BY SOREN ANDERSEN The News Tribune

At a business conference in Finland a few years ago, a speaker from the World Trade Organization informed the audience that the WTO had come up with a new method of controlling workers at distant locations. Stepping from behind the lectern, he was approached by an aide who grabbed him by the lapels and tore off his suit.

Underneath his staid and sensible business attire he was clad from neck to feet in what appeared to be a jumpsuit made of shiny gold lamé. As conferees stared, he hit a small switch and a giant golden phallus unfurled from the folds of the outfit. On its tip was what looked like a small TV screen. On that screen, the speaker soberly said, managers could monitor the activities of faraway employees.

True story.

Now here's the punch line: Nobody gasped in outrage. Nobody called security. Nobody turned a hair.

These people had just become unwitting extras in a documentary about a pair of pranksters who traveled the world to spear, spindle and otherwise spoof the conventional wisdoms of global trade policy.

The two, Andy Bichlbaum, 40, and Mike Bonanno, 36 - two East Coast activists - call themselves The Yes Men. Their movie, called by no coincidence whatever "The Yes Men," opens in Seattle on Oct. 1 at the Landmark Harvard Exit.

"Nobody noticed there was something fundamentally wrong with the lecture," said Bichlbaum, the man in the golden getup (which was made of Spandex, not lamé) during a recent visit to Seattle.

In Finland following the great unveiling, Bichlbaum continued his speech in sober tones. When he finished, there was polite applause. And then there were questions. Those, too, were polite.

"Afterwards, they came up and said, 'That was really strange for the WTO to be engaging in theatrics for us.' But nobody noticed that there was something wrong with what the theatrics were about," Bichlbaum said.

Everyone seemed willing to let the suit slide. It was bizarre.

It was all caught on video, and that was no mere happenstance. The conferencegoers had been hoaxed, duped, punk'd! The pair's flimflam in Finland was not their first act of political prank-pulling. Long active in left-wing political causes, the men have been pulling similar stunts since 1999 when, in the wake of the WTO riots in Seattle, they set up a parody Web site that mimicked the WTO's actual online site. It was so realistic that it wasn't long before organizers of business conferences from around the world were e-mailing invitations to their events, invitations Bichlbaum and Bonanno were only too happy to accept.

They've been out of the business of satirizing the WTO since 2003 when, figuring that they had pushed the joke to the limit, they announced at a conference in Australia that the organization has dissolved itself.

Like all their other audiences, the Aussies believed them. That's not to say their prankster days are passed. Far from it. In Seattle to talk about their movie, they said that lately they've been busy trying to give heartburn to George W. Bush and the GOP. In a sense, that brings them full circle. During the 2000 presidential campaign they set up a spoof site that mimicked the official Bush Web site. That effort so irked the candidate that according to their movie he said, "There ought to be limits to freedom."

This summer they were at the Republican National Convention in New York, where they managed to get onto the floor, under false pretenses. There, they handed out fliers to delegates urging the faithful to, as the cover said in letters of red white and blue, "Take the USA Patriot Pledge." Printed on slick paper and adorned with the smiling face of the president, the professional-looking brochure exhorted delegates to vow to volunteer "to have a permanent nuclear waste storage facility in my community" and "to send my children to fight for America in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea or anywhere else President George W. Bush deems necessary."

And so on. The Yes Men are coming from quite far out in left field. They're soulmates of Michael Moore. In fact, Moore appears briefly in their movie, denouncing globalization.

But their brand of humor is more playful than Moore's. And their film is far less polished than "Fahrenheit 9/11." There are few news footage inserts or other visual sweeteners in "The Yes Men." Instead, directors Chris Smith, Sarah Price and Dan Ollman kept the camera trained steadily on Bichlbaum and Bonanno, following them as they traverse the U.S. and girdle the globe, using made-up names, and passing themselves off as representatives of the WTO.

In one sequence they appear before a conference of lawyers in Salzburg, Austria, and make a case for creating a free market in democracy by selling votes to the highest corporate bidder. Elsewhere, they deliver a PowerPoint presentation on the economic benefits of slavery - "involuntary imported labor," as they style it.

In the movie's most memorable, which is to say disgusting, sequence, they appear before a class of American college students and narrate a computer-animated presentation on Third World recycling … of human waste into fast-food hamburgers. The presentation is preceded by a meal break in which the kindly lecturers treat their listeners to a takeout feast of, you guessed it, fast-food burgers.

Only in the last instance do their listeners eventually become a little upset. The passivity of the older victims of their other pranks disheartens the pranksters.

Successfully pulling off a stunt like the phallus-suit caper is exhilarating, Bichlbaum said. "At the time it's pretty fun and pretty crazy. I didn't think about how depressing it was until afterwards."

The depression set in with the realization that there apparently is no economic theory so outlandish that it can't be made palatable to supposed experts in the field, providing it's delivered by a man in a suit who claims to be representing a respected global organization - even if the man's suit comes from a thrift store.

"We're just really cheap and we don't have any money," Bonanno said. What they save on suits can be spent on plane tickets to their next prank site. Their cheapness even extends to their haircuts. In several scenes, they're seen shaving their hair ultrashort at home with an electric razor.

But cheapness is only part of the reason for the thrift-store attire. It also reinforces their point that it's appearances and not content that give them credibility. That, and a persuasive delivery. Onscreen, reading from a carefully crafted text, Bichlbaum sounds smooth, sincere and deeply knowledgeable.

Both men proudly admit they have no training in economics. Bonanno is a teacher in art and media at a university in upstate New York. Bichlbaum has held more jobs than he can count: teacher, computer programmer, journalist, you name it. But nothing remotely related to economics.

"There's no need to have a background in economics to be an expert on the subject," Bichlbaum said. "It's such a simple thing." They say they learned everything they needed to know on the subject from business magazines and by reading information on the real WTO Web site. Once they got comfortable with the jargon, they figured they were ready to roll.

"You fall into the role," Bichlbaum said. "If you're an actor, you have to convince the audience that you're somebody you're not. Whereas here they believe you are that person, and so they convince you: 'They're taking me for real, so I must be real. Hey, I suspend my disbelief.'"

"It was hard to bring him back," Bonanno said. "It was like a Jekyll and Hyde situation."

"The Yes Men" is coming out a time that might go down in history as a golden moment in left-wing documentary filmmaking. With "Fahrenheit 9/11" already well north of the $100 million mark at the box office (and with more lucre to come when it's released on DVD in early October) and with such films as "The Corporation," "The Hunting of the President," "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" and "Bush's Brain" (about presidential political guru Karl Rove), the theaters and DVD shelves are awash with movies that portray the president, his party and his ideological brethren in an unflattering light. But will any of these movies make a difference when Nov. 2 rolls around? The Yes Men say they hope so.

"We have this very strange situation in this country where there is a very, very small sliver of the population that gets to decide who the next president is," Bonanno said. "There are a few swing states and there are a few people in the swing states called undecided voters, and hopefully these films and all this media will reach some of those people and change their minds."

But what if they don't? What if the president is re-elected? The smiles vanish from the pranksters' faces. "It's bad for everyone," Bichlbaum said. "It's unthinkable."

And for a moment, the Yes Men fall into a glum silence. The unthinkable, it seems, is no joking matter.

Soren Andersen:

253-597-8742, Ext. 6235

soren.andersen@mail.tribnet.com
(Published 10:35AM, September 24th, 2004)