Mr. Media Interviews  

Nemesis is a new Miami-based independent feature film that tells the story of an idealistic young rap star fighting for his own voice against the corrupting influence of the hip-hop industry. A record label discovers him, and he is forced to promote violence and materialism in exchange for fame.

The movie dramatizes the hypocrisies of a multi-billion dollar industry that encourages its fans to stay true to the streets.

Directed by Lee Cipolla and produced by Jeremy Mitchell and Justin Marx, Nemesis stars Sheaun McKinney as the unlikely gangster rap star, Nemesis, and Marlon Taylor, aka rapper Messiah, as the real gangster rapper, Razor Ric. The soundtrack features original music from fresh and new artists such as Messiah, a Mr. Cheeks protégé, and Suzie Abromeit, already known for her number one single duet with hip-hop star Fat Joe.

As for co-producer Jeremy Mitchell, our guest today, he’s worked steadily over the last six years, notably appearing in Harder They Fall, King, Full Circle, Chat, and Motel. He has also appeared in numerous independent and short films.





BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Jeremy, you’re an actor and if you don’t mind me saying, a white guy to boot. How did you wind up producing a movie about the hip-hop scene?

MITCHELL: That’s funny. It’s the question that seems to pop up over and over. Well, as far as being an actor, I can answer that pretty easily. It’s just sort of been a process that’s kind of evolved. Like you said, I’ve been working in the industry, and those films you named were, as an actor, but through doing that, you start to work and meet people. And with Lee, the director, he directed Harder They Fall as his first feature, and we met on that project and just started to develop sort of a working, collaborative relationship and did a couple other little projects together and then did a competition where I wrote the script, and he directed it.

Then this project, Nemesis, started to germinate. It actually began with a trailer that he made, an original idea. We have a third writer that had created the idea for it, and they put together a trailer, but it was a completely different type of movie at that point. It was more of an urban thriller. And over a period of time, some opportunities arose for major locations, such as a concert venue, that we thought we’d be able to shoot in. We thought, “Hey, this would be a great idea.” And really, we’re looking to get started. I’m early in my career as is the director, Lee, so we’re looking for a vehicle that’ll push us out there and to be able to do bigger and bigger projects. This presented itself, and it was an amazing opportunity.

Most films in this genre, typically, are not done with a lot of integrity or a lot of art. They’re really just commercial vehicles. We saw Nemesis as a vehicle that could be commercial, but we could do it our way and bring our integrity to the project and try to expand the limitations of the genre and make it in something that had quality to it. So that’s how we got involved in the project.

And as far as being white and being in it, it all has to do with the philosophy of the movie against stereotypes. The main star himself, Nemesis, is your typical black hip-hop star in every way. He’s just a cliché. That’s what the executives are trying to tell him. They’re trying to teach him to be what the industry and what the fans expect him to be, but that’s not him at all. He’s a lot more than that. And the film, in many ways, is about defying people’s expectations and being true to yourself, not true to what people want you to be. So I think that goes hand in hand with us making the movie. You probably wouldn’t expect us to make the movie like this or me, as a white guy, being able to come in and say something about a life that I don’t really live. But I think that’s the job of all writers and artists is be able to have more voice than just their own, to be able to empathize with other aspects of society and culture and look at things from the outside in, which is certainly, in this situation, we were just looking at it with an outside perspective and trying to look at it objectively.






ANDELMAN: Do you have a background in or knowledge of the whole hip-hop scene? Are you a hip-hop music fan?

MITCHELL: A fan, yeah. I’m not the industry insider. None of us are. We have worked with some hip-hop stars. I won’t mention any of them, but being on set down in Florida doing music videos we’ve been exposed to how they’re really like a lot of times when they’re not performing, when they’re not in character, when you don’t see them on a music video or in an interview. And a lot of that was the inspiration for the movie. The persona, many times, is completely different than what you see and what’s commercialized. And a lot of them are just really articulate, really intelligent. They’re business people, and they’re putting on a character and making money and being successful at it, and they’re really good at what they do. But the image that they portray and project is nothing like what they are themselves and certainly not what they believe you should act like. The funny thing is that the people, the fans, the public, buys into the image, and they think it’s real, and then they start trying to portray it themselves and act like it cause they are taught through propaganda that artists are marketing, cultural marketing, that that’s the way we’re all supposed to be. We had a point to make about that about conformism and what’s going on right now in pop culture.

ANDELMAN: I’m thinking I’m probably a generation removed from today’s hip-hop scene, but I did cover pop and rock in the 1980s and maybe early ‘90s. And it seemed to me that the story could easily have been about the pop or rock scene at any time as well as hip-hop, that the storylines are basically the same. It seems like, in hip-hop, there’s a lot more drama. There’s a lot more violence, perhaps, a lot more urgency.

MITCHELL: Absolutely. It’s just a natural dramatic form, hip-hop, because the whole pressure of the music itself is geared toward violence and competitiveness and rivalries. So it makes for a really dramatic story, but it could even be this today now in pop or in rock. Go outside in any major city, on the streets, and you’ll see, especially with kids, teenagers, they’re usually trying to label themselves, categorize themselves. They’re in some type of sub-genre, whether it’s hip-hop or they’re into being surfer types or prep types or goth. You see a lot of different groups. Kids, especially, are searching for an identity, and through music and through advertising, we give them this characterization that they can portray and sort of fit in with a type. And it could’ve applied to any scene in music. Absolutely. I think that’s one of our big issues, big points. It’s not really about hip-hop. It is. Hip-hop is the route we took to express the point, but certainly, it can stand for any of the other genres of music and just trying to totally contain yourself into what people’s expectations of you are. But, yeah, with hip-hop, obviously, there’s a lot more at stake. So it was a perfect avenue for us to tell the story in something that the stakes could escalate and a lot could happen.



ANDELMAN: What can you tell me about the film’s stars, Sheaun McKinney as Nemesis and Marlon Taylor as Razor Ric?

MITCHELL: Sheaun is an amazing actor. He’s a major theater actor, and he’s out in L.A. now, but he’s done a ton of work in Florida and Miami. And everybody in the theater world knows him there. He’s won a Carbonell Award -- which is sort of the Florida equivalent of the Tonys -- for his stage work. And you don’t expect that in a hip-hop film because pretty much any one you see out there will have real hip-hop stars and not actors, sorry to say. Some of them are adequate, but they’re not actors. They’re rappers. Our intention with the film going in was we’re gonna cast actors, and what thing we’re gonna do to make this stand out is just have a really good story to tell. We needed people that can really, really act and portray the character. So that was our mindset going in. We weren’t just going to cast rappers. And we came in, and we had the auditions. I had already known Sheaun cause, like I said before, I’m an actor, too, so I knew how good he was. I didn’t know what he could do as a rapper, and that came as a total shock. But he came in to audition, and he’s just really talented, just really natural and genuine and has a lot of different complexity that he can pull off. And to be able to play your stereotypical rapper and to be able to pull off that cartoonish, cliché aspect of a character, which is what they do, and then his other half too, which is the introverted, deeply-talented artistic side, showed a lot. But it totally surprised us because he had also been a rapper in his past. When we were doing the film, he ended up contributing music to the movie. He hadn’t rapped or anything and was able to pull it off. But, yeah, Sheaun did and did a really admirable job.

As for Marlon, it’s funny. He auditioned right afterwards and so did Bechir Sylvain, who plays Jason. Three of our main cast came one right after another and just knocked us away. But Marlon is a real rapper himself, and we didn’t know that coming in. We just cast him on his acting abilities alone, and he has such a sharp presence, just in his face and in his mannerisms and his persona. You can tell he’s had a lot going on in his life, and he has a lot going on inside of him, and it just comes out in the character. Everybody who sees the movie will just always make a kind of “Wow.” He has presence. “Wow, who is that guy?” And he just hits you with so much so quickly. He’s just very, very, very sharp, and he did an amazing job as an actor. And he’s a great musician as well, and we’re telling everybody, “Why isn’t this guy out there? Why isn’t he famous right now? Why is he the best-kept secret?” Only us know about him. So we’re hoping that this gives him a platform to get his music out there as well and become a star in his own right, as well as an actor.

ANDELMAN: And they’re all fine and good, but tell me about Suzie.

MITCHELL: Suzie, yeah, of course you want to know.

ANDELMAN: I know guys are going to see her, and they’re going to want to know more about her so we’re going to have to fill in around the edges here.



MITCHELL: I’m sure they will. And I think a lot more people will be wanting to know about her soon, as soon as this gets out there. Suzie is a developing star as well. It’s funny. Suzie and me actually have a long background because we’re both tennis players, originally, and we knew each other from way back then. And the role she played was by far the most difficult to cast in the movie because, again, going back to the whole stereotypes concept, we were trying to play with them, and the opposite of the black male gangster rapper is the white female rapper, which you don’t see ‘cause nobody will accept it. And so we said, “Okay, they won’t accept it. Let’s see if we can put a character in there in the movie that’s actually, in reality, a lot more hard-edge in her attitude and her upbringing than the main guy really is, even though he’s pretending to be what she really is.” So that was sort of the intention of the character, but to cast that was a real mission because we actually had to find somebody that could pull it off. I never even thought of Suzie even though I’d known her and knew she was in the music industry because I didn’t know her music that well, and what I had heard of it was more R & B, sort of Nelly Furtado-ish, Black-Eyed Peas girl, Fergie, something more along those lines. I knew how attractive she was, and you obviously don’t mind having an attractive girl in the role, but we had seen it more as sort of a thuggish, hard-edge type as a girl. But another friend of mine who was helping cast the movie knew we were having trouble casting the role and had seen this girl, Suzie, on MySpace, and she mentioned her to me, didn’t even mention the name, said, “I know this girl on MySpace who’s amazing, fits the role perfectly.” And the power of new medium or whatever, artists being able to get out there, and this had reached the friend of mine so I checked it out, and boom, it was Suzie. I was like wow, I didn’t even think of her, and there was a rap song up on her myspace page, and I was like I guess I’ll have to bring her in. And I did, and she was able to pull off both aspects of the character really well. And, yeah, she’s going a lot of places. She’s gotten a role on “Burn Notice” recently. I know she has a lot of commercials out there. So she’s up and coming. She’s done a duet with Fat Joe that was a number one hit. I think you mentioned that in the intro. She’s really taking off. Again, we’re hoping it’s a platform here for her to take further steps, but yeah, I know she’s got the commitment cause of her past and the talent and the star quality, obviously.

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

MITCHELL: You can probably see that.

ANDELMAN: No disrespect to your male co-stars, but I think a lot of the guys are gonna be very interested in Suzie. And I don’t want to give anything away from the movie. And she keeps her clothes on. I don’t want to be misleading here, but I think guys would be very interested to check her out.

MITCHELL: Yeah, I think so, too. And no, she doesn’t have to take her clothes off to…She’ll steal the show in a lot of ways.

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©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

posted by Bob Andelman | 8:47 PM

Stephan Pastis, a former attorney, is the creator of the hilariously subversive "Pearls Before Swine" comic strip. "Pearls" was named "Best Newspaper Comic Strip" by the National Cartoonists Society in 2004 and 2007.

For anyone still mourning the departure of The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes from your local newspaper’s comics page, cheer up! There is a weird new kid on the street, and he’ll make you forget about your favorite strips from the last century.

LIO is the creation of Mark Tatulli, and he’s a fresh brand of weird and wonderful now appearing in more than 250 newspapers, with more adding the strip daily. If Far Side creator Gary Larson and Calvin creator Bill Watterson had mated, LIO is the character they would have produced. Tatulli’s brainchild, LIO, and that’s spelled L-I-O, is a young boy who combines elements of mad scientist, comic strips, science fiction, and the Adams family, and get this, LIO never speaks.


ANDELMAN:Has LIO ever spoken in the strip?

TATULLI:No.
ANDELMAN:Will he?

TATULLI:He never will.

ANDELMAN:And he never will.

TATULLI:I mean, others around him may speak, and he may get visitations from other comic strip characters, but he will never actually talk.

ANDELMAN:I was talking to a friend whose history of comics goes back even further than mine, and we both came to the same connection. We remembered a character called Henry.

TATULLI:Sure.

ANDELMAN:Is that close to LIO’s lineage in some way?

TATULLI:Well, they are both pantomime strips, what’s called a pantomime strip, and those area basically strips that are driven by pictures in it instead of dialogue, so characters revealed by action rather than by words. I used to love pantomime strips when I was a kid. Henry is one, as you mentioned, and there was also Ferd’nand, which was, I believe that was not produced in the United States, but it did get circulation here.

ANDELMAN:So Henry was certainly a strip that you were aware of.

TATULLI:Oh yes.

ANDELMAN:There really hasn’t been another one like that in some time.

TATULLI:No, no, not since like the 1950s, and I just thought that with the space that they dial down to, that they actually allot to comic strips, I thought that it would be fun to do a comic strip that didn’t have any dialogue and any word balloons taking up any of that space, so I could utilize the entire space for illustration. It’s great fun on Sunday.

ANDELMAN:Is LIO mute, or is it he just doesn’t speak in the strip?

TATULLI:Yeah, he doesn’t speak, his father doesn’t speak, none of the characters really speak. Somebody might show up that you would expect to speak, like say Cathy from the Cathy comic strip or maybe Calvin and Hobbes or something like that, and you would expect them to speak because they speak within their world, but within LIO’s world, pretty much nobody speaks. There are sound effects, and there are billboards and so forth, but there is no actual dialogue.

ANDELMAN:Have you ever in the time you have been doing this strip, have you had an idea, you woke up in the morning or in the middle of the night or you are in the shower, wherever you get your ideas, you had an idea for the strip that would have required him to say something, and then you went, oh, and you slap yourself on the head and go, ah, that’s right, he doesn’t talk, it’s not going to work?

TATULLI:No, no, because I don’t think that way when I do these strips. It’s all visual, and so my brain is just switched in that mode. It’s odd, because I do have another comic strip called Heart of the City, and it is dialogue-driven or script-driven, and I hear their voices. I put them in situations, and I see how they react, and there is dialogue, but with LIO, because I don’t put any dialogue in, I just don’t hear a voice.

ANDELMAN:It must require a tremendous amount of, oh, what’s the word I’m looking for, I mean, focus, to not want to slip and go to words, especially because you have the other strip where you are used to putting words in people’s mouths.

TATULLI:Well, again, you know, I just don’t even think in terms of that. That’s not even an option. The other strip is dialogue-driven, and like I said, I hear the voices, but when it comes to LIO, I am just thinking visually, completely visually.

ANDELMAN:What other rules have you set for this strip? What parameters are there?

TATULLI:There are no parameters.

ANDELMAN:Okay.

TATULLI:It’s really a basic concept. It’s just LIO who lives with his father, and that’s basically it, and whatever I come up with. I set no parameters because I didn’t want to lock myself in. I mean, having no dialogue means that there is going to be no dialogue-driven gags, so I have to leave myself as open as possible to any kind of thing, so anything basically can happen.

ANDELMAN:Mark, you mentioned that LIO lives with his father, and I wanted to ask you about that. Is there no mother?

TATULLI:There is no mother, no.

ANDELMAN:Is he a product of a broken home, or is it that Disney tradition of kids only have one parent?

TATULLI:Well, I can’t imagine that a sane woman would stay in that environment for too long. Between the father and LIO, they are a couple of weirdos, so my guess is that she just about had it one day and just took off, but you know, it may make things simpler, because then there would be no dialogue between parents or anything. LIO’s father is kind of his guardian, more or less, and he just kind of goes with the flow.

ANDELMAN:Now, we frequently see LIO’s father in fairly treacherous situations. How do you envision their relationship? Is he tolerant, or is he in fear of his son?

TATULLI:Oh, he’s just tolerant. He just kind of goes with it. He just wants to, the interesting thing was that I had written the character of the father when I was out of work. I had lost my job, and I was feeling, you know, useless, and I kind of projected that onto this father character here, and he doesn’t really have a job. We never see him going off to work, and he just kind of sits around and watches TV and just kind of goes with the flow, and weird things happen, but, you know, he doesn’t ask too many questions, because I don’t think he really wants the answers.

ANDELMAN:Now, what are some of the, in your mind, some of the strangest things that have happened between LIO and his father?

TATULLI:Oh, my gosh. Every day is a new adventure, you know. They have been visited, well, I guess one of the strangest things would be that the father went into the refrigerator to get bacon and eggs, because he wanted to make bacon and eggs, and he found this enormous egg in the refrigerator and was very pleased about that, and the final panel is the egg has split open, and it was the alien from the Alien movie, the Ridley Scott movie, it wraps around his neck and was on his face, and LIO comes in and slaps his face, like, oh, my God, he’s getting in my experiments again. I would say that is among the most bizarre things, but those kinds of things happen every day, and everything is fine the next day.

ANDELMAN:That’s the amazing thing. I love that. It’s just like there is a giant octopus or something, and LIO is so in command of his situation. What elements of personality does he take from his creator, and what kinds of things have you given him that would you like to have in your own personality, perhaps?





TATULLI:Oh, geez. It’s mostly about fear. When you are a little kid, I was afraid of everything, because everything seemed so scary, and things that were even designed for kids seemed so scary. When you went and saw Sleeping Beauty, you know, the dragon in that was just really, really scary. Now to an adult taking the kids, oh, this is a lovely fairy tale I am taking my child to, and then you get there, and there’s this evil-looking queen, the most evil-looking queen you ever saw, and she turns into a dragon, and it just envelopes the screen, and it’s really, really horrific. Same thing with book illustrations. I remember being fascinated by Grimms’ Fairy Tales when I was a kid. Those stories are just downright sick, some of them. I remember, you know the story of Tom Thumb, but you don’t know that he actually is killed by a spider, and there was this illustration in this Grimms’ Fairy Tale of the spider kind of coming up on him and pounced on him and did battle with him, but the spider breathes his poisonous breath and then basically killed Tom Thumb, and you know, it’s shocking for a kid. LIO’s world is that way. Everything is kind of a shock or surreal or bizarre or scary.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

I have enjoyed the illustrations of Drew Friedman for many, many years. He has going for him what many artists can only dream of – a distinctive style and, if you will, a voice that sets his work apart.

Depending upon your age and interests, you’ve no doubt seen Friedman’s work somewhere, including the National Lampoon, Spy, and the New York Observer.

When Drew draws a satirical picture, it always screams with attitude. There is no subtlety involved.



BOB ANDELMAN: Drew, thanks for joining us this week.

DREW FRIEDMAN: Thanks, Bob, nice to be here.

ANDELMAN: Thanks. Now, your new book is Old Jewish Comedians, so I have to ask you, why old Jewish comedians? Why not capture them in their youth?

FRIEDMAN: There have been other books about Jewish comedians, actually a lot of them, but I wanted to sort of bring a different spin into that world and capture sort of a melancholy-ness about them that you don’t really see elsewhere. Also, I enjoy drawing older people, because there is more character in the faces, and it is just more interesting for me to draw older people with all those lines, so that was part of it, too. Basically the fact that a lot of these guys were forgotten, also, throughout their entire careers, like basically added up to nothing. Some of them were incredibly famous throughout their careers, but I also drew a lot of people who nobody ever heard of, including Menasha Skulnik, who is the one guy who everybody says, who is he, except people over 50 sort of remember him.

ANDELMAN: And who was he, because you’re right, I like to think that I know a lot of these guys, but that name went right by me.

FRIEDMAN: I didn’t even know who he was, either. I saw him photographed in an old Player’s Guide, which was a book of just actors and comedians and who used to advertise in this book called The Players’ Guide. I think it still comes out, but his face was in there, and I sort of googled him and got some information. It turns out he was incredibly famous in his day, mainly in the Yiddish theater, but he was a comic actor, and he also turned up on Ed Sullivan, and he was on Broadway into the 1960s. I think he died around 1970, but he was hugely popular. Now, he’s completely forgotten except for my aunt and uncle remember him, and my father said, “Of course I remember him!” And usually people over 50 will, it will register, but anybody under 50, they have no idea who he was.

ANDELMAN: Why just Jews, by the way?

FRIEDMAN: Well, can you think of any non-Jews who are funny? Somebody said, “You could do an Old Protestant Comedian book,” and I said, “Well, that would be a pamphlet, wouldn’t it?” I can think of a few. Bob Hope was funny, of course, and Charlie Chaplin, claimed he was Jewish; I think he was half Jewish, and Jackie Gleason and Lou Costello. There is a handful of them, but across the board, it mainly comes down to Jewish guys. In fact, there are so many that I am doing a sequel that will be out next year called More Old Jewish Comedians. This book is only 35 pages, so I had to sort of pick and choose my favorites.

ANDELMAN: Who did you miss in the first book that you’ll have in the second book?

FRIEDMAN: Oh, there is a long list. I have already started the book, but my rule is that to be qualified as old, you have to be past 70. My first rule for the first book was born before 1930, but I am sort of breaking that rule with the second book, because I am including Woody Allen in the second book, and he was born in 1936, so he’s a little younger.

ANDELMAN: See now, I went back and looked, because I got to the end of the book, and I thought, where’s Woody? He’s got to be close.

FRIEDMAN: Woody Allen. Part of the book is including their real name and then their show business name, so that’s basically the text in the book. I didn’t include biographies. Leonard Maltin wrote the introduction, and I thought that summed everything up nicely, but Woody Allen’s real name was Allan Stewart Konigsberg, and he was born in 1936, and he will be in the next book. The illustrations are already complete.

ANDELMAN: Nice Jewish boy from Coney Island, isn’t he?

FRIEDMAN: I think he’s from, I’m not sure, exactly. I’m not sure he’s from Coney Island, but I think he’s from… I don’t know exactly.

ANDELMAN: I’m reaching that point where I’m confusing his life with his movies now.

FRIEDMAN: There was another Jewish comedian born in Coney Island. It’s possible it was Sid Caesar, but …. That great scene, of course, in Annie Hall where he goes back to his home, the place in the rollercoaster.

ANDELMAN: Right, like under the rollercoaster.

FRIEDMAN: It’s weirdly ironic that you’re mentioning that, because I had relatives who lived in that rollercoaster, and that’s where they filmed the scene.

ANDELMAN: Really.
FRIEDMAN: Yeah, they were like second cousins to my mother, and they had that apartment under the roller coaster. It wasn’t the Cyclone, it was the Thunderbolt roller coaster, and we visited them when I was a kid, and it was exactly like Woody Allen portrayed it in the film where the rollercoaster would just, it was on, and then the people were sitting in the house and didn’t even react to it they were so used to it, so he captured that beautifully.

ANDELMAN: When you started on this, had you done some of these illustrations for something else and adapted them, or did you do this solely for the book?

FRIEDMAN: Everything we’ve done is just for this book, for that square format. This book is 10 x 10. It’s a hardcover, 10 x 10, and it sort of feels like a children’s book, like a storybook, but it’s a 10 x 10 hardcover. There are only thirty-five pages, but everything we’ve done specifically for the book. I’ve drawn some of the people before who appear in the book, like Jerry Lewis, I’ve drawn him a number of times. I’ve drawn Woody Allen a bunch of times and some of the other ones, but this was all for this book.




ANDELMAN: Yeah, some of these really are obscure. Mousy Gardner and who’s the other one? Al Kelly. I don’t know who Al Kelly is.

FRIEDMAN: He’s pretty much forgotten, too. He was in one movie, one movie short, but he was a Friars' guy. He had his career with the Friars'. He did like double talk. He was a double-talk comedian, so he would like come out as like an ambassador at a Friars' roast and pretend to be a foreign dignitary, and he would get everything confused in his dialect. His dialect was off. It made no sense, but he was funny, but he is completely forgotten, also, although he wrote an autobiography that came out in the ’60s. But his real name was Abraham Kalish, and he changed it to Al Kelly, which certainly doesn’t sound Jewish. Part of this book, I didn’t want to sort of say I was outing some of these guys because they sort of changed their names, and a lot of them wanted to play down their Jewishness, but the book, again, I wasn’t trying to out them, but part of the charm and fun of the book is to have their real name included in there. I wasn’t even sure he was Jewish when I first thought, “Oh, Al Kelly, I guess he’s an Irish guy,” but it turned out his name was Abraham Kalish. And Mousie Garner was, he just died recently. He lived into his nineties, but he was a guy who was one of the, not the Three Stooges, but when the Three Stooges left, Ted Healy, who was there, he was sort of in charge of them in the ’30s, he was the straight man, and they were his stooges, but when they quit to go to Columbia Pictures and do their own films, Mousie Garner was part of the three guys that Ted Healy hired to be the new Stooges. And then he sort of like existed in show business for half a century, and he wound up in Spike Jones’ band briefly in the ’50s, although he couldn’t play any instruments, but he looked funny, and that was important. And he just recently died, but there he is.

ANDELMAN: I love the illustration that opens the book of William “Bud” Abbott, of course, partner of Lou Costello for so long. One of my great regrets is that late in his life, when I was growing up in New Jersey, he played a gig at a cheesy hotel in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and I couldn’t find a way to get there. I think I may have been like 16 or 17, and you had to be 18 to get in or some such thing, and I have always remembered that. Every time I drive by that little dumpy hotel, I think, damn, if only I had gotten to see him there, and I think like a year or two later, he was gone.

FRIEDMAN: Oh, I feel your pain.

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

FRIEDMAN: I have the same regret about not visiting Larry Fine when he was at the Old Actors’ Home in Hollywood at the end of his life in the ’70s after he had suffered some strokes, but he loved getting visitors. And kids would fly out from all over the country to visit him, and I never did that. I regretted that, and he died in the mid-70s, but I did have the opportunity to visit Groucho Marx at his house.

ANDELMAN: Really?

FRIEDMAN: My father was friendly with the woman who lived with Groucho Marx at the time, and she invited us in 1975, when Groucho was 85, to visit his house and have dinner there, and there were other guests there, so we spent the afternoon with Groucho, and that was an incredible experience. The thing that I am still kicking myself about is that we were invited back the next week. Groucho just loved company, loved younger people. When he met us when we were out at the house, we came to his door, and Groucho approached us, and he looked at my father and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you and your three lovely daughters,” because our hair was a little long at the time. Everything with him was a one-liner. He was as sharp as ever. He was all slowed down, but he still sang, he still wanted to be involved in everything. Everybody that came in he came and greeted them. It was amazing, but everything was a one-liner, and it was incredible how it came out of him. We knew Groucho lived in Great Neck, Long Island, where we lived when we were kids in the ’60s, so we knew Groucho had a house there before he moved to Hollywood, and in Great Neck, there was a movie theater that was still there when we were kids called the Playhouse, and we had always heard it had been an old Vaudeville theater, so my brother said, “Groucho, do you remember the Playhouse Theater in Great Neck? They had an old organ in the back?” And Groucho, without missing a beat, said, ”I got an old organ myself.” It was incredible. Nonstop, and then he got up and sang for like an hour with, I think, Harpo’s son playing piano, so it was an incredible experience.

ANDELMAN: So it’s not just a visit, it’s entertainment.

FRIEDMAN: Of course. Of course. I mean, just sitting there with him. I got to sit there while he ate his creamed chicken at the table, and it was just like just that was enough for me. My regret is that we were invited back the next week, because Groucho was going to be reunited with Mae West. They hadn’t seen each other for 35 for some reason. I guess we felt, “Ah, we had enough Groucho.” I still regret that. I also regret that we didn’t take any photographs, either, but….

ANDELMAN: I wanted to ask you about that. I wanted to ask you, you have, for lack of a better term, the doubletruck in the book of Groucho and Harpo and Chico, did you meet his brothers, as well?

FRIEDMAN: No. Chico died around, he died in the early ’60s, around 1960, and Harpo died in 1964, so that…

ANDELMAN: Okay, I didn’t realize it had been that long.

FRIEDMAN: Zeppo lived into the ‘70s and so did Gummo, who everybody said was the funniest Marx Brother, but he quit even before they were on Broadway, but Gummo and Zeppo will be in the second book together on one page.

ANDELMAN: Where did you get the photo references for all of these old Jewish comedians? I mean, obviously, it’s easy to find photos of them in their youth and at the height of their popularity, but some of these you wouldn’t even recognize.

FRIEDMAN: A lot of the photos are photos I have been clipping over the years. It has always been a hobby of mine to just clip weird photos and photos of celebrities and not just like smiling shots of celebrities staring at the camera but just stranger kind of like shots of them or even like the sides of their faces. So I had a file. I also have a lot of books with photographs of some of these guys, and their biographies usually have… And then people were sending me stuff, and then, of course, these days, you can Google certain people, although if you try to Google Menasha Skulnik or Jackie Miles, you’ll basically get nothing or even Georgie Jessel, who was incredibly famous in his day, but there’s hardly anything there on him, so…

ANDELMAN: The Jack Benny is interesting. I gather he’s wearing bifocals, if I’m looking at this correctly, but also, he’s not in one of his usual poses. He’s not holding his hand out like he’s just hit his punch line or something. It strikes me that your illustration of him is quite different from the illustration of pretty much anyone else. It’s very relaxed, he’s not smiling, looking kind of off. It’s really interesting looking.

FRIEDMAN: One of the reasons I don’t include text is because I want each illustration to sort of tell a little story, and some more than others, and the Jack Benny one in particular is Jack at the height of his career, at the end of his career, but he had an incredible career, he was incredibly famous, successful, was really funny, was successful on Broadway, in movies, television, radio. So I wanted to show him relaxed in his Beverly Hills home. One of the great lines that I read recently was from a Woody Allen interview in Vanity Fair where he talked about visiting Jack Benny, and his comment was, “Jack Benny was a real Beverly Hills Jew,” and I just liked how that sounded, so I wanted to just present him in his Beverly Hills home, just relaxed like he doesn’t have anything more to prove, he’s done it all, and he’s just looking at the reader like just with a contented smile. And the fact that it’s opposite the drawing of Mousie Garner in what might be an old-age home, but he’s got an electric blanket wrapped around him, and he’s sort of looking at the reader saying, “What happened?” Like, “I’ve been in show business my entire career, and this is where I wound up?” It’s sort of the opposite of… Jack Benny just had done it all, and there he is….

ANDELMAN: Right. He almost looks like a woman, actually.

FRIEDMAN: Well, he wore his hair like that. He usually combed it, Mousy Gardner, he usually combed it back; when he did his comedy act, he had crazy hair and greasy, and he would let it fall, sort of like Shemp.

ANDELMAN: Will the second book have any old Jewish women comediennes?

FRIEDMAN: Yes, yes. I had considered them for the first book. There are not that many. There were a lot of funny ones but not that many. I couldn’t really come up with too many, but the second one will have some, including Molly Picon, who was also incredibly popular in her day, mostly in the Yiddish theater, but then she branched out to television and Broadway shows. Phyllis Diller was Jewish, and she’ll be in there, and then there are some other ones that are a little more obscure. And then there are other ones that I am still considering, like Joan Rivers, possibly, and Elaine May. But then some of them died kind of young, like Fanny Brice died when she was in her early 60s, and Totie Fields didn’t live that long, so they didn’t quite… Lenny Bruce won’t be in any of these books because he died at age 40.

ANDELMAN: Drew, you are best known for your caricatures, this type of work. What’s the process for doing one in terms of what medium do you work in, is there a signature in your mind in terms of the background or the expressions, is there something beyond what we just see when you do one of these?

FRIEDMAN: That’s the beagles in the background.

ANDELMAN: We’ll get to the beagles, I promise.

FRIEDMAN: The process, it depends whether it’s an assignment, of course, if I have to draw somebody specific, but my technique used to be what people called “stipple” style. I haven’t done that in many years, but now, I use water color. I work only with a brush, but I do a pretty tight pencil sketch before I paint, so the effect that you are seeing in the Jewish Comedians book and in my work, it begins with a tight, tight pencil, and then I paint right on top of that, and I don’t erase the pencil, so hopefully that will just give it a richer look, which is what people seem to pick up on, the intense detail. But if it’s an assignment, if it’s a magazine assignment, if they tell me exactly what they want, that’s the easiest way, but if it’s up to me, then I have to kick around some ideas and submit some sketches. But with this book, the Jewish Comedians book, I first came up with a list of people I wanted to do, and then as I got to each person, I would figure out how I wanted to present them. Some of them are just up close like faces in your face. I wanted the effect to be like these guys are just staring right back at you in your face, and then I pulled back on some of the other ones and wanted to show them in an environment, like the Jack Benny one, Mousie Garner, a few other ones.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Lee Salem is a guy I’ve admired for many, many years. As the president and editor of Universal Press Syndicate, he is the man responsible for recognizing a slew of creative talent that impacted American pop culture over the last 30-plus years. The origins of Garry Trudeau and “Doonesbury,” Gary Larson and “The Far Side,” Bill Watterson and “Calvin and Hobbes,” Lynn Johnston and “For Better or Worse” and Cathy Guisewite and “Cathy,” all can be traced back to the man I’m about to interview.

I had my own up-close and personal moment with Lee Salem. Mr. Media was originally a weekly syndicated column, one distributed by Universal Press Syndicate from July 1996 to May 1998. I remember my first email from Lee, suggesting Universal was interested in distributing the column, which until then had been self-syndicated. He even invited me out to Kansas City, where I met a half-dozen people – including Sue Roush, Bill Mitchell and Darrell Coleman - who I stayed friendly with for many years to come.

And on that trip, seeing how awed I was by whom I was with and my surroundings, Lee jokingly invited me to take a spin in his office chair. Who could resist? Would a political junkie refuse the chance to sit in the President’s chair at the Oval Office? Would a Trekkie turn down the opportunity to take the con from Captain Kirk? It was a pretty cool ride for a guy who dubbed himself “Mr. Media.”

I like Lee a lot and respect him even more. And when I decided to restart Mr. Media as an online feature, Lee Salem was at the top of the list of people I wanted to interview.


BOB ANDELMAN: Lee, thanks for taking the time to do this.

LEE SALEM: I enjoy it.

ANDELMAN: Not a bad introduction, huh?

SALEM: Pretty good.

ANDELMAN: Let’s start by playing a game of first impressions. Tell me what you remember, the first thing you remember about these things that I mentioned, if you would. Let’s start with “Doonesbury.”

SALEM: Well, a slight correction. “Doonesbury” was picked up by the syndicate in 1970, and I started in 1974, but it wasn’t more than a year and a half or two when I started editing Garry. One of my earliest recollections on the bad side was letting the word “missile” to through misspelled, a word I will never misspell again. And on the good side, I started in July of 1974, and the following spring, we nominated him for the Pulitzer for his work in 1974, which mostly focused on Watergate. And that year, he won his Pulitzer, so that was a thrilling time for all of us.

ANDELMAN: All right. And what about “The Far Side”?

SALEM: We had been doing Gary’s books for maybe a year or so, and Gary at that time was with a smaller syndicate, Chronicle Features, and made it clear that he wanted to come over to us, and we had some tough negotiations with his lawyer, and Bob Duffy, who preceded me in the presidency and was then sales director, and I kind of looked at each other wondering about the tough terms of his contract, but it worked out great for everybody, and we had a wonderful run with Gary and still do calendars with him on a regular basis and still remain friends.

ANDELMAN: “Calvin and Hobbes.”

SALEM: Well, Bill is Bill. The somewhat rancorous relationship between the two of us, while occasional, was still public, and he made his feelings clear about the business obligations that we felt and thought that we were asking too much of him and “Calvin and Hobbes” in terms of exposure in the market. We ultimately accepted his arguments and redid his contract, and he retired after a brilliant ten-year run, probably as strong a ten-year run as anyone in comics history, I think.

ANDELMAN: “Cathy.”

SALEM: Well, we just celebrated thirty years with “Cathy.” We had a nice dinner with her last fall. When “Cathy” began, everyone was apprehensive. We circulated it in the office before we launched it, and people were saying, what is this, the art and the character? And it is still in well over a thousand papers after thirty years, which, in this market, is quite an accomplishment. I really look on her as a pioneer, and if “Cathy” had not worked the way we hoped it would, I am not sure we would have made the plunge with Lynn Johnston and “For Better or For Worse.” But “Cathy” worked, and it seemed natural to us that the time was right for talented women on a comic page.

ANDELMAN: All right. Well, then, “For Better or For Worse.”

SALEM: Well, that’s a great segue. When we saw Lynn’s work, we loved it. We loved her perspective. In the late ’70s, there was not a great demand for more family strips because the pages seemed to be dominated by them, but what attracted us was the mother’s perspective and the somewhat wry tone she would take on her situation and her husband’s life and children’s lives, and it has proven to be a comic strip that has dominated the surveys in terms of popularity for a long time.
ANDELMAN: And another family strip, “Foxtrot.”

SALEM: It’s a wonder Bill even signed with us. When Jake Morrissey, who was an editor with us, and I first visited Bill out in California, we had breakfast with him and went outside and went to wish him well, and somebody had taken off the bumper on the front of his car, and we had to dash off because we had another appointment. We were in Berkeley, and there was a comics convention then, and we kind of left Bill there. We waved at him and wished him well, and ever since then, I have felt terrible about it, but “Foxtrot” was another case of, answering the question, does the world need another family strip, but the kids were so different, and he was bringing in science, and that occasionally kind of added another perspective to it, and really, until his retirement from the daily portion of “Foxtrot” a couple months ago, I think it was consistently a top ten strip.





ANDELMAN: We just have a couple more. I promise I am not going to take you through the whole list. “The Boondocks.”

SALEM: Well, “The Boondocks,” for a long time we had been looking for a strip by an African-American cartoonist, and nothing really leaped out to us as saying this is a Universal-type strip, and then “The Boondocks” landed on our desks, and one of our editors in Chicago spotted it. He sent in a submission to us about the same time. Everyone had a very similar response that this was a breath of fresh air, and it proved out to be a wonderful strip for us. It didn’t achieve in number as some of the strips we have already mentioned, but in terms of its notoriety, it certainly was a national phenomenon, and he used that to springboard to what we hope will be a successful career in animation in television.

ANDELMAN: “Bloom County.”

SALEM: Not one of ours.

ANDELMAN: I know.

SALEM: But Washington Post Writers’ Group. I have been a long-time admirer of Berke’s work and met him a few times in social situations. I think he tried assiduously to get away from the mantle of being a derivative of “Doonesbury,” and I think to some extent he succeeded, because I think the characters and sensibility developed to be pretty much his own.

ANDELMAN: And the last one, “LIO.”

SALEM: “LIO” is a new strip, has been out less than a year, and it is something different. There is no language in it, it’s all pantomime, which I suspect is very, very difficult to do from the creative standpoint trying to think up a new situation each day using this character as the focal point. It’s a little dark and edgy sometimes though oriented for younger readers, and we have had a terrific launch with it, and it’s approaching 300 papers in less than a year, so we are delighted with it.

ANDELMAN: Oh, is it up that high already?

SALEM: Yeah.

ANDELMAN: I spoke to him a month ago, and it was at 250.

SALEM: Well, it’s at 275 or 280 now. He did benefit somewhat by “Foxtrot” going off the daily pages, but I think we will have a good long run with it.


© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

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.




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.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.