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Here's the guy who's done the impossible. With Bob Roberts, he's come up with a movie that makes you laugh and vote.

His portrayal of a rising studio executive in Robert Altman's The Player set Hollywood on its ear. Now, with Bob Roberts - his hilarious, dead-on satire of the American political system - writer, director, and star Tim Robbins is right on target again, and just in time.

Tim Robbins arrived for our meeting at a comfortable Manhattan restaurant wearing a fatigues-green golf shirt, faded jeans, and sneakers and carrying a guitar case and a stack of posters - campaign posters for Bob Roberts, the fictional neo-Conservative folksinger/senatorial candidate Robbins plays in Bob Roberts, a film he also wrote and directed. In his two most recent roles - Bob Roberts and Griffin Mill, the conniving and insidious studio executive at the pitch-black heart of Robert Altman's The Player - Robbins has perfected a comedic portrayal of the corruption of the American soul that sets a searing tone for cultural and political satire in the '90s. He has also worn a lifetime's worth of power suits. "All the nice clothes I own are from these movies," he admits.

The son of a folksinger father (Gil Robbins, a member of the Highwaymen - who sang Michael (Row the Boat Ashore) - appears as a Bible-thumping minister in Bob Roberts) and a publishing executive mother, Robbins grew up in Greenwich Village, not far from where he now lives with Susan Sarandon, their two wee sons, and Sarandon's seven-year-old daughter, Eva.

At twelve, Robbins started spending his summer vacations performing improvisational agitprop off the back of a flatbed truck with the Theater for the New City. Later, Robbins studied acting at UCLA and co-founded the alternative LA theater company the Actors' Gang. With their first production, a revival of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi - the influential presurrealist epic that dares to reduce the high drama of a classic history play to outrageous buffoonery and baby talk - the Gang gained a reputation for political commentary laced with acid humor.

Robbins has continued to work with the Gang as an actor, writer, and director, while moving on to create memorable and astonishingly irony-free performances on film. In Five Corners (1988), he played an earnest pacifist whose dream of peace is born from his father's violent death. As Bull Durham's "Nuke" Laloosh (also 1988), the baseball player with a powerful but out-of-control pitching arm, Robbins glowed with dull wit and unfocused desire, and in Jacob's Ladder (1990), he played a Vietnam vet riddled with nightmare images of war.

In both The Player and Bob Roberts, Robbins creates characters whose blind ambition and moral destitution are toxic by-products of the '80s me-uber-alles ethic.

Bob Roberts is a New Right "rebel" whose past is a road map of Reagan and Bush high crimes and misdemeanors. Through the course of this campaign "documentary," candidate Roberts is linked to failed S&Ls, the misuse of low-interest housing and urban development loans, and covert drug- and gun-running operations into and out of Central America - all carried out through a front organization that claims to be fighting the war on drugs. Sound familiar? Scheduled for US release in September, Bob Roberts premiered earlier this year at Cannes and won critical acclaim for its sharp, hilarious indictment of the abuse of power and decay of the democracy in the American political system.

Susan Morgan: After chronicling the media nightmare of Bob Roberts's creepy campaign trail, you end the movie with a visual coda - one word, spelled out big, in black and white: VOTE.

Tim Robbins: The disillusionment of the voter is a real problem in this country. Most people are making the decision whether or not to vote based on the top two candidates for president. If they don't like the candidates for president, they don't vote. That's a huge mistake: there are so many other issues on the ballot, so many other candidates in your own community who can affect your life in a direct way.

Change isn't going to occur by electing a Democrat or an Independent [to the White House] - and it's definitely not going to happen by electing a Republican - but it can happen by empowering the local community, by electing the right people to go to Washington. If there were fifty more representatives in the House and ten more senators sympathetic to the needs of the electorate, it wouldn't matter who was president; the House and Senate could override any veto on any bill. It would be a true representative democracy. But I don't think Bush and the Republican party want people to vote. And there seems to be a fear of voting now, too.

SM: It's a fear of participating on the most basic level. People have actually told me that they've never registered to vote because they're afraid it causes tax audits or jury duty.

TR: It's this "get government off our back" attitude, which was the biggest lie of the Reagan years. This government *is* truly on our backs, *because* of Reagan's and Bush's appointments to the Supreme Court. Our civil liberties are being eroded. In many states, the police can now search your home without reasonable cause.

SM: In California.

TR: In Los Angeles, I've been stopped and had my car searched. Why? Because of this fictitious war on drugs that we are fighting. The emotional issue of the drug war is used to justify taking away civil rights. And what would you call someone who appoints people to whittle away at our constitutional rights? I would call that person a dangerous, anti-American radical. Reagan and Bush have done exactly that, but you never hear them referred to as radical or anti-American.

SM: Following the 1969 Watts riots, Reagan was elected as the law-and-order governor. And with the recent LA riots, the response was to call in the National Guard and militarize the situation. Someone from the northern Iraq told me that Bush, on his official visit to LA, acted like "the dictator of any Third World country."

TR: Bush is very clever. When the debate should have been about the deterioration of our cities and the lack of action by government, he sent in his idiot to make an outrageous statement about Murphy Brown.

SM: It's like a puppet show. "Hey, kids! Look over here!"

TR: "Look at the idiot!" It was very smart, because the press was suddenly all over that. Just as everything was getting serious, and we were going to deal with some issues, they sent in the clown. And everyone bought it. What was he talking about? A fictional character on a television show? Listen, there's no question that Quayle is an uneducated idiot. But someone, somewhere, cleverly realized that the best diversion from Bush is to put on a clown show. The LA riots were very unsettling for people, because no one there was able to drive to work anymore without seeing a reminder of how troubled the city is.

SM: When did you live in LA?

TR: I went out there to work when I was nineteen and officially had to support myself. I got a job in a warehouse on the morning shift: worked from 4 am until one or two in the afternoon, went home, drank beer, went to sleep, got up, and went to work again. That experience really motivated me to go back to college. Then I lived in LA from '78 until '87. It can be a great city, if you really pursue it and actively seek out what is happening. I think New York City is a pretty hostile place [in which] to learn as a young artist. You're not allowed to fail. In Los Angeles, there is a very supportive artistic environment. The Actors' Gang was really nurtured out there. I don't think we could have survived in New York.

SM: How long have you been part of the Gang?

TR: This is our eleventh year. When we started, our common bond was music. In the early '80s, when we were all listening to punk rock, we did our first production - Ubu Roi. It's an amazing play. There is no polite way to do it. We had a lot of grotesque acts of violence, heads chopped off and plenty of blood. Ubu is also a very ugly play that can consume you as a performer. There was a lot of bile flowing around the dressing room. It's a wonder we survived it. I could see doing Ubu Roi again, because it is so much about our times.

SM: What are you doing next with the Actors' Gang?

TR: They are doing Georg Buchner's Woyzeck. It's very exciting, because we're now in a situation where we have a theater on Santa Monica Boulevard and an audience that keeps returning. I'm serving as artistic director; I'll consult directors on design and interpretation, but I'll give them free reign and try not to get in the way. I'm also able to help support them financially. We plan to do a staged reading and a radio broadcast of a play I wrote called Mayhem. It's about Columbus and the Gulf War. I wrote it during the Gulf War.

SM: That's when I moved to Los Angeles. I was alarmed to see the Hollywood sign decorated with a huge yellow ribbon. I felt as if I had landed among the pod people. I encountered perfectly reasonable-looking individuals who would suddenly sprout American flag badges and start talking about Schwarzkopf for President.

TR: I know how you felt; it was a very frightening time. So many people were intimidated about speaking out. I remember finally deciding to go down to Washington to protest the war. I tried to rally people within the business, and they were unwilling to go, for whatever reason - "I'm not touching this one, I'm not putting my neck on the line." I felt very unsure about going. But, boy, once I got there, I was so glad I had gone. I saw half a million people who were against the war and realized that I wasn't crazy. It gave me a lot of hope.

Newspapers, of course, reported that 75,000 people were there. That is par for the course for the National Park Service's estimation of marchers. Along the entire route, there was only one strategically placed group of twenty pro-war supporters ready for the photo op. But the visual representation of the event was one pro-war person against one antiwar person. From that photograph, you could never get the feeling of the enormous number of people and the overwhelming antiwar feeling.

SM: When I was in junior high school, there was a girl who had broken her hip and was on crutches for about twenty months. For two years in a row, she ran for student council office. She had obviously seen Sunrise at Campobello. She would get up to make her election speech, hand her crutches aside, and walk with great difficulty and determination to the podium. She always won. I realized that we, the little student voters, were being horribly manipulated.

TR: No question about it. Let's face it. Look at the Gulf War; we were fed a fast-food war - without blood, without death, without babies screaming, without people being buried alive. We were not given any of the images that occur in war. We were given a clean, sanitized Nintendo war, and we loved it. This was war as entertainment. But it doesn't last. Just like a movie that doesn't seem real, it never reaches your soul, and it disappears five minutes after you view it. The memory of that war has not lasted a year. There are no reports from Iraq about the hundreds of thousands of people who never voted for Saddam Hussein but who were killed [because of him].

We savaged that country, destroyed its infrastructure - its clean-water system, electrical supply, and health care - and we did not get Saddam Hussein. Unless we face that reality, that tragedy will be repeated again and again. It will cost more human lives and the spiritual life of our country. If we are a country that celebrates the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, we are spiritually dead.

I don't think it's the individual's fault. I think it's the fault of a society that acts irresponsibly and does not distribute information to its citizens. The Gulf War was supposed to be this huge, positive experience for all America to share, but it is not even being used as a campaign issue - it's not testing well enough on the surveys. In politics, you know, they now do focus groups just like they do for new movies.

SM: Are you serious?

TR: I'm dead serious. It's happening: they're way ahead of us. Willie Horton [the convicted murderer who raped after escaping from prison through the Massachusetts furlough program put in place under Governor Dukakis] is the perfect example. During the '88 campaign, [Bush promoters] selected a target group of Democratic Dukakis supporters who had previously voted for Reagan. They were seated in a little room and tested to find out what exactly stimulated them: what did they like and what didn't they like? Willie Horton scored the most negatively among Dukakis's own supporters. Bingo! It won the election for Bush.

Theoretically, we still have a democracy in this country, and the one thing that worries people in power is that voters can throw them out. So they keep testing and taking surveys and shaping the elections. People are incredibly naive to think that there is no planning in government. There is no such thing as zeitgeist in the political world. The primary job and focus of government is to plan ahead - how to stay elected, how to stay in power, how to divert stumbling blocks and plan what is going to happen in the future.

SM: It's also the same cast of characters year after year.

TR: It's all the same faces. Now we've just had the twentieth anniversary of Watergate, and the media have been talking to all the criminals. No one is talking to the real heroes. Larry King did a Watergate program and talked to G. Gordon Liddy [the former FBI agent who helped plan the Watergate break-in] for half an hour; Sam Dash [counsel for the Ervin Committee, which held the Senate hearings investigating the break-in and cover-up] for fifteen minutes; and then someone from the Nixon library for another ten minutes, to refute everything Sam Dash had said. That was the most slanted show I have ever seen in my entire life. Sam Dash and Archibald Cox [the special Watergate prosecutor fired by Acting Attorney General Robert Bork when his investigation got too close to the Oval Office] are American fucking heroes. I have to say that Elliot Richardson [attorney general before Bork] is a hero for refusing to fire Cox. But it was the real boneheads who were on TV, getting all the coverage and being treated like movie stars. G. Gordon Liddy is doing his own talk show [on WJFK radio in Washington, DC].

There is a real desire to rewrite history. Here we should be celebrating the fact that corruption can be weeded out of government and applauding the heroism of those Republicans who went against the party line and voted to start Nixon's impeachment hearings. That's something rare in this world. Watergate was really a shock to everyone. But I think - and this goes against everything I generally feel about compassion - that criminal proceedings should have been brought against Nixon. It's as if the doctor found a cancer and you said, "OK, cut off just the tip, and I'll ignore the rest." The cancer continues to fester. It was only four years later that the Republicans were back in the White House, rehiring all the people Carter had kicked out.

SM: In Bob Roberts, you capture the nauseating realization that all these people are connected up in terrible ways. I thought Giancarlo Esposito was perfectly cast as the twitchy underground journalist driven slightly round the bend by mind-boggling information.

TR: It was very important for me not to romanticize that character. He has good intentions but absolutely no sound-bite quality.

SM: When did you start working on Bob Roberts?

TR: I developed the character for a short film I did for Saturday Night Live about five years ago. I shelved the story for a while, and, as the '80s progressed, Bob became more and more ambitious.

SM: He flourished. It was his decade.

TR: It *was* the Bob decade. He did flourish, and he didn't show any signs of stopping. It was the longest decade I have ever lived through, and we are now left with its horrifying legacy.

SM: Was Bob always going to run for Senate?

TR: Originally, the candidate was going to be Lukas Hart [Roberts's key adviser, played by British actor Alan Rickman]. But while I was doing The Player, I wrote the final draft and made Bob Roberts the candidate. Because this is not a traditional narrative, I needed to streamline all the stories in the script. It was clear that who Bob was would represent what the movie was all about.

SM: He was described to me as a cross between Bob Dylan and Oliver North.

TR: I would never say that. I don't like to bring Dylan's name into this, because he is such a hero of mine.

SM: I did notice that you borrowed quite a few shots from D. A. Pennebaker's early Dylan documentary, Don't Look Back.

TR: Absolutely. Don't Look Back is great. But I think Bob Roberts owes as much to This Is Spinal Tap as it does to anything else. I love Spinal Tap; it is one of my favorite movies. I've always approached Bob with a sense of humor, and I think it's important that we don't take ourselves too seriously.

SM: Is Bob Roberts a musical Mike Milken?

TR: I like to think of Bob as a young George Bush with a guitar.

SM: Do you remember Up with People? In the '60s, they were traveling right-wing hootenannies that got people tapping their toes and clapping their hands to John Birch sentiments.

TR: Bob is definitely an Up with People kind of guy.

SM: The Bob Roberts songs you composed with your brother were eerily on the mark.

TR: Frightening, eh? My brother is an extremely talented musician. I was lucky to have him involved.

SM: You sing a lot better in this movie than you did in Bull Durham.

TR: I can sing better than Bob Roberts. I had to act that - competent singing, with no heart. I sing better when I believe the words.

SM: Alan Rickman was an interesting choice to play your adviser. He was entirely convincing as an American corporate sleazeball.

TR: He's a wonderful actor, and he'll be around for a long time, because he follows his heart and not his pocket. Gore Vidal was also a great addition to the film. I knew I didn't want an actor in that part, and one day, as I was driving to work, I thought, Gore Vidal. I immediately sent him a script. He called within a week and said he would love to do it. I was ecstatic; he told me that I was a dangerous man.

SM: When Gore Vidal was asked what dangerous activities he enjoys - was he a rock climber or a sky diver - he answered that he is a writer. Writing is the most dangerous activity of all.

TR: Getting that phone call from Gore Vidal while we were in preproduction was a real validation of our project. It was like when we got the go-ahead to use "I've Got to Know," by Woody Guthrie. His daughter, Nora Guthrie, came to one of the last days of mixing and saw the film. The song had never been heard before, and she felt that it had been written for our film. I was so moved. This was such a great stamp of approval at the end of the project. just before we contacted her, I read in the newspaper that the Guthrie estate had turned down a request from Ross Perot to use "This Land Is My Land" as a campaign slogan.

SM: Isn't the title "This Land Is Your Land"?

TR: I'm sorry.

SM: You're not going to turn into Bob Roberts, are you?