Amy Alcott, LEADERBOARD author, LPGA Golf Hall of Famer: Mr. Media Radio Interview

Amy Alcott, image by Getty Images via Daylife

Something’s wrong with this picture.

I’m Mr. Media. I do the interviewing, right? Somehow I’ve booked an interview with LPGA Golf Hall of Famer Amy Alcott to talk about her new book, The Leaderboard—but it turns out the book is a collection of interviews she conducted.

Has the whole world gone crazy?

On the other hand, this could be my lucky break. I don’t know a damn thing about golf, so maybe it’s a good thing—we can talk about something I do know about.

Thank goodness I don’t have to talk about birdies and bogeys—about which I know nothing.

And in case you’re wondering, Amy has been waiting in a hermetically sealed, soundproof room where she couldn’t hear a word of this introduction. So let’s bring her on…

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You can LISTEN to this interview with LPGA Golf Hall of Famer AMY ALCOTT, author of the book THE LEADERBOARD, by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player above!

Copyright 2009 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Clearly, Strangely, a Hillary Man (Rolling Stone)

"People like Bill Clinton . . . intelligence just leaks out of him, it forms a cloud around him. You can't penetrate it. I'm thinking about cartoons and he's talking about how to save the planet, so I always feel in over my head there."
— David Letterman in a Rolling Stone magazine cover story Q&A conducted by Jason Gay. According to the magazine, it's the first in-depth interview he has given since 1996.

Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Hillary Clinton is F***ing Barack Obama

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANDELMAN: I lost track.

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

ANDELMAN: Well…

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

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

VON SHOLLY: Right.

ANDELMAN: What were some of your favorites to do?

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

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

VON SHOLLY: Kind of interchangeable.

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

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

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

VON SHOLLY: Yes, I like that one.

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

VON SHOLLY: Yeah, you decide.

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

ANDELMAN: That’s alright.

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

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

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

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

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

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

VON SHOLLY: Oh, you have to buy two.

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






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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





VON SHOLLY: …and Harry Reid.

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

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

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

VON SHOLLY: Yeah. Going down with the bomb.

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

VON SHOLLY: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: And Karl Rove and Valerie Plame.

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

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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Chris Matthews, "Hardball" host: Mr. Media Interview Classic

Originally published June 30, 1997

As a political aide to a pantheon of Democratic stars from the last 25 years, including the late Senator Edmund S. Muskie and former House Speaker Tip O'Neill -- as well as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter -- Chris Matthews knows power when he sees it.

And as Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner, he also knows bullshit when he smells it.

Combine these attributes with a hard-charging, uzi-sprung delivery, a nightclub bouncer's physical presence, blonde hair, brown eyes and a zealot's demand for truth, justice and the American way and you must be watching Matthews' cable TV show, "Hardball." Seen nightly on CNBC, Matthews, 51, grabs viewers in his teeth for 30 minutes and doesn't stop shaking until he forces them to take one side or another of the day's top political issues.

"This is a program about the contest which is implicit in just about every big story," Matthews says, "whether it is the Republicans against the Democrats, prosecutors against defense attorneys, defense attorneys against the media, whatever. There is usually an omen of the contest in just about every major story. That is why there is conflict and that is why there is a story."

Like "The McLaughlin Group," a show on which Matthews was himself once a frequent panelist, "Hardball" features a revolving cast of political and media savvy commentators who the host jabs and provokes, sometimes into a frenzy. And despite his blue-chip credentials as a former behind-the-scenes Democratic policy maker, Matthews doesn't always take predictable sides in a debate. In fact, it sometimes appears as if he chooses the position most likely to get a rise out of his guests. It makes great television, even if it leaves an occasional squishy area in his own ideology.

"If I were sitting around the dinner table with you, with my family or anybody else," he says, "I would like to think that the voice you heard as the evening wore on would be very similar, very recognizable, from my books and columns and what I do in television. If I am in the company of a lot of conservatives who are all self-satisfied or ideologically secure, I love to challenge them and go to the liberal side of things. But if I am in a group of people where I think that the politically correct point of view is liberal, I will be extremely tough on that view, coming off as more conservative than I am, because I am surrounded by liberals. If I were put on a desert island with a bunch of conservatives, I would quickly adapt my skepticism to the other side of things. I have sympathy for people that tend to be losing, too. I find myself sympathizing with any side that lost a war."



Conservative? Liberal? Opportunist may be the best label for this political manimal.

"If you can isolate the conflict," he explains, "and find out where the contest of wills and wits and tactics and strengths and weaknesses is at work, then you can usually find a different way of looking at a major news story than other people are using."

When Bill Clinton's lawyer suddenly began attacking Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, it opened a delicious can of squirming worms for Matthews. "What's this going to the air about?" he wondered aloud. "Why go to the media? Why resort to a media strategy at this point, what's that about? What about the tactic of leaking and attacking and leaking, what's at work here? Are they trying to discredit Ken Starr, or are they trying to intimidate him into not leaking? What are they up to?"

"Hardball," which debuted in January, is probably on the crest of big things. Matthews masterfully finds fresh edges in even the most well-aged of news stories by giving each an infusion of sports-like energy. It's no accident the show is named "Hardball" instead of "Meet the Week Group" or something equally vague and obsequious.

Does the format work every night? Can Matthews rub his guests and himself into a lather five days a week? For 30 minutes a day, couldn't you?

"It is a heat-seeking program," says the host, "and I think that you can detect the heat (in certain topics) such as the JonBenet Ramsey (murder investigation) or the sentencing of Timothy McVeigh. In politics, you can sense it around the Clintons, especially Hillary Clinton. I think whenever there is a lot of heat and argument about something, it makes a more interesting program, because people are already tuned into it emotionally, and then the question is to give them another look at it from a totally different prism, which is the contest. Not who is right and who is wrong, but who is winning, who is losing, and how are they doing it, how are they managing to compete with each other."

In fact, each edition of "Hardball" opens with a tight camera shot of Matthews' face as he blasts through the day's "Winners & Losers" as he sees them. And each show closes with a personal essay by Matthews, taking viewers further into his heart and sometimes tortured soul.

A Peace Corps veteran, Matthews first worked as a journalist in 1973 under the aegis of consumer activist Ralph Nader. "I wasn't really big on investigative reporting," he recalls. "I didn't really like it. Some people are good at it. Bob Woodward is obviously the best, but I just didn't like doing it."

He quickly turned his back on journalism to work for Utah Senator Frank Moss (D), which eventually led him to a series of prominent appointments with Muskie, Carter and O'Neill.




His TV career kicked off in 1988, with Matthews proffering political commentary, first on "CBS This Morning" and then ABC's "Good Morning America." Along the way he made frequent appearances on "The McLaughlin Group" before being tapped to host a two-hour show on the little-watched NBC cable channel that preceded MSNBC, America's Talking. A year ago, he joined CNBC as host of "Politics," which was on at 8 p.m. EST, and which gave way in January to "Hardball" at 8:30 p.m.

Being on the tube is a way of life in the Matthews household; his wife, Kathleen is a top-rated local news anchor at WJLA Ch. 7, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C.

The 25-year-old Watergate break-in recently helped score major publicity for Matthews both in his twice-weekly column for the Examiner (syndicated by Tribune Media Services) and on TV.

"I will brag a bit: I broke all the stories on the Nixon tapes. All those stories that ran in the Washington Post, I broke four major ones (in the Examiner)," he says. "I broke the story that Nixon organized the surveillance campaign. I lifted it out of the archives at the beginning of last year. He was the one who got the whole stupid campaign going. He ordered the sneaking into the National Archives. He ordered the break-in of the Republican National Committee Headquarters the week after Watergate to make it look like both sides did it. He did all that, and I got all that from the archives and broke all those stories, and in each case, the Washington Post gave me credit."

He gained another coup in June when newspapers nationwide ran a compelling picture of him and former Nixon aide-turned radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy looking out from a terrace at the Watergate Hotel the week of the break-in's 25th anniversary.

Actually, 1997 has the potential of being an even bigger year still for Matthews, with publication of the paperback edition of his second book, Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Post-War America (Simon & Shuster/Touchstone) in August. The paperback will include new material based on discoveries Matthews made while researching the latest Nixon tapes.

Matthews' first book, a political primer called Hardball (Harper Collins), was first published in 1988. It is still in print and selling steadily.



Frequent "Hardball" guests -- maybe targets would be a better word -- include Time magazine's Margaret Carlson Newsweek's Howard Fineman, Republican pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, GOP strategist Ed Rollins, disgraced advisor Dick Morris, Michael Barone of Reader's Digest; Fred Barnes, Cokie Roberts, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradley and Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute.

"They are my people," Matthews says, "exciting people to have around and they come loaded for bear."

But when them come loaded with bull, this host isn't afraid to call them on it.

"'The bigger they are, the harder they fall' would be a good motto for the show," he says. "I think I am skeptical of power and most skeptical of the most power. I harbor a good dose of good old American, Irish-American, resentment. Probably makes me a fairly familiar voice. I think I resent people in power and may even envy them some, and I would even admit that. I think that I have a voice which is experienced because I have been there all those years, and I think I have a pretty good crap detector."

Sometimes, Matthews gets his guests all lathered up just in time for a commercial break. But rather than politely waiting for them to finish spinning their message or trying to kindly interrupt the way Ted Koppel or Larry King might, he looks into the camera and talks over them, teasing what's coming up next with the combatants still drawing blood in the background. It makes great television but Matthews swears it's not done with intentional rudeness.

"Maybe that's show biz," he says, "but I do have somebody in my ear saying, 'Break!' Or else I am saying, 'Let's leave the audience asking for more.' The program is only 22 minutes long and each segment really tries to deal with a different contest.

As for his rapidfire delivery and execution, Matthews compares himself to a high-performance race car.

"You have to get around that track as fast as you can," he says, "but you have to drive fast enough to win and not too fast to get killed. McLaughlin's great strength is speed. He says, 'Let's get out of this.' People are very quickly bored today; they want you to move or else they will surf you right off the planet."

Working in print and electronic media, Matthews exalts in the best of both.

"On TV," he says, "you can reach half a million people instantly, and you can revel in a kind of a phenomenon that you can't in print. Print, you can only write the story and describe the event; television, you can be the event. I think it is like the difference between going to a party at someone's house and being mailed a description of the party."

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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