By Johnny Ray Huston

ANDY BICHLBAUER IS a man of many names and a master of yet more disguises. As one of the pair of titular media hijackers featured in Chris Smith's new doc, The Yes Men, Bichlbauer changes monikers and outfits to fit – or better yet, attack – the occasion. Appearing on MSNBC as World Trade Organization spokesperson Granwyth Hulatberi, he argues that "justice vouchers" will enrich an open market in human rights violations. Lecturing at a Finnish business conference as WTO textile expert Hank Hardy Unruh, he models the future of CEO fashions: a skintight gold lamé one-piece featuring an inflatable phallus capped by a surveillance screen. Can this TV phallus help leisure-craving higher-ups oversee sweatshop workers, or is it just an opportunity for one dickhead to stare at another? The latter implicit question lingers sans answer in the stale corporate air.

Monkey suits come in various shapes and sizes, though this particular afternoon, Bichlbauer is probably the only diner at Postrio sporting a pair of hairy simian feet. One day earlier, Bichlbauer's Yes Men coconspirator, Mike Bonanno, donned an entire ape outfit and hit (where else?) the Castro. There, as Diversity Compassion Orangutan – a Bush campaign mascot whose orange hair reflects "how completely unnatural gay marriage is" – he clamored for forceable gay divorce under the strictures of the USA PATRIOT Act. Needless to say, this monkey wasn't shot up to gay heaven, though at least he wasn't shot. "Everyone was horrified, and they were yelling at us," Bonanno recalls with a wince.

The Yes Men's movie publicity tour is doubling as a mock campaign for Bush – or is it a mock-Bush campaign? Regardless, they're trying to lose the election for Bush one vote at a time. "Yep," Bichlbauer concurs, "only 10 million to go."

At least they're not alone. "Pregnant Teens for Bush in Chicago – they're very active," Bonanno says.

All this city-hopping multitasking has worked up the pair's appetites. Years of experience impersonating official business leaders mean these two know how to rack up corporate tabs: a lunchtime interview becomes an opportunity to order a bottle of pinot noir, lobster club sandwiches, and a sausage plate featuring chutney and wasabi-mustard garnishes. Dessert? Profiteroles, of course. The last five minutes of my tape recording are dominated by mmm sounds.

Bichlbauer and Bonanno met through past prankster feats: the former programmed gay revelry into SimCopter, while the latter's Barbie Liberation Organization gave Barbies and G.I. Joes the Freaky Friday treatment. Bichlbauer has lived in San Francisco, and he professes admiration for Gay Shame as well as another media hijacker, Craig Baldwin. "He's a role model," Bonanno concurs, before outlining his ties to another filmmaker, Yes Men codirector Smith (who made the film along with Dan Ollman and Sarah Price). Back when Bonanno met the man behind American Movie, he was working on another movie with American in it's title, his first feature, a long look at Midwest dead-end employment called American Job. "The pacing," Bonanno explains, "is like nothing you'd ever see in a movie theater in the U.S."

The Yes Men trots forward a bit more quickly, though it gives ample time to the pair's planning, mishaps, and – most perceptively – moments of through-the-looking-glass doubt, such as an instance when they exhaustedly weigh satire's merits against those of sincerity.

Such moments of crisis are hard to avoid these days, as American "normalcy" morphs into an even more grotesque parody of itself. Bichlbauer has a particularly odd angle on military mania: he shares an East Village apartment with an antiterrorism agent from the Department of Homeland Security. His roommate's favorite reading material is Tactical Response magazine. "It has everything you need if your opponent is armed and around a corner," he says.

"So many companies right now are producing video cameras and guns that look around corners," Bonanno adds.

Scanning the technologically advanced Stone Age that is the Bush era, you don't have to use corner-turning weaponry to look for doomsday signs. Witness – if you dare – the current TV mania for wife-swapping and spouse-trading shows: basically, a sex-lib catchphrase has mutated into even more misogynist propaganda for nuke-you-lar family member use-value. As corporate think tanks and right wing interests raid and spin terminology, perhaps it's time to steal some pages from their books as well.

Or at least rifle through their trash. While protesting the Republican National Convention, Bichlbauer came across a script for Day Three of the convention (devoted to "compassion," it starred immigrant governor Arnold Schwarzenegger). He found it near where it belonged: a garbage bin. To his surprise, every last gesture was rigidly outlined in the script's pages. The parade of falsehoods, though, can be attributed to speechwriters. "Schwarzenegger's speech was riddled with blatant untruths, historical inaccuracies, and impossible facts," Bichlbauer says.

The future promises more of the same, especially if Schwarzenegger is allowed to run for president in 2008. "I bet the only person who could beat him is Oprah!" Bonanno muses. I wish I could say he was joking.

'The Yes Men' opens Fri/1, Embarcadero Center Cinema, 1 Embarcadero Center, Promenade level, S.F. (415) 267-4893; and Shattuck Cinemas, 2230 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 464-5980. See Movie Clock, in film listings, for show times.