Al Franken

No, I thought that would be a bad idea. There were certain things I know I did that I wish were in the movie but it’s their movie [laughs]. You know that party where the Republicans all are?

Yeah, I saw Charlie Rose at the party and Charlie sees the camera and he goes, “How long have they been following you?” I said, “Like a year.” He goes, “well, how are you going to end it?” We didn’t know at the time and I said, “you know what, if we can’t find an ending I may have to murder someone and Charlie, it could be you.” Then a couple months later, we’re in Minneapolis and I was saying something like, “Why don’t we just end the movie by including that clip in earlier and then have me murder Charlie Rose.” They would follow me as I go into his apartment building, go up the elevator, knock on his door, Charlie answers and then you cut to me pistol whipping Charlie while he is on his hands and knees begging for his life. Charlie is doing a terrible job of acting and then we cut to Kevin Spacey as Charlie Rose and me pistol whipping him and killing him. Then we cut to The Charlie Rose show with Charlie, [director] Nick [Doob] and me asking why we put Kevin Spacey in. Now I knew they weren’t going to end the movie like that but I thought it would be very funny to put that in. But they decided otherwise.

I’m not ruling out an HBO special for me in the future.

They can certainly attack me when I’m not there. They do that all the time. I was with Mark Luther who is our resident dittohead [a fan of The Rush Limbaugh Show] on my Air America show. He’s the guy we have on like once a week and we play Rush Limbaugh and Mark has to try to defend him. Mark has known me for 39 years. He said he was listening to some right wing show and this guy said he was at a hot dog stand with me at the Republican convention in San Diego and this guy tried to say hi to me and I was really rude. I said to Mark, “Does that sound like me?” Mark says, “you know that doesn’t.” I got to put up with that crap.

It’s really important to me not to lie. It’s real important not to make mistakes. But you make mistakes. There’s a difference between making a mistake and lying. We had one mistake in [the book] Lies and the Lying Liars. We included a preliminary report on the damage that was done when the Clintons left the White House. The report said there was no damage done, [laughs] but remember Arie Fleischer [George W. Bush’s press secretary at the time] and all these guys were saying there was all this huge vandalism that was done by the Clintons as they left but that was just a big myth. The second report came out and said that there were some W keys removed from the computers. There was also some incredibly minor stuff that might have occurred when a rug came up or a phone line got ripped out. But that was a mistake because we used a preliminary report but that happens. There’s a big difference between that and then doing the painstaking lying that Ann Coulter does, where you just have to labor and labor just to make a lie.

I think she is deluding herself some of the time and she knows she’s lying some of the time and justifying it. I did a debate with her which I will not do anymore because it is not any fun. I repeated a litany of lies that she’s done and she just wouldn’t respond. She’d go, “This can’t be about Ann Coulter. Ok, I’m a flawed person.” I think there’s something desperately wrong with her and I think that there’s a self-esteem issue there. Most of us try to do our best work and see our work as an extension of ourselves and try to do something that is good.

I’m serious about it but I don’t know if I’m going to do it. Obviously it’s a big personal decision and also I don’t know what the rest of the DFL thinks. I’m getting an idea that a lot of people want me to do it [laughs]. I told myself I don’t have to decide until next year.

They just got to feel that it means something, that it means something to their lives. Our politics has to be more about the future than it is now. Look at these huge deficits and look at the investments in prisons and weapons as opposed to investments in education.

Very short term thinking. But we also have to convince kids that it is worth the work and it is actually a lot of fun and also real important at the same time. How many things are fun and important at the same time? [laughs]

No, there were times when I hated it. There were times when it drove me nuts, especially toward the end where it was getting unwieldy with all the cast members. There was just a tendency to start getting too many people. It started to get frustrating to me because we would produce too much and I had kids and we were staying there way too late at night. But mainly I loved being there. The best memories of my life are always going to be rolling on the floor laughing up on the 17th floor on a Tuesday night and writing with incredible writers and cast members. That’s the quintessential memory of Saturday Night is Live.

Yeah and it was a very interesting thing. He was in this review in Chicago and there was really funny stuff in it and there was stuff that wasn’t really funny. I said “Somebody in this group is really good.” [laughs] They had the right ethic of every one of them writes everything and none of them writes anything kind of thing. That’s all fine and dandy except I couldn’t hire everybody and somebody there was the guy. So I kept coming back to the show and figuring out by who was in what sketch and talking with them and it was Smigel. I really saw a talent there.

We actually just did. We did a fundraiser in Minneapolis on June 8th and we did a half hour together.

Some old, some new. It was great.

Wesley Clark is half Jewish.

Oh, it would be a dot on my ankle [laughs].

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck