“Donny doesn’t give a fuck,” is how Eli Roth sums up the bloody-minded motivations of his character in Quentin Tarantino’s delirious new WWII film, Inglourious Basterds. A Boston-bred Jewish kid turned soldier who is fully aware of the existence and breadth of the Holocaust as it’s occurring, and... more

“Donny doesn’t give a fuck,” is how Eli Roth sums up the bloody-minded motivations of his character in Quentin Tarantino’s delirious new WWII film, Inglourious Basterds. A Boston-bred Jewish kid turned soldier who is fully aware of the existence and breadth of the Holocaust as it’s occurring, and is motivated by inconsolable rage towards Nazis as a result, Donny is one of many carefully-sculpted, subtly modernized characters in a film that is itself a counterfactual kaleidoscope, cut loose from the moorings of history and propelled solely by the emotional impulses of its makers. Donny’s blind, seething anger – and the justice he dispenses with a baseball bat – are the secret weapons of the Basterds, an unlikely platoon of Jewish-American soldiers dropped into Nazi-occupied France by the Allies to act as a roving insurgency, capturing and mutilating Nazi stragglers in order to unnerve the German high command. At least, that’s their mission until they become tasked with something even grander a top-secret assignment to target the Nazi leadership, which is personally shepherded by a cigar-chomping Winston Churchill.

Among other things, Inglourious Basterds is ultraviolent, which makes it not utterly new terrain for Roth, who is a long-time friend of Tarantino, as well as the writer/director of the horror smash Hostel and its criminally-underrated sequel, Hostel: Part II. Time and again, Roth’s work has examined the notion of pleasure as a counterpoint to pain, putting a microscope to characters who secretly relish the opportunity to cause suffering in others, and with Basterds he deepens that examination considerably. Few would doubt the righteousness of Donny’s cause, yet this is a soldier for whom revenge has seemingly become indistinguishable from bloodlust; for whom torture and execution are a personal reward, to the point that it’s impossible to imagine him existing within the confines of a real army, or even a more traditional war film. Roth recently called up SuicideGirls to discuss the real-life implications of playing a man consumed with a desire to take Nazi hides, as well as Nation’s Pride, Inglourious Basterds faux Nazi propaganda film-within-a-film that bears his directorial stamp.


Eli Roth: So you do the interviews for SuicideGirls now?

Ryan Stewart: Some of them, yeah.

ER: I remember talking to Daniel Robert Epstein a couple of times, before he passed away.

RS: He was the man. Nobody did it better.

ER: I know. He was a good dude, you’ve got some big shoes to fill. But I’m looking forward to talking to you. I really love the site. I always thought the film interviews, in particular, on the site were really, really fantastic.

RS: Well, you’re talking to a guy who saw Hostel: Part IIfour times in the theater, so I think we’ll get along fine.

ER: I love it, thank you. You’re the one!

RS: Yep. I made my contribution to whatever the box-office was.

ER: It did well. It did better than people think it did. It did well enough for them to make a number three, let’s put it that way. It’s running on cable now, so a lot of people who missed it in the theaters are finally catching it. Also, there was a thing in Entertainment Weekly this week where they listed the twenty greatest horror films of the past twenty years and Hostel: Part IIwas on there. I thought that was nice.

RS: I remember thinking that Lauren German, in particular, deserved a lot more positive attention than she got. She really knocked that role out of the park.

ER: Lauren German is a kind of unsung hero of film. She’s done a lot of indie movies and I wanted Hostel II to blow her up. I think people who see her really do respond to her. She’s a superb, superb actor and I was lucky to work with her. She was really great.

RS: You’re probably starting to become an expert on shooting in Europe.

ER: My third movie in Europe! And my second fake trailer, fake movie. I’ve made three movies in Europe and two fake movies in Europe – Thanksgiving and Nation’s Pride. I love shooting in Europe. I really had incredible experiences on both Hostel movies, and it was a very similar type of crew, a similar method of working, with the German crews in Berlin. It was great, I loved it, and it was very strange for me to be there as an actor. I remember my first crew production meeting as the splinter unit director on Nation’s Pride, and my first instinct was to answer every question, so it was a little strange to sit there next to Quentin while he went around the room with people. But yeah, I loved shooting over there. I like getting out of my element. I like getting outside my comfort zone and going to a new country and exploring a new city and learning a new language and making new friends. I’d love to shoot in every country in the world, make a movie in every different country.

RS: Did you outline Nation’s Pride as a feature? Was it all Quentin’s conception?

ER: Well, what happened was that Quentin had the story in the script. You know, Zoller in the tower firing at the American soldiers. And he had the location picked. And he had some very specific moments, like the Bo Svenson line and the “Who wants to send a message to Germany!” I think there were three specific moments that Quentin wanted to shoot. It was all Quentin’s idea, he just said “I need battle footage,” so he thought maybe just some guys firing and Zoller firing back. And I just gave him two hundred shots in five and a half minutes. In the script Zoller picks a guy apart, so I specifically shot two squibs in the shoulder and him shooting at a guy’s knees. I also flew my brother Gabriel to Berlin and he was my second-unit director, cause I had all these sequences that I wanted to do. We shot piles of bodies getting higher and higher, guys running and falling over walls and being thrown out of buildings. I really wanted it to feel like a war epic. And I came up with this bit of Zoller carving the swastika and Quentin loved it. It was all about the swastika: the swastika and the bullets, Zoller turning and you see the swastika on his helmet, then we showed bullets covering the swastika and there’s been a passage of time and he uncovers it and the power of the swastika gives him the power to continue fighting. [laughs] It was a very interesting experiment for me, pushing myself that hard both as an actor and as a director, and also filming that kind of subject mater. Tonally, it was very different for me. I loved shooting in black and white, I loved shooting that kind of 1940s hammy acting, but I didn’t want it to be a joke. I wanted it to look like an authentic propaganda film. Quentin was ecstatic – he said “Eli, if I had done this it would have been like eight shots, and you did two hundred shots!” That was like a thank you to him, for everything he’s done for me.

RS: Was it emotionally difficult for you, getting those shots? Or all business?

ER: Yeah, it was all business. I mean, I didn’t want it to be a watered-down propaganda movie. The purpose of the film, Nation’s Pride, was for it to be shown in the context of Hitler enjoying it, so I knew the more authentic it was, the more self-aggrandizing it was, the more ridiculous it would make Hitler and Goebbels look. So, I wasn’t making it in order to make the greatest Nazi movie every made, I was making a movie that would show just how ridiculous and self-aggrandizing those buffoons were. They just look like apes when they are sitting and laughing at that stuff and enjoying it. So, sadly, it was all too accurate – a lot of people thought it was an actual propaganda film. They didn’t even realize that I had shot that footage, and I took that as a very high compliment. But no, it was actually much more difficult to film the acting scenes. The directing I love, I get more and more excited as I’m getting my shots, and when I tackle a subject matter I dive into it fully, so that by the time I’m shooting I’ve already gotten over anything that I might be uncomfortable with long before. But when I was shooting that scene where I beat Rachtman to death – beat his head in with a baseball bat – I put on forty pounds of muscle for the part. I went into that character. I said, if I’m gonna do this, if I’m gonna be on screen next to Brad Pitt, I’ve got to dive in like Peter Sellers or Robert De Niro. I had to become the role, and I had always wanted to do that, but I never had a reason to.

Writing and directing is my passion, but when Quentin put this opportunity in front of me, I knew right away that I would have to prove to everyone that there was a very specific reason why Quentin cast me and no one else in that part, and that it had nothing to do with us being friends, and that it wasn’t because we’ve made movies together. It was because he wanted a Jewish guy from Boston, he wanted a guy who could bring intensity, and he felt that I had a talent for acting that I had never mined or pushed myself to fully realize. And now this was a reason to do it. I also knew that I had to win over everyone instantly when I came out of that cave, and it wasn’t just about me putting on muscle, you had to see the look in this guy’s eyes. You had to look in his eyes and see in his face the pain and the anguish and the murderous rage. You had to know that he is going to beat every Nazi to death that he comes across. To do that, I had to dredge up the most painful experiences of my life. And I found that after shooting, even though the scene was fake, the things that I was thinking of were so real that I was just devastated. I just wanted to crawl into a hole and die. But I made myself do it repeatedly, day after day, so it was really intense. The acting was a much more intense experience than the directing. With directing, I get physically tired, but I push that aside because I know I’m getting my pieces and the film is gonna work great. But with acting, you are in your head, in your zone, in all of these moments, and then at the end of the day it doesn’t just go away. You can’t just turn it off.

RS: I would think that creating a backstory for Donny would be unnecessary for you. He seems like such a force of nature – a vessel fueled by your own emotions.

ER: You’re wrong, because you can’t do that without the backstory. You can’t just come out and say “This is who I am, and I’m mad!” You have to know that there is a backstory, and that he feels like a real guy. The fact that he feels like a real guy to you means that there is a backstory. Everybody in the film has a backstory. That was the first thing Quentin said to me, he said “This isn’t Death Proof,” which is just a character of a guy who is just showing up and joking around and trying to pick up a girl in a bar and it’s not that much of a character. There was no backstory for that guy, he was just friends with the other guy. This, Quentin said, was to be a 360 degree character, and it’s not just going to be lifting weights to prepare for the part, I’d have to know this guy like I know my best friend. I’d have to know who his parents are, his brothers, his sisters, everything about him, his entire life story. When we got to Berlin, everyone sat around and the first thing we did was to talk about who we are, where we were, and we just talked about everything – in character. There were some people who couldn’t keep up and they were fucking gone the next day. It was a military operation. If you couldn’t keep up, you were out. And there were scenes that we filmed of Donny in Boston cutting hair, and I trained to cut hair for the role. There was a scene that was cut – if Quentin shoots his prequel he’s gonna use it – and producer Pilar Savone, her father owns Umberto salons in Beverly Hills, and Umberto trained me to cut hair! So, I was willing to cut hair for the part – I was that serious about it. Everything has to feel real and full to you, even if it’s never discussed and never explained. You know who Donny is, you know how he relates to the script, you know how the other guys relate to him. And yes, he’s in it for that moment, but he has to make an impact. There’s a reason why Floyd pops in True Romance and why Christopher Walken pops in Pulp Fiction, and it’s not just because they got the funny lines. There’s a full character there with a life and a backstory. Once you see them, you remember them they’re real people. Quentin demanded that everyone create a 360 degree character. Quentin knows and you as an actor know where they’ve been before the war, during the war, after the war, and if they’re killed what they would have gone on to do. That’s what separates Quentin from everyone else, he thinks of the movie to that level of detail. And even if there are scenes in your pocket that are never seen, it’s all stuff that contributes to making it feel real.

RS: The scene where you confront Rachtman, the captured Nazi, is unnerving because he’s so righteous. He’s convinced that of the two of you, he’s the good and noble character.

ER: We discussed it in the rehearsal period, and that’s what made the scene interesting. I think Donny doesn’t give a fuck either way. He’s seen that before. This is a guy that’s already beaten so many Nazis to death, and he’s seen them terrified, and he’s seen them try to act brave, but what made Rachtman an interesting character was that Quentin shows us that the guy has dignity. He’s gonna die a brave war hero. I think Quentin does a wonderful job there of creating someone who is very real and human and does not see himself as the bad guy. But I think that, for Donny, this doesn’t phase him at all. He just doesn’t give a fuck. He’s seen everything in the book and he’s not intimidated by anybody. He’s gonna fucking pummel them. They can act as brave as they want, he doesn’t give a shit. He’s going to demolish them. His job, when he comes out of that cave, is to terrify the other guys that are alive. That’s what Donny is there for, because we need information out of them. So, this guy knows that he’s dead and he wants to die with dignity – fine. Donny’s gonna make it entertaining either way. But that’s what I thought made it great, that little encounter between the two of them right before he smashes them with a bat. That made it really, really interesting. We had a wonderful time doing that scene.

RS: Quentin has expressed admiration in the past for some films of the period, mountain films and other stuff. What’s your position on those German directors?

ER: Mixed emotions. There are some amazing, amazing films of that period, but the directors that were Nazis, I don’t watch their movies on principle. I think Riefenstahl was a good filmmaker. You watch her films and they are well-made films, but there are so many other directors whose films I’d rather watch! [laughs] Most of the directors from that world at the time fled Europe for Hollywood. They fled the Nazis. So, yeah, those filmmakers [who stayed behind in Germany] disgust me. I want to kill them. If I saw Nazi filmmakers today, I would kill them. That’s how I feel about them, to be honest. I don’t want to dignify their work, based on what they did. But then you have to draw a line – it’s like, are you going to do that with every artist and every filmmaker? But the Holocaust is such a personal thing to me. Many distant relatives of mine were murdered in it, and anyone who contributed to that, I want to see them killed.

RS: Some have compared the last act of this film to Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s obviously a much lighter entertainment, but both films evoke a sense of almost divine retribution.

ER: Well, the end of this movie is a cathartic ending, but at a certain point when you see the Nazis burning, their uniforms burn off. There’s a point in that fire sequence where it’s not enjoyable anymore and that’s a good thing. People should feel a bit uncomfortable and suddenly recognize that these are human beings that are being torched in that scene. And it’s not God coming down and doing it. It’s human beings doing it. The Nazis effectively built an oven with their own propaganda. They built their own inferno. So, I feel like it’s a much more complex and a much different film than Raiders of the Lost Ark. The purpose of Raiders is to have you cheering at the end of it, but with Inglourious Basterds it’s a kind of reserved cheer. The purpose wasn’t for us to get a bigger cheer than Raiders, I think this is a different movie trying to achieve different things. People feel good about the ending, but it’s not to the point that the theater erupts in joy. The scene goes on long enough that we say, wait a minute, these are people too. The fact that you are affected by it shows that you’re in touch with your human side.


Inglourious Basterds opens in theaters everywhere today.

Forgive me if there is already a thread like this - I searched but I didn't find one...(unless my search failed :blackeyed Basically - who do you want to see together in a multi set? I want to see Wildy and Lee

Hello there! I have been pulling pics from the threads you have been posting about eyes and girls who look like celebrities to post as previews on facebook for awhile now. It has been a wealth of great images of the girls. I thought I could start a new thread to find the sexiest clothed pics on the site. more

Hello there!

I have been pulling pics from the threads you have been posting about eyes and girls who look like celebrities to post as previews on facebook for awhile now. It has been a wealth of great images of the girls.

I thought I could start a new thread to find the sexiest clothed pics on the site.

I'll start...





Thank you in advance!

xoxo
-missy

Obsidian Entertainment’s Dungeon Siege 3 is a polished and highly addictive button-mashing action-RPG that succeeds in creating a story-oriented co-op fantasy dungeon crawler for mainstream console audiences in the tradition of Secret of Mana or Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. Though the Dungeon Siege... more

Obsidian Entertainment’s Dungeon Siege 3 is a polished and highly addictive button-mashing action-RPG that succeeds in creating a story-oriented co-op fantasy dungeon crawler for mainstream console audiences in the tradition of Secret of Mana or Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. Though the Dungeon Siege franchise was originally developed by Gas Powered Games, Obsidian is known for taking on sequel projects from other developers, most notably the sequels to BioWare’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Bethesda’s Fallout 3. SuicideGirls spoke recently to Dungeon Siege 3’s Lead Designer, Nathaniel Chapman, also a veteran of Neverwinter Nights 2 and Fallout: New Vegas, about where this sequel fits in with its predecessors, his design philosophy, and how Diablo is Diablo.

Keith Daniels: So how did Obsidian end up working on a new Dungeon Siege game?

Nathaniel Chapman: It’s an interesting, weird triangle of circumstances. Square[-Enix] for a while has been wanting to develop an RPG with a Western developer and just in general work with more Western developers in their games. At the same time, they were working with Gas Powered [Games] to do Supreme Commander. Gas Powered had the Dungeon Siege license, but they had decided to focus more on real-time strategy games and weren’t really doing much with the Dungeon Siege license. At the same time, Square was also working with us, wanting us to start working on something. So this happy coincidence came together where Square was able to buy the Dungeon Siege license from Gas Powered and we were able to develop the game with it. That’s how it all went down.

KD: I understand that Chris Taylor [Gas Powered Games founder and designer of the original Dungeon Siege] still had some input on this game. Are there some specific places where Dungeon Siege fans can spot his influence?

NC: There’s the broad direction that we took from the earlier games, the lore stuff. We really wanted to bring a lot of touchstones from the earlier game’s lore into Dungeon Siege 3. We also took the general feel of the game: it’s a loot-driven action-RPG; it’s non-stop action. One of the things we do at Obsidian is story, so there is more story and more dialogue, but still the pace is pretty hectic -- which is influenced by the previous games. The loot system is very in-depth; there’s lots and lots of gear you can get, which is also influenced by the earlier games.

In terms of specific stuff that he contributed to this game it was more kind of... feedback. When we were in initial development there were some ideas that our Creative Designer George Ziets would throw out and [Chris] would say, “Yeah, that fits well with Dungeon Siege,” or, “Here’s how you can modify that to fit better with the franchise.” He also gave us some specific game feedback on things like character control and issues like that throughout development. So it’s kind of hard to point to it and say, “This one thing is Chris Taylor’s influence on the game.” It’s more the general attitude of the gameplay and the way that the game feels.

KD: What were the essential elements of the earlier games that you wanted to preserve?

NC: I think the critical thing that people remember from the first Dungeon Siege games is tons of loot. When fans started talking to us on forums the thing they brought up most often was having a really in-depth loot system and having a ton of loot that the player can collect and optimize. That was something we definitely wanted to keep. Also, Dungeon Siege is kind of a no-drama game; it’s not really complex. None of the games were too complex to get for a new gamer or someone who doesn’t want to get into a ton of complexity. Within that, we found ways to provide the RPG customization that you find in our other games while trying to keep the barrier-to-entry low for people who aren’t used to a ton of stats and a ton of abilities in other RPGs.

KD: The original Dungeon Siege almost played itself it was so automated, but Dungeon Siege 3 is almost arcade-y, very twitchy, action-oriented. Were there some non-RPG games that inspired the gameplay in this?

NC: Oh definitely. I play a ton of fighting and action games like Devil May Cry and God of War and games like that. Our [inaudible] director was also a big fighting game player. So there are definitely influences from that. Obviously, we still wanted it to play like a Dungeon Siege game. The biggest change for the franchise is this is the first one that’s coming out on [home] consoles. So we really felt like having a game with a whole bunch of classes wasn’t going to be something that console gamers really wanted to play. It also wasn’t something we really wanted to do. We wanted to have you take much more control of a single character. So really there was an influence from those kinds of action-y games, but it was also part of bringing it forward for console players and people who want more of an intense action experience in the game.

KD: Where do you think many developers have gone wrong in trying to bring hardcore PC RPG franchises to consoles, and how did you solve that challenge?

NC: I think one mistake that a lot of developers make is that they try to take the mechanics that work on the PC and just directly map them onto a console controller. Then when you inevitably hit the fact that the console controller just doesn’t have enough buttons to support the variety of input that you have on a computer game you just start cutting. Like, “We have to simplify the number of spells, we have to simplify the mechanics, we have to cut down the amount of stuff that we let the player do.” Then I think you end up losing part of what makes the games interesting, which is the ability to choose between those different options. You want to have all those different options available because if you do there are situations where one option is best or another one is best. So you end up, I think, watering down the experience if you take that route. That was one thing that motivated our development of the stance system in Dungeon Siege 3, which is basically that you hit a button and it swaps you to a different stance and the face buttons get mapped to new abilities, because we wanted to have a lot of abilities available for the player to use at any one time without having to go through any menus to remap them or anything like that. So with one hit of a button you now have three new abilities available. It’s sort of akin to hitting Shift on the keyboard and now all your keys do something slightly different. That was one of the examples of how we tried to keep the complexity of a PC RPG while molding it onto the console controller instead of just cutting stuff from the PC RPGs to make it work on the consoles.

KD: I really enjoyed the stance mechanic. I felt like the core skill to learn in the game was juggling those stances, and in the higher difficulties you just had to do it faster.

NC: [Laughs] Yeah. That’s definitely the main thing for players to learn.

KD: I liked your blog post discussing your philosophy on adding difficulty to games. How did you go about it with this game?

NC: Increasing damage and increasing monster health has value but only in as much as it requires... Maybe the best way to think of it is that usually when you lose in a game it’s because you failed to do something, or when it feels good to lose, so to speak -- obviously it never feels great to lose -- but when you feel like you can improve and get better at it you see clearly that you failed at something. How you can make a game harder in a way that’s fun is by increasing the number of fail points, meaning that there are new challenges you have to master to beat a harder difficulty level, or you increase the severity of earlier fail points. A good example in Dungeon Siege 3 is that if you’re playing on Casual you don’t have to block and dodge as much -- you still have to do it some but it’s not as much of a requirement. By increasing the difficulty, instead of it being a linear scale and increasing the number of times you have to hit a guy, it actually increases the importance of the mechanics in the game relative to just hitting the A button and attacking over and over again.

If our game was more tactical, I actually think increasing monster health and damage [would be] less interesting. It doesn’t force you to use a mechanic more or less in a lot of cases, it just makes fights last longer, which does consume more resources but is not an interesting kind of difficulty. I think for an action-type game it actually is a huge difference when monsters do more damage because that’s the core action challenge: avoiding getting hit. That’s what we wanted to do. That’s the goal of the Hardcore difficulty. Hardcore plays a lot like Standard except that you need to execute your dodges and your blocks very well, and you need to know how to optimize your stances so you can get guys down [and] do as much damage as possible in as little time as possible. Obviously there were things that we would love to do in a future game. I would love to add new abilities to monsters and do things that introduce new fail points for players on harder difficulty levels, but a lot of that is constrained by time. The challenge that you get is that only a small number of players play on the hardest difficulties. When you’re developing a game you have to choose where to spend your resources. You don’t want to introduce a crazy new awesome ability, but only on Hardcore, so 80% of people aren’t going to see it when they play through the game. That can be fun but it’s something that you have to be really careful about when you’re developing a game because it’s often a bad idea to spend resources on something that only a small number of players are going to see.

KD: In the old Dungeon Siege games, you would pause and give everyone orders, but in this one the AI does its own thing. Did leaving the control of the companion characters up to the AI pose any design challenges? For example, did some encounters have to be planned around the limitations of AI?

NC: One of the things that we decided pretty early on, because we were going with a more action focus, is that we felt it would just be too stressful for the player to manage their companions directly, to directly order around their companions. We were originally going to go half-and-half; we were going to give you a vague control system where you could order a stance, put on Offensive stance, take off Defensive stance, whatever. We actually found that generally that wasn’t helpful, that it made more frustrating than not. We’ve found that from other games we’ve worked on, too, where you feel like you almost have control of companions but you don’t really. What we thought would work better would be to have our companions work as satellites to the player. They help your damage a little, but when having a companion in Dungeon Siege 3 feels really good is when you get knocked out and they come help you up. That’s the kind of thing we focused on: having them try to be aware of what’s going on in the combat and try to help you out when they can. So they’re almost like an extra bonus to the combat, not something extra that you have to manage to win fights.

KD: The example I was thinking of in particular was my favorite boss fight: the [spoiler] in Stonebridge -- [a fight involving waves of mobs along with environmental targets that have to be destroyed and environmental hazards that have to be avoided simultaneously]. That was the only fight where I really noticed the AI struggling, and I was wondering if there weren’t more fights like that because of some limitation.

NC: It was a challenge. Have you finished the game yet?

KD: Oh yeah.

NC: The [spoiler] fight. The [spoiler] will do an attack which, unless you’re standing behind a barrier, will nuke everyone in the area. We actually got the AI to run behind those [barriers] and avoid them. The trick really became how much specific AI scripting we did on a specific fight. We didn’t want to make it feel like the AI was cheating. It’s a tricky line. If the AI dodges the enemy’s attacks perfectly every single time, but you were not dodging them, it feels unfair. Like..

KD: “He’s better than me!”

NC: [Laughs] We didn’t want to make the player feel bad that he couldn’t perform to the level of the AI. It is a tricky balancing act, and it’s not perfect all the time. But we didn’t feel like we had to really pull back on our boss mechanics because of that.

KD: What attracted you to the story of the 10th Legion and the Kingdom of Ehb?

NC: We really wanted to have the player feel like they were part of something bigger because for a lot of players this is their first introduction to the Dungeon Siege franchise. We didn’t want to have to introduce new players to this world where there’s a bunch of stuff that’s already happened and they don’t necessarily have a direct investment in it. That’s another reason why we had characters with their own backstories. We wanted the character to have a personal investment in this organization that will restore the Kingdom of Ehb. It’s a theme that a lot of people can identify with. ‘Where you live sucks, you want to make it better; it used to be better, so you’re going to try to get people working together again and rebuild what used to be great.’ That kind of theme was very interesting to us, and it worked very well with the fact that this was an established world but not a lot of players would necessarily know a lot about it. We didn’t want to have you dealing with the intricacies of the lore from the first two games or anything like that. [The previous games’ lore] was more like the icing on the cake of the core story of you bringing back the 10th Legion.

KD: Do you see this game as a reboot of the franchise?

NC: Yeah. Certainly in terms of core gameplay I think it is a reboot. It’s much more action and a little less automated and tactical. It’s a lot like Fallout 3, in a lot of ways, where it is a reboot but it doesn’t feel like a reboot. Bethesda stayed really close to the feel of the first two games even though the gameplay is totally different. It still feels like a Fallout game. The core gameplay [in Dungeon Siege 3] is very different. You’re directly controlling a single character, you have combos and all that stuff, but it still feels like a loot-driven action-RPG set in the same world.

KD: I really enjoyed the way the motivations for Odo, Jeyne Kassynder, and the Queen were all complex and understandable in some way. Is it more interesting to you if a villain is relatable?

NC: Absolutely. Something that I joke with Josh Sawyer [Project Director on Fallout: New Vegas] about is the mustache twirling, scheming villain who is doing everything that they’re doing just because they’re evil. You don’t encounter someone walking down the street and go, “That guy’s evil!” People generally feel like they’re doing the right thing even when they do something that everyone else thinks is terrible. Because our games place a lot of emphasis on choice and consequence, we intentionally try to make the villain a bit more relatable because we often like to let the player choose, “Do you think that what the villain did was acceptable?” We set up the story to put the villain in the place of someone that you have to fight, someone that is constantly working against you and whom you’re working against, but at the end of the game we question the assumption that the player makes throughout the game. Were you doing the right thing? Was this person that you’re fighting against really hunting you for no reason? Is there something more deep behind it? I think it makes the characters feel a lot more real and the player’s choices a lot more meaningful.

KD: I also liked that you could choose to spare the lives of many of the major enemies and their stories continued later in the game. Where did that idea come from?

NC: It’s something that we’ve tried to do in the past in a lot of cases. It is very tricky. We did it recently with Alpha Protocol. It’s something that for Obsidian and the previous company that a lot of people came here from, Black Isle Studios, is kind of a hallmark of those [classic PC RPG] games. It’s another part of making the enemies more relatable, because when we present players with a character with these complex motivations, we don’t want to force the player to kill them. It’s not satisfying. We generally like to let the player define their role in the story because it gives them more investment in the story and the world. It’s also fun to play around with the idea: what happens when you choose to let someone go? In certain cases it can be bad, in certain cases it can be good. Part of what makes RPGs really interesting is when you have complex choices, and when you make one of those choices it’s fun to see what the consequences are from them -- especially if they’re not something that you necessarily expect.

KD: One thing that concerned me... The first time I play through a game I usually play the good guy, the ‘paragon’. The second time through I usually play like an asshole. [Laughs] In this game when I was playing like an asshole there were times when I felt like I was missing out on certain things. For example, not destroying the [spoiler] in [spoiler]. Are those missed opportunities paid off later if you play that way?

NC: There are some. One example is if you choose to spare [spoiler] or kill [spoiler]. If you choose to kill [spoiler] you get her spear as a weapon that you can equip, and it’s a really cool, very powerful spear. Whereas, if you don’t kill her you don’t get it, but you get to talk to her and she takes a role in the story later -- which I’m sure if you spared her on your first play-through you saw. In a lot of games you play the good guy and get a great reward, and if you play the bad guy you don’t get anything; it’s very easy to be good. I think it’s a lot more interesting where if you’re good it’s actually harder. Being a jerk is the easy way to get what you want, and being good is a lot harder. So if you choose to spare someone, sure you might get more story, but you might not get as much loot; there might be some other consequence.

KD: The environments in this game are gorgeous. Is there one that you’re particularly proud of?

NC: The art team did an awesome job overall. The thing that I’m most impressed with is that they were able to hit so many different architectural and stylistic points really strongly throughout the game. You get the really creepy forest vibe in Rukkenvahl, then the Mournweald is this mystic, messed up forest, then Stonebridge is a huge transition to this steampunk, Renaissance German city. Then Glitterdelve which is the snowy area. I feel like they did a really great job of defining what the style was of each area, visually, and then sticking to it and executing it well. It’s hard to pick a specific area because I’ve been so close to it for so long, but to me what’s really impressive is how they were able to make them all so different but all look very close to the vision of what they wanted them to be.

KD: You mentioned Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas earlier. When New Vegas came out it got a little heat for some technical issues. What did you learn from that, and how did that affect your process going into this game?

NC: Dungeon Siege 3 isn’t as huge as Fallout: New Vegas. We feel, and we hope, that when people get it that it doesn’t have a lot of those technical issues and it’s very polished. We’ve learned that we can pull back on the riskiest elements. As we’ve become more experience we’ve learned, “These elements of development are more risky, these ones aren’t.” Even to focus on something that may be very creatively risky, something like choosing whether you kill guys or not and then having the consequences of that, we actually are pretty good at that and it’s something that we’ve learned to do fairly well. So we pulled back on things that we’re not as good at. It takes a lot of self-knowledge [to say,] “Yeah, we’re not going to do that for this game. Instead, we’re going to focus on the things we do well, doing those really well and making sure it’s a polished technical experience.” That’s part of it.

The other part of it is developing our own technology. This is our first game that uses our own engine, Onyx, which is completely internally developed. It’s not necessarily that any of the other engines we’ve used are bad, they’re all good engines, but having the people who developed the engine in-house has been a huge help. So when we have technical problems it’s just as easy as going down the hall and getting the programmer who wrote every line of code that we’re dealing with, bringing them in and having them look at it. So it’s much easier to diagnose those kinds of problems.

KD: Playing through it about one and a half times so far on the PC version I didn’t encounter a single bug or crash.

NC: That’s great, I’m glad to hear it.

KD: But what you were saying reminded me of a quote I heard recently: “creativity is subtraction”.

NC: The designer of Shadow of the Colossus [Fumito Ueda] has a great philosophy. He said something like he knows a game is done not when there’s nothing left to add but when there’s nothing left to take away. I think that’s a really great way to look at developing games. Especially those games like ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, and whatever they’re going to release soon -- which I’m excited for but no need to give it too many props. Those games are very focused. They’re very beautiful in the way they execute on a very core set of ideas and they don’t spend a lot of time dealing with the fluff. Every game has to have X, Y, Z, and their approach is, “What if we take away X and Y, and Z is some weird version you’ve never done before? Yeah, we’re going to have boss battles, but only boss battles, and they’ll be the craziest boss battles you’ve ever seen.”

I think RPGs are very different. Part of being an RPG is defining how you want to play the game. So by definition RPGs have a lot of different ways you can play the game, different mechanics, but I think focusing in on what exactly you’re trying to say with a game and what experience you want the player to have and then pushing ancillary things aside can really make a game communicate a lot more clearly and make it a lot more focused.

KD: The only thing I found myself wishing for in this game was some sort of Zelda-style lock-on. I’m assuming you guys thought of that, too, so I was wondering what the thought process was for not using that, or why it wasn’t needed.

NC: I’ll be honest. I think our melee feels really, really good. Our ranged combat... if there was a point of the controls that I was less happy with it would be the ranged combat. Actually, I think that where our game’s control scheme works better than something like Zelda’s lock-on system is when you’re dealing with a large number of enemies around you and you need to quickly swap between targets -- which is very helpful in our game, especially on harder difficulties where a lot of what you’re trying to do is interrupt enemies before they attack you. You’re trying to bounce around between all of the different targets around you. So [in] something like a Ninja Gaiden style we do have a kind of soft-lock where if you hit a button it will try to pick the correct guy to aim at. It doesn’t just blind fire. Where that’s a lot trickier though is in ranged combat. I think that’s where a lock-on system might be better. Characters like Katarina still feel really satisfying because her pistol/shotgun stance feels kind of like melee in a way. I think that works really well. I still think ranged combat is really fun in DS3, especially with Katarina because you can kite guys. That character is super fun. But if I were to do everything over again, given infinite resources and infinite time to polish, I would probably have some sort of ranged lock-on system.

I was talking with another designer and one of the things that occurred to me was that when you do two things in a game, the benefit isn’t additive, it’s multiplicative. Like if you do two things at 50% you don’t get a full game at 100% that people love. You get a quarter of a game that’s infuriating to people. So if you have half of a good combat system and half of a good dialogue system it’s not like, “Oh, you guys made a great game! It all adds up to one full game!” You have to make sure that each aspect is completely solid on its own. So part of the question is, “If we’d focused on doing lock-on for ranged, what would the cost have been in our melee combat, and would that have hurt the game rather than helped it?” That’s one of the things where having a sequel is nice because you can build on top of the stuff that you’ve already done. So, like Fallout 3, they had Oblivian, and so they had all the stuff that they’d done in Oblivian and they could make ranged combat and guns feel really good in Fallout.

KD: What do you anticipate will be the major areas of praise and criticism for this game?

NC: I’m pretty close to it, so I guess I’ll say more what I hope. I hope people really like the combat because I think it’s a big departure from the previous game’s combat and is, I think, pretty different from most RPG combat systems because it has that heavy action influence. I hope that people enjoy that and get into having more of a straight up action experience mixed with the RPG stats and item gathering. As a developer you can pretend to be confident about anything but you don’t really know until it hits a lot of player’s hands. Obviously we do play-testing, but especially as the gameplay guy my biggest concern is always, “Do people enjoy and get the core mechanics?” I do think that people who play it, especially in multiplayer, like Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance or the old Secret of Mana games -- I played Secret of Mana beginning to end with my best friend when I was growing up -- people who play the game like that, co-op, I think are going to have an awesome time.

But we intentionally did not set out to make Diablo from the very beginning. I think people who only want to play Diablo are probably not going to be satisfied with the multiplayer in the game. That’s OK, because Diablo is Diablo and I’m sure it will be great at being Diablo, but we wanted to do something different. We wanted to make that experience of going through the game from beginning to end with your buddy, even if your buddy is online. It’s hard to know exactly what people’s reaction will be. My hope is that people want what it is the game does well.

KD: What do you have planned for the future of the Dungeon Siege franchise?

NC: Wow. Well, we don’t have any super-specific plans. Obviously, Square still owns the franchise. We would love to continue to work on it but it’s kind of up to what Square wants to do. It’s been great working with them, so I think that hopefully we’ll make a Dungeon Siege 4, but it all depends on what we can do and what Square wants to do.

But, from a gameplay perspective, we have those choices in the game where you see the consequences of them later on. I would love to see more of that layer throughout the game even more. We probably could do a more fleshed-out multiplayer system in a future game. When you’re developing a game, people will always bring up ideas and you know there’s no way you’re going to get to them in time, so the joke is always, “Oh, that’s Dungeon Siege 4,” or “That’s Alpha Protocol 2.” So every time you finish a game you always have this long list of things that you thought of that would be really awesome but you just had no way to get to during development. Part of it is also looking at people’s different reactions to the game. So if we find that people love the combat system [you say,] “Awesome! Let’s give them more.”

Your last glimpse of Michelle Rodriguez was probably in the third act of Avatar, when, as heroic marine pilot Trudy Chacon, she turned on her colonial military bosses and went down with her ship, fighting for the rights of the native Na’vi cat people. It was a typically badass finish for an actress... more

Your last glimpse of Michelle Rodriguez was probably in the third act of Avatar, when, as heroic marine pilot Trudy Chacon, she turned on her colonial military bosses and went down with her ship, fighting for the rights of the native Na’vi cat people. It was a typically badass finish for an actress who has garnered a reputation for both kicking much on-screen ass and almost always biting it in the end. (See her roles in Resident Evil, Fast & Furious, and BloodRayne for other examples of this now familiar formula). Whether or not the formula will be repeated in her latest film, the hard-R Mexploitation film Machete, remains to be seen. Co-directed by filmmaking tornado Robert Rodriguez and his long-time editor Ethan Maniquis, Machete is the long-delayed feature about a Mexican assassin posing as a day laborer (Danny Trejo) that was promised in one of the four “fake trailers” in 2007’s cult hit Grindhouse. Ms. Rodriguez recently called up SuicideGirls to talk about strapping on the big guns once again and the off-screen passions that drive her.




Ryan Stewart: I hope there’s a moment in this film where you get to pull up that eye patch and gross us out.

Michelle Rodriguez: [laughs] Ah, you didn’t see it yet, did you? Well, no, I’m sorry to have to disappoint you!

RS: From what I’ve seen, the whole outfit is a little sexier than you usually go for. Was that your idea?

MR: Yeah, me and Nina, in the costume department, basically hooked up and came up with the concept of a bra ...[laughs]…she took my La Perla bra, which does the boobies some justice, and put some leather over it, and then I grabbed some Genetic jeans that fit me like a glove, and I grabbed these Prada boots that I have that are like superhero boots that they don’t make anymore – I’ve tried to get them to, but they won’t – and then we went over to the props department and started gearing it up. We were hooking up straps, and the next thing you know… I’m a cowgirl, man. All I need is my steed. You know when you’re working with Robert that you’re not gonna be in one of his movies and not be hot. It’s just not gonna happen. He wouldn’t hire you, I don’t think. Unless your whole purpose was to be a mutant! Then you might still get a gig with him.

RS: Been there, done that, in Resident Evil, right?

MR: Yeah, that was a minute ago!

RS: What kind of weapons do you heft in this one? Are we talking major firepower?

MR: Dude...there’s this makeshift weapon that they created, I think it’s like an M4. It’s an AR-M4. That sucker is huge, and it was a makeshift thing by the props and weapons department. Those guys are so cool! And it’s uber-heavy. I’ve got, like, marks on my shoulder from just holding it for like a half-hour to take photos.

RS: Did they train you on that?

MR: No, but I decided to go shooting on my own, like a dumbass, and I thought I was all cocky shooting this shotgun, and you know what? I’ve had this cracking noise in my shoulder ever since. That was a bad idea.

RS: Ouch. But you grew up in Texas, right? They probably send you guns in the mail.

MR: Oh yeah, honey. I’ve got that whole thing down pat. All the gun and NRA stuff is within me, for sure. I am definitely a believer in the right to carry.

RS: Do you pack?

MR: No, I don’t, but I do believe in it. I have at home. And I’m not allowed to carry -- you have to be either a cop or a marshal or something, to have the right to carry a weapon around. But I ain’t worried, honey. Nobody wants to hurt me. I haven’t done anything to anybody. I’m chill.

RS: I interviewed Ethan Hawke once and we talked about how actors are good marksmen because they spend so much time shooting guns. Does that apply to you?

MR: Again I have to disappoint you! [laughs] It’s not true for me, I’m a horrible shot.

RS: So, how much of this film did Robert actually direct? Was it like a 50/50 split with Ethan Maniquis?

MR: Well, the thing is that I wasn’t there long enough to make that determination. I know that he directed me in most of my scenes, but Ethan had a lot to do with the job as well. He was there and he was planning everything along with Robert – it was really a collaboration between the two of them.

RS: It must have been wild to go from the biggest production of all time to this little do-it-yourself Troublemaker Studios movie.

MR: But that’s the whole thing – working with Robert is never a little thing, and you always consider it a blessing. He is so much fun, first of all. He may not make the hugest movies on the planet, but boy, does he make some interesting stuff, and it’s like, you will watch it. There are scenes in his movies that you will never forget as long as you live. I mean, Desperado? Come on. From Dusk Till Dawn? Dude, come on. I could go on forever. Sin City? That was the first time I had ever seen that texture, that kind of art, on screen before. That kind of comic book-esque thing was so awesome, so classic, that it was almost surreal. Robert always makes things look really amazing and unforgettable, really. If you want to be immortalized, you should go work with him. It’s a guarantee that there will be scenes in his movies that people never forget, and along with the scenes are the actors in them. So, it’s a privilege. I can almost promise you that there are at least three scenes in this film that you will never forget as long as you walk this planet, if only because of the shock factor and the way things are shot. You’ll be amazed by how all of these very familiar elements are used, the context that they are used in. It’s pop culture-esque, but it’s done in an exploitative fashion, so you’re like ‘Is this pop culture, is this pulp culture, what is this culture?’ [laughs] You know what I mean? You can’t really tag it, but it’s definitely shock value-enhanced.

RS: Once Robert hires you, does he pretty much leave you alone, or is he giving you notes, saying ‘Let’s try it this way, or that way…’

MR: It’s definitely collaborative, I’d say it’s about 65 to….whatever is left. [laugh] I suck at math. What is left, like 45?

RS: Something like that.

MR: Right, anyway, what I mean is that he is collaborative and one thing that’s for certain is that when you walk onto his set you know that this man knows what he wants and is very sure of what he wants before you even come on board. That’s what I find amazing, and then he gives you that extra 45 percent at the end to kind of be open to other options, which is great. But at the end of the day a director without a vision isn’t a director, to me, so I just love the fact that he knows what he wants, because it makes everything work so fast and smooth. You’re in and you’re out, and the next thing you know you’re sitting in the movie theater and going ‘Whoa!’

RS: You don’t do a ton of movies, in general. Battle: Los Angeles is the only upcoming credit on your IMDB page. Are you just very choosy?

MR: Yeah, honey, I’m really picky. I didn’t really get into the business to be an actress, I got into the business to be a writer, and because of that I feel like when I act it should be something that’s pleasing to me. It shouldn’t be a labor. Some people become actors because they love the chameleon aspect to it, they love interchanging and taking on different lives, and I can understand that appeal, but personally, for me, I would prefer to play characters that I would respect and that I would admire, as opposed to playing any character just because it’s, like, an interpretation of life. Should I be open to that? No, because I’m not! [laugh] I honestly just want to kick ass and take names.

RS: So if someone was about to send you Sleepless in Seattle: Part 2, don’t bother?

MR: Not unless it is incredibly funny! I do like comedy, I’ll flip my script for a comedy, as long as it’s really, really funny. I just wanna play, you know? I like to play, I like things to be light-hearted. Don’t send me a script that compromises me in any way, because I won’t have fun doing it. Why do you need to compromise me as a woman, or as an integrity-carrying individual? I just can’t drop that for anybody, especially to millions of people around the world – what am I saying to them? What is the point? What message is behind it? ‘I understand your pain?’ Great. Big whoopty-doo, you know? I don’t want to understand anybody’s pain. I just want to share joy and revel in victory.

RS: Did Machete become a less lighthearted thing for you when it got tied into the whole immigration debate?

MR: Well, it is called Troublemaker Studios, so you know for sure that there’s going to be some trouble.

RS: What did you think of Robert putting that Special Message to Arizona trailer out on Cinco de Mayo?

MR: I thought it was funny, and I thought it was neutral. At the end of the day, it’s just a voice. And it’s not just one side talking to the other side, both sides are represented in the film, so I think it’s fine. At the end of the day, it’s like, are you going to beat up the guys who make South Park? Are you going to beat up the creators of The Simpsons? Are you going to beat up the guys from SNLor Family Guy? They all make fun of current events and news and sometimes they’re incredibly controversial in their content, but nobody ever really attacks them hard core, and why? Because you can get away with that stuff when it comes to comedy -- that’s the venue to do it in. The minute you start to take things seriously people will come after you with hatchets. They’ll try to destroy your career and stuff, but this isn’t that kind of situation. It’s just lighthearted and fun.

RS: Can you write your own funny stuff? Is that your passion?

MR: No, no. For that I have to partner with people, for sure. But I’m all about networking and finding the people who are all about tomorrow, the youth, mostly. I’m slowly starting to learn about what’s going on out there within the community. I want to make connections with the young people and try to understand what’s going on. The social networking systems like Twitter help me out a lot, and my website helps me out a lot, and slowly but surely I’m going to start doing webcams. I really want to just feel what people want, and then from there I’ll assess what I can provide. But I really am all about the youth, I want to see what’s on their minds, and then I want to take the ideas that I’ve had since I was fifteen years old and start collaborating.

RS: I heard you’re off to Antarctica soon. That’s crazy.

MR: I know! Isn’t it insane? But you know what? I’ve had this script idea in my mind since I was a little girl, since I was about fifteen, and it’s about these little kids who undergo this crazy adventure. It’s kind of like The Goonies meets Jumanji. It’s this amazing story about these little kids who are kind of eco-warriors. The Avatar green event used the term eco-warriors, so I’ve taken that name, and I really need to learn about that world. So far, all I’ve done is appreciate activism from the outside, I haven’t really gone in on a nitty-gritty level and found out what the troubles are and what the real issues are in the world with animals, and with the planet. It all kind of started with Battle in Seattle, when I got to meet a bunch of activists and learn from them first hand: guys from Green Peace, Global Green guys, all of these sort of different experts, and I slowly started to grow fond of them. My heart goes out to them now, but I also realize that there is something blocking them from success, so what is it? Is it conscious capitalism? Do they need to adapt to the environment that we live in today? What is the issue? So, I’m going to go out there, to Antarctica, on the ship, and help save some whales, and learn from a man who helped start Green Peace, Paul Watson, because I admire him. I think if there’s anyone who can be a teacher it’s this guy who’s been around since the freakin’ 60s. He’s been hooting, hollering, and fighting about this same subject for the last forty fucking years. I’m so excited about it. I don’t even care about the cold weather or anything.

RS: Jim Cameron has totally rubbed off on you.

MR: Oh yeah. Jim walks around with his heart out. He’s just that kind of guy. He could inspire anybody.

RS: We never technically saw you die in Avatar, by the way. I have a hunch your character did a last-second bailout.

MR: Dude, could you please tell him that? I would love to come back aboard.





Machete opens in theaters everywhere on September 3rd.

Trina Robbins is a legend among people who read and study comics. She’s a cartoonist who was active in the San Francisco underground in the '70s and '80s where she contributed to many publications including the East Village Other, It Ain’t Me Babe and Wimmen’s Comix. In recent decades... more

Trina Robbins is a legend among people who read and study comics. She’s a cartoonist who was active in the San Francisco underground in the '70s and '80s where she contributed to many publications including the East Village Other, It Ain’t Me Babe and Wimmen’s Comix. In recent decades she’s worked more as a writer on books including Go, Girl! and Chicagoland Detective Agency, in addition to working on Wonder Woman, Xena and The Spirit.

Robbins’ other claim to fame is that she is one of the great comics historians. In books like A Century of Women Cartoonists and From Girls to Grrrlz she writes not just thoughtfully and passionately about many cartoonists whose work has faded from consciousness, but she also reshapes our perception of comics past. In the book The Brinkley Girls, which she edited, the work of the artist Nell Brinkley was brought together, showing her incredible drafting skill and demonstrating why she was one of the most popular and important illustrators and cartoonists of her time.

This spring Robbins' multi-pronged careers move forward in earnest. Her latest graphic novel for kids, Chicagoland Detective Agency, is being released and she's contributed a short story to the anthology Chicks in Capes. In addition, Robbins is launching a comicbook starring the classic detective Honey West. However, her major historical and long-time passion project is Miss Fury, a collection of the comic strips written and drawn by Tarpe Mills from 1944 to 1949. A Hitchockian thriller set at the end and in the aftermath of World War II, the series follows the saga of a socialite who at times dons a panther suit to creep through the night to foil Nazis, smugglers, and gangsters. Marla Drake is the grandmother that Buffy Summers and Sidney Bristow didn’t know they had, and now she’s being reprinted for a public which is much more interested in, and open to, heroines who find themselves neck deep in intrigue, action and soap opera.

ALEX DUEBEN: Your new project is editing the Miss Fury collection of comics by Tarpe Mills, which I hadn’t heard of until it was announced. Could you talk a little about it just because it’s a comic that people don’t know.

TRINA ROBBINS: That’s the thing, she’s so obscure now. These are comics that no one has really seen for sixty years. We have five years worth of Miss Fury. Miss Fury started in 1941 but the ones that we’re running are from 1944-1949. She was so good. The story was just totally captivating. It’s very film noir. It just reads so well and she was an incredibly good artist.

There was a group of artists and they were all the school of [Milton] Caniff. I don’t mean that they studied under Caniff, but Caniff and Terry and the Pirates was their jumping off point. Romantic adventures. They didn’t draw the same, but there was a style that they all had. She was of that school. She was the only woman of that school. Everybody else was guys and all the others did great adventures, very rip-roaring, and all of them were inspired by movies, but they all had male heroes. She was the only one who had a female hero.

And the most interesting thing about Tarpe Mills is that the heroine looks like her. She basically put herself into this strip. She not only put herself into the strip but she put her cat into the strip. Tarpe Mills had a cat named Peri-Purr who actually was quite famous. During the war she actually donated her cat to the war effort as a mascot on a warship. We assume that she got the cat back and this was all done for publicity purposes, but she gave her heroine in the strip, Marla Drake, the same cat, a white persian cat named Peri-Purr. It’s her having adventures on the page. And of course was so cool is that you can do this. If you’re an artist and a writer you can create your own world, all you have to do is draw it on paper. And that’s what she did.

AD: The strip ran for a decade, but how hard is it to research and put something like this together?

TR: Well I was very lucky because I found the right people. The first person I owe a lot to is an unnamed male fan. I cannot remember what his name was because this was back in 1975 or maybe earlier. I don’t know. At a New York convention, he said to me, have you ever heard of Miss Fury? I said no and he said, you would love it. Shortly after that I found my first few copies of Miss Fury reprints. What they used to do in those days the comic books they would take the strip and recut and paste them and put them in comic book form and that’s what they did to Miss Fury at Timely Comics. That was how I first saw Miss Fury and I was totally hooked.

The next person I owe a lot to is Bill Blackbeard. He used to have the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art. The San Francisco Academy was basically his two story house that was crammed from bottom to top with mostly newspaper strips and you could do research there. If he liked you, he would really help you with your research. If he didn’t like you, you probably couldn’t even get an appointment because he would never answer the phone. I was very lucky that Bill liked me. He liked me and he liked what I was doing and he wound up giving me a huge amount of Miss Fury strips which were doubles. He had a lot of doubles. I was able to really read it and not just the cut and paste versions, but really read it, and it was just incredible.

AD: What did Tarpe Mills do after the comic finished?

TR: She did some commercial art until she retired.

AD: She wasn’t that old when the strip ended?

TR: No she wasn’t that old. I think she was born in 1912 so she wasn’t even forty when the strip ended. And she wasn’t very old when she died either.

AD: Do we know what led her to retire from comics?

TR: She had great difficulty meeting her deadlines. And she had emphysema. She died of emphysema. She smoked and never stopped smoking. It occasionally put her in the hospital. She was just not well. She stopped drawing [the strip] for the last year. She would be in the hospital and couldn’t meet her deadlines and they’d ghost it. The last year the strip is completely done by somebody else and you can tell. It’s awful. The writing is terrible. Everything about it is awful. And of course it lost papers. And they finally retired it.

AD: So is this volume a selection of strips or is it the complete run of that period?

TR: The book starts in ‘44 and ends in ‘49. It’s five years worth. The reason we didn’t do the first few years is because it has been reprinted in those Timely Comics comicbooks. Somebody got ahold of them in 1979 and put out a Miss Fury reprint book reprinting the Timely Comics proofs, not the newspaper strips. The newspaper strips were recut and pasted. And since then that particular issue has been reprinted from those same proofs at least three times. Very small press and none that easy to find, but findable on amazon or ebay. That stuff has been seen and I wanted to start it later with the stuff that no one has seen for sixty years.

AD: If you’re only get to publish one book, include the best stuff.

TR: The fact is that she got better. I mean, her early stuff is great, but she simply became a better artist. All that work just makes you better and by ’44, she was at her peak.

AD: Shifting gears, you recently wrote a few issues of Honey West for Moonstone Comics.

TR: I did. Only two have been published, but I wrote two more that are being illustrated. It’s another two parter and the first book is inked and book two is still being pencilled and that’s being done by a really really nice guy in Argentina. Then I’m about to start a third Honey West but I haven’t started that yet because I’m working on another project.

AD: She’s one of those characters that’s fallen through the cracks a little.

TR: Not as much, because she’s more recent. A lot of people remember watching Honey West on TV. An awful lot of women of a certain age who were young then absolutely adored her, because there were all these guys on TV, but she was a woman private eye. Plus Anne Francis was great. I love her.

AD: I think you commented that the characters’ appeal was that it was a pulpy Mickey Spillane kind of story without the obnoxious misogyny.

TR: That’s right. And it was never as violent as Mickey Spillane. He was very violent, though by today’s standards it might seem tame. That was really her creator. G.G. Fickling was a pseudonym of Gloria and Forest Fickling, a married couple who wrote the Honey West books starting in 1959. They intended her as an answer to the popularity of Mickey Spillane at the time. They said, let’s do a female Mickey Spillane.

AD: So what can we look forward to in the new issues?

TR: Well I’m keeping it in the period because it would just be totally wrong to bring it up to date to now. It’s 1965 and 1966 forever in my world of Honey West. (laughs) In this next one she goes undercover at a Renaissance Fair. It’s not really a renaissance fair, so I’m calling it a medieval fair. The title is Murder Forsooth. And the one after that which I haven’t even started writing yet takes place in 1965 and it’s a team-up. Do you know much about old tv of the sixties? There was another short-lived black and white TV series that was really quite good called T.H.E. Cat.

AD: I’ve never heard of it.

TR: It’s very obscure, but I’ve seen the videos and they’re great. It’s very evocative and moody and noir. He owns a club called Del Gato in San Francisco and he’s not really a private eye but he just gets involved in all these adventures and solves crimes. They said, how would you feel about teaming up Honey West with T.H.E. Cat and I thought, that’s really cool.

It just so happened that around that time, my partner and I did a three day Vegas trip to get away from it all. We do Vegas every six years, and it’s fun every six years. Then I was thinking of old Vegas, this tiny strip in the desert. When we got home, the first thing I did was I rented Oceans 11, the original one, to get the feel for what it was like. The one that really inspired me was Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas. They both take place around the same time in the original mob-ridden Vegas. But I haven’t even written that one yet so I don’t want to give anything away.

AD: How did you get involved with Moonstone?

TR: A few years ago they approached me to do a story. They do these anthologies where people write short stories based on old characters that just aren’t being done anymore, like The Phantom. They got in touch with me to do a Phantom story and they sent me a couple of their books as examples and I loved the idea. So I did a Phantom story and I thought in terms of old pulp magazines so I wrote this really great pulpy jungle story and then I did a Captain Midnight story for them too which was a lot of fun. Then Lori Gentile approached me about Chicks in Capes, which was just a brilliant idea. What happens when you get a bunch of women to create superheroines which is so different from what happens when men create superheroines. And that was great because I’d had this superheroine concept in my head anyway and here was my chance. Then she approached me about Honey West and I was thrilled. So I’m happy as a clam working with them.

AD: Did you want to talk about your story in the new anthology, Chicks in Capes?

TR: Absolutely. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a really long time and someone has already sent me a very nice email about it saying that they think there are at least two novels that could spin out of it and I think they’re right. She called it a superhero Handmaid’s Tale. It takes place in a future dystopia, in what could frighteningly easily be America today or tomorrow. There was some unnamed war, I called it the six day war, and out of the ashes of that arises a right wing Christian dictatorship. He’s just called the President and people pledge allegiance to the United Church of America and the cops are the church police. It’s not like The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s not quite that bad for women, but everyone’s become extremely conservative and proper and they burn witches and stone adulterers and, well, you have to read it.

AD: Your other big project is for younger readers, The Chicagoland Detective Agency.

TR: Yes Tyler Page is working on the third book right now. He draws the pencils and I get to see them and comment on them, which is really so important to me. I have had really bad experiences where I’ve done graphic novels, mostly educational graphic novels for use in classrooms for companies like Scholastic. I really enjoy doing that but they pick the artist, I have no say on the artist, and I don’t get to see what the artist has done and the results are sometimes horrendous. It was really important to me that I see all the pencils for everything that I’ve been doing since then I have insisted on seeing the pencils so that I can make changes and corrections and they’re usually so minor but they’re important.

But yeah, I’m having a really good time with Chicagoland. It’s a lot of fun. These are things that I never had a chance to do before until graphic novels. Thank god for graphic novels. I wanted to tell stories, but if you couldn’t write about or draw overly muscled superheroes viciously and violently beating each other to shreds, there was nothing else there. You couldn’t do stories for kids. You couldn’t do adventures like I’m doing now. I’ve never been happier. I’m able to write adventure stories, mystery stories with women detectives. I’m doing everything I’ve always wanted to do. And there was never a venue for me to do these things before.

AD: Which is sad because it’s not as if you’re not trying to do something out there and experimental.

TR: No. I just want to tell a good story. I want to tell a good story for kids, I want to tell a good story for women and for open-minded male readers who think that there’s more to comics than overly muscled guys with thick chins and women with breasts that are so big that if they were real they would fall face forward.

AD: Now you used to draw and you may draw for yourself, but you haven’t drawn professionally in a long time. Why is that?

TR: Sometimes I say it got beaten out of me. This is a better explanation, because I wasn’t physically beaten or anything like that. It’s like Pavlov and Pavlov’s dog. We react. When you’re praised and treated well for something you do, when you get recognition, then you feel good about it and you want to do more. When you’re treated badly, when you’re slapped down when you try to do things, when nobody wants to publish you anyway, soon you don’t want to do it anymore. Drawing comics was such an uphill battle, but no one wanted me. They didn’t want me in the underground. They didn’t want me in the mainstream. For a while I had Wimmen’s Comix, which was like a safe house for me. I didn’t even do that much in Wimmen’s Comix, but it was a place where I was accepted and then it folded in ’92 and I had no place to draw.

I just couldn’t draw anymore. You react by not being able to do it. I couldn’t do it. If I wanted to do a comic, I would get so stressed and have such feelings of depression, I just couldn’t do it. But as a writer, I’m treated so well. I can do things I want. Editors are nice to me. I mean I don’t have to do the underground. I never really belonged in the underground. That’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to do graphic sex. I have nothing against it. I just don’t want to write it. And obviously I don’t want to write superheroes so I didn’t belong anywhere. Now I’ve found a place where I belong. I can do Honey West. I can do the Chicagoland Detective Agency. I can do my books on rediscovering these great women. I can do the stuff I’ve always wanted to do.

AD: Is there anything else you’re working on?

TR: I’m working on something else for Lerner’s, the ones who publish my Chicagoland series. Do you know who Lily Renee is?

AD: The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place her.

TR: I hope to do a collection of her work. Lily Renee is the most amazing woman. She was a young Jewish girl in Vienna in 1938 when the Nazis marched in. In 1939 she escaped from Vienna via kindertransport. She escaped to Leeds, England and like apparently a number of the young Jewish refugees who found families to take them in, it turned out that the woman was expecting an unpaid servant. She left in the middle of the night with her one suitcase and not even enough money for bus fare and walked into Leeds and went to an employment agency and found work, finally in Leeds Maternity Hospital. This was during the blitz when she’s ferrying babies down to the shelters during the air raids. But eventually, happy ending thank goodness, her parents had escaped to America and they found her and she came to America.

At this point she’s eighteen. They’re just getting by. They had been very well off in Vienna, but they had to leave everything. Her father found work as an elevator operator. He had been a manager of the Holland America steamship line. Lily was an artist and they see an ad in the paper that said a comicbook company is looking for cartoonists. She has never drawn a comic in her life. She goes to the newsstand, buys a couple comics, studies them, draws some sample panels, and brings them in. At this point she’s nineteen, and by the way, she was beautiful. She got the job. She wound up drawing comics for Fiction House, which was just about my favorite golden age publisher. During the war, when a lot of women were working for comics because the men were off fighting, they hired more women than any other company and the women drew these really great strong heroines. Fiction House is full of all these fabulous heroines, aviatrixes and girl reporters and girl detectives and jungle girls and spies. Lily drew a number of titles for them but the one that’s the most famous and most connected to her is Senorita Rio who was this beautiful nightclub entertainer who was also a spy. This is a graphic novel telling of her adventures ending with her finding work as a cartoonist. She’s still living in New York. This will come out in the fall. It’s currently being illustrated by Anne Timmons who I worked with before.

AD: What was her work like?

TR: She was good. Really really good. Very decorative. But also just beautiful women. Excuse me. I get really excited you probably noticed so I’m losing my voice because I’m getting so excited. I did 36 pages of Lily Renee in the Comics Journal. Issue 279 in 2006, so if you can find the back issue, there’s 36 pages of Lily Renee including a photo of the young incredibly beautiful Lily Renee. I would love to do a collection of her published comics the same way that I did the Nell Brinkley book and the Tarpe Mills book.

On the surface, The Last Mountain is a documentary about the dirty business of coal, the highly destructive and toxic practice of mountaintop removal mining, and one community's fight to preserve their homes, their livelihoods, their health, and the last great mountain in the region. However, the... more

On the surface, The Last Mountain is a documentary about the dirty business of coal, the highly destructive and toxic practice of mountaintop removal mining, and one community's fight to preserve their homes, their livelihoods, their health, and the last great mountain in the region. However, the story of Coal River Mountain in West Virginia is allegorical of much that is wrong with America, which is why during our roundtable conversation with the film's champion, renowned environmental lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., he barely mentions the four-letter word that is coal. Instead, Kennedy focuses on the underlying history and climate that has allowed corporations to rape and pillage our environment, and poison and kill our citizenry with impunity.

In The Last Mountain, Don Blankenship, the former CEO of Massey Energy (he retired at the end of December 2010), is typecast in the role of modern day robber baron. As the largest coal producer in Central Appalachia, his company is only able to function on the scale it does by subjugating democracy. Mountaintop removal mining is cheaper and less labor intensive than traditional underground coal extraction methods, but it causes such an affront to the landscape, water and air, that it can only be done when the authorities charged with protecting the public interest are willing and able to look the other way.

Between 2000 and 2006 Massey chalked up a staggering 60,000 EPA infractions, but has suffered little in consequences beyond much belated and pitifully low fines that serve the government's need to be seen to be doing something while maintaining the status quo. Of course, Massey is not the only corporation and coal is far from the only industry that is using and abusing our severely compromised shell of a democracy. In light of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling allowing corporate campaign donations (and a subsequent one that makes direct-to-candidate payments permissible), our government couldn't be for more up for sale if it were posted on eBay.

Though there will inevitably be dark days ahead for our democracy, it's not all doom and gloom thanks to a groundswell of grassroots activism as witnessed in Coal River Valley and documented in The Last Mountain. As for the environment, Kennedy points out towards the end of this interview that there's an (LED) light at the end of the tunnel, and ironically it's capitalism in its cleanest and purest form that may end up saving the day.

Question: What is it that touched you as a child that set you on an environmental path?

Bobby Kennedy: Well, I was interested in the environment from when I was a little kid...I was raised in the country, and my mother says that I was the interested in it from when I was born. When I was 8-years old, I wrote my uncle, who was down at the White House. There was pollution along K Street in Washington, D.C. because there were a number of cement factories there. To me, the pollution seemed like a kind of a theft, that somebody could steal the air from their neighbors and pollute it and make people sick. It seemed like a theft to me. So I wrote my uncle a letter saying that I wanted to meet with him about pollution, and that I was going to write a book about it. He wrote me back and asked me to the Oval Office, so I had a meeting with him in the Oval Office about that. I went in my shorty shorts and I brought him a salamander that I had caught the night before in a vase. I think I killed the salamander with chlorine from the tap water. It was a big spotted salamander. So a lot of the meeting was his observations that the salamander didn't look well. We went and released it in the Rose Garden fountain. There was a striking inanimation.

I didn't really get around to writing the book until I was 29-years old. But...he set up interviews with Stewart Udall, who was Secretary of the Interior, and a number of the other environmental ministers. At that time, he was involved in a battle to vindicate [trailblazing conservationist] Rachel Carson against his own USDA, and the medical community, and everybody else who was trying to dismiss her as a quack. She was very quiet and wouldn't defend herself because she was dying of cancer. But I'm very proud that he went to bat for her and stood up for her.

Then I started kayaking and training hawks when I was very young. I started training pigeons when I was seven, and raising them, and then training hawks when I was nine, and I still do that today. I wrote the exam that people use to become falconers in this country...I run a wildlife rehabilitation center at my house and I have a kayaking company, a whitewater company that I've had for 15 years. So it's been part of my private life. But also, more importantly, you know, I've always seen pollution as an act of theft, as stealing of the commons, or the public trust assets. That the constitution of every state, including the State of California, says that the commons belong to the people. That the fish, the waterways, those things, those assets that are not susceptible to private property ownership by their nature are the property of the entire community.

The air, the water, the wildlife, the fisheries, the wandering animals, the beaches, the shore lands, the wetlands; that these things belong to the people, whether rich or poor, humble or noble, black or white, young or old. You have an absolute right to go down to the waterway and take out the fish. You have a right to go surfing without coming out with an ear infection. And those rights are being stolen from the people of the state. They're being stolen by powerful political entities within the state who break the law, violate the law, in order to privatize public trusted assets. I have three children with asthma, they get sick on bad air days when there's ozone and particulates in the atmosphere, and somebody, literally, is making money by privatizing the air in their lungs.

And this is ancient law by the way, it goes back to Roman times and the Code of Justinian. It's in the Magna Carta. One of the first acts of tyranny always includes activities by powerful entities within a society to privatize the public trust resources...I'll just give you a little history lesson. In 375 AD, the Code of Justinian had these enumerated protections of the public trust resources, so that if you were a citizen of Rome, no matter what color you were, or whether you were African or European, you had an absolute right to take a walk across the beach, throw a net into the water, and take out your share of the fish. The emperor himself couldn't stop you. That was the public trust doctrine. And in 375 AD, Christian fundamentalists, who were anti-enlightenment, they wanted the one source of knowledge to be their source of knowledge -- the Bible. They burned all of classical literature and all of classical learning in the Library of Alexandria, and that event was the beginning of the Dark Ages and it plunged Europe into 800 years of feudal Oligarchy.

At that time, when the Roman law disappeared, all the local lords and feudal kings began reasserting control over public trust resources. For example, in England, King John said that the deer no longer belonged to the poor. The deer were an important food source. And game animals no longer belonged to the poor also. You couldn't hunt them. That's what got him in trouble with Robin Hood, because for them that was a critical right of their democracy. He also erected navigational tolls in the Thames and the other rivers of England so that what was once free to all the people, now wealthy people controlled the access to the rivers. They sold monopolies to the fisheries, so the last thing that a very poor person could eat, you could always go out and catch a fish, now you had to pay a wealthy person for the right to do that.

That attack on the commons caused the public to revolt. They rose up and confronted him at the Battle of Runnymede and they forced them to sign the Magna Carta, which was the first act of constitutional democracy in the history of mankind. And, if you read the Magna Carta, it has rights that we no longer have, like habeas corpus, in this country. But it also has enumerated rights about the commons. It says it protects the air, the water, the wildlife, the fisheries, the public lands on behalf of the public. In fact, in the 1600s in England, there was a clean air act where it was illegal to burn coal in stoves in London, and people who did it were actually executed for the offense.

So on Earth Day 1970, 20 million people came out on the street, inspired by Rachel Carson's book. 10 percent of the population of our country. The largest public demonstration in American history demanding our political leaders return to the American people the ancient environmental rights that have been stolen from our citizens over the previous 80 years, since the Industrial Revolution. Over the next 10 years, a frightened political establishment of Republicans and Democrats created EPA, Nixon made EPA, signed the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and 28 other environmental laws. But really it was just a resurrection of these ancient laws. It's a restoration of the public trust doctrine, and the doctrine of the commons that had always existed. So it wasn't just a bunch of hippies in tie-dyed T-shirts making up a new set of laws. They were just reenacting old laws that had always been there. And those are the laws that we operate with today. They're ancient laws, they're part of Western history, they're the central values of government in democracy, that the core responsibility of a government is to protect the commons on behalf of all the people...

The issues that come up with coal are all the issues that you'll see...when you see large scale environmental injury, you'll also see the destruction of democracy. You'll see the disappearance of public participation at the local level. So the public can no longer participate in decisions about how their public trust resources are allocated, how the air, or water, or wildlife, or fisheries, or public lands are allocated. You'll see the disappearance of transparency. Things are done in secret...And that's a key foundation stone of government. You'll see the capture of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. They become sock puppets for the industries that they're supposed to regulate.

If you see this movie, there's a scene in the movie where a small group of local activists tries to do a demonstration in front of the DEP [Department of Environmental Protection]. Well, if you look very carefully, they are put off in a distant corner of the parking lot and they are surrounded by all kinds of barriers that are erected by the police to stop them from actually getting anywhere near to the offices that they're boycotting. Then you have a line of police around them to make sure that nobody crosses that barrier. And then behind the police, you have several thousand private miners who have been invited in by Massey Coal to give that final concentric ring of protection around the agency. And it says a lot about the agency because it's saying, you know, the real protectors, the real alliance with the agency is the coal industry, and that the enemy are the environmentalists who want to clean up the coal industry, and that government is on their side. That's the classic destruction of the environment...the coalition between government and corporate power.

It's the classic combination that every visionary leader in America's history has warned us against. Franklin Roosevelt, who was a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign enemy, but he warned that our beloved political democratic institutions would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth who would get their hooks into government officials and then erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, in his most famous speech ever, another Republican, warned Americans against the domination of the military industrial complex and the loss of our values. That would come with the ascendancy of the military industrial complex, and we're living in that era right now. Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in history said at the height of the Civil War, in 1863, he said, 'I have the South in front of me, and I have the bankers behind me, and for my [country] I fear the bankers more.'

And Franklin Roosevelt during World War II said that the domination of government by corporate power is 'the essence of fascism.' He was looking at the history of Europe where in 1932 the Nazi party in Europe had a 1.1 approval rating, and then all of the sudden, the big industrialists like Krupp and Messerschmitt and the chemical industry come in and say, 'Hey, we'll make a pact with you. You provide us the foot soldiers...for the cause of corporate profit taking.' When Hitler got in, he got rid of all of Hindenburg's cabinet and he replaced them with industrialists and let the industrialists run the country. He cut taxes to the rich, he banned unions, and that was called European style fascism. The same thing happened with Franco's France and Mussolini's Italy. You hand the power over to the industrialists and it becomes a kind of industrial feudalism, a corporate kleptocracy. And Mussolini, who had insider's view of that process, complained that fascism should not be called fascism, it should be called corporatism, because it was a merger of state and corporate power.

What we have to understand in our country is that there is a huge difference between free market capitalism, which makes a nation more efficient, more prosperous, and more democratic, and the kind of corporate crony capitalism which has been embraced in the state houses and in Washington, D.C. today, which is antithetical to efficiency, prosperity, and democracy in America...It's capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich and for corporations...

We really need to understand that the domination of business by government is called communism. The domination of government by business is called fascism. And our job is to walk a narrow lane in between, which is free market capitalism and democracy, and keep big business at bay with our right hand and excessive corporate power at bay with our left. In order to do that we need an independent and courageous press that is willing to stand up and speak truth to power, and that doesn't get distracted by you know, entertainment news, you know, Britney Spears' slow emotional decline...and talks about the issues that we need to understand to make rational decisions in our democracy. And you need a public that is informed. You need an informed public that is willing, that is [capable] of recognizing all of the milestones of tyranny.

Q: Wouldn't it also take campaign finance reform and a public understanding of the need for it?

BK: Right...And we lost democracy at one point in our country. We lost democracy during the 1880s, when the big trusts were running our country and they were running it for their business. The steel trusts, the railroad trusts, they're all overlapping boards. It was the Carnegies, then the Mellons, the Fricks, the Osbornes, and a number of other large companies, just like South America, and they owned everything. They owned everything in our country...and they owned the legislatures. It was said at that time that John D. Rockefeller had done everything to the Pennsylvania legislature except refine it. And at that time legislatures appointed the senators, so there was no direct election of senators. So they could literally appoint every senator in the United States Senate just by controlling these legislatures, and that's what they did, these big corporations did that.

A couple of things happened during the early 1900s. You had a couple of reformers come along. One of those reformers was obviously Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, who had incredible charisma and who was willing to stand up to the big corporations. Then you had a whole slew of really, really courageous journalists who turned our country around, Ida Tarbell and Sinclair Lewis, and cartoonists, who really turned the country around and made Americans see for the first time that democracy was falling apart in and around them.

They woke Americans up, and they passed the Sherman Antitrust Act...which said we're going to get rid of monopolies. They passed graduated income tax so that the rich had to pay their share. They passed laws that allowed unions to organize so we could begin developing a middle class in our country. And, above all, they passed in 1907 a law [The Tillman Act] that said corporations cannot make direct contributions to federal political campaigns, and that law lasted for 100 years. And then, [with] the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court -- which is not conservative, the Supreme Court is corporatist...If you look at classic conservatism, it has nothing to do with this court. This court is always on the side of the corporation...

I wrote the introduction to Barry Goldwater's book, The Conscience of a Conservative, which is the bible of the conservative movement, and he says the same thing. He says corporations are a really important thing, they encourage people to assemble money and to risk it, and they drive prosperity, and that's what you want to do. But they should not be running our country. Because corporations want a different thing than Americans want. Corporations don't want democracy. They don't want free markets. They want profits. And the best way for them to get profits is to use our campaign finance system, which is just a system of legalized bribery, to get their hooks into a public official and use that public official to give them monopoly control, a competitive edge in the marketplaces to skew it towards them, and then to allow them to privatize the commons.

That's what they do, and that's what you see in West Virginia, where the corporations really have fixed the whole deal. It's not democracy anymore, it's a corporate kleptocracy, it's a plutocracy. And the biggest thing they did was campaign finance reform. This Supreme Court, if you look at the history of the Supreme Court...My partner, he was a clerk to the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, so he's very interested in court matters, he did a diagram of all of their decisions. Of Scalia and Alito and Thomas and Roberts, you look at all their decisions and there's a formula, which isn't conservatism. If an individual goes up against a corporation, the individual loses. If an individual goes up against government, the individual loses. If corporation goes against government, the corporation wins. So, in all cases, the corporation wins. It's a blueprint for the domination of our country.

So now they've passed this law, Citizens United, which gets rid of 100 years of environmental law...One of the things that H.L. Mencken said was that ['Newspapers are unable, seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.'] And, you know, we saw Citizens United passed, and for the next year we've been reading about Charlie Sheen...They appeal to the prurient interest that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brains for sex and celebrity gossip. Right? We're, today, the best entertained and probably the least informed people on the face of the earth...

Q: So what do we do? The unions have been attacked, and the places for journalists to print serious journalism and get paid for it have collapsed, so how do we proceed?

BK: I don't have an answer for you, okay. I'm trying to do my part. I think we all got to do our part and then die with our boots on if we have to. I have a radio show, and it talks about these issues. What we found was when we did Air America is that Air America failed because we couldn't get advertising, because we were blackballed...We had tiny little signals, we were going head to head against Rush Limbaugh on Clear Channel, and we were beating him everywhere we went, even in conservative districts. We were the number one most popular radio station in San Diego. In a Republican district. And all over the country, even where we were allowed in the Midwest, we were beating people, head to head. But, our biggest advertisements were for penis enlargement, and erectile dysfunction, and weird crap that you're embarrassed about. And we got a memo -- I have a copy of it still -- with several hundred corporations, it was being circulated by ABC, saying all of these corporations do not want to appear on Air America. So naturally we're not going to get pharmaceutical dollars. Pharmaceuticals are the number one supporter of the nightly news, and we're not going to get any on TV. We're not going to get any pharmaceutical dollars, because we're attacking the pharmaceutical industry all the time. We're not going to get oil dollars, we're not going to get coal, we're not going to get automobile, which is the biggest, $15.5 billion. But it was also people like recreational equipment, REI, which you would think would be on our side. But they were on the list. And these were all companies that were boycotting progressive radio...

Q: You say that it would take an active press to battle this. But the problem I guess with the way the press is structured in America is that the press is owned by corporations who choose to pay people to write about particular things...that cornerstone [of democracy] has basically been removed and has been substituted by something that shores up the agenda of the right and the Republicans. So how do you get around that? And how do people get motivated, or even know what they need to be motivated about? I mean, like you say, a lot of this goes back to the Supreme Court. It's really frightening what's going to happen in two years time...there's going to be money pouring into those elections, and we'll have no idea where the money is even coming from because it doesn't need to be reported. God help us in two years time.

BK: Yeah. I'm worried about it. I think everybody's worried about it. And the people on Capital Hill who are watching the money accumulate against them are terrified of it. I'm terrified in our democracy. But I think what we have to do is create the same kind of infrastructure that the right wing created in this country over the past 30 years. They were very patient. They built Fox News as their own network. We now have MSNBC that to some extent counterbalances Fox News. I think the big tragedy was losing CNN. You know, when Ted Turner walked away from CNN. He got distracted. CNN could've provided us a counter balance and changed really the history of our country. You know, to counterbalance what's going on with Fox News. But, I don't know, I think we have to use all the little tools of communication to build structures, scaffolds, platforms for progressive advocacy to fight that the powers of ignorance and greed are threatening to drag us into Armageddon.

Q: In making this documentary...what was the biggest surprise for you?

BK: [pauses for thought] I guess just the disconnect between what's happening down there and how inconsistent it is with American values. You know, it really is a colonial economy...They're sickening and killing people...I spent a lot of my time growing up in Latin America and watching United Fruit and IT&T and Anaconda [Copper] destroy the lives of people and poison them and stuff. But that was happening there...Now it's our companies doing it to us here. And they're tearing down an entire mountain range. Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and bluegrass music and NASCAR racing comes from there, and so much of American culture is rooted in there.

The Appalachian Mountains are the richest ecosystem north of the equator. The reason for that is because during the Pleistocene Ice Age which began 20,000 years ago, my home in Mount Kisco, New York had 2 1/2 miles of ice over the top of it, and virtually all of North America became a tundra, so there were no trees left. The only place the forests survived were in a tiny, what they call refusion in Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky. There's a tiny place there which, because of peculiar barriers of these mountains which were quite a bit higher back then, they protected these little valleys and the forests were able to thrive and they didn't get pushed down by the glaciers.

After the glaciers withdrew 12,000 years ago, all of North America was reseeded from the seed stock in the Appalachians, so they're the mother forest of all North America. And the typical North American forest, like where I live, there's three dominant tree species. That's pretty common all across America. In Appalachia there's 80 dominant tree species -- in any forest you walk into. There's more abundance, biodiversity per cubic meter [there] than any other place north of the equator. So this is the richest ecosystem north of the equator. And now Massey Coal is doing to it what the glaciers couldn't do, which is plowing it under and poisoning the people and destroying the communities. It just shouldn't be happening in our country.

[break]

Q: The problem with green energy is that it's perceived as being expensive...I was watching the debate that you did with the CEO of Massey [Don Blankenship] and you talked about the solar energy plant that you're building out in California.

BK: Yeah, BrightSource...It cost a little over $3 billion a gigawatt.

Q: So you're building it at the same cost as a coal powered station, but then moving forward all of the energy is free.

BK: Right.

Q: That will change things massively because once you have this up and running, and contributing to the grid it will be hard for anyone to say 'it's too expensive' or 'it's unproven technology'.

BK: Exactly. And that's why, the more you see electric cars out there...the more people see how they function, and how cheap they are maintain...An electric car costs six cents a mile over the life of the car to drive. If you include the purchase of the car, the repairs, the gasoline, the power, the fuel, it costs sic cents a mile to drive. It costs 60 cents a mile to drive an internal combustion engine. So the market forces are so compelling, they're going to...drive out internal combustion very quickly.

We're now at this tipping point and you're going to watch this cascade come very quickly...If you went to the Detroit Auto Show this year -- two years when we were negotiating the TARP plan with Detroit, they were laughing at us. Literally. The CEOs of General Motors and of Ford. We made Billy Ford drive a Tesla, which is one of our cars, and he went and he said, 'I want all the engineers in my office on Monday.' And now, this year, at the Detroit Auto Show, every automobile manufacturer has an electric car. That's how fast it went. You're going to see this cascade as the costs start going down, as the batteries become more efficient, as the infrastructure for delivering the batteries becomes more efficient. You're going to see a real sun drop...We are going to watch the end of internal combustion engines.

Now, these bulbs here [indicating ceiling light fittings]...these bulbs are traditional Edison bulbs. That technology is 130-years old. That technology is now illegal in Europe. The 100-watt bulbs are illegal here...People don't even know that. So there are now a thousand companies making LED solid state light bulbs. Our company, we think, is the leading company. It's called Switch. And we're in a bidding war now between General Electric, Philips and Siemens over who's going to get this bulb, our bulb. GE has a bulb that costs $40 for a 40-watt bulb. We produce a 60-watt bulb for $15, and it's completely dimmable...It lasts for 25 years and it uses 12% of the energy...And, even at a $15 price point, they pay themselves back in 18 months. Well, we will have dropped that $15 price point down to $5 within two years, so there's not going to be any of these [Edison] bulbs left.

Q: So ultimately it will be capitalism that will [prevail].

BK: I say this, that for the last 27 years of my life I've been doing Martin Luther King's prescription, which is all the tools of advocacy: agitation, legislation, litigation, and education. And I would add that the most important tool that I've dealt with has been innovation. That's what I'm doing now. I'm spending more and more of my time doing that. I still am doing the litigation. I'm still doing the agitation...They're prosecuting me for criminal offenses in Poland and wanted to see me do a two-year jail sentence there. So I'm doing that stuff. I'm going to go do a civil disobedience next week in coal country in West Virginia. I'm continuing to do that stuff, but most of my work today is based upon innovation, it's based upon [the fact] that we have these technical solutions that by themselves are going to drive into the marketplace and they're going to be embraced by people -- not because they want to be green -- but because they want to have better lives and save money. And we can do that for them.

Q: You touched on civil disobedience; obviously it's a big decision as a career lawyer to take that step.

BK: Right.

Q: To say that the system is so broken that there are no other options...

BK: That's what you have to do. That's the analysis you have to do. Before an attorney does a civil disobedience you have to say the system is broken, the legal system does not provide redress to this deserving client. You have to make that decision. You have to do an economic analysis before an attorney can go anywhere near a civil disobedience.

Q: Also as an attorney that puts your ability to practice in jeopardy.

BK: Right. Because we're an officer of the court, so we have a special responsibility. We're not allowed to speak ill of judges publicly -- that's against the law for us.


The Last Mountain opens in New York and Washington D.C. on June 3, and goes nationwide thereafter.

Visit TheLastMountainMovie.com/ for information on screenings in your area.

Read our interview with the film's director, Bill Haney, here.

For more on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his fight to protect the environment, visit RobertFKennedyJr.com/.

I first heard of Rebecca Watson in her role as the lone female host on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, on which she appears as one of a quartet of co-hosts led by Dr. Steven Novella, but she first gained notice within the skeptic community because of her work with the collaborative blog she... more

I first heard of Rebecca Watson in her role as the lone female host on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, on which she appears as one of a quartet of co-hosts led by Dr. Steven Novella, but she first gained notice within the skeptic community because of her work with the collaborative blog she founded, Skepchick.org. Skepchick advocates for the interrelationship between critical thinking, science, secularism, and feminism. One of the most passionate, articulate, and fearless secularists in the public eye, Rebecca divides her time between Skepchick, the SGU podcast, and frequent speaking engagements at atheist and skeptic-oriented conferences and conventions. In 2009 Skepchick started its own convention, SkepchickCon, which occurs annually as part of the larger CONvergence at the end of June in Minneapolis. We spoke recently about Skepchick, the Religious Right’s war against women in the United States, and the difficulties women face even within the secular community.

Keith Daniels: In the last six months you’ve been from Norway to California to New York. Next week you’re going to Ireland. How often do you wake up and not know where the fuck you are?

Rebecca Watson: Every day. I have this weird sleep thing. I talk in my sleep a lot. So I get really confused. If I wake up in the middle of the night it can take me ten minutes to figure out where I am anyway, and so when I’m traveling it’s just a mess. I like it, though. It’s fun.

KD: Have you been able to, recently, make a living doing nothing but the blogging and the talk circuit?

RW: Yeah! That’s been my job. I’m also supposed to be writing articles for CFI [Center for Inquiry] and stuff, but I haven’t even had time. I gave them one article like three months ago. [Laughs] So yeah, it’s been really great because this is what I want to do with my life. I’ve just been traveling around giving talks. I’m selling skeptical [and] atheist merch online at skepticalrobot.com. Plug. [Laughs] So yeah, that’s how I make my money. I’m not going to be rich, but I’m going to be happy, dammit.

KD: I saw on Twitter that you got to visit the set of Mythbusters last week. How was that?

RW: Yeah. Adam Savage is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. We met a couple of years ago at The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas. He’s just been really awesome. So, when he heard that I was coming to San Francisco he first asked if we could go to dinner, and I was like, “Yeah! Definitely!” I wanted to go to the set but I wasn’t sure how Kosher it was to just ask. Then at the last minute he was like, “Oh yeah, we’re filming all week, so if you want to you can come out.” So I did. I can’t talk about what I saw, though. Y’know, spoilers. I can tell you that it was big [Laughs] and it involved smashing things.

KD: I love Adam and Kari and all of those guys too, and I’ve watched every episode of the show, but sometimes I find it a little disappointing. I don’t know if it’s just the limits of TV, or...

RW: You’re questioning their scientific rigour?

KD: [Sheepishly] Yeah.

RW: I don’t really know the others so I can’t really speak to their thought process, and I really shouldn’t even be speaking to Adam’s [Laughs] but I will anyway. The reason why I love him is he’s one of the most curious people I’ve ever seen. He has this genuine interest in learning new things, and in getting to know people who do interesting things. If you tell him that something he did on the show was wrong, I can tell you with a pretty solid degree of certainty that he will either already have known that and will have tried to do it the correct way but was somehow rebuffed by the network, or yeah, just the limitations of filming what they wanted to do, or you’ve said something new to him and he’ll be really, really excited and want to do a follow-up episode on it. [Laughs] So, yeah, they may not always get things right but they do have an honest openness to learning about the science involved and staying as true to the science as possible.

KD: He seems like the kind of person who might be exhausting to be around because he’s always on.

RW: You know, in a way he really is always on, but he’s not always bouncing off the walls like he is on the show, although on the set both he and Jamie were running around the set between takes kicking things and throwing bouncy balls all over the place. So there was a lot of energy on the set, and if you’ve ever been on a TV set you’ll understand is quite remarkable considering it takes forever to get anything done on a TV set. But they kept up this great energy level throughout. It was really cool to see.

KD: What was the inspiration for starting Skepchick?

RW: I was involved in the skeptical community, which I hadn’t known existed until a few years ago. I got involved through James Randi’s website. Randi, of course, offers a million dollar prize if you can prove you have paranormal abilities. I noticed that there weren’t very many women’s voices at the forefront. The people I was reading online and in books were people like James Randi, Michael Shermer, or Carl Sagan. They were older white men. So we came up with this idea to raise money to send more women to the conferences, because in addition to there being very few women onstage, there were very few women attendants.

We started selling pin-up calendars: very tongue-in-cheek, very mild, very PG-13. We thought we would just sell a couple of them and maybe get enough money to send one woman to The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas. It ended up being this huge success! We sold like a thousand of them or something. More than that, the traffic we were getting to Skepchick, which I set up specifically just to sell the calendars, and the emails, were just overwhelming. They were saying, “Wow. It’s so great to see women standing up and declaring their skepticism and trying to get more women involved.” There was a lot of support from both men and women. I thought it would be wrong to waste that kind of traffic, so I turned Skepchick into a monthly e-zine, back when e-zines were the thing. Were we ever so young? [Laughs] That eventually turned into the blog as it exists today, which is updated several times a day by about a dozen different writers who all contribute.

KD: I liked your post today about the war against women by the Religious Right in this country. You know, normally when I interview women I don’t want to make the fact that they’re female an issue. But I think it is an issue today, both within the skeptical movement and with the Religious Right. Just being a woman is an issue.

RW: Yeah. There is something to be said for normalizing that there happens to be a woman speaking. When I first started speaking at conferences I would talk about just general skeptical topics, just whatever happened to catch my fancy. But I realized there were all these issues that affected me as a woman that weren’t being addressed by other people because they were all older white males. They didn’t have any perspective on these issues. I realized that that’s the whole point of having a more diverse movement: getting more women involved, getting more African Americans involved, more asians, hispanics. We need all of these people, in part because we’re missing a lot of secular, skeptical topics that need to be addressed that aren’t being addressed. Instead we’re focusing on Bigfoot and aliens while the Republicans are taking away women’s health. They’re directly affecting women’s health.

So I’ve started doing more talks about feminism. [I’m] trying to teach a new audience what feminism is, why it’s important, how it can strengthen skepticism, and how skepticism can strengthen feminism. These two groups can get along and help another out. My most recent talk that I was giving in the past few days in California is this one specifically on the Religious Right, because these were specifically atheist conferences that I was going to. I generally find atheist conferences to be a little dull [Laughs] because they’re all talking about things that we all agree with.

KD: A circle-jerk?

RW: [Laughs] Yeah. “No God! Let’s all go to the pub.” What’s the point? But some do discuss particular activist topics that are of interest to atheists. Usually those are more general issues like separation of church and state, or the idea of keeping creationism out of our schools. Things like that. But never do I see women’s rights mentioned. This year has been a landmark one, I think, for the Religious Right’s backlash against women. I don’t know if maybe I just wasn’t noticing it before but this seems like an all-time high level of ridiculousness on the part of the Religious Right. I mention in my talk, and in the article you just mentioned, that in the first quarter of 2011 49 State legislatures introduced 916 bills that restricted women’s rights [and] women’s reproductive health.

The only reason why it wasn’t 50 states is not because there’s one good state out there -- it’s because Louisiana didn’t meet until April, and once they did they promptly started introducing the same bills. They all copy-cat one another. What happens is that the Religious Right introduces a bill at the federal level that they know is never going to pass, for instance defunding Planned Parenthood. They nearly shut down the whole government over this despite the fact that 65% of the American public in a number of surveys specifically said they had no interest in defunding Planned Parenthood. However, there’s this huge, powerful Religious Right lobby that convinced politicians that this was worth doing. So they tried to defund Planned Parenthood at the federal level. Luckily, it was defeated. Barely.

Now we’re seeing dozens of states introducing copy-cat bills attempting to do the same thing: defunding Planned Parenthood. In Texas they introduced a bill and then did a study to determine how much money they would save, because that’s the tact they’re taking, the Tea Party thing. “No more government money for abortions!” despite the fact that no federal money currently goes to abortions, and only 3% of Planned Parenthood’s involve abortions. So, “No money to abortions! Save your tax dollars!” Well, it turns out that it would actually cost Texas something like -- I don’t have the actual numbers at hand -- a hundred million dollars, because Planned Parenthood does so much more than abortions. They do cancer screenings, they do general women’s health, and they do them for poor women -- poor women who will have to rely on Medicaid, which will then have to be paid for by Texas. So it would end up costing the taxpayers money [to defund Planned Parenthood]. It’s not going to stop them, because the Bible tells us that women should be having babies and don’t deserve to have control over their own bodies.

Based on these Biblical principles the Religious Right will continue to wage this war against women until we as secularists stand up with the feminists and say, “No more.” [We need to] start contacting our representatives, especially if you have a Democrat representative... they’re not doing enough. They’re letting the Religious Right get away with this stuff. They’re not making abortion an issue. It needs to be an issue. They need to stand up for women’s right to choose and they’re not doing it. That’s basically the soapbox that I’ve been on of late: to urge secularists to get organized and help women.

KD: Do you think the reluctance of secularists, skeptics, scientists, to get involved in that sort of issue is cowardice, or is it just, “Well it’s not a directly scientific question so I’m not going to get involved.”?

RW: Yeah. I got an angry email a couple of weeks ago accusing me of politicizing skepticism because on my podcast, The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, I was talking about Osama Bin Laden conspiracy theories, and I mentioned that the two groups who are doing the bulk of the conspiracy theories are the Tea Party and the 9/11 “Truthers”. Well, there are a lot of libertarians in my audience, and there are a lot of libertarians in the Tea Party, and these overlap. So I had someone write in and say that I was damaging skepticism by politicizing it. My response is, “Bullshit! It’s already a political issue. It’s already become politicized.” Politics are important. We can’t just shy away from them because ‘you can’t have science and politics’. Bullshit! You can have evidence-based political activism. You can fight people who are anti-science. You can fight the Religious Right who are using Biblical imperative to try and get that [anti-science] into the government. You can fight them! It’s really important that we do that.

So, yeah, I think it is cowardice. I think it’s also the fact that too large a percentage of the skeptical community, the secular community, are made up of angry, rich libertarians, capital-L Libertarians, who consider themselves “pro-life”. They’re anti-choice. They believe that Global Warming is a conspiracy theory. That’s why these issues become really difficult for us to tackle, because every time we do they say, “Stop getting political.” Again, “Bullshit! You guys are the ones who made it political.” Global Warming was a scientific topic [until] the Right made it a political topic, and now it’s almost impossible for us to attack without getting a flood of emails from libertarians and conservatives saying that we’re being too political.

KD: Aside from being necessary, I think [politics are] a lot more interesting. I mean, we all know ghosts and homeopathy are bullshit. What else is there to discuss about that?

RW: Yeah! I got involved in skepticism in the first place because I was really always interested in scams and hoaxes. It’s fun to think about the Bigfoot stuff, the aliens and whatever. But, at the end of the day... We realized this on Skepchick a couple of years ago... We were talking about how other skeptics would sometimes get us down. Other skeptics would sometimes attack Skepchick for being too liberal, for being too feminist. We were getting a bit depressed about it. We made a decision as a group to ignore the haters, [Laughs] first of all, and second of all to choose some specific topics that we could have an impact on -- some specific ways that we could make a positive difference in the world. And y’know, Bigfoot was not at the top of the list.
We’ll still talk about it when it’s funny, but other than that I don’t really care if Loren Coleman thinks Bigfoot exists. Go have fun searching for Bigfoot. I don’t care.

What I do care about is there are a growing number of people around the world who believe that vaccinations will cause autism when there’s no scientific evidence to suggest that this is so. We decided as a group of Skepchicks that we would make [vaccination] one of our number one issues. Because of this, one of my writers, Elyse Anders, started the Women Thinking Freely organization that focuses on getting easy-to-understand scientifically-accurate information into the hands of parents and pediatricians. They are working with another Skepchick, organize vaccination clinics at various events. We already set one up at Dragon*Con last year. We vaccinated something like 200 people for Pertussis. Pertussis, also known as Whooping Cough, should not exist anymore. We should be completely rid of it. But because people aren’t getting vaccinated it’s continuing to harm people, to kill infants, for instance, who haven’t been vaccinated yet.

These are ways that we can make a measurable difference in the world, and I think that focusing on feminism, focusing on women’s rights, is another one. I think that’s proved by the response I got after my talk. The response wasn’t what I think what the larger organizations feared. The larger organizations fear that if we talk about this stuff all we’re going to get is this angry backlash from their conservative donors, but no, the response was overwhelmingly positive: people thanking me for speaking up about it and being inspired to go out and blog about it, to podcast about it, to contact their representatives, to spread the word that we’re not going to sit down and shut up about this issue.

KD: The right-wing PR machine has so successfully poisoned the well on feminism and abortion that not only have they framed the entire debate, you can’t even say the word “feminism”.

RW: Exactly. Someone just commented on my blog post today, “I support women’s rights, but I don’t call myself a feminist because I don’t overreact at every little thing.” I’m like, “Can you even hear yourself? You’re playing right into their hands.” We need to reclaim the word “feminist”, and we need to go out and be positive examples of feminists so that people understand what it means: it’s ‘the radical idea that men and women are equal’. That’s it. I feel the same way about the words “skeptic” and “atheist”. These are words that have been put in a negative light by our opposition, and in the past we’ve tried to change our name to “brights”. Really?

KD: [Laughs]

RW: Really? We thought that would work? No! Even if we came up with a good name, which “brights” isn’t, then that word would be cast in a negative light by our opposition. We need to reclaim these words. You’re right. We need to frame the debate in a proper way. I’m really excited to see more people speaking up about that. For instance, I was at the OC Freethought Alliance’s conference the week prior to being in San Francisco, and Sadie Crabtree was there. She’s the Director of Communications for the JREF [James Randi Educational Foundation]. She doesn’t come from the world of skepticism. She comes from the world of LGBT activism. She got up and she talked about the words we use, about the framing, and about how before we even engage with the other side we need to reframe what we’re talking about.

I try to speak a little to that as well in my talk. For instance, I mention that these people are not “pro-life”. Studies show that when you ban abortion, abortions don’t decrease; women still have abortions in exactly the same numbers. All that happens is more women die. So you can’t call yourself “pro-life” and then support bans on abortion. You are, in fact, pro-death. [Laughs] By definition. I try to teach the audience that this is why we don’t go by their vocabulary. We don’t accept their vocabulary because it gives them an advantage straight out of the gate. So they are “anti-choice”. That is what we call them. It’s little things like that that I think our community can benefit from. There’s always been a little bit of an emphasis on this idea that, “Well, the science is on our side, therefore we will win.” If that were true, we wouldn’t be here having this discussion. Superstition would have died out long ago.

KD: History is littered with the corpses of very right losers.

RW: [Laughs] Exactly. What we need our communities to learn is how to launch a movement, how to be persuasive. So I’m really excited that there are more people who are doing that. Greta Christina is another person who spoke at the conference I was just at in Oakland. She’s fantastic because she’s passionate, she’s angry, and she’s not afraid to speak out about what’s going on. She’s another person like me who directly addresses women’s rights and associates it with the secular movement. I think we need more of that.

KD: Is this issue [of women’s representation within the secular movement] why you wanted to start your own convention? This year will be, what, the third SkepchickCon?

RW: Yeah, SkepchickCon! It is the third one. It sort of is [the issue]. We always just wanted our own excuse to get together and hang out anyway. But yeah, we spent a lot of our time encouraging other organizations to put more women on their stages. We pester them. We publicly point out when they don’t have enough women on the stage, and we give them lists and lists and lists of women who would be more than happy to get up on stage. And it’s working, you know. This year at The Amazing Meeting there’s going to be more women on stage. I think it’s even 50/50 this year, amazingly. But that [pestering] does get tiring. At some point we’re like, “Maybe it would be cool to set a good example.” So our conference, SkepchickCon, happens every year at another conference called CONvergence, which is a big nerd-fest in Minneapolis. It’s always 4th of July weekend-ish -- whenever they would have the fireworks. It’s June 30th to July 3rd this year. Basically, we have our own track of panels and we stock them with awesome women. We have a bunch of the Skepchicks coming, including Bug Girl, who’s a scientist, a biologist...

KD: She rules.

RW: She’s awesome. I think Elyse Anders is going to be there; she can speak to what her organization’s been doing. Maria Walters will be there; she’s teaming up with Desiree Schell who does a radio show called Skeptically Speaking in Canada. Desiree and Maria will be running a whole grassroots activism workshop on exactly the things that we’ve been discussing: how to get involved and actually make a difference in the world. We’ve got Sadie Crabtree from the JREF coming. We have Ashley Paramore from the Secular Student Alliance coming. Hopefully Debbie Goddard from Center for Inquiry is coming. Also a few token men, of course. We have P.Z. Myers, who’s a long-time supporter of Skepchick and an avowed feminist, as well as Greg Laden who is also on Scienceblogs and is also a feminist. Stephanie Zvan is another one. It’s always a great lineup of panels that cover not just feminism but science and skepticism, y’know, geekery. It’s always a really good time and I encourage people to come on out. You can attend just by getting tickets for CONvergence. You can find out more about the Skepchick track at skepchick.org.

KD: Last week on his radio show Glenn Beck pretended to vomit while making fun of Meghan McCain. Obviously, he’s an asshole, but is that something that women who publicly advocate for their beliefs often have to deal with? That your attractiveness becomes the issue instead of what you’re saying?

RW: Yeah! It happens all the time, to the point where people say, “Oh, that’s just what happens. Boys will be boys.” It doesn’t happen to men. Men are allowed to be in public without the world wondering where they got their suit, how much cleavage they’re showing, how much they spent on their hairstyle -- unless you’re John Kerry. For the most part, yeah, if you’re a woman in the public sphere, and not just politics but everywhere, then your appearance immediately becomes part of your worth.

That happened at the conference I was just at. The man who was speaking before me was talking about ‘Youtube Atheists’, and he showed a picture of one female Youtube atheist. He specifically said something like, “Oh, it really helps if they’re hot,” or good-looking or blonde or whatever. And he was called out on it! Normally that sort of comment happens all the time at these sort of conferences -- all the time -- and it passes without mention. But at this conference there just so happened to be me, and Greta Christina, and Jen McCreight from Blag Hag. During Q&A Jen called him on it and he offered a sort-of half-hearted apology, saying, “Of course these people are talented in other ways and that was just assumed.” I was like, “No. It’s not assumed. If you’re picking one trait to focus on, and it’s their looks, we can’t assume anything about what you think about their other skills.”

I think a lot of people hear that and think, “Well, he’s probably not sexist.” Well, he probably isn’t. I’m sure he’s a really nice guy who believes in women’s rights and blah blah blah. It just goes to show you that the culture we live in is this inherently sexist thing, and these sexist thoughts tumble out of people’s mouths all the time. I’m really proud that we have more women now who are standing up and pointing it out when it happens so that the few women who are in the audience don’t just sit there in silence feeling uncomfortable and isolated. Instead, and this is the first time I’ve seen this happen, there was this immediate wave of, “What the fuck?” that went through the audience. [Laughs] You could see the relief on the faces of other women who weren’t sure at first, like, “Is it just me that suddenly feels less-than?” Like a non-entity. Instead it was like, “No, there are other women here and we’re pissed off too, and no, we’re not going to shut up about it.”

KD: I think a lot of people would say I have a lot of room to talk considering who I work for.

RW: Yeah. The idea of whether or not pornography can be empowering and whether it’s helpful or hurtful is a huge can of worms, I think, among feminists. I know some really great, intelligent feminists who can disagree on those points eloquently. I’m sure you get a lot of shit for it.

KD: Where do you come down on that question?

RW: Well, I’m a bit torn. I think that women in the sex industry can be empowered and often are. I know one reader of Skepchick who comments often and attends TAM and things is a sex worker who works for herself, and if anybody wants to tell her that she’s not empowered I would wear a cup first. [Laughs] I think that’s definitely possible. I think that right now the majority of the industry is sexist, though, [and] is damaging to women.

KD: So are you still needing donations for SkepchickCon?

RW: Yes. People can donate at events.skepchick.org, and that will help us continue to fly in awesome female speakers. I didn’t mention earlier that our Guest of Honor this year is Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon she’s a fantastic skeptic and feminist and just perfect for it. To help pay for things like that we rely on donations.

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