Author: Greg Beato

Today, Tom Green’s profile in the world of pop culture is so marginal it’s easy to forget how prominent he once was. But in 1999, after MTV imported his eponymous show from Canada, the hyperactive slacker hit America like a virus. “He’s become famous faster than anyone I’ve ever been associated with,” exclaimed Brian Graden, head of MTV programming, in April 1999. That was a mere two months after Green’s show debuted on the network, and all the hallmarks of A-list stardom soon followed. Green guest-hosted Saturday Night Live. He made the cover of Rolling Stone. He landed a deal to write, direct, and star in his own movie. He married a major Hollywood star. And then the big fade commenced.

But it didn’t happen because we tired of Tom Green’s shtick. To the contrary, our appetite for the sort of antics he displayed on his show—sucking face with a butchered lamb’s head, asking the prime minister of Canada to sign his balls, playing pranks on his long-suffering parents—has only increased.

So when Green stopped production on his show at the height of its popularity—first to deal with testicular cancer, then to pursue a movie career—countless others stepped in to meet the demand for transgressive cathode mayhem. For the last six years, NBC has made squid guts and liquid sewage a key part of its prime-time lineup with Fear Factor. When Jackass: Number 2, the big-screen prankfest starring Johnny Knoxville and his wondrously shatterproof troupe of masochists, catapulted into theaters in late September, it grossed $29 million its opening weekend. Jackass spin-offs Wildboyz and Viva La Bam are MTV2 staples. And then, of course, there’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. It’s the only show on TV that features as much real-life wanton destruction as Green’s once did—and the only one with a host, Ty Pennington, who can scream as loudly, moronically, and incessantly as Green once did. (Where Pennington makes use of a megaphone to achieve his effects, Green mostly worked acoustic.)

Ultimately, Green’s influence is felt most deeply on the Internet, on sites like YouTube and Google Video, where thousands of his aesthetic heirs upload clips of themselves spazzing out in their bedrooms, taunting security guards, and engaging in various other Greenian theatrics.

Green himself is part of the Internet fray now, too. Last summer, with support from a company called ManiaTV, he started broadcasting a live call-in talk show from his living room four nights a week. So far, technical difficulties are more common than not, and his worldwide audience is only around twenty-five thousand people, a fraction of the millions who once watched him on MTV. Compared to his previous level of stardom, this may seem like a fairly mediocre prize. Still, Green commutes from his bedroom to his living room, no longer has to worry about network censors, and, if he feels like going on for an extra half hour any given night, he can. So maybe the Internet’s not such a bad place to be—in fact, it’s actually where Green was headed all along.

Back in 1993, when only Al Gore and a few other techno-prophets knew what the Internet was, a twenty-two-year-old community college student in Ottawa, Ontario, was busy inventing its future—on a Canadian public-access channel. On his weekly, hour-long show, Tom Green did whatever it took to create a few visceral, visually arresting moments in no-budget, handheld fashion. He descended on city streets and shopping malls, saying things that people just don’t say in public, rubbing his “bum” against strangers, and otherwise invading their space with fearless abandon. He tortured his parents, painting their house plaid while they were away on vacation and dumping a severed horse head in their bed in the middle of the night as they slept. He harassed his best friend, Glenn Humplik, an amiable human punching bag whose unfortunate surname apparently gave him a tolerance for constant abuse. Slouchy and slack-jawed, swinging from catatonia to mania in the blink of a haunted, heavy-lidded eye, Green looked like a guy who’d end up stalking a beautiful blonde movie star, not marrying one.

Somehow, this haphazard approach to TV worked incredibly well, perhaps in part because Green’s shtick wasn’t exactly revolutionary. In fact, his show was modeled very closely on the traditional late-night talk-show model. He interviewed guests on a studio set and ended with a musical performance by a local band. He and his crew performed short comic sketches, and he did man-on-the-street bits, too—just like one of his major influences, David Letterman. The affable, endlessly accommodating Humplik served as Green’s Ed McMahon-like sidekick.

But while the Tom Green Show shared the same DNA as Letterman et al, it also bore a strong resemblance to COPS. There were long stretches of noisy, repetitive tedium, with Green screaming nonsense at strangers on the street, followed by bursts of inspired lunacy: a surprisingly clever ad lib on Green’s part, or a moment of inspired rage from a benign-looking soul whom Green had pushed too far.

But compared to other lo-fi, vérité shows, like the Real World and even the amateur submissions of America’s Funniest Home Videos, the Tom Green Show seemed shoddily made. Segments often had no discernible rhythms or structures, and overall, the show’s aggressive artlessness didn’t play as faux-authentic contrivance—the work of self-conscious, shaky-cam auteurs—it just looked bad and cheap and incompetent. Where, one wondered, was the craft? Where was the desire to hone a comic premise until it reached its full potential, to perpetrate some ingenious, Candid Camera-style prank? Green just turned on his video camera and started throwing shit at the wall. If it stuck, great. If it slid, even better.

For all its lazy, sloppy, and grating qualities, the Tom Green Show was also quite compelling. It didn’t matter if Green was donning scuba gear to dive for change in shopping mall fountains, or trying to convince his sweet, clueless grandmother that a box of neon-colored vibrators was actually a collection of kitchen gadgets, or simply smashing a platter of fresh meat with a baseball bat. More often than not, whatever he was doing was the most arresting thing happening on TV at any given moment, and restless channel surfers stopped and paid attention. Here was a show that adhered to none of the conventions that lent all TV programming, good and bad, a certain sameness. For a few months, at least, the Tom Green Show pulled off that rarest of TV tricks: It looked like nothing else on the tube. That’s why, after just a few episodes, it became a local cult favorite, then a hit on national Canadian cable, and ultimately, an MTV classic.

So it was that, as the twentieth century ran down, Green had figured out where twenty-first-century entertainment was headed. Before Jackass, before Fear Factor and YouTube, Green proved that punch lines weren’t necessary. That plots weren’t necessary. Even the themes that unified similarly plotless clip shows, like World’s Wildest Police Chase Videos, weren’t necessary.

Green’s efforts echoed the innovations of late-80s gonzo pornographers like John Stagliano and Ed Powers, who realized that their viewers weren’t particularly interested in storylines, dialogue, costumes, character development, or any of the other Hollywood conventions that the adult-film industry had traditionally aped. What drew viewers was raw, unrehearsed spectacle—unexpected moments—so that’s what Stagliano and Powers gave them.

Demonstrating that what worked for porn videos worked even better on mainstream TV—where the competition for viewer attention was (and is) relentless—Green liberated his audiences from having to follow complicated storylines, or watch from start to finish, or even watch all that closely. No matter when you tuned in to his show, there was always some kind of confrontation or disturbing imagery, or at the very least, a skinny, disheveled slacker who appeared to be in the midst of a psychotic breakdown. After just six episodes on MTV, the Tom Green Show had established itself as the network’s highest-rated series.

The show’s success marked the ascendancy of the amateur, bringing a punk-rock, DIY spirit to corporate television. Once Green became a certified network hit, the medium that had once been the most exclusive was suddenly accessible. Inspired provocateurs were no longer consigned to the ghetto of public access. A fifteen-year-old delinquent in the middle of nowhere could actually compete against Hollywood production companies—he just needed a handheld video camera, some wacky ideas, and the nerve to pull them off.

Green’s time at the top didn’t last long. Like many other purveyors of ambush TV, who rely on unsuspecting individuals to pull off their tricks, he found that his new notoriety made guerrilla street theater difficult. The objects of his attention began responding to him not as a random lunatic, but as Tom Green, MTV icon. His bout with cancer and an unsuccessful foray into movies further sidetracked his career. His first run on MTV ended in mid-2000, and a 2003 resurrection of the show, in a somewhat different format, lasted only a few months before being canceled due to low ratings.

Even so, Green’s initial success had a permanent impact on viewers, other rogue auteurs, and industry executives. It was suddenly clear that there was a lucrative market for all kinds of raw, surreal, caught-on-tape spectacles, no matter how slapdash or tasteless. For years, critics had accused TV executives of pandering to the lowest common denominator, but Green’s success proved that those execs were actually tight-assed gatekeepers. Even the scuzzy laughs and cheap thrills of Fox staples like Married with Children and World’s Wildest Police Chase Videos looked like Masterpiece Theatre compared to Jackass, Girls Gone Wild, Bumfights, and all the other DIY fare that followed in the wake of the Tom Green Show.

While it’s been more than a decade since Green first went on public-access cable, the style of programming he helped pioneer is still in its infancy. As the Internet evolves, it will become only more prominent; nothing else delivers the same bang for the buck. In the same way that traditional print-media operations, with their large staffs, cumbersome production processes, and expensive payrolls, are trying to find success while competing against bloggers, who can amass sizable audiences at virtually no cost, traditional TV producers will also face the democratizing wrath of the Internet.

When prime-time audiences ultimately splinter into pieces too small to underwrite the likes of Lost or even the Amazing Race, producers will turn to the kinds of shows that can aggregate eyeballs on a budget. In Nielsen terms, the twenty-five thousand nightly viewers at TomGreen.com is nothing; but what other regular producer of independent programming for the web—one that doesn’t involve naked women—can claim such numbers? Just a few years ago, few people believed that independent amateurs like DailyKos.com and Instapundit.com could crash the insular world of the news media elite in any significant way, but now, major players like Time and the New York Times have adopted the tools, techniques, and attitudes that such bloggers pioneered. Once again, Tom Green finds himself ahead of the curve.

The face of George W. Bush, sliced into eleven salmon-pink fillets, is neatly arranged on a six-foot banquet table in the sunken living room of a suite at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. This sounds like a liberal fantasy but in fact it’s a Republican one. The fillets are dusted with something that looks like coarse, blue- and red-tinted salt. Scissors, sponges, tongs, and other mysterious utensils complete this weird tableau. In a few minutes, makeup artist Mari Okumura will begin attaching the fillets, which are made out of latex, to the face of a comedian named Steve Bridges.

Over the last four years, Bridges has appeared on The Tonight Show more often than anyone not named Jay, Kevin, and maybe Gilbert, but if you saw him now, in his natural state, you wouldn’t recognize him. For the record, he’s approximately six feet tall, lanky, with fine, brown, thinning hair and light blue eyes. Dressed in a white v-neck T-shirt, jeans, and black ankle boots, and sporting a black corded necklace, the forty-two-year-old looks safely hip, like, say, a drummer in a Canadian rock band.

As he settles into a canvas director’s chair in front of the presidential facial buffet, he picks at a plate of black beans and peppers and worries about the state of his voice, which is scratchy from a cold. Then, for the next two hours, he closes his eyes and goes into standby mode, not quite unconscious but definitely conserving energy, as Okumura transforms him into the most powerful man in the world.

On a table in the corner, there are color photos of the real President Bush for reference. Okumura moves quickly and surely, patting simulated cheeks and chin flesh onto Bridges’ face with her fingers, tweezing a tiny nugget of adhesive from the nostril of his new nose. The flecks of blue and red on the facial prostheses are there to approximate the ruddiness and depth of real sixty-year-old skin. Once Okumura has secured all of the pieces to Bridges’ face, she applies a topcoat of a more flesh-like color with an airbrush, then adds nuance and detail using several fine-bristled brushes and numerous shades of makeup and powder.

Upon completion, Steve Bridges is to George W. Bush what the canals in front of the Venetian are to the actual canals in Venice: The likeness is not exact, but it’s a pretty spectacular simulation just the same. Because Bush’s face is essentially piggybacking on Bridges’ face, the resulting mug is a little oversized. And from some angles, Bridges has the plasticky, oddly tinted look of an aging movie star who’s had too much work done. But from across a room, or even closer, when Bridges assumes that familiar dusty drawl and starts cupping and pushing his hands in an effort to shepherd wayward thought fragments into something like a complete sentence, he does Bush as well as Bush does, maybe even better. The strong, crooked beak and untended eyebrows? That hardscrabble, are-you-shittin’-me squint? They’re all there.

To complete the effect, Bridges changes into a crisp navy suit and fastens a tiny American flag pin to its lapel. He’s ready for business. Tonight, that means entertaining fifteen hundred or so attendees at an open-bar reception sponsored by Cadillac, which is part of the International Limousine and Chauffered Transportation Show. When Bridges arrives outside the vast banquet room where the reception is taking place, a half-dozen Cadillac executives crowd around him, eager to shake his hand and snap photos.

In the real world, far beyond the glow of the Strip, morgues in Iraq are overflowing as the sectarian violence there escalates. Here at home, the Dubai ports deal has prompted bipartisan outrage. Republican officials are distancing themselves from their leader and Bush’s approval rating has hit an all-time low. But at the Venetian, his facsimile is the most popular man in the building.

“Is it OK if I put this Cadillac pin on you?” asks one pompadoured bigwig. When Bridges gives his assent, the man attaches the pin to Bridges’ lapel with great care and deference, just below the American flag pin.

“Can we get a photo of you all together?” asks a photographer for a trade publication.

There’s a moment of indecision about how best to set up this shot; then Bridges gets presidential. “How about right here?” he says, pointing to the wall, and the executives nod vigorously, like it’s the smartest thing anyone’s ever said.

A few minutes later, when Bridges enters the banquet room to the strains of “Hail to the Chief,” the leading lights of the international limousine and chauffered transportation industry stand as one and cheer like fat ladies at an Il Divo concert.

Bridges smiles and waves as he strides across the stage. “First I want to thank you for having me,” he exclaims after settling himself behind the podium. “And third, I want to apologize for forgetting my second point.”

He goes on to thank Cadillac for pimping his ride, and the crowd roars. One guy whips out his cell phone, punches in a number, and proceeds to repeat every line Bridges utters to the person on the other end of the call. Unlike the real Laura Bush, who stole the show at last year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner with her same-sex horse-milking joke, Bridges works clean. Telling G-rated jokes to a couple thousand drunken car salesmen and limo drivers on holiday in Sin City may sound like a recipe for disaster, but Bridges maintains complete command of the room. “I’m a uniter, not a divider,” he asserts, bear-hugging each syllable with folksy evangelical fervor, then cuing up his punchline with a pause and trademark Dubya head-bob. “Seriously, I can’t divide.”

Many of Bridges’ jokes satirize Bush in this fashion, but no one would mistake him for Dick Cheney on a quail-hunting expedition. Instead he aims very, very carefully. Domestic spying? Outing CIA agents? The heckuva job Brownie did in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? Jon Stewart and his late-night colleagues have been gorging on such fare for months, but Bridges doesn’t even take a nibble. Instead, his act is more homage than critique, a tribute to Bush as the charismatic dunce who’s cagier than he seems. When Bridges finishes at the Venetian, dozens of people surge forward to meet him.

Meanwhile, in the nation’s capital, the handlers for the real commander in chief are planning a new strategy to improve his image: a series of April roadshows that will present the president in a looser, more playful manner. The Washington Post will eventually dub this the “let-Bush-be-Bush strategy.” Apparently the president is determined to give Steve Bridges a run for his money.

In the midst of his 1999 campaign run, the man who was once a Yale cheerleader scuffed up and spit-polished his Texas twang. Shortly before he was elected, he bought a sixteen-hundred-acre pig farm in Crawford, Texas, and transformed it into an old family homestead, complete with a man-made lake stocked with largemouth bass cross-bred so that they’re easy to catch. When Bush became president, a private think tank, the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, was established to tell him what to think. Five speechwriters were hired to tell him what to say. Sometimes accused of being fed lines through an earpiece when speaking in public, he is most engaging during carefully choreographed pieces of reality TV: landing jets on aircraft carriers, liberating designer turkeys from Iraq, fielding canned questions at invitation-only town hall meetings that have been carefully cast, scripted, and rehearsed. To play the president of the United States, George W. Bush is paid $400,000 each year.

To play George W. Bush, Steve Bridges earns substantially more. His fee for a private appearance like the one at the Venetian is $18,500. Bridges only pockets a portion of that—his manager, his makeup people, and booking agencies get a cut as well—but he averages around ten to fifteen engagements a month. In addition, The Tonight Show provides a weekly check to keep him on exclusive retainer.

There are other surrogate Bushes who’ve been at it longer than Bridges has, but none who’ve been quite so successful. However, were it not for a chance encounter with a talent manager named Randy Nolen, this probably wouldn’t be the case. Just as it now takes an army of advisors, consultants, work wives, counselors, media directors, and spokesmen to make a president, these days it takes more than one man to make a successful presidential impersonator. Randy Nolen is essential to the operation—he is Steve Bridges’ Karl Rove, the man with the plan to turn a promising, but incomplete performer into the top man in his profession.

Like Rove, Nolen is a fifty-five-year-old former whiz kid who never finished college. He wears wire-rim glasses, he’s graying at the temples and receding on top. Officially, he’s Bridges’ manager, but he likes to think of himself as more of a collaborator, a developer of talent, just as Rove does. Both men are energetic and focused, but unlike the pasty Rove, Nolen is tanned and tranquil, with a ready smile. And while Rove has a reputation for being ruthless, sneaky, cynical, and vindictive, the mastermind of whisper campaigns and dirty tricks, Nolen is quite candid. Even worse, he’s nice. In theory, at least, that quality is a huge liability in his profession, but he seems to have overcome whatever obstacles it’s presented.

Nolen got his start in the entertainment business in 1972 when, at the age of twenty, he turned his father’s struggling restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, into a successful rock ’n’ roll nightclub. In the late 1980s, Nolen established his own talent agency, representing around twenty performers—jugglers, ventriloquists, comics, and singers—most of whom worked in the under-the-radar but increasingly lucrative niche serving meetings, conventions, and other private engagements.

In 1992, Nolen took on a real-estate professional named Tim Watters. Watters couldn’t juggle or sing, but he did bear a striking resemblance to Bill Clinton. While Nolen was initially skeptical about working with a celebrity impersonator—“Look-alikes get booked at the county fair for $750,” he explained—he changed his mind after Watters displayed a knack for comedy. “A lot of look-alikes smile and wave at corporate receptions and that’s it,” Nolen said.

Though he had no interest in managing three-dimensional wallpaper, Nolen felt Watters had the potential to do more than that. To help Watters develop his performance skills, Nolen enlisted a comic named T.P. Mulrooney for a crash course in the craft of stand-up. Like the real Clinton, Watters was a quick study. He could sell a line, charm an audience, and conjure the spirit of the man from Hope, Arkansas. Reportedly, he even once prompted a double take from Hillary. In 1996, his best year, Watters played 177 private shows, grossed more than one million dollars, and landed a role in the movie Contact.

Then came Matt Drudge and his Code Red buzzkill. In the public sector, Monica’s stained dress turned Clinton into the star of every late-night monologue for the next two years, but in the meetings-and-events realm, where any act more controversial than the average Successories poster is considered taboo, it was a problem. “In 1998, Tim’s gigs dropped to around six a month,” said Nolen. “That’s still very good for a performer in the private sector, but it was nothing like it was.”

But it wasn’t just Monica who was holding Watters back, Nolen believed. Over time, the former real-estate agent had developed, in Nolen’s opinion, a solid twenty minutes of material. Unfortunately, his act lasted thirty. “I was always trying to get him to hire writers, but he didn’t want to invest money in that,” said Nolen. Instead, Watters insisted on writing most of his material himself. “He was good, but I felt the act could go further.”

Still, Watters showed Nolen that presidential impersonators were a perfect fit for the private market. There, audiences didn’t necessarily share the same taste in entertainment; they just happened to be at the same event. The president was a figure everyone recognized, one of the last true superstars. But who best to play the part? Saturday Night Live didn’t rely on accidents of physiognomy when casting presidential impersonators, and Nolen began to think that he needn’t do so either. The factor that had traditionally defined value for look-alikes—their striking resemblance to a famous person—wasn’t really that important. What mattered, Nolen decided, was stage presence. Everything else could be outsourced. A prosthetic makeup artist could perfect the look. A writer could produce the jokes.

Nolen had begun to think like Karl Rove. As detailed in the book Bush’s Brain, when Rove first identified George W. Bush as a potential political candidate, Bush knew more about major-league baseball statistics than he did about public-school budgets. He cared more about major-league-baseball statistics than he did about public-school budgets. But he was also engaging, he had family connections, he knew all the right potential donors, and he had stage presence. Everything else could be outsourced.

In 2001, shortly after September 11, Nolen found his Bush. “I was calling a booking agency on behalf of one of my clients,” he said. “When I was put on hold, I heard Steve doing his impressions. He really had Bush down, I thought, so I wanted to find out more about him.”

At the time, Bridges was thirty-seven years old. He was living, it turns out, a life that was in some ways the opposite of the president’s. As a young man, he’d been full of serious purpose. The son of a Baptist minister, he had plans to follow in his father’s footsteps, first earning an undergraduate degree in theology, then a master’s in education while working as a part-time youth minister in Fullerton, California. As he grew older, however, he realized that what he really wanted to do in life was fool around. “During that last year at the church I was doing more and more comedy,” he said. “I asked people what they thought and they all said, ‘You gotta go for it. Your impersonations are good.’ ”

For the next decade, Bridges worked steadily, mostly in the private sector where his clean brand of comedy was in higher demand than it was in the clubs. But it was a tough way to make a living. Sometimes he took day jobs to make ends meet—working the counter at a deli, mowing lawns. When Nolen contacted him, he was renting a room in someone else’s apartment. “Like most comics, I’d been looking for some kind of a break,” he said. Suddenly, someone was telling him he could book fifteen gigs a month, appear on The Tonight Show, land roles in movies. All he’d have to do was learn to delegate.

“The more I thought of putting together a forty-five-minute show that was just one character, the more I was like, ‘Yes, let’s hire writers,’” said Bridges. First, however, came the face: In contemporary politics, appearance always trumps content. To create Bridges’ new look, Nolen hired prosthetic makeup artist Kevin Haney, a movie-industry veteran who’s won an Oscar for his work on Driving Miss Daisy, turned the elfin Martin Short into porky talk-show host Jiminy Glick, and, in the early 1980s, worked on the low-budget horror favorite, Basket Case.

But as hard as it may have been to design a tiny, murderous Siamese twin monster who lives in a basket, simulating the face of someone as instantly recognizable as George W. Bush presented a unique challenge. If Haney didn’t nail the resemblance, the world would easily see it: Bush was simply too well-known to get it wrong. The development process took three months. The result of those initial efforts was a latex mask that looked like Dubya’s face on the outside, while snugly conforming to Bridges’ face on the inside.

If the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Al Gore in 2000, a single-piece mask may have been sufficient. But it didn’t offer enough flexibility needed to play a president whose face actually moves. So Haney deconstructed the mask into eleven smaller pieces. This gives Bridges the opportunity to wink, smirk, squint, glower, waggle his eyebrows, and generally contort his faux features in whatever way an occasion demands, just like Bush does.

Once they’d perfected the look, Nolen hired a group of writers, led by comedian Evan Davis, to help Bridges approximate Bush’s unique brand of lexical alchemy. “Basically, it ends up costing us around a thousand dollars for a minute of new material,” Nolen says. So far, he’s invested more than $150,000 in the writing alone. Here, Bush has him beat—the highest-paid White House speech-writer earns $161,000 annually, and throughout his reign, Bush has always employed at least three speechwriters and sometimes as many as five.

But Nolen has arguably gotten a better return on his investment. Bridges debuted as Bush in early April, 2002, first at a series of local and state election wrap-up parties in Illinois, then at several showcases for private-event bookers around the country. By the end of the month, Judy Woodruff was interviewing Bridges on the street in front of the White House for a segment that appeared on CNN’s Inside Politics. That summer, he made his Tonight Show debut, and in the fall, he started playing private engagements for a ten-thousand-dollar fee. This figure soon rose to $18,500, and in the fall of 2004, when Bridges was in peak demand due to the presidential race, it hit twenty-five thousand dollars.

Nolen and Bridges have talked about releasing a DVD, and sometimes, especially when he’s working out new material, Bridges plays a comedy club in the Los Angeles area as Bush. Except for his appearances on The Tonight Show, however, he mostly stays out of the public realm of entertainment; corporate shows and other private events are his bread and butter. “I think if he did public shows or a college tour, people would yell things, try to disrupt him,” says Nolen. “He doesn’t need anyone throwing pies at him, or anything like that.”

To this end, even President Bush himself has weighed in. In February 2003, just a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq, Nolen and Bridges received an invitation to the Oval Office. “It was surreal,” says Bridges. “We were giddy as schoolchildren.” Bush said he appreciated the humorous-but-polite tone of Bridges’ portrayal, and even invited him to do some fishing in Crawford. “He also gave us some advice,” said Nolen. “He said we should be careful about how we use this, because in the wrong hands, there was a chance it could be used against the best interests of Americans.”

So far, however, in the insular, relatively controlled realm of private entertainment, Bridges has only been a force for unity. When Norman Lear hired him to play a birthday party for his former production partner, he had a roomful of

Hollywood liberals in hysterics. “Dustin Hoffman was doubled over laughing the whole time,” said Nolen. At a book-signing event that Jerry Seinfeld organized, Eliot Spitzer, attorney general of New York and a front-running Democrat in this year’s race for governor, loved Bridges’ routine.

“I remember one lady who told me to go
F- myself, but that hardly ever happens,” Bridges said. “Usually, it’s the other way around. People are speechless. They’re stuttering. They know I’m not the real president, but they love him so much they just can’t stop hugging me. I’ve even had a few women grab my butt.”

One person who has yet to succumb to Bridges’ charm, however, is fellow fake president Martin Sheen. Last year, Bridges was asked to appear at a charity benefit in Beverly Hills. “The people who were organizing it were trying to get Martin Sheen to come out and make an appearance with Steve,” Evan Davis recalled. “They were asking me if I could write some lines that Sheen could say about Steve’s impression of the president. But then they called back and said, ‘Martin Sheen will not be seen on the same stage with someone who even looks like Bush.’ ”

Team Bridges is a bipartisan affair. Nolen and Bridges are conservatives; Evan Davis and many of the other writers are liberals. Ultimately, however, they insist that Bridges’ act is nothing more than entertainment. “For me this is not about politics at all—this is comedy,” Bridges insisted. “Our goal is to keep the act non-partisan and fun,” echoed Davis. “I deal in character and relationships. That’s where the humor comes from.”

For some liberals, however, a simulation as accurate as Bridges’ is too compelling to deploy in such gentle fashion; it’s like using a sixteen-wheeler as a grocery cart. “We’ve received a few calls from Democratic candidates to basically bash President Bush,” Nolen said. “I got a request for Steve to read a script as part of a classroom project for young kids. The whole thing is anti-Bush—we’re not even going to respond to it. We’re not any sort of political arm of the president, but we want what we do to be respectful.”

Sometimes, Nolen said, they wonder if they cross that line, but they really shouldn’t worry: Bridges is the best ambassador the president has. Indeed, during the photo op that followed Bridges’ performance at the Venetian, a woman made a telling remark. “We hope you take over for the guy who’s in there now,” she exclaimed, clearly fed up with the genuine article but nonetheless smitten with his latex doppelganger.

That’s because Bridges isn’t playing Bush circa 2006. Instead, he’s playing an earlier, more appealing Bush, a Bush unsullied by history. His Bush is the cocksure charmer who doesn’t take himself too seriously. The middle-aged corporate slacker who cluster-bombed sentences into verbal rubble but would be hard pressed to find Iraq on a globe.

The testy, defensive Bush who insists that secret wiretaps are necessary to protect freedom and liberty does not exist in Bridges’ universe. Neither does the Bush who treats his constituents like slightly deaf koala bears as he explains for the umpteenth time why he can’t simply wave a magic wand at gas pumps to reduce the price of unleaded.

Instead, Bridges offers an apolitical Bush, which, while it may be unintentional, is a stroke of political genius. Divorced from actual experience, the president’s charm goes on the offensive again. Campaign-trail Bush re-emerges, and it’s 1999 in America, a return to the peace and prosperity of that era.

None of which seems lost on Republican party officials. Bridges is a favorite of the Republican Eagles, a super-elite Republican National Committee group of the party’s most generous donors. During the Republican National Convention in 2004, Dick Cheney was the opening act at an Eagles function, and Bridges closed the show. More recently, Bridges almost served as a replacement for the real deal at another RNC function. “We received a last-minute call from the people who plan events for them,” Nolen explained. “There was an event the president was scheduled to attend—both a reception and a dinner. But he couldn’t make the dinner, and [the planners] thought, ‘Well, these donors are going to be disappointed—can we get Steve Bridges to fill in for him?’ ”

Bridges already had an engagement booked—these days, with the help of Kevin Haney’s facial prosthetics, he also now impersonates Arnold Schwarzenegger—so he couldn’t help out on that occasion. But in the future, who knows?

At Backwardsbush.com, a clock counts down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds left of Dubya’s reign. When it finally zeroes out on January 20, 2009, Bridges’ lucrative career as the leading George W. Bush impersonator won’t grind to an immediate halt—six years after Bill Clinton left office, Tim Watters still gets gigs. But George W. Bush will no longer be the world’s most powerful and recognizable figure; someone else will assume that mantle. And, thus, the job of top presidential impersonator will be in play too.

Like incumbents everywhere, however, Steve Bridges is not prepared to give up his office so easily. Instead, he aims to be the first three-term president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

During the 2004 election, Kevin Haney created a John Kerry face for Bridges, so if the Massachusetts senator makes another run in 2008, Bridges is ready to go. He does the voices of Al Gore, Howard Dean, and John McCain too, and believes he can adapt to any electoral outcome. “We actually considered, in sort of a lighthearted moment, of having Steve do Hillary,” said Nolen. “He thinks he can get the voice down.” In the end, though, they chose an alternate plan. If Hillary wins the 2008 election, Bridges will play Bill and they’ll find a woman to play Hillary.

But perhaps in simply impersonating the president (or the first gentleman), Bridges is setting his goals too low. No one expects the commander in chief to be an operating system anymore; an interface will suffice. In this manner, Bridges excels. He can play to a small group of executives, or a huge TV audience. He can take a line he’s said a hundred times already and still make it sound fresh. The camera loves him. Corporate America loves him. He’s even big in Dubai, where a businessman recently paid him fifty thousand dollars to play at an economic summit.

Bridges doesn’t have a famous father, but with the help of Kevin Haney, he’s a very familiar brand nonetheless, and potentially, the ultimate end-run around the Twenty-second Amendment. Bush could run again! Only it wouldn’t be Bush, it would be Bridges. Somewhere in Malibu, Martin Sheen is praying Karl Rove hasn’t thought of this yet.

Jared has a last name, but like Michelangelo, Madonna, and Saddam, he doesn’t need one. When I say “Jared,” you know I’m not talking about actor Jared Leto or Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond. Those guys have their constituencies, but uninym status? There’s only one Jared who can make that claim: Jared the Subway Guy, the innovative weight-loss adventurer who, thanks to his ability to shed pounds while eating nothing but fast food, stands as the most improbably enduring icon this new millennium has produced.

Sisqo, we hardly knew ye. Crabby British lady from The Weakest Link—what was your catchphrase again? These days, celebrity is as ephemeral as a wrinkle on Joan Rivers’ brow. But six years after Jared’s first commercial aired nationally, in January 2000, his special brand of reduced-calorie charisma remains in high demand. “I’m on the road around two hundred days a year,” Jared told me over the phone recently. He was at the Denver airport, en route to Seattle to represent Subway at a Seahawks game. A few days earlier, he’d been in California with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, kicking off a campaign against childhood obesity. When he visited Washington, D.C., last April, as part of an American Medical Association lobbying effort on cardiovascular disease, Senator Barack Obama did a double-take in the halls of the Capitol, then called him over. (“He loves Subway’s new toasted subs,” Jared reports.) At a hotel buffet in Hawaii, Jerry Seinfeld got a little starstruck when he recognized the mythic sandwich pitchman in the omelet line. “This big smile spread across his face, and he said, ‘You’re Jared, right?’ ”

Such fame generally requires one to star in a few hit movies, or at least an unauthorized sex video with extensive Internet distribution. Lasting fame is even more elusive; like weight loss, it’s harder to maintain than achieve. But Jared has made it look exceedingly easy. He estimates that he’s shot around thirty-five to forty national commercials over the course of his career, including ten in 2005. (He also appeared in another two dozen or so regional ads.) Most of these commercials were thirty-second spots; some were only half as long. Add them all up, and you can’t help but think of the Warhol cliché: Jared’s fame is literally built on approximately fifteen minutes of exposure.

Of course, Jared’s commercials air thousands of times each year, at all hours of the day, across multiple channels. In today’s vast TV universe, shows like Yes, Dear can run forever without making a single cast member a household name, even in the households of CBS network executives. But unless your TV is a goldfish bowl, you’ve seen Jared holding up his old blue jeans and extolling the virtues of Subway. “We took a trip to the Arctic Circle,” he told me, recalling a journey through Alaska. “This one village we went to, the closest Subway was more than five hundred miles away. But because they get satellite TV, all the kids there knew who I was.”

Somewhere in Milford, Connecticut, where the Subway chain is based, there are men and women who literally get paid to market baloney. (Or, as they might put it, “bologna.”) In the late 1990s, they were, in the words of Subway co-founder Fred DeLuca, “firmly convinced that consumers were not interested in food that was low-fat.” And, indeed, even after exposés like Fast Food Nation and Supersize Me, fast food remains appealing specifically because it’s not low-fat—it’s greasy, salty fare that tastes like artery-clogging indulgence, not deprivation.

But as DeLuca explained in a 2002 interview with QSR, a fast-food trade journal, two things happened that helped Subway change its mind about the marketability of healthy fast food. First, a Houston franchisee started promoting the fact that Subway’s menu included seven sandwiches with fewer than six grams of fat. Then, after that franchise enjoyed a significant jump in sales, Subway incorporated the concept nationally. That’s when Jared, a twenty-year-old student at Indiana University, happened to notice a “seven under six” sign at his local Subway.

At that point, the business major was morbidly obese: 425 pounds and gaining. His knees and shoulders ached under the load of all that weight. There were courses he didn’t take because they were held in classrooms where the seats could not accommodate him. He required two parking spots for his car—unless he could open the driver’s door completely, he couldn’t get out.

Ironically enough, the local Subway, which was literally on the other side of a wall of Jared’s apartment, was part of the problem. It was open till three a.m., and he used to feast there on steak sandwiches with extra cheese. But when he saw the “seven under six” sign, he decided to forsake such treats for healthier choices: a small turkey sandwich (no cheese or mayo) for lunch, and a large veggie sandwich for dinner. About one year and seven hundred Subway sandwiches later, he’d lost 245 pounds. Subway franchisees in the Chicago area learned about his success via a brief mention in Men’s Health magazine and produced a TV ad for the local market. “The national people never bought into it until they saw that it was interesting to consumers,” DeLuca told QSR.

Indeed, while Jared’s star was rising over Chicago, Subway’s national team was focused on a campaign featuring Billy Blanks, the fitness trainer who masterminded the Tae Bo craze by mixing ballet, boxing, martial arts, and hip-hop. When it came to selling hoagies to couch potatoes, though, the former superheavyweight kicked the former karate champion’s perfectly toned butt. Fan mail flooded corporate headquarters. The Oprah Winfrey Show, Today, and Good Morning America supersized Jared’s renown. In the first year that Subway broadcast its Jared commercials, sales rose by nineteen percent.

Jared is fairly circumspect about what Subway pays him. A couple of years ago, in a Washington Post article, he said his earnings would make him a “future millionaire.” All he would tell me with regard to his salary was, “They treat me very well.” No matter how much he’s earning, though, it’s likely that he’s underpaid. Consider that Advertising Age reported in July 2005 that “Subway executives have said when ads featuring [Jared] stop running, sales dropped as much as ten percent,” and that Subway’s revenue for 2004 topped $6 billion. This suggests that Jared is worth as much as $600 million a year to the chain. So it’s no surprise that Subway remains committed to him. What is curious is the public’s enduring interest in the guy.

Let’s face it—in the canon of commercial pitchmen, Jared doesn’t exactly leap out at you. Hell, in the canon of guys hanging out at your local Best Buy, Jared doesn’t exactly leap out at you. He lacks, for example, Ronald McDonald’s sartorial daring. He has none of the Pillsbury Doughboy’s infectious joie de vivre, or Mr. Whipple’s riveting psychosexual turmoil. Unlike Jimmy Dean, there’s no music career, however dimly recalled, bolstering his reputation. What Jared does offer is a dramatic and inspiring personal story, one with a touch of irony, too: Not only did he lose 245 pounds in just eleven months, but there were no sit-ups involved, no steamed broccoli or soy-protein smoothies—just fast food, pure and simple! It’s diet porn with a punch line, an urban myth that’s actually true.

But as irresistible as that story may be, it’s a short one, and it’s been going on now for six years. Where’s the sequel? Or even a single plot twist? Jared 2006 is essentially the same as Jared 2000. His is not an Oprah-esque saga involving the loss and gain and reloss of, cumulatively speaking, hundreds of pounds. He hasn’t slapped an ex-con Harley Davidson salesman in the face at an airport, à là Richard Simmons. He’s never even changed the style of his glasses.

Jared himself attributes his enduring popularity to his authenticity. “I’m not an actor,” he said. “People know what I did was real. When I look back and ask why am I still doing this six years later, that’s one of the only reasons I can think of.” But there’s more to it than that. This is the age of reality TV, after all; prime time is infested with real people scratching and clawing their way into our consciousness. They’re as subtle as silent movie stars, spewing their neuroses all over your flat-screen.

Jared, on the other hand, evokes an old-fashioned TV professionalism. He’s calm, informal, never hurried. He’s never had a snappy catchphrase, and thus, people have never tired of his snappy catchphrase. He’s also so demographically limber his parents ought to get some kind of advertising award for concocting him. While he grew up in Indianapolis, he seems at home anywhere there is a mall and a Subway. Which is to say, everywhere.

Those tiny wire-rim glasses of his? Definitely blue-state. The fact that he once weighed 425 pounds? You can’t get any more red-state than that! Women like him, but not in a way that makes their boyfriends or husbands jealous. At twenty-seven, he’s youthful, but there’s something sort of middle-aged about him, too. He knows how to play to schoolkids, politicians, whoever. When he holds up those old size-60 blue jeans—they’re so big, they look like a shower curtain with legs—everyone responds.

But perhaps what’s most extraordinary about him is his willingness to remain average. The first rule of accidental fame, after all, is that you must try to exploit and extend your celebrity, however possible. But Jared has not only not gone Hollywood, he hasn’t even gone Planet Hollywood. He lives in an Indianapolis suburb with his wife, Elizabeth. If he’s ever had a desire to pursue a career in Rob Schneider movies or go on a drunken bender with Nicole Richie, he’s successfully resisted it. He hasn’t remodeled his face à là Paula Jones, or tried to establish himself as a makeover show host or infomercial fitness equipment guru. He’s simply stuck with what made him famous in the first place: low-key, matter-of-fact commercials for Subway. Year after year, he remains on message, as stalwart as the Nike swoosh or the McDonald’s arches, a logo made flesh.

And certainly his mission is far from over. Because of the public’s response to Jared and his ads, Subway went from halfheartedly pointing out that some of its sandwiches happened to be low in fat to fervently promoting health as a key part of its identity. It developed additional low-fat sandwiches, and added salads and other health-oriented menu items, such as a line of products for carb-counting customers. It also helped for customers to keep track of how many calories they were consuming, right down to each slice of cheese. And perhaps the most significant sign of success with this approach was that other fast-food chains began adding healthier choices to their menus.

Nonetheless, all those salads with dressing on the side have yet to have an impact on the nation’s collective waistline. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about two out of every three adults in the U.S. are overweight or obese. It also estimates that fifteen percent of six- to nineteen-year-olds are overweight. “Obesity is a bigger problem now than it was six years ago,” said Jared. “So I think that keeps my story relevant.” And unlike a lot of celebrities, Jared actually wants to be a role model. “I see how keeping my weight off, and staying on the road and talking to kids, inspires other people,” he said. “When I was at my heaviest, my self-esteem was so low. I never expected to be able to give hope to somebody. It’s such a fantastic feeling.”

In TV years, Jared is a mere toddler compared to other average-guy advertising icons. The six years and sixty to seventy national and regional commercials he’s got under his (size 34) belt are still no match for Dick Wilson, aka Mr. Whipple, who shot 504 ads for Charmin toilet paper between 1965 and 1989. Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s, appeared in more than eight hundred spots for his hamburger chain. Jared’s life expectancy on TV, however, looks promising. “We expect he’ll be with us for a while,” said Subway PR specialist Mack Bridenbaker.

Indeed, Jared is more than a corporate pitchman now, and more than an evangelist for healthier eating. He’s transcended those roles to become a living symbol of change, a vivid reminder that people can radically transform their bodies, and, along with that, their lives. In a way, he’s a contemporary version of Charles Atlas, the entrepreneurial bodybuilder who, via his “dynamic tension” system, promised spectacular transformation. At a time when America was a land of hungry young immigrants eager to bulk up and prove their strength, the target audience was ninety-seven-pound weaklings who were tired of getting sand kicked in their faces. Now, in the land of supersized plenty, the audience is three-hundred-pound endomorphs who, instead of longing for pecs the size of Big Macs, would settle for being able to see their feet again. To them, Jared offers regular, thirty-second glimmers of hope. Charles Atlas’ first ads appeared in 1929; his image is still today used to sell his system. Perhaps, after six years, Jared is just getting started.

Until June 14, Camp Gitmo, the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a controversial prison—to some, a necessary response to the war on terror; to others, a Bermuda Triangle of legal rights where suspected terrorists serve indeterminate sentences—but still, in pretty much everyone’s mind, a prison. Then, Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, likened the interrogation techniques that Guantanamo’s proprietors sometimes employ to those used “by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime.” Critics of this assessment responded quickly, emphatically, and with a surprising degree of culinary discernment. Not only was Guantanamo not a gulag, they insisted, it was actually a world-class vacation resort and a great place to eat.

Rush Limbaugh dubbed it Club Gitmo, “a one-of-a-kind resort on the west coast of Cuba overlooking the bay” that served as a “tropical retreat from the stress of Jihad.” Dick Cheney took his cues from Limbaugh, claiming that the prison’s detainees were “living in the tropics” with “everything they could possibly want.” Duncan Hunter, a Republican congressman from California, lauded Gitmo’s spa-caliber cuisine and the kitchen staff’s free hand with portions. Detainees get “double vegetables and two types of fruit,” he boasted. “The inmates in Guantanamo have never eaten better, they’ve never been treated better, and they’ve never been more comfortable in their lives than in this situation.”

Throw in two fifteen-minute showers a week, spacious eight-foot-by-eight-foot detention suites, and some relaxing enforced solitude, and, well, you can see why the editors at Condé Nast Traveler are kicking themselves for ranking this suicide-optional luxury hideaway so low on their 2005 Hot List. If anything, though, even Gitmo’s most avid boosters have been selling the place short. Why? Because along with the sumptuous chow and the breezy island ambiance, there’s also enough booze at Gitmo to drown the French Quarter. “On average, people will increase their alcohol consumption by three hundred percent when they come here,” explained combat stress control specialist Sgt. Michelle Olson in an article recently published by the American Forces Press Service.

The prisoners’ favorite drink? The Gitmojito, of course. A refreshing twist on one of Cuba’s signature cocktails, it’s made with fresh spearmint leaves, limes, sugar, rum, and a generous splash of urine. Okay, just kidding there. Guantanamo detainees are sometimes rewarded with candy and ice cream, but alcohol is strictly reserved for U.S. military personnel. Why are the guards so thirsty? Not because of stress, that’s for sure. Instead, as Rush Limbaugh or Dick Cheney could tell you, it’s because this parched, semi-arid paradise, with its lush bowers of razor wire and acres of pristine land mines, is even more fun when you’re not chained to the floor and forced to crap on yourself. Still, an important question remains: Are Gitmo’s bartenders using premium rum, like Bambu or 10 Cane? If not, then somebody call Amnesty International! Plain old Bacardi Superior is torture.

—Greg Beato

In the beginning, there was the self-help book. With its stirring message of movin’-on-up empowerment and its ten directives for highly effective living, the Bible is the cornerstone on which today’s human-potential industry is founded. Yet the products from self-help authors never garner the same respect as the book that started it all. No other class of contemporary writers grapples as nakedly or as forcefully with life’s deepest, most enduring questions—How can I make others like me? How can I make money? How can I get laid?—but to what ends? Newspaper book reviewers would sooner appraise Danielle Steel’s annual Christmas letter than Tony Robbins’ latest volume of psychological jumping jacks. Citadels of higher learning are even more indifferent: Courses at both UC Berkeley and Harvard University have celebrated the drive-by iambs of rapper Tupac Shakur, but where are the seminars devoted to self-help giant Zig Ziglar, who, in between advising CEOs and government officials, has been helping car salesmen and real-estate agents maximize their productivity for almost four decades now?

Success soothes the cold slap of indifference, of course. Every year, the publishing industry produces more than 3,500 self-help titles, and every year the sickly, the fat, the lonely, and the indebted turn a handful of these books into bustling cottage industries. According to publishing industry research firm Simba Information, self-help books took in $650 million in 2003. Similarly, Tom Butler-Bowdon, a self-help sommelier who has penned a handy guide to the genre, 50 Self-Help Classics, estimates that over the last hundred years, upwards of half a billion copies of self-help books have garlanded our wretched planet. On the one hand, it makes you question their efficacy. On the other, imagine how miserable the war-torn, disease-ridden twentieth century would have been without the salves of Dale Carnegie, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, and John Gray.

As successful as self-help has been in print, however, it took television to fully capitalize on its potential. Doubt, pain, joy, faith, embarrassment, hopelessness, triumph—the buffet of supersized emotions generated when people attempt to radically transform themselves is endless, and shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Extreme Makeover, and The Swan lay out a feast for emotional voyeurs. Suddenly, self-help isn’t just utilitarian anymore; it’s entertainment, too.

So why don’t more self-help publishers play up the vicarious appeal of their various titles? Indeed, as the industry evolves, it’s getting more entertaining all the time. With thousands of titles glutting the market, it gets harder and harder to come up with a fresh angle, so self-help authors, who are by nature overachievers anyway, work extra hard to develop winning ideas. Sometimes fate intervenes, creating unprecedented scenarios ready to be strip-mined. For a genuinely interesting account of capitalism’s adjustment to a Code Orange world, see the most perversely upbeat title of the fall publishing season, Dan Carrison’s Business Under Fire: How Israeli Companies are Succeeding in the Face of Terror—And What We Can Learn From Them. (Sample question: “After a terrorist attack, do you call your customers, to do a little PR?”)

More common than a new angle, however, is a new target audience. In today’s one-size-fits-me world, the generalist approach of self-help classics like How To Win Friends and Influence People and The Power of Positive Thinking is countered by titles designed for increasingly specific audiences. And while you may not be an erotically challenged Bible-thumper or a would-be hip-hop Lothario yourself, what better way to learn about the aspirations, ideals, and fears of such creatures than by reading the self-help literature that’s been tailored especially for them?

Before reading Real Questions, Real Answers About Sex: The Complete Guide to Intimacy as God Intended, for example, I was under the impression that Christians already know far more about sex than they actually want to. After all, Hollywood and various other engines of our depraved pop culture are poisoning us all with a permanent smog of hardcore obscenity—according to faith-based cultural exterminators like the American Family Association and Morality in Media.

Yet Real Questions, Real Answers suggests that there are still many Christians with only the most remedial knowledge of carnal hydraulics. And apparently they’re aching to know more. Can a penis break? Must I vacuum to earn sex? How can we live with Grandpa’s exhibitionism? These are just a few of the queries that married Christian sexperts Dr. Louis and Melissa McBurney field in their frank look at the ins and outs of consecrated crotch action. Alas, being a Christian sexpert is sort of like being a three-fingered pianist: Against a long list of forbidden fruit in love’s secret garden (porn, penis rings, cybersex, stranger lust, anal sex, bondage gear, homosexuality), the McBurneys valiantly insist that a wedding ring is the hottest sex toy of all. It’s not a very convincing argument, but they give it a good try.

Unlike God, who has reservations about vibrators, all-powerful Fox News deity Bill O’Reilly enthusiastically endorses them. This, at least, is the claim of Andrea Mackris, the former Fox News producer who says that O’Reilly frantically self-helped himself during degrading, nonconsensual phone calls he made to her last summer. With Mackris leveling her charges just weeks after the publication of O’Reilly’s latest foray into advice-mongering, The O’Reilly Factor for Kids: A Survival Guide for America’s Families, opportunistic critics have jumped all over the story: What kind of role model, they demand, is a man who commits extramarital phone rape?

The truth, however, is that The O’Reilly Factor for Kids could have used a heavy dose of the surreal imagination that O’Reilly allegedly displayed while subjecting Mackris to imaginary tales of Caribbean shower sex starring her, him, a loofah, and, in a positively Dr. Seussian touch, a falafel. Minus such whimsical lapses, The O’Reilly Factor for Kids doesn’t have much going for it.

Theoretically, this book should have been a spectacular mismatch between author and audience. But instead of bitch-slapping trembling tots into cowed submission, as he does with the guests on his TV show, O’Reilly plays it like a butch Mr. Rogers, gently instructing his charges to avoid cigarettes and to be nice to their parents. The aggressively uninspired tone is somewhat amusing, especially since O’Reilly had a co-author. (It didn’t really take two human beings to craft the sentence “Parties are the dessert of life, not the main course,” did it?) And in an effort to show he’s down with the shorties, O’Reilly occasionally interjects instant-message shorthand into his narrative. But after a few perfunctory IMHO’s and TTYL’s, you can tell his heart’s not really in it. Cyber-banter’s the communication style of a younger generation; O’Reilly no doubt prefers the phone.

With the exception of Deepak Chopra, contemporary self-help tends to be dominated by extremely white men like O’Reilly, John Gray, Tony Robbins, and Richard Carlson. Thus, it’s refreshing to see the emergence of Tariq “K-Flex” Nasheed, author of The Art of Mackin’. Originally published in 2000 by a small press in Chicago, Mackin’ has reportedly sold more than 100,000 copies over the last four years. Now, Riverhead Books, the publisher of best-selling financial guru Suze Orman and best-selling guru guru the Dalai Lama, is bringing out a new edition of Nasheed’s book.

Going a step further than the spiritually minded Lama and the money-oriented Orman, Nasheed proclaims his ability to get “the paper, the power, and the pussy.” In the pages of The Art of Mackin’, though, it’s the pursuit of the third “P” that claims most of his attention. With a combination of Machiavellian dispassion and
hip-hop posturing that often reads like unintentional satire—just a few steps away from Tim Meadows’ old Saturday Night Live character, the Ladies’ Man—Nasheed lays out his rules for using “pimp game as a form of manipulation (not deceit) in order to get what [you] want from women.”
With its emphasis on honesty, logic, and self-discipline, The Art of Mackin’ is a weirdly decent book, and yet also a depressing one. Based on Nasheed’s characterizations, macks aren’t misogynistic so much as misanthropic, fundamentally cynical about human nature, and obsessed with looking out for number one. For a book devoted to sexual attainment, there’s virtually no sense of pleasure in The Art of Mackin’, and certainly no romance. In Nasheed’s worldview, women aren’t people one actually connects with on any sort of human level, even temporarily. And they’re not even sex objects to hedonistically enjoy. Instead, they’re merely stereotypes to analyze, codes to crack.

Still, if macks seem as unsympathetic and humorless as sharks, don’t judge them too quickly. They may display an almost preternatural self-assurance, but as The Art of Mackin’ reveals, they’re just as susceptible to bouts of low self-esteem as any of us. In such instances, Nasheed advises, the key is to look on the bright side of things. “Start giving positive affirmations to yourself such as, ‘I have a nice smile. I’m a fun brother to be around. I’m smart. My game is tight. I have a nice speaking voice,’ etc.” For self-help voyeurs, it’s money shots like this that make the genre so rewarding: Even when you just go looking for entertainment, you end up learning something new!

In the realm of home improvement porn, HGTV is the softcore king. Designer dominatrices who flagrantly ignore client safe-words (“Please, no purple walls!”) have no place on this channel. Nor do professional organizers who march around like Dr. Phil with obsessive compulsive disorder, tough-sorting messy homeowners into a state of tidy bliss. In an effort to enliven a genre that is literally based on the notion that watching paint dry is entertaining, HGTV competitors like TLC and The Style Network dish up cheesy theatrics—but HGTV goes a different route. Modestly upscale, stylishly mild, it serves televisual polenta.

The male and female hosts of HGTV shows are uniformly upbeat, gracious, and well-assembled, like Stepford wives but with an even greater interest in the home arts. Shows like House Hunters and Designer’s Challenge, despite their semi-verité sequences, have less dramatic tension than a marketing brochure: Self-conscious homeowners “spontaneously” interact with realtors and designers until, after two or three time-killing missteps, they manage to find the two-bedroom townhouse or solid-oak entertainment center that truly speaks to their souls. If Martha Stewart has earned a reputation as the whitest woman in America, then HGTV would surely seem to be America’s whitest TV network.

Peer deeper into this blizzard of blandness, however, and you will discover a vision of swatchbook inclusiveness. Both the pros (hosts, designers, organizers, etc.) and the amateurs (homeowners and aspiring homeowners) come in a variety of hues. Gays and lesbians are present too, as are biracial couples, single-parent families, and even that oft-marginalized group in the home-improvement universe, renters. (TLC and The Style Network feature the same commitment to diversity, but because their shows aren’t so painstakingly vanilla in temperament, the sense of disjunction isn’t nearly as pronounced.)

Perhaps it’s bad manners even to bring up this observation; the shows themselves are quite demure on matters of ethnicity or sexual orientation. Instead, they concentrate on life’s more pressing concerns, like how to turn a dark, crowded bedroom into a soothing retreat with plenty of storage space. Beyond race, beyond sexual desire, HGTV suggests, a common yearning for vaulted ceilings and chic but functional window treatments binds us all.

On occasion, Hollywood shows similar insight. 2002, the last year for which statistics are available, was a record year for minority representation in TV and movie productions, with 24.2 percent of all roles going to African-Americans, Latinos, Asian/Pacific Islanders, or Native Americans. The current TV sitcoms My Wife and Kids, The George Lopez Show, and The Bernie Mac Show all feature minority families, and in general, race is as incidental a factor on these shows as it is on those like Everybody Loves Raymond or Malcolm in the Middle.

But despite such progress, Hollywood still has a penchant for portraying ethnic characters exclusively in terms of their ethnicity (and gay and lesbian characters in terms of their carnal preferences). And it still has fairly narrow notions about how ethnicity and sexual orientation map to potential roles. Last year’s Exhibit A was Banzai, Fox’s Japanese game-show spoof that tossed out Asian stereotypes like a peanut vendor at a baseball game. This year’s Exhibit A is the new sitcom Method and Red, yet another exercise in racial harmony in which funky black people serve as the antidote to white suburban sterility, and white suburban sterility serves as the varnish of propriety that funky black people need to pass in the land of leaf-blowers and McMansions.

In Method and Red, two rappers (aka Method Man and Redman) move to Nottingham Estates, a snooty gated community where African-Americans are apparently as rare as unicorns. By demonstrating their essential decency, however, Method and Red gradually earn some cul-de-sac cred with their Caucasian neighbors, and they don’t even have to change the way they dress or talk to do it. Like Queen Latifah in the hit movie Bringing Down the House, they prove that they can succeed in the suburbs on their own terms. But self-affirmation and empowerment aren’t the only messages at play here: Such storylines tacitly endorse the idea that the suburbs aren’t a natural place for blacks to live, and they present African-American authenticity as a narrow, fixed phenomenon. Unless you look like you’re rolling with the Wu-Tang Clan or G-Unit, they suggest, you’re not truly black.

HGTV is much less doctrinaire. As long as you’re dedicated to home improvement, you’re in. And, thus, the network ends up featuring people with a variety of income levels and personal styles. This is true of everyone on the network, regardless of their ethnicity or gender preference. Sometimes you see an affluent black attorney dreaming of a backyard putting green; sometimes you see a black family of more modest means renovating their kitchen. On HGTV, there’s no single way to be black or white or gay.

Still, in some instances, the network does seems too willing to keep its progressive perspective in a (brightly lit, neatly organized) closet. When the double sinks in the master bathroom suite are his and his or hers and hers, HGTV’s indifference to gender preference seems at least as timid as it is enlightened. On a recent episode of Curb Appeal, for example, the featured gay couple was never actually referred to as a couple, or even as partners. Instead they were simply, neutrally, the “homeowners.” And while one of the pair gave their designer a hug at the end of the episode, they were never shown hugging (or even touching) each other.

Given that gays and minorities still contend with discriminatory mortgage lending practices and other related issues, HGTV’s reluctance to address such realities is disappointing—and yet even this has an upside. By completely ignoring race and gender preference, HGTV helps normalize the idea that American families come in many varieties. If HGTV was your only source of information about the state of American culture, you’d have no idea that millions of “family-values” zealots hate gays, that biracial marriages still raise eyebrows, or that media depictions of middle-class black and Latino families are relatively rare. Indeed, it’s either a testament to HGTV’s bland artistry or, perhaps, to its modest Nielsen ratings that conservative finger-waggers aren’t fulminating against the network on a regular basis.

Despite what the producers of Method and Red might think, there’s nothing particularly novel about black people owning their own homes. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, African-American homeownership has risen six percent in the last fourteen years, to approximately forty-eight percent today. With numbers like that, you’d think that Hollywood could easily pump out rainbow-tinted visions of multi-culti domesticity that conformed both with reality and the perennial daydreams of Californian bleeding hearts. After all, as talk-radio squirt-guns like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity love to remind us, Hollywood is a giant liberal propaganda machine, right?

As it turns out, though, the network that does the most to flesh out such statistics isn’t really part of the Hollywood establishment. HGTV is owned by Scripps Networks, the cable arm of the E.W. Scripps Company. This is a newspaper conglomerate that owns approximately two dozen daily papers in cities like Abilene, Kansas; Birmingham, Alabama; and Knoxville, Tennessee. With its corporate headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio, Scripps is a heartland enterprise whose corporate bullpen of political commentators, may of whom are syndicated and distributed through the Scripps Howard News Service, features more than a few hard-throwing righties. A few recent column titles: “Ronald Reagan, Intellectual,” “Gun Control Loses Firepower,” and “Kerry’s Plan to Wreck The Economy.”

Perhaps it’s Scripps’ red-state bona fides that keep the Limbaughs and Hannitys of the world at bay; Hollywood elitists trying to engineer a more politically correct society from their Malibu mansions make much juicier targets. Or perhaps HGTV draws so little criticism for its progressive vision because scapegoats are so much easier to demonize when they’re kept abstract, or caricatured in movies, TV shows, and hip-hop videos.

On HGTV, gay couples go about the everyday mundanities of domestic life, and guess what? They seem every bit as boring and innocuous as straight people! Even the most tremulous defenders of the sanctity of heterosexual marriage must take comfort in such essential truths, because, really, how can the nation’s homosexuals undermine Western Civilization when they’ve got basement clutter to battle and new kitchen fixtures to contemplate? And, ultimately, HGTV has this humanizing effect on everyone that it invites into its placid utopia. White, black, Asian, Hispanic, gay, straight, whatever—everyone is welcome at HGTV, everyone shares similar aspirations and desires, and everyone looks completely at home.

Greg Beato has written for Spin, the Washington Post, LA Weekly, and many other publications.

“I am big,” sneered Norma Desmond, the superannuated silent-movie star in Billy Wilder’s mid-century classic, Sunset Blvd. “It’s the pictures that got small.” Today, Ms. Desmond must serve as the patron saint for any number of superstars wondering where the magic went. But now, of course, it’s not just the pictures that have gotten smaller. Audiences have shrunk too, and so has our interest in just sitting back and watching. When we’re not playing videogames, we’re starring in reality TV series. When we’re not starring in reality TV series, we’re blogging. In a world of niche markets and interactivity, it’s almost impossible to be big like Norma Desmond was big, and one day soon, our own disgruntled superstars will descend upon suburban shopping malls and cineplexes with AK-47s blazing.

But even as the potency of superstardom diminishes, the idea of it remains as tantalizing as ever, and thus I direct your attention to Superstar USA, an anti-talent show that aired on the WB in May and June. A deft amalgamation of Fox’s American Idol and MTV’s Punk’d, eager hopefuls who turned up for the show’s open auditions thought they were participating in a search for the next overnight pop star. Superstar was really on the prowl for karaoke Kevorkians, song-butchers so lethal they could kill classic hits in five notes or less.

Superstar employed three judges, all closely modeled after their American Idol forebears. Eighties novelty rapper Tone-Loc provided mechanical urban flava in the manner of American Idol’s Randy Jackson. (However, understanding that it is technically impossible to jam more “dawgs” and “a’ights” into a sentence than Jackson does, Loc simply played it cool.) Second-tier pop star Vitamin C was a revelation in the Paula Abdul role of MILFish nurturer: Who knew the woman behind generic hits like “Graduation” and “Smile” was so funny and appealing? Lastly, there was television producer Chris Briggs, an acerbic, leather-clad cad, Superstar’s Simon Cowell.

Together, this trio dispatched talented performers with hilarious poker-faced viciousness. “I didn’t sense there was the preparation with that song, which is disrespectful to Gladys Knight,” exclaimed Briggs to one singer. “And it’s a little disrespectful to the Pips.” Awful performers, on the other hand, were greeted with equally exaggerated deadpandering. “You made love to that song,” Briggs told a finalist named Tamara after her semi-narcoleptic performance. “You seduced it over dinner. You massaged it. You led it discreetly into the bedroom. You disrobed it. You laid it upon the bed gently. You found a rhythm.”

No matter how tone-deaf or rhythmically challenged, the performers ate up such praise like Ruben Stoddard attacking a box of donuts. Eventually, twelve finalists were flown to Hollywood to compete for a recording contract and a $100,000 prize. There, they received state-of-the-art celebrity processing (image enhancement, vocal triage, dance lessons, etc.) and engaged in more performances. Rosa, a pretty twenty-two-year-old from Mexico City, sang in a quavering soprano that transformed hackneyed pop lyrics into strangely beautiful Martian poetry. High-kicking, hip-grinding Nina Diva favored costumes that made her look like a hooker moonlighting as an aerobics instructor. Eighteen-year-old Frank, a manorexic clothes-horse from New Jersey, belted out “Survivor” in a nasal monotone while stalking the stage in high heels and flared slacks with fishnet cuffs.

As I write this in early June, the WB has yet to air Superstar’s final episode, wherein host Brian McFayden reveals the truth behind the show and destroys the visions of superstardom swooshing around inside the contestants’ fame-addled heads. At times, it has seemed like the show is actually a hoax on its viewers, with the contestants in on the gag. After all, could sweetly confident Mario, a cadaverous nerd with the dance moves of a depressed flamingo, really think he had a legitimate shot at international superstardom? Didn’t he have friends or family to give him a reality check?

In the end, Superstar USA was real: The contestants’ inventive vocal flourishes, performance tics, and singular fashion choices were too off-handed and variegated to have been crafted by some reality-show writer. Which, of course, means that Superstar USA was indeed a pretty mean-spirited enterprise, capitalizing on unsuspecting oddballs, and using predatory editing techniques and off-screen manipulation to exaggerate their haplessness and their hubris. One example: The contestants were apparently told which songs to sing only minutes before their performances, and thus didn’t always know the words. Jamie Foss, a beautifully upholstered blonde from Erskine, Minnesota, met this challenge with can-do aplomb, writing the lyrics on her hand. The producers loved her ingenuity and promised that the cameras would cut away from her whenever she needed to consult her notes. In reality, of course, they zoomed in on her hands repeatedly.

The idea that people whose aspirations run circles around their abilities deserve to be publicly humiliated for such folly gains currency with each passing TV season. MTV laid the groundwork for this conceit, perhaps inadvertently, with shows like FANatic (crazed fans meet their favorite stars) and Becoming (crazed fans don their favorite stars’ clothes and make music videos). True, these shows were somewhat subversive in relegating superstars to bit-player status and making fans the biggest stars of all.

Very punk concept in theory, it was often the opposite in practice. As everyday teens interacted with their heroes, the differences were thrown into bold relief. The superstars were beautiful, self-assured, worthy of worship. The fans were awkward, tongue-tied geeks, obvious and unsightly trespassers in the realm of celebrity.

On Fox’s American Idol, designated dream-killer Simon Cowell explicated the subtextual cues of FANatic and Becoming with bracing clarity. “You’re absolutely dreadful,” he tells aspirants who don’t measure up, because for him, it’s not enough to break bad news, he wants to break spirits too. For American Idol, the old order still holds. A precious talented few belong on stage; the rest belong on Barcaloungers, and they need to know their place. The artistic sanctity of near-gods like Barry Manilow and Elton John must be preserved.

At Superstar USA, the ruling forces are more attuned to the zeitgeist. They know that talent is just another commodity now. Sure, it may be relatively scarce on a per-capita basis, but in an age where services like iTunes put thousands of songs at your fingertips, it’s still available on-demand. In fact, there’s actually a talent glut: Thousands of expertly styled, technically accomplished Stepford singers are milling around out there who know exactly what’s expected of them and exactly how to deliver it. They’ve studied, they’ve polished, they’re suffocatingly professional. Indeed, how else to explain the popularity of William Hung, American Idol’s own Johnny Rotten, except as the audience’s collective gasp for fresh air? Gently wobbling to “She Bangs,” politely dismissing Simon’s fussy strictures, Hung reminded viewers of Punk Rock 101’s primary lesson: that technique can be oppressive and limiting—an uptight, middle-aged, British-accented drag.

American Idol remains resolutely married to the idea of talent. In contrast, Superstar USA just wanted to entertain. “Cookie-cutter pop star wannabes with good voices need not apply, because we’re looking for someone different,” declared host McFayden. “There is an infectiousness to these people that’s fun to watch,” said judge Briggs. And however conveniently such sentiments helped to mitigate the show’s inherent sadism, they were also true. If Mario and Nina Diva and all the rest had merely been bad singers, the show would have gotten old fast. What kept it engagi
ng was their personalities, their unique twists on stale pop-star conventions, their style, and their spirit. Sure, none of the WB’s superstars are likely to go platinum, but for a few weeks in the spring of 2004, they were the most interesting thing on TV—candid, vulnerable, full of enthusiasm and irrepressible confidence. Best of all, they were completely unpredictable.

They were also pretty disposable, but these days, who isn’t? While Superstar USA drew criticism for exploiting naïve dreamers—the Parents Television Council dubbed it the “ultimate sick joke”—it also poked fun at its own inconsequence in an era where superstars are a dime a dozen and loyal fans are the scarcest resource of all. Indeed, remember who got hired as judges. Tone-Loc was a superstar himself once, going double-platinum on his 1989 debut album. Vitamin C was a viable commodity even more recently, with a platinum album and five Top 40 singles between 1999 and 2001. Both are smart and personable, both have musical talent, and yet despite their successful track records, look where they are now. In her time, Norma Desmond would have been too big to participate in a low-budget, gimmicky reality show that hardly anyone watched, but in 2004, fame’s a bitch, and real-life former icons have to pay the bills somehow. That, perhaps, is superstardom’s cruelest joke of all.