is that pretty much the way these things go, that someone is either very into doing it, or they get there and they just don’t do it at all?

COLLINS: For someone to go this far into the process of submitting pictures and communicating with us and then showing up on set and not going through with it, that is incredibly rare. Usually, this is a dream come true for a young lady, and we are very particular about the photographers that we work with. We do have seven sets of photographers and producers around the country and in the U.K. and Canada, and they’ve been with Playboy for a very long time, and they know the drill. They know how to make a model feel comfortable. They know how to make her feel beautiful, and it just really sort of happens naturally. I have been surprised sometimes by a girl who’s incredibly green. We’ve just plucked her out of Midwest USA, put her on a set, and she comes alive in front of the camera because the comfort level is there. And I think, again, the excitement level to be affiliated with a brand like Playboy that is world-renowned, that is respected, that they know that they’re going to be treated properly and that the pictures are going to be beautiful.

ANDELMAN: So what was it like, Breann, to see yourself in the magazine the first time?

McGREGOR: I remember the first issue that I was in, it was College Girls. There’s a main girl on the front cover and then on the back, they’ll put a picture from a couple of the pictorials like one of each girl or a couple of the girls on the back of it just to show kind of what’s on the inside. And I was right there in the middle, in the center, and it just drew your attention. It was just like, “Oh, my God, I don’t know!” The Playboy editors called me, and it shocked me, and I’d gotten all excited. Like I was getting into the car, and they called me with some news, and I literally just fell out of the car while they were backing up cause I wasn’t in the car yet. I was just like, “Oh, my God!” It’s like excitement. I can’t explain it. Like she said, it’s like a dream come true. It’s just like wow, this is really happening.

ANDELMAN: Who was the first person you showed the magazine to?

McGREGOR: I showed my mom, and I think everybody went out and got it that day. The next day I was signing forever. Everybody was like, “Oh, my God, I saw your issue!” I think actually my friend had called me ‘cause he saw it first, and he was like, “Oh, my God, you’re on the back, you’re inside!” I’m like, “Oh, my God!” So I went and got it.

ANDELMAN: Was there anyone that you hesitated to show it to?

McGREGOR: No. No. My grandma is 79, so she’s kind of old-fashioned. She supported me. She went to Barnes & Noble, and she’s like, “Do you have a Playboy?” And they looked at her all weird, and she’s like, “My granddaughter’s in it!” She supports me. Everybody’s really supportive. They know this is what I want, and it makes me happy, and they’re happy for me.

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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.