Marrying Swiftian satire with hi-tech saboteurship and the good ol' art of the con, The Yes Men are an infamous group of agitprop pranksters who've emerged as cable news darlings and mini movie stars in their own right. Just mild-mannered and vaguely authoritative enough in demeanor to slip through security cracks, The Yes Men -- aka Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno -- assume the identities of everyone from big oil and chemical execs to World Trade Organization officials to representatives of the U.S. Government, mounting bogus press conferences and lecture appearances to make their point. (At a Canadian oil conference, for example, they posed as ExxonMobil reps, telling 20,000 industry workers they've devised a new technique that would turn the human victims of their irresponsible practices into an oil substitute called "Vivoleum.") It's all part of their all-out, highly entertaining battle against what they finger as the U.S.'s most dangerous enemy: disaster capitalism. Their second film, The Yes Men Fix the World, expanded its release last week -- a full list of theaters showing the movie is here. Movieline chatted with Bichlbaum recently about his life's mission of punking with a purpose.
MOVIELINE: I just watched your most recent prank at the Chamber of Commerce. I wonder if you could pull back the curtain a bit and explain how a prank like that gets off the ground?
ANDY BICHLBAUM: It turns out to be ridiculously easy if you have smart people setting it up for you. We worked with these people in D.C. who decided the Wednesday before the action to do it. They rented a room at the Press Club and said they were the National Council on the Climate. They prepared a press release. I bought chamberofcommerce.us.
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Do you always buy a URL for your fronts?
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, if you're sending out a press release you should send it out from somewhere where you can get mail back.
And chamberofcommerce.us was available?
Yeah. Weird. I was surprised too. That morning we sent out an advisory to a bunch of media that there would be a press conference. But because there was such a high chance that a reporter would call the real Chamber of Commerce, we started blasting the phone lines and got people to call them relentlessly. It stopped reporters from being able to call.
How many people in that room were plants?
Maybe half. There were about 20 people there. We just wanted to be sure to have good questions after, and wanted the first question not to be hostile.
Did you anticipate that that guy would storm in?
No. That was an amazing coincidence. There was a reporter who got the advisory, and didn't read the location, which was the Press Club. She just automatically went to the Chamber of Commerce itself. They said, "What press conference?" of course, and that's how they found out about it. She showed up, then he did shortly afterward.
His reaction was so overblown yet utterly impotent. It was almost like a comedy sketch. You must have been loving it.
Totally. It was a shock at first, but then it was amazing. It made it onto CNN and MSNBC. If he hadn't come on it wouldn't have been as dramatic.
How did you get started in prank activism?
In 1999, we wanted to go to the Seattle protests, but we couldn't make it. So we set up a fake WTO website, and accidentally started getting e-mail to it. One day we got an invitation to a conference. We took a camera just to film whatever mishaps might happen, because we prepared this really offensive talk as the WTO, and we figured people would react badly. They didn't. They just sat there and applauded. We had lunch with them afterward. Then we kept getting invitations, and we started to bring a movie crew along. We never anticipated that we'd get the reaction we did the first few times -- otherwise we would have brought more cameras.
You never expected people to accept it. Is it because people aren't listening? Or they're just trained to accept something if it's delivered at the proper, authoritative cadence?
I think what we say is basically normal to them. Like at this Halliburton conference, I say "disaster can be an opportunity. You need to seize the day. The Black Plague was a great opportunity and so was the great deluge." That's actually what they're saying. We just make it so clear that it's absurd to the rest of us. To them, it's what they hear. Disaster capitalism.
How do you write the scripts?
It's a group effort. We trade them back and forth, working on them as long as we can. The Chamber speech was basically done in a day. But some of the speeches -- the Exxon one at the oil conference -- we worked on it for six months. It's a lot about the writing. Speeches get published a lot. In the film, you see just a couple minutes of each speech, but they are quite long. Twenty minutes usually.
Is there a Yes Men manifesto?
I guess so. There's a Frequently Asked Question page on our site. We just want to expose the absurdity of the theory that if you let the wealthy do whatever they want, things will eventually work out for all of us. That was the dominant theory of our society for 30 years, beginning with Reagan. Our manifesto says that's completely preposterous, so let's ridicule the hell out of it and provide an alternative. The only alternative is that there's this enormous corporate pressure on elected leaders like Obama; we need to provide a different force. We put ourselves on the line, we take risks and do absurd things at conferences, sometimes we get hauled out. Usually it's nothing, but there is a risk, and we're saying that's what's called for now. Visible public pressure. It's really come to that.
Has it not come to arrest yet?
No.
Not even close?
Not even close, no.
What's the worst thing they did to you?
At the Exxon thing, we were hauled out -- and not because they caught onto it because of the absurdity of what we said, but because someone recognized me. They basically dragged us to this holding cell and said that things were going to be very bad for us. The police arrived and just laughed and let us go. We've pissed off a lot of people, obviously.
Have you found it harder to pull these things off with your newly increased visibility?
No. Not at all.
Are you getting recognized?
No. I think I'm ordinary-looking enough that I just kind of blend in. But we are involving a lot of people now in the things we're doing. A lot of it is just hitting the streets with 100,000 copies of a newspaper. We share our secrets liberally with people, so if anybody wants to, they can do it. We also want to start training to show how to do this.
Is there a dream sting you have? Someone you'd really like to take down?
Chamber of Commerce. They do represent the nastiest of American business. It's so powerful; they have so much money. The Chamber itself has $37 million quarterly budget to lobby. And the corporations like Chevron with their Human Energy Campaign. The Faces of Coal. The Energy Citizen Rallies -- these fake rallies they put on. It's just this incredible pressure, and it's the worst thing in our society. The pressure money exerts over politics. So the ideal target is diffused, but it's that mindset. It's not one target specifically. When Bush was in power it was easy. Now it's still all there, but now we have a chance to beat it. That depends on us actually activating.
What do you think of the job President Obama has done until now?
Nothing to complain about except that people haven't provided countervailing pressure. So when he gives into industry and makes stupid compromises, you have to wonder why he's doing that. He does that because we aren't providing anything else. He has to be able to point out the window and say to his corporate influencers, but I can't do what you're saying because these people are coming here with pitchforks, basically.
Is there a specific example of instance in which he caved to a corporate pressure that rankled you guys?
Just in general. No. I mean -- yes and no. I actually believe he's doing the best he can in the constraints he's got to deal with, as are a lot of elected officials. But what is missing is pressure from our side. But the tide is changing on that.