Peter Brown | The Curious Garden

October 26, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Peter Brown [17:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From the JacketFlap website:

Peter Brown is a published author and an illustrator of children’s books and young adult books. Some of the published credits of Peter Brown include ‘Kaline Klattermaster’s Tree House,’ ‘The Fabulous Bouncing Chowder,’ ‘Snowbone,’ and now ‘The Curious Garden.’

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Comics, Art, Childrens, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Entertainment, PODCAST

Tony Fucile | Let’s Do Nothing

October 9, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. We have some great guests on the show today. It’s a brand new show format. This week, the featured guest is Peter Mulvey. I’ll be talking with him for upwards of half an hour later on in the show. He’s put out his latest album called ‘Notes from Elsewhere.’ Actually, ‘Letters from a Flying Machine.’ They’re both recent albums. I’ll be excited to talk to him and play some great music. On this show, I talk to both Sound Authors and Authors of Sound, so before that, I’ve got a couple sound authors indeed on the show, at the very beginning. Right after my first guest, I’ll be talking to Tom Edwards, who’s the author of ‘Blue Jesus.’ It’s an incredible folk tale. It explores faith, miracles and racial divides in Appalachia. That’ll be fascinating. But my first guest is the incredible author and illustrator Tony Fucile. He’s written a fantastic picture book called ‘Let’s Do Nothing.’ It’s absolutely hilarious and beautiful. Welcome to the show, Tony!

Tony Fucile: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: How do you pronounce your last name?

Tony Fucile: ‘Foo-chili,’ like chili beans.

Dr. Kent: Fucile. I like that. Tell me about this book; it’s awesome.

Tony Fucile: Well thanks, thanks a lot. The idea of doing nothing didn’t come right away. That was kind of a product of two bored kids. I just sort of invented these two kids that were bored out of their minds, and then had them talk to each other. Out of that came this idea of trying to do nothing.

Dr. Kent: I can recall, when I was a kid, summer vacation was all about doing nothing, to my parents’ chagrin.

Tony Fucile: Oh, yeah. It’s one of those things where I feel like I discovered what I love because I had nothing to do. I was just sort of trying everything on a whim. Drawing was the thing (and eventually the animation) that I found. That may not have happened had I been overscheduled, like a lot of kids are.

Dr. Kent: Now you’ve worked on a bunch of big films, and some really cool stuff. One of my favorite movies ever is ‘The Incredibles.’ You were on that film as well. Now you’re a children’s book author: are there similarities, differences?

Tony Fucile: They’re amazingly similar in a lot of ways because you’re telling a story. In a sense, the picture book is more like a short film. You’re coming up with an idea, and you’ve got a beginning, middle and end. You’re staging everything, and you’re designing props. For me the comfortable part of course was animating the character. If you want, look at the book; you can see that it’s very similar to animation poses: key expressions; what we call ’storytelling poses’ when we’re animating. Every scene in an animated film has a ‘key pose,’ that kind of describes what the character’s feeling or thinking; kind of a mix of a lot of emotions, a lot of the other drawings. So the book is a little bit like a bunch of key poses. So there are a lot of similarities. The one thing that I have to get used to is the solitude because animated film, a feature film especially, takes hundreds of artists. We all do our own thing, so it’s a bit of a shock for me to have to figure out color, because all these years I’ve been drawing basically in black and white. The experts, painters and color specialists, do all the other stuff. Also, staging, that’s something that an animator generally doesn’t do. Also designing the world; in this case, the room or backdrops, and the props and things. It was fun, but very different in that regard. You’re not really collaborating as much. There is collaboration with your editor and art director, but not nearly the same as being on a film.

Dr. Kent: When you’re writing for children, and when you’re animating for children, or drawing for them, what do you think about? Do you get yourself back in that summer vibe of not having anything to do? How do you get yourself back there? What do you do?

Tony Fucile: You know, I don’t have to do anything. I don’t think I’ve ever really left. I started really young; I started making films when I was 12. I knew I just wanted to be an animator early on. I even had the notion of making storybooks too, but animation was the thing that got me going. So I never really got out of that. I never had that thing where I would go to an animated film and feel all sheepish about it: you know, the 17 year old guy going into the Disney film and feeling a little embarrassed. It’s always been a part of my brain; it’s been stuck in that childhood way of looking at things.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about this book. What do you do as a children’s author to support it? Do you do readings for kids? How did you end up writing in the first place?

Tony Fucile: I had another idea for a film, for a storybook, that I wanted to do first. Then, while I was working it up, I saw that someone else had done it: Jules Feiffer had done it, ‘The Daddy Mountain.’ I was a little bummed about that. I had such a strong idea for this thing. Then this idea came to me one night in bed, and I told my wife; it was midnight, or whatever. She told me to write it down, and I said ‘I’ll remember it tomorrow.’ Of course, she kicked me out of bed and said, ‘Write it down, write it down.’ So I ended up writing the whole thing that night. The basic beats are pretty much what I came up with that night. I definitely wanted to do picture books; it’s something that I’ve been sort of quietly thinking about for a long time.

Dr. Kent: How about the characters themselves? You look at the front cover of this thing: I feel like I know these two kids.

Tony Fucile: Sal is sort of based loosely on me and a little bit of my son, Eli. So it’s kind of a combo. It’s really based on me and my friend, Steve Kerr, who’s my buddy. He’s almost a year younger than me, and we were neighbors. We grew up together. I remember he and I going through moments like that, where we felt like we were losing our minds; we were bored. You just sit there and you lay on the ground and writhe in pain because it’s so awful. So it’s really based on him. He was always much smarter than I was. He was kind of like Frankie; he was always a little bit ahead of the curve. I was maybe the enthusiastic one, but he was a little bit ahead. So they are loosely based on him and I.

Dr. Kent: Cool. Are you the one with the goofy glasses, or the one with the cowlick?

Tony Fucile: I have the cowlick: the skinny guy. He has a little paunch on him. He didn’t have the glasses, though. I added those. I needed a prop for him.

Dr. Kent: You’ve got these characters. In your brain, do you know what they look like from every angle? Because a weird thing for children’s illustrators is of course that as he goes through the book, when you look at him from different angles, he’s got to look like the same guy, right?

Tony Fucile: Yes. Especially the little square-headed guy, Frankie. So I sculpted their heads; I did little sculptures. Starting with a square, and I put some yellow hair on it. Yes, so it was rough. I needed that reference to figure out how to draw him from various angles. We had that in animation a lot, especially the hand-drawn animation. We would have mockups that would help us draw particular angles.

Dr. Kent: You actually sculpt the head, like out of clay, or on the computer, or what?

Tony Fucile: I sculpt them with clay.

Dr. Kent: Wow.

Tony Fucile: Then I’d stick them on top of a pencil. Then I would grab the pencil, and if I was having trouble with an angle, I would use it as a prop.

Dr. Kent: So every character you’ve ever created, do you have little pencils with little heads on them?

Tony Fucile: In the studios we had professional sculptors come in and do work with us and do our characters for us. Then we referenced those during production. It’s one of those things that they’ve been doing since ‘Snow White.’

Dr. Kent: Really?

Tony Fucile: Yes, because when you’re trying to get something, you can get away with it with a children’s book because things aren’t moving through space as much. You want it to feel solid and that it looks like it’s fairly substantial and it’s dimensional quality there. With animation you have to actually move through space. You really have to pay attention to where things are attached, and the perspective of the head. It’s one of those really tough challenges for hand-drawn animation especially.

Dr. Kent: So you do draw by hand? You’re not one of the folks that does the digital animation part of it?

Tony Fucile: Do you mean digital drawing?

Dr. Kent: Yes.

Tony Fucile: Well I do a mix. Strangely, I started this on the computer, on a tablet. I like that because you can maneuver things around quickly, shrink things, and then organize things which is good. But the final art, I like to draw it as much as I can. ‘Let’s Do Nothing’ is drawn and painted: painted with acrylic and ink.

Dr. Kent: This kind of has the vibe of the old Dr. Seuss books. It’s got the real tactile feel of real illustration.

Tony Fucile: Well, thanks! Thank you.

Dr. Kent: Cool. It’s a pleasure to chat with you about this. Where can folks pick up this book? Are you doing any kind of traveling around? I know Candlewick Press put it out, and they’re a great children’s publisher. The book, of course, is called, ‘Let’s Do Nothing.’ What are you doing to back it up?

Tony Fucile: I did a couple of school events, and that’s really about it. I went to the ALA last summer; that was interesting - that was fun.

Dr. Kent: Fun. What kind of feedback are you getting?

Tony Fucile: Pretty good. A lot of Internet blogs are reacting to it well. It’s been reviewed fairly well.

Dr. Kent: Any angry parents who are saying, ‘We don’t want our kids to do nothing!’

Tony Fucile: [Laughs] I haven’t had that yet. Kids, it’s so fun to read it to them. I’ve learned how (well, I’ve only done a couple of these now), but I’ve learned to let them kind of do the page turn. When you see that the dog’s about to take a pee on him, and all that stuff, they really like to get in there and yell at me: ‘Hey, wait a minute! The dog’s in the corner!’ So I kind of play dumb when I read it, and they tell what’s going on. It’s really fun. So that’s a blast seeing the kids react.

Dr. Kent: You actually see your audience, yes.

Tony Fucile: They get the whole idea that you can’t do nothing. There’s no way to do nothing. It’s a lot of fun to see that.

Dr. Kent: That’s awesome. I’ve been chatting with Tony Fucile and his book’s called, ‘Let’s Do Nothing.’ It’s out on Candlewick Press. Thank you so much for chatting with me.

Tony Fucile: Thanks for having me, thank you.

Dr. Kent: I can’t wait to see what he does next. This is a great little book: ‘Let’s Do Nothing.’ Check it out.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Childrens, Comics, TRANSCRIPTS, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Tony Fucile | Let’s Do Nothing

October 9, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Tony Fucile [13:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Tony Fucile has spent over twenty years designing and animating characters for cartoon feature films. During the first fifteen years, he put pencil to paper to help bring life to characters from The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, The Lion King, and The Iron Giant. And in the last six years, he put mouse to mouse pad for the Oscar-winning Finding Nemo and The Incredibles, for which he was a Supervising Animator. Tony’s first picture book for children, Let’s Do Nothing!, was released by Candlewick Press in Spring 2009. He’s currently working on a chapter book series by Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee about two friends named Bink and Golly. He’s also excited to begin work on Mitchell’s License, a picture book by Hallie Durand to be published by Candlewick Press. Tony was born in San Francisco and currently resides nearby with his wife, Stacey, their two kids, Eli and Elinor, and two Chihuahuas (Pedro and Kahlua).

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Comics, Art, Childrens, Fiction, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Eric Appleman | Sound Authors Radio

December 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is Friday, September 12, 2008. We’re in the middle of the political season, it’s been an exciting fall for anyone that watches CNN and listens to the polls like I am. I’ve got four guests on the show today and my first guest will have something to do with the political race. His name is Eric Appleman. The second guest wrote a book called A Nation For All: How the Catholic Vision of the Common Good Can Save America from the Politics of Division; that’s Chris Korzen and Alexia Kelley. The third guest on the show will be Stop Clutter from Stealing your life. Of course that’s always a good thing in our lives at any time of the year. Mike Nelson wrote about clutter from stealing your life. Then I have a musical guest on the show at the end, The Boulder Acoustic Society, a great new band. So my first guest on the show I’d like to welcome Eric Appleman, who edited a book of editorial cartoons called the Race for the 2008 Democratic Nomination, and he also edited a book called The Race for the 2008 Republican Nomination. Welcome to the show Eric Appleman.

Eric Appleman: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to talk with you.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about these books.

Eric Appleman: Yes, so basically I run a website on the presidential campaigns, which I’ve been running since 1998. We have a section where we look at all the different books on the campaign and I noticed there were no books of editorial cartoons on presidential campaigns. There was one done in 1992 on Bill Clinton but there hasn’t been anything since then and so this struck me as a gap and I’ve always been interested in political cartoons. My background is in political communications and how you present ideas. So in 2004 I went to the association’s American editorial cartoonist and said you guys should do a book. I spoke to them at their convention here in Washington DC briefly and no one took me up on that.

I went back again in 2007 and said I’ll work on this book and you guys can get a substantial share of the proceeds; what do you think of that. They went through the Board and approved the idea and the next step was to find a publisher and there was a publisher in Gretna, Louisiana; Falcon Publishing and they’ve done a series every year called best editorial cartoons of the year. So they agreed to take on this project. The idea was to have them out in time for the convention since they describe and show cartoons on the road to the democratic and the republican nomination.

Dr. Kent: Where did you get into the world of cartoons themselves? Of course I guess most folks are more excited about political cartoons than articles and all the rest. They’re fantastic but how did you get this idea for yourself?

Eric Appleman: As I indicated, presidential campaigns is my specific focus, so even in 2000 I clipped a full box of these editorial cartoons and pasted them in a book. So its just basically these are some of the most incisive commentators around and really you can capture in one drawing what you might not even be able to capture in a full length article; the essence of a candidate or a candidacy or an event. So that’s why that’s particularly interesting. But once we got the go ahead to work on the book, it was a very great challenge.

We sent out emails to members of the AAC and I went even further afield to non-members soliciting cartoons. All sorts of cartoonists, over 120 cartoonists, sent in anywhere from one to four or five dozen cartoons and so you can imagine it was a huge challenge to sort through all those and decide which ones were the best ones. The original idea was for a book of 98 pages and we moved that up to 160 pages but even then, that was really not enough.

There were so many good cartoons that we had to cut out and I should really emphasize that this is a unique book because it has cartoons from the top editorial cartoonists around the country who you would see in the paper and news magazines and that was possible through this arrangement with the AACC and in which they receive a substantial share of the proceeds. They also have a very good website that I should note; its editorialcartoonists.com and Ted Rowe, who is the president of that association was extremely helpful in bringing these books together.

Dr. Kent: You have a website called Democracy in Action, the race for the white house. What do you think of it? Its fantastically interesting contest right now. Talk about the election and I guess the importance of political cartoons to us in the middle of what Obama calls silly season where it just seems like lipstick on a pig and all of this stuff. Tell me what you’re following right now?

Eric Appleman: Well, right now we’re just getting off the conventions. I was in both Denver and Minneapolis so I’m still recovering from those experiences, which can be very grueling and they were so close together that there was really no time to recover and so the books came out in mid-June and the idea was to have them available for the convention on the theory that they would be interested in seeing how these candidates emerged and Barack Obama and John McCain. I should note that there were different challenges in putting the two books together. As you can imagine there was a lot more interest in the democratic race and the Hillary / Obama contest. So there was just so much more material to go through and so many more painful cuts that could not be included to try in get in that 160 page limit.

Dr. Kent: And on the republican side?

Eric Appleman: On the republican side, the race ended earlier and so we have included some cartoons from those first few months when senator McCain was out there pretty much as the presumptive nominee but the interesting thing there are the cartoons that show the conservatives distrust of Senator McCain. There are many of those once he was the nominee he kind of distanced the conservatives from himself, which we now see has been somewhat alleviated by his choice for Vice President.

Dr. Kent: So tell me a little bit about you. you’re the author of many political CD ROMs, you’ve self published a field guide to the 1992 presidential campaign, now of course you’ve published these two books with the political cartoons. Tell me about the website, tell me about what you do, what you’re working on now, all of that?

Eric Appleman: Right, well the website p2008.org is really designed to educate folks about the political process and their role in making it work and the specific focus is on presidential campaigns and I really try to be very systematic rather than be turned to a new state where there will be a story on page one on a particular campaign and maybe a story on page B5. I try and lay it all out very systematically and reference original source material and point people to the best available resources by other organizations. So it has done fairly well as indicated by Monster-Sifford in May of 1998 after working on CD-ROMs before that.

The books reflect that approach, so you’ll see in the book that I have included cartoons on some of the candidates who really didn’t get very far, like Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Ron Paul for example was a difficult one. The editorial cartoons in some sense reflect news coverage so I had to search far and wide to find some Ron Paul cartoons. I found four finally but you know, I included about 20 each for Giuliani, Romney, Thompson and Mike Huckabee, and really had to scrabble around to just find those four for Ron Paul. So I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your question there.

Dr. Kent: We can keep going. Ron Paul still interests me. He’s apparently still on the ticket out in Montana.

Eric Appleman: I’m not aware of that. I know that he was at the press club yesterday I think it was and had third party candidates on the stage with him and was encouraging people to eschew the two major party candidates and consider voting for a candidate of principle. It was kind of eye opening to see how few of these cartoonists took on a Ron Paul toon. And I should say that after all the editing was done, starting with these 125 or so cartoonists who submitted works, there are about over 75 cartoonists that represented in the books and over 250 cartoons in each book. It’s very rare that you would see such a collection.

Dr. Kent: Tell me the life of a political cartoonist. What do they do every day? How do they go about creating these incredible things?

Eric Appleman: Well, I talked to them and it’s interesting that some of them have very long careers. It’s remarkable they’ve been working for 30 or so years but they go into the office or some of them work out of their home and they face a blank sheet of paper and they’ve got to come up with an idea. Some of these guys are really geniuses and I should also note that the whole industry if one can call it that, or business, is under some pressure. You may have read about newspaper downsizing? And that does affect editorial cartoonists and some of these people have been downsized or offered buy outs.

One of the examples that come to mind is Layne Powell, a Raleigh news observer and a very good cartoonist. He’s been there I think for at least two decades, probably longer and they wanted to reduce his hours and he said no. Bottom line is he’s working there through the election and then after that it’s not clear what he will be doing. So there’s been a lot of stories like that. Another thing that’s very interesting is how cartoonists have tried to adapt to the pressure.

So you see a lot of animation, people working on animations, and that’s very time consuming. Also another thing that you see from editorial cartoonists is some of them have very good logs and they show you some of their early sketches and ideas that they started out; thrown out rather. The newspaper maybe said this is too strong, we can’t do that. So I would be encouraged to take a look at those kinds of things. One in particular was Matt Davies and you can just Google him and he has a very good blog. There are others out there like that.

Dr. Kent: How has it been supporting this book, getting into this world of editorial cartoons so much that you have to have this book and you’re out on the road talking about it and all that? I can imagine it’s like a kid in the candy store.

Eric Appleman: Well you have a fervid imagination there! I haven’t really done much in the public arena; it’s not really my cup of tea. I’m more of a content person so I did you know an appearance out there in Minneapolis at the Civic bash but I have not really done much promotional stuff; I’m not really the most articulate person and I think the books really do speak for themselves. If you are in a bookstore and have a chance to look, just thumb through and you’ll see on any one or two pages there’ll be one that really brilliantly captures the essence of some of these candidates.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real honor speaking with Eric Appleman. He edited two books; one for the democrats, one for the republicans. The Race for the 2008 Democratic Nomination, a book of editorial cartoons and The Race for the 2008 Republican Nomination; a book of editorial cartoons. With all of the recent happenings in the presidential race, wouldn’t it be great if we had a chance to automatically have another book full of the recent happenings but I guess we can check out all of the artists that are within these books on their own websites and blogs. It’s an exciting book, I love reading all of these cartoons. It’s been a great thing speaking with you.

Eric Appleman: Well thanks very much and again I would just refer people to the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, which were essential in putting these books together and their website editorialcartoonists.com.

Dr. Kent: And your website again?

Eric Appleman: That is www.p2008.org.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful, well thank you so much for chatting with me today and I look forward to the next 60 days.

Eric Appleman: Thanks very much, it was a pleasure to be with you, take care.

Dr. Kent: My next guest on the show is going to be Chris Korzen from the book A Nation for All: How the catholic vision of the common good can save America from the politics of division. Come on back for that.

Posted by admin | Filed Under Comics, History, TRANSCRIPTS, Politics, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST

Interview with Christopher Tennant | Sound Authors Radio

December 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! There’s a lot of talk these days about the rich and the poor, Wall Street, the scoundrels and the elite and all sorts of things. There are some television shows on all about the lives of the rich and famous; Gossip Girl is out there for kids and the author of The Official Filthy Rich Handbook is Christopher Tennant and he’s on the show with us today. Welcome to the show.

Christopher Tennant: Hi how ya doing? Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about the lifestyles of the filthy rich in a nutshell here.

Christopher Tennant: Let’s see, it’s the .001 percent of Americans who as you might have read made a ton of money in the last decade basically. There’s always been the rich, but never this sort of filthy rich, which are people with more than well 30 million in liquid assets. And they’ve never had a book; they’ve never had a guidebook in like every exclusive club. Every exclusive club I’ve been to I didn’t see one so I decided to write a book for that. It’s a hysterical tongue in cheek book that is really a cradle to grave guide of how to fit in with the filthy rich.

Sally: This is so funny Christopher. I was reading your website last night and right now I’m actually looking at the heiress and can you tell us a little more about how you came up with the whole idea for how you’re labeling her earrings and her dress. Did you have any sort of models or guides for this particular photograph and picture?

Christopher Tennant: Yeah, basically from my end I’ve been a journalist in New York for about ten years working at page 6 of the New York Post, and a bunch of different New York magazines; New York Magazine and a newspaper called the New York Observer and ran into all of these people. I started thinking there’s a lot of, it’s a subculture like any other subculture. They have their own kind of ways of speaking and dressing and their own social rules that guide how they all behave.

And the official preppy handbook you might remember came out in 1980 and basically the publisher I ended up going with actually published the preppy handbook in 1980 so I got to work with the same designer. The preppy handbook was kind of a first satirical guide and that was about the declining species of the 80s, which was certainly the pop color, glossy, New England preppy. So the format kind of worked for it.

Dr. Kent: The book is amazing. It pops on every page and I’ve got to say I sat there for about an hour just reading page after page when I first picked up the book. It’s fantastically put together. There’s so much information in there, this must have taken you for ever.

Christopher Tennant: It took about a year and a half. It started out being late so I kind of when I was finally done I looked back on it and said oh my god, how did you do that? It was really kind of, I worked at 100 percent true and I wanted it to be 100 percent funny but I settled for 90/80 to be charitable. Yeah, it was just tons and tons of research. All of the information is kind of out there and I did a lot of interviews with a lot of very over privileged people in different parts of the country.

Dr. Kent: This week is a big week in politics along with just the Wall Street stuff and I got to say I’ve been hearing about a lot of really rich folks scrambling a little bit because they know their taxes are going to be going up.

Christopher Tennant: Yeah, they’re just, they seem, the filthy rich are just suffering the same kind of lack of awareness as everyone else. It just seems like the country as a whole everyone is kind of pulling back in anticipation of something really bad happening, which I think is going to be a self fulfilling prophecy. I’ve heard of people canceling their job charters in St. Bart’s over Christmas and all that. It’s those tough decisions but it seems like nobody really knows what’s going to happen so they’re saying oh, maybe its not a good idea to you know go on a three week golf excursion in Scotland this year. Everyone has this wait and see approach. So their obviously doing fine, they’re going to be just fine.

Sally: I’d love to know in terms of you working with your publisher and editor, how much input did you have and how much editorial control did you have to give up? Were you involved in picking the photographs of the models? Were you involved with a lot of it?

Christopher Tennant: I actually did, yes. The design was really a collaborative effort and I was involved in every step. I recluded people for the photo shoots and it was really a back and forth effort. Because there are so many pieces in it, I think there’s over 300 little pieces of independent boxes or little charts or whatever so I would kind of map out what the chapter would look like and the designer would go into it and we’d go back and forth.

Sally: It’s just a great job. As somebody that did my own book I just want to say it’s great.

Christopher Tennant: Thanks, they really wanted to kill me by the end of it. They gave me a lot of rope because it was this sort of seminal book for me. I always wanted to write a book like that and I think its pitch perfect satire so that was kind of hanging over me. I wanted to produce something that was at least as good as that so I was really, we didn’t speak for a few weeks after the book was done, they were like okay crazy person go away.

Dr. Kent: Were these models or were they people playing the part?

Christopher Tennant: Half of them are friends of mine and the other half are people that work in publishing companies.

Dr. Kent: How about you? Did you model the filthy rich on yourself?

Christopher Tennant: No, not at all. For better or for worse, no.

Dr. Kent: Is that your goal with this book and all the rest to become on of these filthy rich?

Christopher Tennant: It’s got to sell an awful lot of copies because it’s only $11.95. So 100 million copies might put me up there. If I had known what I was getting into from the beginning because it really took from cradle to grave to cover everything. So I would go around and talk to people at parties or read something and go wait we have to mention that. There would always be something. Or ooh, there’s this picnic boat, this boat made by Hinckley and its 36 feet long and costs $750,000 and John Kerry has one and all these people have one. And it was like no, I didn’t know about the Hinckley boat. So then all these little kind of bits of information was tossed at me from different research excursions and I would add it in. I really did want to be all inclusive.

Dr. Kent: The book is called The Official Filthy Rich Handbook. It’s really something that all Americans, especially middle class Americans have to read. It’s about the lives of the filthy rich and how to get there by Christopher Tennant. It’s a beautiful tongue in cheek satire, I love it, we both love it. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Christopher Tennant: Well thank you, so much. It’s at Barnes, Borders and Amazon and I have a website filthyrichhandbook.com.

Sally: By the way congratulations for being number three today in the sociology class at Amazon. I’m very impressed with your ranking so good job.

Christopher Tennant: Thanks, yeah I was worried about the total economic implosion but we’re hanging on. But its still fun to read even if you’re hurting for cash.

Dr. Kent: Thanks so much and have a wonderful day.

Christopher Tennant: You too man.

Dr. Kent: Right after the break we’re going to have book marketing strategist Warren Whitlock, legendary book marketing fellow and he’s going to be twittering at the same time as he’s talking with us on the show and I’m twittering here as well. Come on back for Warren Whitlock.

Posted by admin | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Comics, Entertainment, Hollywood, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST