Jesse Ventura sees 'American Conspiracies' in places Mr. Media only sees incompetence

By BOB ANDELMAN

Jesse Ventura came to national prominence as a wrestler nicknamed “The Body,” took a turn on the silver screen in Predator with Ah-nuld, and even went by “Governor” for a term.

Now he’s bidding for you and me to start thinking of him as “The Brain.”

Don’t get me wrong; Ventura hasn’t asked anyone to call him that—yet. But reading his new book, American Conspiracies, it’s clear he’s given considerable thought to the real story behind some of this country’s most nagging unsolved mysteries.

Whether you believe what he believes or think he’s nuts, a reader of American Conspiracies can’t deny Ventura has thought out his positions on everything from the Kennedy assassinations and 9/11 to the world financial collapse we’re just starting to come out from under.

I should mention this is ground also covered in his new TV show, TruTV’s “Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura,” every Wednesday at 10 p.m.

Not that Ventura is all drama and no fun these days. Anyone who’s caught him on the radio with Howard Stern knows he’s just as comfortable talking smack about Hulk Hogan and telling wild stories about his days as a Navy SEAL as he is discussing conspiracies.

GOV. JESSE VENTURA AUDIO EXCERPT: "I took the side of the conspiracy. We brought out the facts; ultimately, it's up to the reader to decide. It's called 'learning the truth.' And if the truth causes panic, we're in big trouble." 

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Copyright 2010 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

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Stephen Chao, WonderHowTo.com web entrepreneur, former Fox TV president: Mr. Media Interview, Part 1

If you think Fox TV is edgy and kooky now, you should’ve seen it back in the early ‘90s when Stephen Chao was a programmer and eventually its President.

He commissioned “COPS,” created “America’s Most Wanted,” and earned a reputation for creating commercial success by pushing boundaries and questioning the conventional wisdom. Chao rose to president of Fox Television and later held the same position at USA Cable where he launched “Monk.”

He dropped from sight for a few years. I hear he did a lot of surfing, and he’s now back in a new medium promoting a website, wonderhowto.com. If you want to see videos such as “Make Your Desk a More Creative Space” or “Increase Boob Size on Pictures with Photoshop” -- yes, I did like that one myself -- check out wonderhowto.com.

You can LISTEN to this Mr. Media interview with STEPHEN CHAO by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I’m sure this is what everybody who runs into you asks this question. But, okay, why on earth did you get a man to remove all his clothes at a meeting with Rupert Murdoch and Dick Cheney?

STEPHEN CHAO: Do I really have to go into that, Bob?

ANDELMAN: So much time has passed, Stephen. It must be easier to talk about.

CHAO: Let’s see. Let’s count how much time. 1992, 2002, 2008 – that would be 16 years.

ANDELMAN: Yes. And I noticed that The New York Times, when they profiled you a few weeks ago, referred to it, but they didn’t explain it, and that’s the thing I’ve always wondered about. It’s a bit of notoriety that will live with you forever. And here we are so I was kind of curious to ask.

CHAO: Okay. Actually, to tell you the truth, Bob, this is the first time I’ve actually ever spoken to it with any publication or medium or anything, but since you’re polite, I’ll answer the question.

The answer is I was giving a speech on standards and practices, and it was a speech that was meant to illustrate the trade-offs between the different standards and practices we have in America as it relates to violence on the one hand and nudity on the other. Both of those are big hot points in the media. They always have been, and they still are today. And I was citing an example of Dutch television, which had liberated itself from certain constraints. They said “Nakedness really isn’t that big of an issue, but violence, that’s a really bad issue. That’s anti-social.” So all of a sudden -- and this was 1965 that Dutch television did this -- they said, “We’ll allow nakedness starting now, and we’re going to ban violence starting now.” And, of course, that’s a pretty radical move for any government or television operation to do because it’s a complete switch, and it’s a switch very much like the way it would be a switch today in America, which is that we happen to accept violence on television. We do not happen to accept nudity. And so the question was kind of just a theoretical. Which is better, which is worse for society? Nakedness on the one hand versus violence and killing on the other. So I had a prop, as it turned out, to demonstrate a particular point, and it didn’t go over particularly well. And that’s the end of that story, Bob.

ANDELMAN: Did anyone besides you know what you were going to do, and did anyone try to talk you out of it?

CHAO: I guess the answer to that would be no. No one knew. That’s correct. No one knew.

ANDELMAN: I’m really glad I asked you about it. It was the kind of thing that interested me. I could see myself, a younger version of me, doing something like that to make the same type of point.

CHAO: Exactly. Yeah.

ANDELMAN: And then looking back now and saying, “I don’t know what I was thinking, but it seemed like the smart thing to do then.”

CHAO: To tell you the truth -- and this is an indication of the difference between you and me -- I don’t think I’ve gotten any wiser since then, so I’m pretty much the same person. I would probably do it just as innocently today and go, “What? What’s wrong?” And that would be that.

It was an interesting point. It was backed up by facts and situation and experience that happened in 1967 on Dutch television. It was kind of a landmark situation in Holland, and it was just meant to be a provocative point. I probably, in retrospect, nothing would’ve happened to me if I didn’t have that naked male, but such is life.

ANDELMAN: Do you think it would’ve gone over differently if it had been a naked woman?

CHAO: Yes. That, in fact, was very much a very good point. I don’t know if there’s anything left that can happen. You either get fired, or you don’t get fired. I chose a man for purposeful reasons as opposed to a woman because I think we accept a naked woman. We really don’t accept a naked man. So I don’t know. It was a choice on purpose. It was meant to be provocative. I hadn’t really given it… I just haven’t given it much thought since the incident since you asked me now 16 years later. I know that I chose a man and not a woman in that situation. That’s the only way I can answer that question.

ANDELMAN: I’m thinking about it. Murdoch’s newspapers, of course, have run topless pictures of women for years so I would think that might’ve gone under the radar, but I guess the man...

CHAO: Well, to be fair to Rupert…

ANDELMAN: But you don’t have to be.

CHAO: No, I don’t have to be, but I think he’s pretty good at what he does, and he’s pretty consistent, and I don’t consider him, frankly, hypocritical. If you’re referring to naked pictures, what happens in England, for example, on page 3 of The Sun, that’s a different culture, and in true standards and practices, not that a speech in Aspen is governed by standards and practices necessarily or the rules of English media or the rules of American media, but to be fair, yes, you do it in English media. That’s something you do. In truth, would you put a naked person on in American media? And the answer to that is no, you wouldn’t do that in a newspaper, and you wouldn’t do that on a TV show. You might, if you were Stephen Chao, make a provocative point in a conference and behind closed doors, but it is a different culture, and so you can’t import that culture and that standards and practices to America and therefore, label him hypocritical or not cause it’s just apples and oranges all the way around.

ANDELMAN: Stephen, take me back to your days as a programmer and as a president at Fox, the early days of Fox. What kind of things were on the air then?

CHAO: That was 16 years ago so I’m taxing myself right now. I think there were things like “Women in Prison” and “Boys Will Be Boys” and -- what was that woman talk show? Joan Rivers. And then there was a little bit of bubble at 7:00 on Sunday in the form of “Jump Street,” which wasn’t really working, but it was doing okay. In truth, Sunday night and Saturday night weren’t doing okay at the time. And then there was a show that wasn’t moving very much, that wasn’t getting any appreciation, named “Married With Children,” and this was, of course, all before “The Simpsons” was there. So that’s what was on the schedule then.

ANDELMAN: You get credit for commissioning “COPS” and creating “America’s Most Wanted.” What else did you put on the schedule at that time?

CHAO: I was really interested in exploring what I thought was a new way to turn up the volume on dating so I launched a show called “Studs,” which actually got me in some trouble also. But it was, commercially, quite successful, and it was making an awful lot of money. It had a very quick start. I made a lot of specials, and I made a lot of shows, or my division did, at Fox. So we were making five hours a week for Fox Broadcasting Company. But the other show that stands out, mostly in terms of just kind of in retrospect, it was “Studs.” I just thought that, again, you have to go back to 1991 to have the context, but the most successful show at the time in the dating area was “Love Connection,” and it was really good. There was just plenty of room to make it more fun and carry on in the kind of double-entendre, racy tradition that “The Newlywed Game” had many years before that. I thought we could just do that same kind of thing in a contemporary way where the male was the victim of the joke, so to speak, between 2 or 3 women. And it wouldn’t be so much conceptual fun to step on the ego of women. It would be an awful lot of fun to step on the ego of men, and that was really the idea behind “Studs.” And it took off and worked and was a lot of fun.

After that, I shifted and ran Fox Television and Fox News, so I was out of the production business at a certain point.


ANDELMAN: Those early days of the Fox TV network, it was kind of a wild, wild West. There was some very unusual fare that got on the air, and I say it with respect because I enjoyed it. My wife and I, I don’t know if she wants me to drag her into this, but my wife and I watched those shows because it was so different. It was such a different time. I kind of wondered what was the programming philosophy at that time? What were you looking to do?

CHAO: Behind the scenes, as is the case I would suspect in most good start-ups, it was kind of desperate in many ways, and so it was a combination of desperately looking for any signs of life and Nielsen ratings and reaction, versus the other side, which is what you want it to be, which is more of this open field of creative experimentation. It’s a combination of really, really trying hard and the combination of really being terrified when things aren’t working. So that’s a nice combination. It’s a lovely place to be, between happiness and despair. A lot of things were experimented on, and out of that, again, just to go back, which is what you’re asking, to go back in history, “COPS” came out of nowhere. “America’s Most Wanted” came out of nowhere. They had no antecedent, so to speak.

At the time, everybody said, “Wow, ‘Hill Street Blues.’ It’s so realistic.” And, today, that’s frankly a laughable statement that people would say, “I really look to ‘Hill Street Blues’ to understand the psyche of cops and the psyche of victims and perpetrators and stuff like that,” because, of course, once you get to “COPS,” it’s like, “What was that cartoon they called ‘Hill Street Blues’? What did that have to do with life?” So it was very interesting because it came out of the blue, it had no antecedent, and it just smashed onto the scene as a completely original television idea. And I don’t mean to give “COPS” in the form of Frederick Wiseman, who did documentaries about cops which, by the way, we luckily were too stupid and ignorant to have known about, but they were similar cinema-verite kind of efforts many years before. It’s a lovely combination of experimentation, of ignorance, of having a budget to spend, and really being open-minded to what might or might not engage the national audience.

I think all those factors made it very interesting, and I think that those are factors one really tries to find in life because it’s not too much fun if you get too successful, and it’s not too much fun if you hit too much failure. So I guess it had just the right combination of things. And, by the way, you have to pick your right moment in life. Namely, you can’t say, “I’m going to launch a fifth network,” which 2 people did, and expect there to be enough of a marketplace for that. Now, it’s easy to say in hindsight, but at the time, prospectively, when either CW or Time Warner were being launched, you go, “It’s getting kind of thin. Do you really want to divide the pie up between 6 networks plus syndication?” And the answer is, “Wow, that’s kind of slicing it kind of thin.”

At the time when Fox was started, and, again, it’s a combination of creative programming strategy and smart business strategy. You have to say, “It’s been dominated by the big three. There is this group of stations called the Metromedia stations that could be the core of a new network. The big three incumbents are really kind of traditional. Their timing and their scheduling is kind of traditional. They don’t have a 10 o’clock news. There’s vulnerability. We are only required to do fewer hours. There’s all kinds of opportunity in that situation in terms of advertising, in terms of market, in terms of station groups, in terms of creative ideas. So you look at that, and you look at the larger market, which is basically what Rupert did before he bought the Metromedia stations, and he said, “You know what? I think there’s room here for a fourth network.” So you have to make the big, overall, broad-stroke judgment of it, and then you have to dive in with every piece of smarts you’ve got in every category of advertising, program development, distribution, promotion, everything. But the first stroke is, is the market there? And that stroke was chosen and decided by Rupert very bravely when he decided to buy the Metromedia stations. That was the real beginning of the Fox network.

ANDELMAN: How much pressure was there on the programming side by the people controlling the money at Fox, whether that be Rupert or people working for him? Was there a lot of pressure to perform, or was there a window to experiment and see what might work for a few seasons?

CHAO: I would say, to Barry Diller’s credit, I think there was a lot of pressure on him, but I think what he did is truly the sign of a great manager, which is he kept none of that pressure or transferred none of that pressure to anybody in the program department. And he really said look, you need a carte blanche to be creative and to really think of something interesting. And he didn’t say, “I need money, I need ratings, I need advertisers.” He compartmentalized that and just said, “Do something good.” So the answer is no, there wasn’t pressure. I’m sure there was in some certain areas where there appropriately should’ve been, but in shaping and fostering a creative enterprise, you just have to know when to draw the line.

ANDELMAN: Did you continue to have any relationship with Barry Diller over the years once you were out of Fox?

CHAO: Yes, I was hired twice subsequently - once to help Q2 and QVC and subsequently to run USA. So three different times I’ve worked for him in my life.

ANDELMAN: Wow. I didn’t know that.

CHAO: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: I know that you probably want to talk about your website.

CHAO: I do indeed. You’re a mind reader, Bob.

ANDELMAN: I know that -- but we have some time, and there’s a couple things to touch on, and we’ll come to that. I’m also very interested in what have you been doing since you left USA? I didn’t know about your involvement with QVC, but for the most part, people who watch media haven’t really seen much of you in the last 6 or 7 years. How have you been spending your time?

CHAO: Let’s see. I’ve been a private investor so I’ve bought and sold some companies, not necessarily in the media business. One that I’m particularly fond of that my friend ran was called Helios Nutrition. It was a kefir company so it was a natural foods kind of thing that was in all of the big good stores like Whole Foods and Wild Oats, and it was really successful as an alternative to yogurt. That’s one thing that I did. I just choose ideas and situations that I find engaging. I can’t say that I have to be in the media business. That’s not a requisite when I make choices, although I happen to like the media. I think it’s lots of fun, but it’s not a prerequisite.

ANDELMAN: But was I off-track when I suggested you’ve been doing a little surfing?

CHAO: Well, I’ve gotten pretty decent at surfing. It happens to coincide with my kids. I have a couple of kids. They’re 16 and 13 so the occasion to surf is kind of a magical thing because when you’re a 16-year-old boy, how much time do you really choose to be with your dad? And if dad’s a decent surfer, takes you to kind of really decent spots, and drives you there, dad’s pretty good. So it was really fun to be able to surf and get pretty good at it. I’m pretty good would be an exaggeration. I don’t want to say that. I’ve gotten decent at it.

ANDELMAN: So you’re not “John from Cincinnati” decent at it?

CHAO: I’m okay, actually. I really love it. It’s really a remarkable sport for me. I used to like skiing or snowboarding, but then the idea that you can go into the ocean without any equipment or artifice and just have a surfboard, I just can’t think of any sport like it. So I happen to really, really love the sport.


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© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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.

Predictions R Them

MediaBistro.com asked folks in the media to make fearless predictions of what 2007 will bring our business. Below are a few examples of the 57 unedited insights reporter Dylan Stableford collected; you can read the rest here.

Arianna Huffington | Huffington Post founder
1. Democracy will reign in Iraq (Just kidding.)

2. Lindsay Lohan will be "exhausted" at one point

3. Shocker - Brooks & Dunn will score at Country Music Awards.

4. A famous person will adopt an African baby (you can take that to the sperm bank!)
Dick Cheney's daughter and daughter-in-law will have either a boy or a girl, and he'll nickname it "Go Fuck Yourself."

5. ... and all of the above are going to be reported in the media! (But the blogs will have it first.)

Andy Borowitz | comedian, author
Rupert Murdoch will write a book about Judith Regan entitled If I Fired Her.

Jeff Bercovici | senior writer, Radar
There will be a moderately successful blog started expressly to chronicle the doings of photo assistants at Rodale. The writer will quickly land a book deal and become a regular commentator on The Situation Room.