Stupid as a Fox: The Glenn Beck Story [View All]

http://video.forbes.com/fvn/celebrity-09/brand-it-like-beck

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0426/entertainment-fox-news-simon-schuster-glenn-beck-inc.html?boxes=Homepagetopspecialreports

Media
Glenn Beck Inc
Lacey Rose, 04.08.10, 04:30 PM EDT
Forbes Magazine dated April 26, 2010
In his empire there's the ideology--and then there's the money machine.

Five and a half hours before showtime Glenn Beck still isn't quite sure how he'll provide tonight's entertainment, "The Future of History"--two hours of monologue (and answers to preselected questions) before a nearly sellout crowd of 1,000 or so people at the Nokia ( NOK - news - people ) Theatre in New York City's Times Square. "But that's me--I'm the next-event guy," says Beck, flanked by two bodyguards as he walks the four blocks between the Fox News Channel studio, where he has pretaped the day's show, and the theater. He won't have to create tonight's performance from scratch, since he's left a long trail of words--millions of passionate, angry, weepy, moralizing, corny, offensive words--in his wake. "The body of work is pretty much the same," explains Beck, 46. "What I'm trying to do is get this message out about self-empowerment, entrepreneurial spirit and true Americanism--the way we were when we changed the world, when Edison was alone, failing his 2,000th time on the lightbulb."

At the theater he runs through images that will appear on one of three projectors behind him. There's David Sarnoff (the NBC founder), Philo Farnsworth (the early television pioneer) and someone Beck can't quite place but, he assures the handful of staffers dancing around him, will remember by the time the curtain goes up. "Does anyone know how many minutes of high-def TV equal one gigabyte?" Onstage Beck paces like a comic Hamlet, eyes bulging every time he figures out how to weave the props (stalks of corn, a chalkboard, a cockatoo he rented for $750 a night) he has ordered into the monologue.

He could rattle off the overarching themes in a deep sleep. He starts with the construction of the Manhattan skyline, using replicas of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building as visual aids. Then he moves on to the birth of radio and TV. Theme: thinking big, creating the American dream. He will work in several plugs for tonight's featured offering, a Web subscription service called Insider Extreme ($75 a year for behind-the-scenes footage, a fourth hour of his radio show, ten-minute history lessons and so on). "I can multitask like crazy," says Beck. "I'm riddled with ADD--a blessing and a curse."

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