Paul Lauer:   Welcome, everybody who has joined us on this fantastic press conference, tele-conference call.  My name is Paul Lauer from Motive Entertainment.   Some of you I know already from previous projects that Motive has worked on, most notably The Passion of the Christ, The Chronicles of Narnia and, more recently, Rocky Balboa.  A lot of fun—we did one of these conference calls with Sylvester Stallone.  A side note: we did not work on Rambo and that’s why—

Ben Stein:  I should tell you that Sylvester Stallone and I went to junior high school together.  

Paul Lauer:  You did, then?

Ben Stein:  Yes.   Ok, go ahead. Sorry. 

Paul Lauer: We’ll have to hear more about that.  We’d love to know all about Stallone in junior high school.   What—

Ben Stein:  He was a good boy.  

Paul Lauer: He was a good boy.  Good.

Ben Stein:  Yes.

Paul Lauer:  At any rate, Motive Entertainment has been engaged for the past year on a very, very exciting project, a movie that comes out this April called Expelled:  No Intelligence Allowed.  This is a film in the provocative documentary format similar to other films we’ve seen in that genre like Michael Moore’s recent film and even former Vice President Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth.  The star of this film is none other than Ben Stein, whom we’ve all come to know in various ways.  Ben is a graduate of Yale Law School.  He was a speechwriter for presidents Nixon and Ford.  America probably knows him best as the teacher in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In fact, A recent poll showed that 49% of Americans know the name Ben Stein, but when you add the phrase, “Bueller, Bueller” that number jumps up into the eighty percentile.    Ben was also the host of Win Ben Stein’s Money—which, I have to say, I never won any of, Ben, because you were too smart for us. 

Ben Stein:  Well, no, no, not at all.  Walt won all of it.  

Paul Lauer:   And also with us on the phone today is Walt Ruloff who is the CEO of Premise Media Corporation and one of the Executive Producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.  Your invitation to this event, by the way, listed a Mr. Logan Craft who is another producer of Expelled, and, unfortunately, he could not join us today; but he will be available, as will Walt, after this call, if people are interested in connecting with them directly for follow-up interviews.   So, we have Walt, we have Ben, we have myself and we have all of you out there in “telephone land”; and all of you represent various media outlets in radio, TV, Web, and print and we’re excited to have you on board for this live conference with Ben Stein. 

Thanks to Motive Entertainment for providing the transcript of their January 22 teleconference with Ben Stein and Walt Ruloff. The full, unabridged telecon is available from Gotham Conference in podcast form. Expelled is scheduled to release in April.