__Garry Trudeau is on a digital roll, reveling in dotcomedy - and chasing vertical eyeballs with his 3-D, full-motion, cross-platform Duke2000 campaign. __
Down on all fours, Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau is yapping like a dog, a small, annoying dog - the kind that might serve as a suitably cranky mascot for Duke, the long-lived, drug-ingesting Trudeau creation who's running for the Reform Party presidential nomination this year. The yipping is just one of many sound effects provided by Trudeau for actor Fred Newman, who, playing the part of Duke, is doing some barking of his own - at a Detroit DJ on the other end of the phone.
It's noon on an April day in Trudeau's Upper West Side studio, and this is the 24th radio show that the team has done since 6 am in support of Duke2000. Some have gone better than others. (A joke about Maya Angelou being responsible for the booming economy, for example, knocks 'em dead on NPR, but falls flat everywhere else.) With his shoes off and his hat on backward, wearing a V-neck sweater over a T-shirt, Trudeau, a youthful 52, looks like a grad student after an all-nighter. "I'm too old for this," he protests while relaxing at a drafting table between calls. But when the phone rings, he jumps back to work. As Duke takes the usual questions and spits back the answers (on his political record: "I've run from things, not for things"), Trudeau is slamming a door, cranking up the stereo, punching up lines for Newman on a blueberry iMac, laughing silently at his delivery, and yipping some more. The segment ends, and it's straight into Phoenix for the last show of the day.
If the image of America's preeminent political satirist imitating a lap dog isn't unusual enough, the fact that he's doing it as part of a media tour - and with me watching - is truly out of character. Trudeau hasn't done an extended interview in 10 years, but D2K has loosened him up, partly because the experimental venture needs his support, and partly because he's nervous about the future of print, where he made his reputation. Trudeau seems well aware that the digital world he's temporarily exploring with the Duke campaign is where his career is headed, and he knows it's high time he got on the fast track of 21st-century media.
Having introduced Duke as a Doonesbury character in 1974, Trudeau has since used him to send up everything from Sino-American rapprochement to the Iranian hostage crisis and the social policies of Newt Gingrich. Surveying the cartoonish landscape of presidential politics last fall, Trudeau decided that Duke was an ideal candidate for these times. In previous campaigns, that would have meant a recurring story line in the Pulitzer Prize-winning strip - a chuckle, in other words, for consumers of comics in any of about 1,400 daily and Sunday newspapers. This time around, it means a multichannel project playing out not just in print and on the radio, but via groundbreaking animation technology on television and the Web, at Duke2000.com. The media splash is giving Trudeau unparalleled exposure to new audiences while allowing him to test out alternative venues for his art.
"I have to keep in mind where I will be 10 or 20 years out," says Trudeau the day before the radio blitz. Speaking recently at Harvard Law School and Brown, he says, he met kids who had never seen Doonesbury in a newspaper but knew it well from the Web. "Part of this project is to determine whether a Web-based video strip is something worth pursuing. The jury is still out on that, but I'm compelled enough by the keys to the new economy - fear and greed - to investigate a chance to reinvent the strip in a new medium."
For nearly 30 years a clear-eyed observer of our cultural attitudes and pretensions, Trudeau embarks on decade four believing that no topic is more important than technology - not only as a medium for his ideas, but as subject matter for his work. The Internet, he says, provides "perfect conditions for social satire - the creation of astonishing, overnight fortunes, and the impact of early wealth on a subgroup not famous for emotional maturity. We're remaking ourselves online, a fumbling process that is incredibly dynamic; we're reinterpreting the way we organize ourselves ethically in situations that have never existed before, from what constitutes piracy to what we mean by privacy."
The freshest story lines in Doonesbury these days often concern the new economy of startups and flameouts (like the rise and fall of MiKim, the software firm cofounded by Mike Doonesbury and his wife, Kim), a milieu Trudeau captures with the same of-the-moment precision he once brought to Vietnam and Watergate. Tech culture is also at the core of Trudeau's Killer App, an hour-long TV drama set at a New York software company, which, having recently been killed by Fox for the second time, is being shopped to HBO, among others. "The multitasking has gotten a little out of hand this year," says Trudeau, who calls Doonesbury his "core business" and plans to continue the strip until he retires.
Clearly, though, he's having fun with the extracurricular work, flying (coach) back and forth to San Francisco with Newman to support the animation production for Duke2000, honing Killer App with executive producer Tom Fontana, working on charity projects with Starbucks. He's stretching his creativity at a time when a lot of successful careers would be running in place. "I was just following my curiosity," says Trudeau about his current spate of activity. "Recently, I've been thinking a little further out."
Duke's first live appearance occurred last winter at a press conference during the HBO/US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen's St. Regis Hotel. The character looked down on the ballroom (via satellite from his "campaign headquarters" in a cheap hotel room in Coon Rapids, Minnesota) from two outsize screens at either side of the stage. Meanwhile, Trudeau and Newman huddled with the crew from dotcomix, the San Francisco animators who bring Duke to life, in a makeshift control room curtained off from the audience. Trudeau was cuing Newman with a laser pointer aimed at a wallboard full of scripted responses. Newman wore a motion-capture suit, sensors velcroed to his body, that fed data to a computer that syncs his movements to Duke - allowing the onscreen character to shrug his shoulders, point his fingers, and move about. A joystick-wielding puppeteer stationed nearby brought Duke's facial expressions to life; Duke's mouth moved in response to particular sounds, called phonemes, in a fraction of a second, syncing his lip movements with his speech.
At first, the crowd seemed a bit underwhelmed. What they really wanted was to run into Steve Martin or Robin Williams on the elevator - not to sit through political shtick at 3 in the afternoon. Slowly, they began to warm up. When actress Lauren Tom appeared onstage as Duke's faithful right-hand woman, Honey Huan, they chuckled. And Duke got some laughs on a couple of cheap gags, including a politically incorrect crack about Honduran gardeners. But not until Duke answered a couple of questions did the audience realize this wasn't just some nicely timed video; it was real time. Duke heckled an unsuspecting cougher in the audience. The energy level in the room tripled. Someone asked about the WTO riots, and Duke fired back a snarky remark. Then the computer crashed. End of story. Tom shifted to the fallback script crafted for such occasions, which, along with some pithy ad-libs, brought her gracefully to the end. And Trudeau walked away unrecognized - happy with the premiere, if a bit disappointed at its premature ending.
A month later, Duke is on Larry King Live, sharing the screen with the host, gesturing with a long cigarette holder while laying out the platform he calls "compassionate fascism." The candidate glowers behind his mirrored shades during one heated moment, coughs violently, and falls down. The other guests, including political commentators Rowland Evans and Robert Novak and comedians Al Franken and Bill Maher, try not to laugh. As satire, it scores a few points for subverting the self-seriousness of talking-head TV.
Live television is hard enough on the usual talking head (take Maher, for example - his material fell flat on Larry King). It's unprecedented for an animated character. (Protozoa, an earlier incarnation of dotcomix, produced a lo-res, prerecorded forerunner named Dev Null for MSNBC's The Site in 1996.) But, prone to debilitating acid flashbacks and arguments for mandatory gun ownership, Duke was made for live TV. As he banters with King, the 40-person team that gives him the ability to keep up in a real-time conversation is gathered at dotcomix's San Francisco studio, crowded into a conference room to watch the broadcast.
It's a nervous hour, a high-visibility demo for the company's most sophisticated product. "This is live theater - as live as it gets," says Buzz Hays, the project's executive producer and a graduate of the USC film school. Hays has run Lucasfilm's THX research unit, coproduced the Kevin Spacey film Swimming With Sharks, and overseen the much-hyped 9 for Robert De Niro's Tribeca Interactive. "It helps that we didn't have to do eyes. The sunglasses are really a godsend in terms of processing power," he says.
Outside the dotcomix studio, a CNN truck with a satellite link is tethered to the building by cables. Inside, it's Aspen all over again - but on steroids. Trudeau has his pointer, and Newman's in his special getup. But tonight the computer is a souped-up SGI Onyx2 supercomputer on loan from its maker. The Onyx2 and its premium graphics engine, commonly used for tasks like modeling combat weaponry and medical diagnostics, creates a world not just of shape but of texture as well. Plus, with four 64-bit MIPS R10000 processors, it will not go down.
To Hays, the technology is merely a way of creating a better ride for the audience. "One thing about dotcomix that's also true of the Lucas culture is that we're focused on the experience - not just the nuts and bolts," he says. "My goal is to bring a sense of theatricality to it."
Of course dotcomix is as concerned with commerce as theater. Damon Danielson, the CEO brought in to raise capital and run the business end, had hoped the project would be paying some of its own freight by now, but a $2.1 million sponsorship and distribution deal with Excite fell apart, and endorsement contracts have not materialized either. Newman and Trudeau both draw regular paychecks, character rights have to be paid for, and the cost of video production and maintaining the impressive Web site add to the expense. Duke2000.com, which is drawing about 3 million hits a month, includes a weekly address from the candidate - produced using Alive, a proprietary technology that lets Duke move his eyebrows and appear to breathe - done in full video resolution.
"We would like to monetize the project," says Danielson. "We've accomplished our goals. We're raising our profile and proving the model. Now we're focusing on bringing those dollars back in."
Investors, including the Canadian cable company Rogers Communications, put $8.5 million into dotcomix in April, filling the company's coffers while also raising expectations. The business plan is to create "channels" of content for specific audiences ("vertical eyeballs," Danielson calls them) on the Web, then sell sponsorships on the channels and, if possible, repackage the programming for TV. For now, TV animation brings in some revenue, but losses are expected for the next couple of years, and working up to the planned late-summer launch of a broadband animation channel hasn't been cheap. "We're committed to staying with Duke2000 through the conventions, and we'll keep going if we can to the election," says Danielson.
Brad deGraf, dotcomix cofounder and an icon in the world of 3-D animation who helped develop the company's authoring technology, is more philosophical. "I'm behind doing it all the way to the end. It's really starting to jell," he says, adding that the value of Duke2000 goes beyond branding the company to demonstrating a new way of defining and marketing content. "This project is naturally transmedia. It can't live in any one medium; it's not limited to TV, or the Web, or print, or the radio. And for the first time, you can give a character a brain."
Trudeau and deGraf met when dotcomix animated Jimmy Thudpucker, Doonesbury's over-the-hill folk rocker, for Netaid.org's 1999 concert. After seeing the October 1999 Doonesbury strips in which Duke considers running for the White House, deGraf reached out with an idea. Says Buzz Hays, "We decided early on that Duke would be integrated into the real world. I asked Garry if he had considered the Roger Rabbit approach, and he said, 'You can do that?'"
DeGraf thinks that major sponsors may still come on board, especially those aimed at the broadband-rich college audience that will return to school just as the presidential race hits high gear. A live campus tour and regular spots on Conan O'Brien and MTV are also possible, he says, as is an eventual mockumentary about the campaign. In the meantime, he enjoys the drama of having the candidate mention products in hopes of gaining an endorsement. "We haven't gotten any money, but we did get a box of Lipton tea," he says, as a result of Duke declaring Lipton the official stimulant of his campaign.
Trudeau and Newman would like to keep D2K going through the summer, then really crank up the campaign after the conventions. To Newman, the possibilities offered by the technology are immense. "Puppetry is no longer required to create an imaginary character that can move and talk in real time," he points out. "You can put Ben Kingsley in the motion suit and let him do anything. He could transform into anybody."
Trudeau, who says Duke will run as an independent or as the head of his own party if he loses the Reform nomination to Pat Buchanan at the national convention August 10, can't imagine what Duke2000 will look like by November. "Everything we're doing seems to be a dress rehearsal for what follows," he says. "We have nothing to compare it to. Who knows where this is supposed to lead?"
Five presidents share the wall-sized canvas that dominates the sitting room of Trudeau's studio, a sunny fourth-floor walk-up near the American Museum of Natural History and not far from his home. The painting, which Trudeau commissioned, is by Philip Burke, best known for his contorted, violently colored illustrations on the contents page of Rolling Stone. Like stuffed heads on a game hunter's wall, the caricatures (shifty Nixon, doofy Ford, bemused Carter, vacant Reagan, prissy Bush) are a reminder of how Trudeau made his reputation. "Taste is important to me, the feel of a place," he says of his carefully appointed workspace.
There's a Chuck Close silk screen on one wall, across from a pair of small Warhols depicting a young Trudeau, plus several toy-cowboy tableaux by the photographer David Levinthal, with whom Trudeau collaborated just after graduating from Yale. But politics dominates the subject matter of the art and mementos in the apartment. There's another Burke (Nancy Reagan rampant beside a pinheaded Ronnie) in the back room where Trudeau draws Doonesbury. Also in the back room are framed drawings by editorial cartoonists, including Mike Peters and the late Jeff MacNelly, many signed and many making reference to Trudeau and his strip as players in national affairs. And a framed drawing by Ralph Steadman presents Nixon adrift in a rowboat. A photograph of a bearded Trudeau and then-President Jimmy Carter is inscribed "with admiration to Garry Trudeau, a valued analyst of the American Scene." His Pulitzer for editorial cartooning, the only one ever awarded for a daily strip, hangs discreetly in the small kitchen.
Raised by Eisenhower Republicans and politicized by the war in Vietnam, Trudeau has never been a lockstep Democrat - a charge he's heard frequently since he began drawing Doonesbury. He grew up in the small Adirondacks town of Saranac Lake, where his father was the fourth generation of the family to practice medicine and a respectable member of the provincial gentry. "His good reputation meant everything to him," says Trudeau.
His parents divorced when he was 12 and his mother, having inherited money from her father, an early IBM employee, moved to Manhattan and introduced him to a more privileged lifestyle. Young Garretson Beekman Trudeau became a painter, copying the style of everyone who impressed him, from Goya to Oldenburg. "I was an academy kind of guy, doomed to fail," he says. "I inadvertently acquired too much respect for my betters to imagine myself in their number."
By his sophomore year at Yale, Trudeau had given up painting and moved on to graphic arts, a better field for what he calls "a more modest talent." After feeling out of place in boarding school - "maybe that would have been true anywhere," he says - Trudeau flourished in college, finding friends who shared his interests in art, journalism, and theater. His creativity soared. As a junior, he developed Bull Tales, a talky, four-panel strip focusing on hero quarterback B.D. and his amorously challenged roommate, Michael Doonesbury. It debuted in the Yale Daily News.
Shaggily drawn but sharply written, Bull Tales was picked up in 1970 by the fledgling Universal Press Syndicate, which was looking for a youth-oriented strip. It launched in a slightly cleaned-up form as Doonesbury. (The name came from combining the prep school slang "Doone" - "a good-natured fool," says Trudeau - with the name of his own roommate, Charlie Pillsbury.) Within a month, Trudeau was making fun of white liberal guilt on the funny pages, and soon his characters were commenting on Vietnam and other subjects that never came up in Blondie. By the time he got his master's degree in graphic design from Yale in 1973, he was firing at will in a target-rich environment. His takes on Watergate (the gradual building of a wall around the White House, the chant of "Guilty, Guilty, Guilty," from former campus radical Mark Slackmeyer, the sunny day when the wall came down) were devastating; his humanizing view of B. D. the GI and Phred the Viet Cong, a relief.
His earliest strips display the political ecumenicism he claims, mocking the extremes of the SDS, albeit with a wink. The opinion page of The Wall Street Journal even once reprinted two weeks' worth of Doonesbury. "Close readers of the strip know that, on many issues, I'm a social conservative, something that's been obscured by the static created by my various progressive stances," he emails me. He and TV celebrity Jane Pauley, married since 1980 and highly involved with their three teenagers, share what some of his satirical targets would call Family Values.
His sharp-edged style has made him some enemies, including the Bush family, which never got over Trudeau's depictions of then-vice president George Bush. In 1984, the cartoonist placed Bush's manhood in a blind trust so that the veep could become a Reaganite. Jeb Bush, now the governor of Florida and a brother of the presumptive Republican nominee, George W., confronted Trudeau at the 1988 Republican convention, demanding that he ease up on his father. "He said, 'I have two words for you: walk softly,'" Trudeau remembers." It was a real productive conversation."
Jeff Greenfield, the veteran political commentator, first covered Trudeau when he was still studying at Yale. "Decade after decade, he's been able to pick out the soft underbelly of a political guy," says Greenfield. "He has perfect pitch."
Doonesbury made Trudeau a star, but he didn't appreciate all the attention. He enjoyed high-profile gigs like drawing magazine covers for Rolling Stone, but the prospect of sitting for a cover-story interview with Time was so upsetting that he threw up on the way to New York and had to bail. "I didn't miss the meeting," he says. "I just decided on the spot not to do the interview." He spoke to the press a lot in the early years, but eventually stopped because he saw no discernible benefit to hawking the strip.
In 1983, Trudeau did something unheard of for a cartoonist. He took a 21-month sabbatical that freed him up to work on a Doonesbury musical and allowed him to figure out what would come next for his cast of characters, who hadn't developed much since their college years. When he came back to the strip, the drawing had gone up a notch, too, but Doonesbury had always been above all a written work. "He's an amazing writer; that's what his strip is about," says political cartoonist Ted Rall. "It's a cool mix of the way people speak and the way they ought to speak. Cartoonists hate it when other cartoonists boldface the wrong word or put the exclamation point in the wrong place. He doesn't do that."
Working with a 10-day lead time for the daily strips and five weeks for the Sunday edition, Trudeau has managed to keep his material current with remarkable consistency. Recently he has been fascinated by the antiglobalism protests in Seattle and Washington, especially the affinity-group tactics used by the protesters, which he notes "could be a new way for individuals to confront and deal with organizations."
Being a parent, he's able to make his younger characters sound young, although as a group, they will never have the freshness of their forebears, or the emotional resonance for their creator. "Mike is obviously a generational touchstone for me, but Zonker is unique and first among equals, my Snoopy," he says.
As important as politics has been to Trudeau, much of his recent political material seems less inspired. This is due in part to his own ideology, but also because politics in general doesn't dominate the culture as it did for much of the '70s and '80s. "It's not as biting now," says Greenfield of the Clinton-era Doonesbury. "He's more hostile to the Republican Congress than he is to the vaguely liberal president. A Newt Gingrich or a Reagan gets him going more than the corruption of language of a Clinton."
Says Rall, whose hard-edged liberalism gets frequent play in the New York Times opinion pages, "He can be a devastating commentator when he wants to be - but, like the other Democratic cartoonists, he ran like a pussy during the impeachment." Consider Trudeau's symbolic representation of Clinton as a waffle, an image that not only lacks the satiric wallop of the bomb used for Gingrich or the feather for Dan Quayle, but also fails to address this president's deepest and most widely understood flaws.
What's certain is that the strip many newspapers carry on their op-ed pages is less controversial than it once was. Satire, which depends on exaggeration to score its points, is reduced to mere parody in the face of Swiftian elements like the semen-stained dress and Jesse Ventura. "Politics matters when there is an urgent need for change, when there's an air of crisis," says Trudeau. "The rest of the time, politics is government - my world in the '50s. Right now, most people are pretty content, which is why it makes perfect sense that the two major candidates are centrists, and Buchanan barely registers."
"I'm guessing that a) people are simply used to the strip or that b) the growing coarseness of political satire and commentary has rendered my work less inflammatory in comparison," he emails. "A decade ago, my work seemed outrageous compared to Tonight Show jokes; these days, Leno clicks off a half-dozen Clinton fellatio jokes in a single show. I have no desire to follow comedy down that particular road. Of course, one could argue that my early edge was part of the cultural shift that eventually begat (or be-shat) South Park and its numerous kin, so my position doesn't exactly lend itself to smugness."
Duke2000 is one way of kick-starting political satire in a less-than-thrilling election year. At the same time, the other Doonesbury characters - who have always thoroughly inhabited popular culture, giving the strip its soap opera addictiveness - have become fixated on business and technology to the same degree as their readers. There was a computer joke (about poorly matched roommates) in the first Doonesbury ever drawn, and early on, there was a story line about geek culture at a computer center during the mainframe era. But technology emerged as a frequent theme only with the advent of the PC in the '80s and grew with the Web in the '90s.
There was lonely Mike, chatting online as his marriage fell apart. More recently, Microsoft crushed his software company, a failure that has led to Internet companies courting Mike as CEO. "I learn a lot about tech culture just by reading and paying attention," says Trudeau, who has used a Mac since 1984 and came online during the brief heyday of CompuServe.
That knowledge, and the ability to explore it through his characters, has given Trudeau a healthy new store of satirical targets and a suitably far-reaching social phenomenon to chronicle. Mike and Kim's adventures in software and Alex's precocious Web savvy are as timely in the national discourse as were Joanie's divorce and Mark's gay marriage, but they are woven together as part of a larger theme, a new economy that is broad enough to sustain several story lines at once. It's a movement big enough to frame his work and occupy his characters in postpolitical times - and a natural target for a writer who first made his reputation as a voice of the '60s youth culture. He hasn't yet drawn a real-world tech figure like Bill Gates into the strip in the way he's done with Donald Trump, but he's definitely interested in the players on the business page. "I find all the personal stories - Gates, Myhrvold, Clark, Jobs, Andreessen, Yang - compelling, probably because I'm old enough to think it's cool that geeks, the lowest caste in my high school, currently rule."
The flip side of that, he says - the part that demands comment - is the "odious" greed and "the sense of entitlement in the ranks of the cognitive elite."
Part of his commentary on technology, Trudeau hopes, will come across in Killer App - a story about a company that develops a revolutionary method of sending full-motion video over the Web - which was up for a possible midseason replacement slot on next season's schedule until Fox killed it in May. The network had already passed on one pilot for the show, developed by Trudeau with his friend Robert Altman, but seemed ready to bite on a recast and retooled version, this one helmed by Tom Fontana, best known for NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street and HBO's grisly prison drama Oz.
For Trudeau, the canceled reshoot is just the latest delay in a three-year effort to get Killer App into production. Even before the latest news from Fox, Trudeau was wondering aloud if the show didn't belong on HBO, where his Emmy-winning Tanner '88 series (also directed by Altman) ran and a smartly written show like The Sopranos can become a breakout hit. "We were disappointed for about 5 minutes," says Trudeau of Fox's decision. "We saw all winter how hard they pushed to make it more of a Fox show, with pretty kids jumping into bed with each other. We now feel less pressure to do the kind of show that Fox feels comfortable with."
In the latest iteration, Killer App's setting has moved from Seattle to Manhattan's Silicon Alley, making production more convenient for Trudeau and Fontana, who is also based in New York and who, along with partner Barry Levinson, gives the project some helpful showbiz heft. Trudeau consulted with an engineer he met while making Doonesbury CD-ROMs in order to salt the dialog with plausible (if dumbed down) technospeak. "He worked up these incredibly dense problems, and I stripped them down and vernacularized them," Trudeau says by email. "The trick, of course, is to convey verisimilitude but keep the focus on the characters."
Creating drama out of the technology business is easy enough even in real life, and Trudeau has sketched a swift story that involves hot technology, perfidious financiers, and a villainous software magnate who, as the world's richest man, is obviously inspired by Bill Gates - yet with a personality drawn from, say, Larry Ellison. The show is stocked with predictable types - the neohippie visionary, the opportunistic VC, the scruffy coding genius - all of whom could quickly degenerate into clichés if not handled carefully. But Killer App already has some characters with potential, including Pam Thieu, a young software engineer probably inspired by Doonesbury's Kim, also a software guru. With five finished scripts and a sixth in outline form, Trudeau is confident that the characters will be well-defined. "Character development is extremely important, and probably plays to my strengths - not to mention Barry and Tom's," he says.
It's true that Doonesbury is populated with some highly evolved and complex personae; this complexity is the key to the strip's enduring popularity. But creating similar depth in a weekly TV series is a different challenge.
Trudeau has ventured into other media several times in the past, with mixed results. The 1983 musical version of Doonesbury, written for the stage with composer Elizabeth Swados, was a modest success. His Reagan-era touring revue, Rap Master Ronnie, another collaboration with Swados, proved to be a cult favorite at best. And the political satire Tanner '88 was the critics' darling. He has turned out a handful of well-regarded but unmade movie scripts, including one about a New Right operative called Special Interest for Robert Redford, and is now working with Fox Searchlight to develop a film about biomedical research.
The latest ordeal with Fox has done little to assuage Trudeau's well-earned wariness of the entertainment industry. He's not banking on the show being a success. "I'll believe it when I see it," he says. "It's a good thing I have a day job."
Although Trudeau may be bowing to the power of television with Killer App, Duke2000 is a lot closer to what has made Trudeau the man he is - it's smart, funny, and not subject to the whims of content boards or focus groups. Both Trudeau and his friend Fred Newman, who played Jimmy Thudpucker for the Netaid project, are jazzed at the chance to work together again. "We laughed so hard we were crying while we wrote yesterday," says Newman, a former host of the Britney Spears-era Mickey Mouse Club, author of a popular book about creating odd noises with one's mouth, and a working actor with a Harvard MBA. "We're comedically in sync. We're able to improvise."
In truth, the improv can be a stretch for Trudeau. "My natural inclination would be to have every word scripted, but Fred brings this observational touch to it," he says. "We introduce new words because his ear is so good, and it's worth the trade-off."
Trudeau sees Duke2000 as important to his own socialization process. Doonesbury has always been a solitary pursuit. He compares it to a writer's relationship with his journal, saying, "It may contain his deepest feelings, but when he's not actually writing in it, it's just a book sitting on his desk." Collaborating on Duke2000 brings out the best in him. "Working with actual people is a good way to air your brain out," he says. "The older I get, the more I seem to need it."
Brad deGraf calls him a perfectionist. "He has characters that he's nurtured over the years, so it can be hard to write for him, but the collaborative effort is great. We're very simpatico conceptually," he says.
When the idea of a character running for president came up, Duke was the obvious choice. "Zonker would have been too limited as a candidate by his nature, which is sweet," Trudeau says. He was looking for something a little rawer than Walt Kelly's seminal Pogo-for-President campaign from the '50s, and harder to ignore than Pat Paulsen. Duke, first seen in 1974 in his office at Rolling Stone after a bout with too much tequila and Coke, using a ruler to kill bats that only he could see, and subsequently becoming governor of American Samoa, ambassador to China, and a zombie, among other things, had the qualifications Trudeau was seeking.
His colorful past also distinguishes Duke from the character's original inspiration - Hunter S. Thompson, says Trudeau. Both Duke and Thompson (who used the name Raoul Duke as an alter ego in his work) were writers at Rolling Stone. They both believed in better living through chemistry, but Trudeau argues that his character has long outgrown easy identification with Thompson. "Hunter Thompson would have proved limiting to the character if Duke had stopped there," he says. "His lawyers call from time to time, but he doesn't have a case."
Thompson, often quoted as saying he'd like to cause Trudeau bodily harm, now denies making the threats. "No, that would be Felony Menacing, and I am never guilty of that," he scrawls in a handwritten note. "Trudo [sic#93; is dumb like Gore and greedy like Bush. My vote is Nader. I might shit on Trudo's chest - is that a crime?"
Duke, the candidate, is entertaining, if somewhat diminished in impact by the stranger-than-fiction nature of the Buchanans, Venturas, and Trumps of the world, and Trudeau says entertainment is the first goal of D2K. What people take away is an open question. "We want him to be John Rocker pretherapy, somebody nobody can get behind," says Trudeau. "If we created what Warren Beatty did with Bulworth - and to some extent this applies to Tanner - a candidate that people would say, 'Yeah, I agree with that,' then we failed. That was a conscious decision."
"A lot of people aren't going to understand the irony at all," counters Rall. "It's like the nimrods who wore ARCHIE BUNKER FOR PRESIDENT buttons because they liked what he was saying."
Newman, who grew up knowing a lot of Dukes in La Grange, Georgia, says his role lets him understand the pleasure of playing a villain: "You let out your hidden desires." Trudeau says he's not venting any steam with Duke's politically incorrect dialog and relentlessly obnoxious behavior. "I have no inner Duke," he says.
Wherever Duke comes from, he's endowed with a fresh existence unlike that of any other fictional character before him. The White House may be out of his reach - "He's done a good job of not peaking too soon," muses Greenfield - but for Trudeau, given the tools to extend his own work into the newest of new media, the campaign is already a winner.
