Investigation: Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear

No thanks: An anti-Monsanto crop circle made by farmers and volunteers in the Philippines. By Melvyn Calderon/Greenpeace HO/A.P. Images.

Gary Rinehart clearly remembers the summer day in 2002 when the stranger walked in and issued his threat. Rinehart was behind the counter of the Square Deal, his “old-time country store,” as he calls it, on the fading town square of Eagleville, Missouri, a tiny farm community 100 miles north of Kansas City.
The Square Deal is a fixture in Eagleville, a place where farmers and townspeople can go for lightbulbs, greeting cards, hunting gear, ice cream, aspirin, and dozens of other small items without having to drive to a big-box store in Bethany, the county seat, 15 miles down Interstate 35.
Everyone knows Rinehart, who was born and raised in the area and runs one of Eagleville’s few surviving businesses. The stranger came up to the counter and asked for him by name.
“Well, that’s me,” said Rinehart.
As Rinehart would recall, the man began verbally attacking him, saying he had proof that Rinehart had planted Monsanto’s genetically modified (G.M.) soybeans in violation of the company’s patent. Better come clean and settle with Monsanto, Rinehart says the man told him—or face the consequences.
Rinehart was incredulous, listening to the words as puzzled customers and employees looked on. Like many others in rural America, Rinehart knew of Monsanto’s fierce reputation for enforcing its patents and suing anyone who allegedly violated them. But Rinehart wasn’t a farmer. He wasn’t a seed dealer. He hadn’t planted any seeds or sold any seeds. He owned a small—a really small—country store in a town of 350 people. He was angry that somebody could just barge into the store and embarrass him in front of everyone. “It made me and my business look bad,” he says. Rinehart says he told the intruder, “You got the wrong guy.”
When the stranger persisted, Rinehart showed him the door. On the way out the man kept making threats. Rinehart says he can’t remember the exact words, but they were to the effect of: “Monsanto is big. You can’t win. We will get you. You will pay.”
Scenes like this are playing out in many parts of rural America these days as Monsanto goes after farmers, farmers’ co-ops, seed dealers—anyone it suspects may have infringed its patents of genetically modified seeds. As interviews and reams of court documents reveal, Monsanto relies on a shadowy army of private investigators and agents in the American heartland to strike fear into farm country. They fan out into fields and farm towns, where they secretly videotape and photograph farmers, store owners, and co-ops; infiltrate community meetings; and gather information from informants about farming activities. Farmers say that some Monsanto agents pretend to be surveyors. Others confront farmers on their land and try to pressure them to sign papers giving Monsanto access to their private records. Farmers call them the “seed police” and use words such as “Gestapo” and “Mafia” to describe their tactics.
When asked about these practices, Monsanto declined to comment specifically, other than to say that the company is simply protecting its patents. “Monsanto spends more than $2 million a day in research to identify, test, develop and bring to market innovative new seeds and technologies that benefit farmers,” Monsanto spokesman Darren Wallis wrote in an e-mailed letter to Vanity Fair. “One tool in protecting this investment is patenting our discoveries and, if necessary, legally defending those patents against those who might choose to infringe upon them.” Wallis said that, while the vast majority of farmers and seed dealers follow the licensing agreements, “a tiny fraction” do not, and that Monsanto is obligated to those who do abide by its rules to enforce its patent rights on those who “reap the benefits of the technology without paying for its use.” He said only a small number of cases ever go to trial.
Some compare Monsanto’s hard-line approach to Microsoft’s zealous efforts to protect its software from pirates. At least with Microsoft the buyer of a program can use it over and over again. But farmers who buy Monsanto’s seeds can’t even do that.
The Control of Nature
For centuries—millennia—farmers have saved seeds from season to season: they planted in the spring, harvested in the fall, then reclaimed and cleaned the seeds over the winter for re-planting the next spring. Monsanto has turned this ancient practice on its head.
Monsanto developed G.M. seeds that would resist its own herbicide, Roundup, offering farmers a convenient way to spray fields with weed killer without affecting crops. Monsanto then patented the seeds. For nearly all of its history the United States Patent and Trademark Office had refused to grant patents on seeds, viewing them as life-forms with too many variables to be patented. “It’s not like describing a widget,” says Joseph Mendelson III, the legal director of the Center for Food Safety, which has tracked Monsanto’s activities in rural America for years.
Indeed not. But in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court, in a five-to-four decision, turned seeds into widgets, laying the groundwork for a handful of corporations to begin taking control of the world’s food supply. In its decision, the court extended patent law to cover “a live human-made microorganism.” In this case, the organism wasn’t even a seed. Rather, it was a Pseudomonas bacterium developed by a General Electric scientist to clean up oil spills. But the precedent was set, and Monsanto took advantage of it. Since the 1980s, Monsanto has become the world leader in genetic modification of seeds and has won 674 biotechnology patents, more than any other company, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
Farmers who buy Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready seeds are required to sign an agreement promising not to save the seed produced after each harvest for re-planting, or to sell the seed to other farmers. This means that farmers must buy new seed every year. Those increased sales, coupled with ballooning sales of its Roundup weed killer, have been a bonanza for Monsanto.
This radical departure from age-old practice has created turmoil in farm country. Some farmers don’t fully understand that they aren’t supposed to save Monsanto’s seeds for next year’s planting. Others do, but ignore the stipulation rather than throw away a perfectly usable product. Still others say that they don’t use Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds, but seeds have been blown into their fields by wind or deposited by birds. It’s certainly easy for G.M. seeds to get mixed in with traditional varieties when seeds are cleaned by commercial dealers for re-planting. The seeds look identical; only a laboratory analysis can show the difference. Even if a farmer doesn’t buy G.M. seeds and doesn’t want them on his land, it’s a safe bet he’ll get a visit from Monsanto’s seed police if crops grown from G.M. seeds are discovered in his fields.
Most Americans know Monsanto because of what it sells to put on our lawns— the ubiquitous weed killer Roundup. What they may not know is that the company now profoundly influences—and one day may virtually control—what we put on our tables. For most of its history Monsanto was a chemical giant, producing some of the most toxic substances ever created, residues from which have left us with some of the most polluted sites on earth. Yet in a little more than a decade, the company has sought to shed its polluted past and morph into something much different and more far-reaching—an “agricultural company” dedicated to making the world “a better place for future generations.” Still, more than one Web log claims to see similarities between Monsanto and the fictional company “U-North” in the movie Michael Clayton, an agribusiness giant accused in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit of selling an herbicide that causes cancer.


Monsanto brought false accusations against Gary Rinehart—shown here at his rural Missouri store. There has been no apology. Photographs by Kurt Markus.

Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds have transformed the company and are radically altering global agriculture. So far, the company has produced G.M. seeds for soybeans, corn, canola, and cotton. Many more products have been developed or are in the pipeline, including seeds for sugar beets and alfalfa. The company is also seeking to extend its reach into milk production by marketing an artificial growth hormone for cows that increases their output, and it is taking aggressive steps to put those who don’t want to use growth hormone at a commercial disadvantage.
Even as the company is pushing its G.M. agenda, Monsanto is buying up conventional-seed companies. In 2005, Monsanto paid $1.4 billion for Seminis, which controlled 40 percent of the U.S. market for lettuce, tomatoes, and other vegetable and fruit seeds. Two weeks later it announced the acquisition of the country’s third-largest cottonseed company, Emergent Genetics, for $300 million. It’s estimated that Monsanto seeds now account for 90 percent of the U.S. production of soybeans, which are used in food products beyond counting. Monsanto’s acquisitions have fueled explosive growth, transforming the St. Louis–based corporation into the largest seed company in the world.
In Iraq, the groundwork has been laid to protect the patents of Monsanto and other G.M.-seed companies. One of L. Paul Bremer’s last acts as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority was an order stipulating that “farmers shall be prohibited from re-using seeds of protected varieties.” Monsanto has said that it has no interest in doing business in Iraq, but should the company change its mind, the American-style law is in place.
To be sure, more and more agricultural corporations and individual farmers are using Monsanto’s G.M. seeds. As recently as 1980, no genetically modified crops were grown in the U.S. In 2007, the total was 142 million acres planted. Worldwide, the figure was 282 million acres. Many farmers believe that G.M. seeds increase crop yields and save money. Another reason for their attraction is convenience. By using Roundup Ready soybean seeds, a farmer can spend less time tending to his fields. With Monsanto seeds, a farmer plants his crop, then treats it later with Roundup to kill weeds. That takes the place of labor-intensive weed control and plowing.
Monsanto portrays its move into G.M. seeds as a giant leap for mankind. But out in the American countryside, Monsanto’s no-holds-barred tactics have made it feared and loathed. Like it or not, farmers say, they have fewer and fewer choices in buying seeds.
And controlling the seeds is not some abstraction. Whoever provides the world’s seeds controls the world’s food supply.
Under Surveillance
After Monsanto’s investigator confronted Gary Rinehart, Monsanto filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Rinehart “knowingly, intentionally, and willfully” planted seeds “in violation of Monsanto’s patent rights.” The company’s complaint made it sound as if Monsanto had Rinehart dead to rights:
During the 2002 growing season, Investigator Jeffery Moore, through surveillance of Mr. Rinehart’s farm facility and farming operations, observed Defendant planting brown bag soybean seed. Mr. Moore observed the Defendant take the brown bag soybeans to a field, which was subsequently loaded into a grain drill and planted. Mr. Moore located two empty bags in the ditch in the public road right-of-way beside one of the fields planted by Rinehart, which contained some soybeans. Mr. Moore collected a small amount of soybeans left in the bags which Defendant had tossed into the public right-of way. These samples tested positive for Monsanto’s Roundup Ready technology.
Faced with a federal lawsuit, Rinehart had to hire a lawyer. Monsanto eventually realized that “Investigator Jeffery Moore” had targeted the wrong man, and dropped the suit. Rinehart later learned that the company had been secretly investigating farmers in his area. Rinehart never heard from Monsanto again: no letter of apology, no public concession that the company had made a terrible mistake, no offer to pay his attorney’s fees. “I don’t know how they get away with it,” he says. “If I tried to do something like that it would be bad news. I felt like I was in another country.”
Gary Rinehart is actually one of Monsanto’s luckier targets. Ever since commercial introduction of its G.M. seeds, in 1996, Monsanto has launched thousands of investigations and filed lawsuits against hundreds of farmers and seed dealers. In a 2007 report, the Center for Food Safety, in Washington, D.C., documented 112 such lawsuits, in 27 states.
Even more significant, in the Center’s opinion, are the numbers of farmers who settle because they don’t have the money or the time to fight Monsanto. “The number of cases filed is only the tip of the iceberg,” says Bill Freese, the Center’s science-policy analyst. Freese says he has been told of many cases in which Monsanto investigators showed up at a farmer’s house or confronted him in his fields, claiming he had violated the technology agreement and demanding to see his records. According to Freese, investigators will say, “Monsanto knows that you are saving Roundup Ready seeds, and if you don’t sign these information-release forms, Monsanto is going to come after you and take your farm or take you for all you’re worth.” Investigators will sometimes show a farmer a photo of himself coming out of a store, to let him know he is being followed.
Lawyers who have represented farmers sued by Monsanto say that intimidating actions like these are commonplace. Most give in and pay Monsanto some amount in damages; those who resist face the full force of Monsanto’s legal wrath.
Scorched-Earth Tactics
Pilot Grove, Missouri, population 750, sits in rolling farmland 150 miles west of St. Louis. The town has a grocery store, a bank, a bar, a nursing home, a funeral parlor, and a few other small businesses. There are no stoplights, but the town doesn’t need any. The little traffic it has comes from trucks on their way to and from the grain elevator on the edge of town. The elevator is owned by a local co-op, the Pilot Grove Cooperative Elevator, which buys soybeans and corn from farmers in the fall, then ships out the grain over the winter. The co-op has seven full-time employees and four computers.
In the fall of 2006, Monsanto trained its legal guns on Pilot Grove; ever since, its farmers have been drawn into a costly, disruptive legal battle against an opponent with limitless resources. Neither Pilot Grove nor Monsanto will discuss the case, but it is possible to piece together much of the story from documents filed as part of the litigation.
Monsanto began investigating soybean farmers in and around Pilot Grove several years ago. There is no indication as to what sparked the probe, but Monsanto periodically investigates farmers in soybean-growing regions such as this one in central Missouri. The company has a staff devoted to enforcing patents and litigating against farmers. To gather leads, the company maintains an 800 number and encourages farmers to inform on other farmers they think may be engaging in “seed piracy.”
Once Pilot Grove had been targeted, Monsanto sent private investigators into the area. Over a period of months, Monsanto’s investigators surreptitiously followed the co-op’s employees and customers and videotaped them in fields and going about other activities. At least 17 such surveillance videos were made, according to court records. The investigative work was outsourced to a St. Louis agency, McDowell & Associates. It was a McDowell investigator who erroneously fingered Gary Rinehart. In Pilot Grove, at least 11 McDowell investigators have worked the case, and Monsanto makes no bones about the extent of this effort: “Surveillance was conducted throughout the year by various investigators in the field,” according to court records. McDowell, like Monsanto, will not comment on the case.
Not long after investigators showed up in Pilot Grove, Monsanto subpoenaed the co-op’s records concerning seed and herbicide purchases and seed-cleaning operations. The co-op provided more than 800 pages of documents pertaining to dozens of farmers. Monsanto sued two farmers and negotiated settlements with more than 25 others it accused of seed piracy. But Monsanto’s legal assault had only begun. Although the co-op had provided voluminous records, Monsanto then sued it in federal court for patent infringement. Monsanto contended that by cleaning seeds—a service which it had provided for decades—the co-op was inducing farmers to violate Monsanto’s patents. In effect, Monsanto wanted the co-op to police its own customers.
In the majority of cases where Monsanto sues, or threatens to sue, farmers settle before going to trial. The cost and stress of litigating against a global corporation are just too great. But Pilot Grove wouldn’t cave—and ever since, Monsanto has been turning up the heat. The more the co-op has resisted, the more legal firepower Monsanto has aimed at it. Pilot Grove’s lawyer, Steven H. Schwartz, described Monsanto in a court filing as pursuing a “scorched earth tactic,” intent on “trying to drive the co-op into the ground.”
Even after Pilot Grove turned over thousands more pages of sales records going back five years, and covering virtually every one of its farmer customers, Monsanto wanted more—the right to inspect the co-op’s hard drives. When the co-op offered to provide an electronic version of any record, Monsanto demanded hands-on access to Pilot Grove’s in-house computers.
Monsanto next petitioned to make potential damages punitive—tripling the amount that Pilot Grove might have to pay if found guilty. After a judge denied that request, Monsanto expanded the scope of the pre-trial investigation by seeking to quadruple the number of depositions. “Monsanto is doing its best to make this case so expensive to defend that the Co-op will have no choice but to relent,” Pilot Grove’s lawyer said in a court filing.
With Pilot Grove still holding out for a trial, Monsanto now subpoenaed the records of more than 100 of the co-op’s customers. In a “You are Commanded … ” notice, the farmers were ordered to gather up five years of invoices, receipts, and all other papers relating to their soybean and herbicide purchases, and to have the documents delivered to a law office in St. Louis. Monsanto gave them two weeks to comply.
Whether Pilot Grove can continue to wage its legal battle remains to be seen. Whatever the outcome, the case shows why Monsanto is so detested in farm country, even by those who buy its products. “I don’t know of a company that chooses to sue its own customer base,” says Joseph Mendelson, of the Center for Food Safety. “It’s a very bizarre business strategy.” But it’s one that Monsanto manages to get away with, because increasingly it’s the dominant vendor in town.
Chemicals? What Chemicals?
The Monsanto Company has never been one of America’s friendliest corporate citizens. Given Monsanto’s current dominance in the field of bioengineering, it’s worth looking at the company’s own DNA. The future of the company may lie in seeds, but the seeds of the company lie in chemicals. Communities around the world are still reaping the environmental consequences of Monsanto’s origins.
Monsanto was founded in 1901 by John Francis Queeny, a tough, cigar-smoking Irishman with a sixth-grade education. A buyer for a wholesale drug company, Queeny had an idea. But like a lot of employees with ideas, he found that his boss wouldn’t listen to him. So he went into business for himself on the side. Queeny was convinced there was money to be made manufacturing a substance called saccharin, an artificial sweetener then imported from Germany. He took $1,500 of his savings, borrowed another $3,500, and set up shop in a dingy warehouse near the St. Louis waterfront. With borrowed equipment and secondhand machines, he began producing saccharin for the U.S. market. He called the company the Monsanto Chemical Works, Monsanto being his wife’s maiden name.
The German cartel that controlled the market for saccharin wasn’t pleased, and cut the price from $4.50 to $1 a pound to try to force Queeny out of business. The young company faced other challenges. Questions arose about the safety of saccharin, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture even tried to ban it. Fortunately for Queeny, he wasn’t up against opponents as aggressive and litigious as the Monsanto of today. His persistence and the loyalty of one steady customer kept the company afloat. That steady customer was a new company in Georgia named Coca-Cola.
Monsanto added more and more products—vanillin, caffeine, and drugs used as sedatives and laxatives. In 1917, Monsanto began making aspirin, and soon became the largest maker worldwide. During World War I, cut off from imported European chemicals, Monsanto was forced to manufacture its own, and its position as a leading force in the chemical industry was assured.
After Queeny was diagnosed with cancer, in the late 1920s, his only son, Edgar, became president. Where the father had been a classic entrepreneur, Edgar Monsanto Queeny was an empire builder with a grand vision. It was Edgar—shrewd, daring, and intuitive (“He can see around the next corner,” his secretary once said)—who built Monsanto into a global powerhouse. Under Edgar Queeny and his successors, Monsanto extended its reach into a phenomenal number of products: plastics, resins, rubber goods, fuel additives, artificial caffeine, industrial fluids, vinyl siding, dishwasher detergent, anti-freeze, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides. Its safety glass protects the U.S. Constitution and the Mona Lisa. Its synthetic fibers are the basis of Astroturf.
During the 1970s, the company shifted more and more resources into biotechnology. In 1981 it created a molecular-biology group for research in plant genetics. The next year, Monsanto scientists hit gold: they became the first to genetically modify a plant cell. “It will now be possible to introduce virtually any gene into plant cells with the ultimate goal of improving crop productivity,” said Ernest Jaworski, director of Monsanto’s Biological Sciences Program.
Over the next few years, scientists working mainly in the company’s vast new Life Sciences Research Center, 25 miles west of St. Louis, developed one genetically modified product after another—cotton, soybeans, corn, canola. From the start, G.M. seeds were controversial with the public as well as with some farmers and European consumers. Monsanto has sought to portray G.M. seeds as a panacea, a way to alleviate poverty and feed the hungry. Robert Shapiro, Monsanto’s president during the 1990s, once called G.M. seeds “the single most successful introduction of technology in the history of agriculture, including the plow.”
By the late 1990s, Monsanto, having rebranded itself into a “life sciences” company, had spun off its chemical and fibers operations into a new company called Solutia. After an additional reorganization, Monsanto re-incorporated in 2002 and officially declared itself an “agricultural company.”
In its company literature, Monsanto now refers to itself disingenuously as a “relatively new company” whose primary goal is helping “farmers around the world in their mission to feed, clothe, and fuel” a growing planet. In its list of corporate milestones, all but a handful are from the recent era. As for the company’s early history, the decades when it grew into an industrial powerhouse now held potentially responsible for more than 50 Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites—none of that is mentioned. It’s as though the original Monsanto, the company that long had the word “chemical” as part of its name, never existed. One of the benefits of doing this, as the company does not point out, was to channel the bulk of the growing backlog of chemical lawsuits and liabilities onto Solutia, keeping the Monsanto brand pure.
But Monsanto’s past, especially its environmental legacy, is very much with us. For many years Monsanto produced two of the most toxic substances ever known— polychlorinated biphenyls, better known as PCBs, and dioxin. Monsanto no longer produces either, but the places where it did are still struggling with the aftermath, and probably always will be.
“Systemic Intoxication”
Twelve miles downriver from Charleston, West Virginia, is the town of Nitro, where Monsanto operated a chemical plant from 1929 to 1995. In 1948 the plant began to make a powerful herbicide known as 2,4,5-T, called “weed bug” by the workers. A by-product of the process was the creation of a chemical that would later be known as dioxin.
The name dioxin refers to a group of highly toxic chemicals that have been linked to heart disease, liver disease, human reproductive disorders, and developmental problems. Even in small amounts, dioxin persists in the environment and accumulates in the body. In 1997 the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, classified the most powerful form of dioxin as a substance that causes cancer in humans. In 2001 the U.S. government listed the chemical as a “known human carcinogen.”

On March 8, 1949, a massive explosion rocked Monsanto’s Nitro plant when a pressure valve blew on a container cooking up a batch of herbicide. The noise from the release was a scream so loud that it drowned out the emergency steam whistle for five minutes. A plume of vapor and white smoke drifted across the plant and out over town.Residue from the explosion coated the interior of the building and those inside with what workers described as “a fine black powder.” Many felt their skin prickle and were told to scrub down.
Within days, workers experienced skin eruptions. Many were soon diagnosed with chloracne, a condition similar to common acne but more severe, longer lasting, and potentially disfiguring. Others felt intense pains in their legs, chest, and trunk. A confidential medical report at the time said the explosion “caused a systemic intoxication in the workers involving most major organ systems.” Doctors who examined four of the most seriously injured men detected a strong odor coming from them when they were all together in a closed room. “We believe these men are excreting a foreign chemical through their skins,” the confidential report to Monsanto noted. Court records indicate that 226 plant workers became ill.
According to court documents that have surfaced in a West Virginia court case, Monsanto downplayed the impact, stating that the contaminant affecting workers was “fairly slow acting” and caused “only an irritation of the skin.”
In the meantime, the Nitro plant continued to produce herbicides, rubber products, and other chemicals. In the 1960s, the factory manufactured Agent Orange, the powerful herbicide which the U.S. military used to defoliate jungles during the Vietnam War, and which later was the focus of lawsuits by veterans contending that they had been harmed by exposure. As with Monsanto’s older herbicides, the manufacturing of Agent Orange created dioxin as a by-product.
As for the Nitro plant’s waste, some was burned in incinerators, some dumped in landfills or storm drains, some allowed to run into streams. As Stuart Calwell, a lawyer who has represented both workers and residents in Nitro, put it, “Dioxin went wherever the product went, down the sewer, shipped in bags, and when the waste was burned, out in the air.”
In 1981 several former Nitro employees filed lawsuits in federal court, charging that Monsanto had knowingly exposed them to chemicals that caused long-term health problems, including cancer and heart disease. They alleged that Monsanto knew that many chemicals used at Nitro were potentially harmful, but had kept that information from them. On the eve of a trial, in 1988, Monsanto agreed to settle most of the cases by making a single lump payment of $1.5 million. Monsanto also agreed to drop its claim to collect $305,000 in court costs from six retired Monsanto workers who had unsuccessfully charged in another lawsuit that Monsanto had recklessly exposed them to dioxin. Monsanto had attached liens to the retirees’ homes to guarantee collection of the debt.
Monsanto stopped producing dioxin in Nitro in 1969, but the toxic chemical can still be found well beyond the Nitro plant site. Repeated studies have found elevated levels of dioxin in nearby rivers, streams, and fish. Residents have sued to seek damages from Monsanto and Solutia. Earlier this year, a West Virginia judge merged those lawsuits into a class-action suit. A Monsanto spokesman said, “We believe the allegations are without merit and we’ll defend ourselves vigorously.” The suit will no doubt take years to play out. Time is one thing that Monsanto always has, and that the plaintiffs usually don’t.
Poisoned Lawns
Five hundred miles to the south, the people of Anniston, Alabama, know all about what the people of Nitro are going through. They’ve been there. In fact, you could say, they’re still there.
From 1929 to 1971, Monsanto’s Anniston works produced PCBs as industrial coolants and insulating fluids for transformers and other electrical equipment. One of the wonder chemicals of the 20th century, PCBs were exceptionally versatile and fire-resistant, and became central to many American industries as lubricants, hydraulic fluids, and sealants. But PCBs are toxic. A member of a family of chemicals that mimic hormones, PCBs have been linked to damage in the liver and in the neurological, immune, endocrine, and reproductive systems. The Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, now classify PCBs as “probable carcinogens.”
Today, 37 years after PCB production ceased in Anniston, and after tons of contaminated soil have been removed to try to reclaim the site, the area around the old Monsanto plant remains one of the most polluted spots in the U.S.
People in Anniston find themselves in this fix today largely because of the way Monsanto disposed of PCB waste for decades. Excess PCBs were dumped in a nearby open-pit landfill or allowed to flow off the property with storm water. Some waste was poured directly into Snow Creek, which runs alongside the plant and empties into a larger stream, Choccolocco Creek. PCBs also turned up in private lawns after the company invited Anniston residents to use soil from the plant for their lawns, according to The Anniston Star.
So for decades the people of Anniston breathed air, planted gardens, drank from wells, fished in rivers, and swam in creeks contaminated with PCBs—without knowing anything about the danger. It wasn’t until the 1990s—20 years after Monsanto stopped making PCBs in Anniston—that widespread public awareness of the problem there took hold.
Studies by health authorities consistently found elevated levels of PCBs in houses, yards, streams, fields, fish, and other wildlife—and in people. In 2003, Monsanto and Solutia entered into a consent decree with the E.P.A. to clean up Anniston. Scores of houses and small businesses were to be razed, tons of contaminated soil dug up and carted off, and streambeds scooped of toxic residue. The cleanup is under way, and it will take years, but some doubt it will ever be completed—the job is massive. To settle residents’ claims, Monsanto has also paid $550 million to 21,000 Anniston residents exposed to PCBs, but many of them continue to live with PCBs in their bodies. Once PCB is absorbed into human tissue, there it forever remains.
Monsanto shut down PCB production in Anniston in 1971, and the company ended all its American PCB operations in 1977. Also in 1977, Monsanto closed a PCB plant in Wales. In recent years, residents near the village of Groesfaen, in southern Wales, have noticed vile odors emanating from an old quarry outside the village. As it turns out, Monsanto had dumped thousands of tons of waste from its nearby PCB plant into the quarry. British authorities are struggling to decide what to do with what they have now identified as among the most contaminated places in Britain.
“No Cause for Public Alarm”
What had Monsanto known—or what should it have known—about the potential dangers of the chemicals it was manufacturing? There’s considerable documentation lurking in court records from many lawsuits indicating that Monsanto knew quite a lot. Let’s look just at the example of PCBs.
The evidence that Monsanto refused to face questions about their toxicity is quite clear. In 1956 the company tried to sell the navy a hydraulic fluid for its submarines called Pydraul 150, which contained PCBs. Monsanto supplied the navy with test results for the product. But the navy decided to run its own tests. Afterward, navy officials informed Monsanto that they wouldn’t be buying the product. “Applications of Pydraul 150 caused death in all of the rabbits tested” and indicated “definite liver damage,” navy officials told Monsanto, according to an internal Monsanto memo divulged in the course of a court proceeding. “No matter how we discussed the situation,” complained Monsanto’s medical director, R. Emmet Kelly, “it was impossible to change their thinking that Pydraul 150 is just too toxic for use in submarines.”
Ten years later, a biologist conducting studies for Monsanto in streams near the Anniston plant got quick results when he submerged his test fish. As he reported to Monsanto, according to The Washington Post, “All 25 fish lost equilibrium and turned on their sides in 10 seconds and all were dead in 3½ minutes.”

Jeff Kleinpeter, of Baton Rouge, was accused by Monsanto of making misleading claims just for telling customers his cows are free of artificial bovine growth hormone.

When the Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) turned up high levels of PCBs in fish near the Anniston plant in 1970, the company swung into action to limit the P.R. damage. An internal memo entitled “confidential—f.y.i. and destroy” from Monsanto official Paul B. Hodges reviewed steps under way to limit disclosure of the information. One element of the strategy was to get public officials to fight Monsanto’s battle: “Joe Crockett, Secretary of the Alabama Water Improvement Commission, will try to handle the problem quietly without release of the information to the public at this time,” according to the memo.
Despite Monsanto’s efforts, the information did get out, but the company was able to blunt its impact. Monsanto’s Anniston plant manager “convinced” a reporter for The Anniston Star that there was really nothing to worry about, and an internal memo from Monsanto’s headquarters in St. Louis summarized the story that subsequently appeared in the newspaper: “Quoting both plant management and the Alabama Water Improvement Commission, the feature emphasized the PCB problem was relatively new, was being solved by Monsanto and, at this point, was no cause for public alarm.”
In truth, there was enormous cause for public alarm. But that harm was done by the “Original Monsanto Company,” not “Today’s Monsanto Company” (the words and the distinction are Monsanto’s). The Monsanto of today says that it can be trusted—that its biotech crops are “as wholesome, nutritious and safe as conventional crops,” and that milk from cows injected with its artificial growth hormone is the same as, and as safe as, milk from any other cow.
The Milk Wars
Jeff Kleinpeter takes very good care of his dairy cows. In the winter he turns on heaters to warm their barns. In the summer, fans blow gentle breezes to cool them, and on especially hot days, a fine mist floats down to take the edge off Louisiana’s heat. The dairy has gone “to the ultimate end of the earth for cow comfort,” says Kleinpeter, a fourth-generation dairy farmer in Baton Rouge. He says visitors marvel at what he does: “I’ve had many of them say, ‘When I die, I want to come back as a Kleinpeter cow.’ ”
Monsanto would like to change the way Jeff Kleinpeter and his family do business. Specifically, Monsanto doesn’t like the label on Kleinpeter Dairy’s milk cartons: “From Cows Not Treated with rBGH.” To consumers, that means the milk comes from cows that were not given artificial bovine growth hormone, a supplement developed by Monsanto that can be injected into dairy cows to increase their milk output.
No one knows what effect, if any, the hormone has on milk or the people who drink it. Studies have not detected any difference in the quality of milk produced by cows that receive rBGH, or rBST, a term by which it is also known. But Jeff Kleinpeter—like millions of consumers—wants no part of rBGH. Whatever its effect on humans, if any, Kleinpeter feels certain it’s harmful to cows because it speeds up their metabolism and increases the chances that they’ll contract a painful illness that can shorten their lives. “It’s like putting a Volkswagen car in with the Indianapolis 500 racers,” he says. “You gotta keep the pedal to the metal the whole way through, and pretty soon that poor little Volkswagen engine’s going to burn up.”
Kleinpeter Dairy has never used Monsanto’s artificial hormone, and the dairy requires other dairy farmers from whom it buys milk to attest that they don’t use it, either. At the suggestion of a marketing consultant, the dairy began advertising its milk as coming from rBGH-free cows in 2005, and the label began appearing on Kleinpeter milk cartons and in company literature, including a new Web site of Kleinpeter products that proclaims, “We treat our cows with love … not rBGH.”
The dairy’s sales soared. For Kleinpeter, it was simply a matter of giving consumers more information about their product.
But giving consumers that information has stirred the ire of Monsanto. The company contends that advertising by Kleinpeter and other dairies touting their “no rBGH” milk reflects adversely on Monsanto’s product. In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission in February 2007, Monsanto said that, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence that there is no difference in the milk from cows treated with its product, “milk processors persist in claiming on their labels and in advertisements that the use of rBST is somehow harmful, either to cows or to the people who consume milk from rBST-supplemented cows.”
Monsanto called on the commission to investigate what it called the “deceptive advertising and labeling practices” of milk processors such as Kleinpeter, accusing them of misleading consumers “by falsely claiming that there are health and safety risks associated with milk from rBST-supplemented cows.” As noted, Kleinpeter does not make any such claims—he simply states that his milk comes from cows not injected with rBGH.
Monsanto’s attempt to get the F.T.C. to force dairies to change their advertising was just one more step in the corporation’s efforts to extend its reach into agriculture. After years of scientific debate and public controversy, the F.D.A. in 1993 approved commercial use of rBST, basing its decision in part on studies submitted by Monsanto. That decision allowed the company to market the artificial hormone. The effect of the hormone is to increase milk production, not exactly something the nation needed then—or needs now. The U.S. was actually awash in milk, with the government buying up the surplus to prevent a collapse in prices.
Monsanto began selling the supplement in 1994 under the name Posilac. Monsanto acknowledges that the possible side effects of rBST for cows include lameness, disorders of the uterus, increased body temperature, digestive problems, and birthing difficulties. Veterinary drug reports note that “cows injected with Posilac are at an increased risk for mastitis,” an udder infection in which bacteria and pus may be pumped out with the milk. What’s the effect on humans? The F.D.A. has consistently said that the milk produced by cows that receive rBGH is the same as milk from cows that aren’t injected: “The public can be confident that milk and meat from BST-treated cows is safe to consume.” Nevertheless, some scientists are concerned by the lack of long-term studies to test the additive’s impact, especially on children. A Wisconsin geneticist, William von Meyer, observed that when rBGH was approved the longest study on which the F.D.A.’s approval was based covered only a 90-day laboratory test with small animals. “But people drink milk for a lifetime,” he noted. Canada and the European Union have never approved the commercial sale of the artificial hormone. Today, nearly 15 years after the F.D.A. approved rBGH, there have still been no long-term studies “to determine the safety of milk from cows that receive artificial growth hormone,” says Michael Hansen, senior staff scientist for Consumers Union. Not only have there been no studies, he adds, but the data that does exist all comes from Monsanto. “There is no scientific consensus about the safety,” he says.
However F.D.A. approval came about, Monsanto has long been wired into Washington. Michael R. Taylor was a staff attorney and executive assistant to the F.D.A. commissioner before joining a law firm in Washington in 1981, where he worked to secure F.D.A. approval of Monsanto’s artificial growth hormone before returning to the F.D.A. as deputy commissioner in 1991. Dr. Michael A. Friedman, formerly the F.D.A.’s deputy commissioner for operations, joined Monsanto in 1999 as a senior vice president. Linda J. Fisher was an assistant administrator at the E.P.A. when she left the agency in 1993. She became a vice president of Monsanto, from 1995 to 2000, only to return to the E.P.A. as deputy administrator the next year. William D. Ruckelshaus, former E.P.A. administrator, and Mickey Kantor, former U.S. trade representative, each served on Monsanto’s board after leaving government. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas was an attorney in Monsanto’s corporate-law department in the 1970s. He wrote the Supreme Court opinion in a crucial G.M.-seed patent-rights case in 2001 that benefited Monsanto and all G.M.-seed companies. Donald Rumsfeld never served on the board or held any office at Monsanto, but Monsanto must occupy a soft spot in the heart of the former defense secretary. Rumsfeld was chairman and C.E.O. of the pharmaceutical maker G. D. Searle & Co. when Monsanto acquired Searle in 1985, after Searle had experienced difficulty in finding a buyer. Rumsfeld’s stock and options in Searle were valued at $12 million at the time of the sale.

From the beginning some consumers have consistently been hesitant to drink milk from cows treated with artificial hormones. This is one reason Monsanto has waged so many battles with dairies and regulators over the wording of labels on milk cartons. It has sued at least two dairies and one co-op over labeling.
Critics of the artificial hormone have pushed for mandatory labeling on all milk products, but the F.D.A. has resisted and even taken action against some dairies that labeled their milk “BST-free.” Since BST is a natural hormone found in all cows, including those not injected with Monsanto’s artificial version, the F.D.A. argued that no dairy could claim that its milk is BST-free. The F.D.A. later issued guidelines allowing dairies to use labels saying their milk comes from “non-supplemented cows,” as long as the carton has a disclaimer saying that the artificial supplement does not in any way change the milk. So the milk cartons from Kleinpeter Dairy, for example, carry a label on the front stating that the milk is from cows not treated with rBGH, and the rear panel says, “Government studies have shown no significant difference between milk derived from rBGH-treated and non-rBGH-treated cows.” That’s not good enough for Monsanto.
The Next Battleground
As more and more dairies have chosen to advertise their milk as “No rBGH,” Monsanto has gone on the offensive. Its attempt to force the F.T.C. to look into what Monsanto called “deceptive practices” by dairies trying to distance themselves from the company’s artificial hormone was the most recent national salvo. But after reviewing Monsanto’s claims, the F.T.C.’s Division of Advertising Practices decided in August 2007 that a “formal investigation and enforcement action is not warranted at this time.” The agency found some instances where dairies had made “unfounded health and safety claims,” but these were mostly on Web sites, not on milk cartons. And the F.T.C. determined that the dairies Monsanto had singled out all carried disclaimers that the F.D.A. had found no significant differences in milk from cows treated with the artificial hormone.
Blocked at the federal level, Monsanto is pushing for action by the states. In the fall of 2007, Pennsylvania’s agriculture secretary, Dennis Wolff, issued an edict prohibiting dairies from stamping milk containers with labels stating their products were made without the use of the artificial hormone. Wolff said such a label implies that competitors’ milk is not safe, and noted that non-supplemented milk comes at an unjustified higher price, arguments that Monsanto has frequently made. The ban was to take effect February 1, 2008.
Wolff’s action created a firestorm in Pennsylvania (and beyond) from angry consumers. So intense was the outpouring of e-mails, letters, and calls that Pennsylvania governor Edward Rendell stepped in and reversed his agriculture secretary, saying, “The public has a right to complete information about how the milk they buy is produced.”
On this issue, the tide may be shifting against Monsanto. Organic dairy products, which don’t involve rBGH, are soaring in popularity. Supermarket chains such as Kroger, Publix, and Safeway are embracing them. Some other companies have turned away from rBGH products, including Starbucks, which has banned all milk products from cows treated with rBGH. Although Monsanto once claimed that an estimated 30 percent of the nation’s dairy cows were injected with rBST, it’s widely believed that today the number is much lower.
But don’t count Monsanto out. Efforts similar to the one in Pennsylvania have been launched in other states, including New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Utah, and Missouri. A Monsanto-backed group called afact—American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology—has been spearheading efforts in many of these states. afact describes itself as a “producer organization” that decries “questionable labeling tactics and activism” by marketers who have convinced some consumers to “shy away from foods using new technology.” afact reportedly uses the same St. Louis public-relations firm, Osborn & Barr, employed by Monsanto. An Osborn & Barr spokesman told The Kansas City Star that the company was doing work for afact on a pro bono basis.
Even if Monsanto’s efforts to secure across-the-board labeling changes should fall short, there’s nothing to stop state agriculture departments from restricting labeling on a dairy-by-dairy basis. Beyond that, Monsanto also has allies whose foot soldiers will almost certainly keep up the pressure on dairies that don’t use Monsanto’s artificial hormone. Jeff Kleinpeter knows about them, too.
He got a call one day from the man who prints the labels for his milk cartons, asking if he had seen the attack on Kleinpeter Dairy that had been posted on the Internet. Kleinpeter went online to a site called StopLabelingLies, which claims to “help consumers by publicizing examples of false and misleading food and other product labels.” There, sure enough, Kleinpeter and other dairies that didn’t use Monsanto’s product were being accused of making misleading claims to sell their milk.
There was no address or phone number on the Web site, only a list of groups that apparently contribute to the site and whose issues range from disparaging organic farming to downplaying the impact of global warming. “They were criticizing people like me for doing what we had a right to do, had gone through a government agency to do,” says Kleinpeter. “We never could get to the bottom of that Web site to get that corrected.”
As it turns out, the Web site counts among its contributors Steven Milloy, the “junk science” commentator for FoxNews.com and operator of junkscience.com, which claims to debunk “faulty scientific data and analysis.” It may come as no surprise that earlier in his career, Milloy, who calls himself the “junkman,” was a registered lobbyist for Monsanto.
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele are Vanity Fair contributing editors.

Simpson Family Values

A cartoon family whacked America's funny bone in 1989, eventually becoming the longest-running TV comedy ever. As The Simpsons jumps to the big screen this month, not everyone involved—including the writers, the voices, and Rupert Murdoch—agrees on what has made it a pop phenomenon.

by John Ortved August 2007

This is an expanded version of the text that appears in the August 2007 Vanity Fair.

In January 1992, during a campaign stop at a gathering of the National Religious Broadcasters, George H. W. Bush made a commitment to strengthen traditional values, promising to help American families become "a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons." A few days later, before the opening credits rolled on the animated sitcom's weekly episode, The Simpsons issued its response. Seated in front of the television, the family watched Bush make his remarks. "Hey! We're just like the Waltons," said Bart. "We're praying for an end to the Depression, too." While the immediacy of the response was surprising, the retort was vintage Simpsons: tongue-in-cheek, subversive, skewering both the president's cartoonish political antics and the culture that embraced them. Twelve months later, Bill Clinton moved into the White House. The Waltons were out; the Simpsons were in.

When The Simpsons had premiered on Fox, in 1989, prime-time television was somewhat lacking in comedy. Despite a few bright spots such as Cheers and the barbed, happily crude Roseanne, the sitcom roost was ruled by didactic, saccharine family fare: The Cosby Show, Full House, Growing Pains, Family Matters. Of the last—the show that gave the world Urkel—Tom Shales piously declared in The Washington Post, "A decent human being would have a hard time not smiling."

It was on this wan entertainment landscape that The Simpsons planted its flag. Prime time had not seen an animated sitcom since The Flintstones, in the 1960s, and the Christmas special with which The Simpsons debuted made clear that Springfield and Bedrock were separated by more than just a few millennia. In "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire," Homer takes a job as a department-store Santa after the family's emergency money is spent on tattoo removal for Bart. Following a motivational chat from Bart on the nature of Christmas miracles on television—meta-commentary was a Simpsons hallmark from the start—Homer risks his earnings at the track, on a dog named Santa's Little Helper. When the dog comes in dead last, the family adopts him. While the ending sounds a tad cheesy, and it was, the seeds had been planted: up against impossible odds, and one another, the family ultimately bonded together and overcame. And the gags were solid: Homer is despondent at the length of his children's Christmas pageant; a tattoo artist unquestioningly accepts 10-year-old Bart as an adult; the family's Christmas decorations are clearly pathetic in contrast to the Flanders family's next door. Critical reaction was nearly unanimous. "Couldn't be better … not only exquisitely weird but also as smart and witty as television gets," raved the Los Angeles Times. "Why would anyone want to go back to Growing Pains?" asked USA Today.

What followed is one of the most astounding successes in television history. The Simpsons went on to be a ratings and syndication winner for 18 years, and has grossed Fox sums of money measuring in the billions. It has won 23 Emmys and a Peabody Award, and was named the best TV show of all time by Time magazine in 1999. (The magazine also named Bart one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. "[Bart] embodies a century of popular culture and is one of the richest characters in it. One thinks of Chekhov, Celine, Lenny Bruce," the writer cooed.) But the most telling accolade is that The Simpsons is TV's longest-running sitcom ever, outlasting The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet's 14 seasons.

Not surprisingly, given its success, The Simpsons has spawned many imitators and opened doors for new avenues of animated comedy. Directly or indirectly, the show sired Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill, Futurama, Family Guy, Adult Swim, and South Park, which, nearly a decade after Bart's boastful underachieving, managed to regenerate a familiar cacophony of ratings, merchandise, and controversy when it premiered, in 1997. (The controversial label was perhaps deserved. Bart's greatest sin has been sawing the head off the statue of the town's founder; last year, on South Park, Cartman tried to exterminate the Jews.)

"It's like what sci-fi fans say about Star Trek: it created an audience for that genre," says Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy. "I think The Simpsons created an audience for prime-time animation that had not been there for many, many years. As far as I'm concerned, they basically re-invented the wheel. They created what is in many ways—you could classify it as—a wholly new medium. It's just wholly original."

"The Simpsons is the bane of our existence," says Matt Stone, co-creator of South Park with Trey Parker. "They have done so many parodies, tackled so many subjects. 'Simpsons did it!' is a very familiar refrain in our writers' room. Trey and I are constantly having our little cartoon compared to the best show in the history of television, The Simpsons. Why can't we be compared to According to Jim? Or Sister, Sister?"

Not that there aren't some debits on The Simpsons' ledger—for every King of the Hill, there was a Fish Police and a Critic. But over 18 years, The Simpsons has been so influential, it is difficult to find any strain of television comedy that does not contain its DNA. And yet the show's footprint is so much larger. Homer's signature "D'oh!" has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. There's a "Simpsons and Philosophy" course at Berkeley (for credit), not to mention the hundreds of published academic articles with The Simpsons as their subject. Even conservatives have come around. "It's possibly the most intelligent, funny, and even politically satisfying TV show ever," wrote the National Review in 2000. "The Simpsons celebrates many … of the best conservative principles: the primacy of family, skepticism about political authority.… Springfield residents pray and attend church every Sunday." Next to pornography, no single subject may have as many Web sites and blogs dedicated to its veneration. The Simpsons has permeated our vernacular, the way we tell jokes, and how our storytellers practice their craft. If you look around, you can see the evidence, but as with any truly powerful cultural force, you can never see it all—it's buried too deep.

Such lofty significance was never the goal of Matt Groening, a native of Portland, Oregon, who, with writing aspirations, moved to L.A. in 1977, at the age of 23, immersing himself in the punk-rock scene and working on novels. He was freshly graduated from Evergreen State College, a hippie school in Olympia, Washington, with no grades, exams, or required classes. After several menial jobs, he began recording his disgust with life in L.A. in a comic strip, Life in Hell, which he sent to his friends back home and distributed at the record shop Licorice Pizza, where he found work behind the counter. The strip featured deeply cynical, existential ruminations from a bunny named Binky, his illegitimate, one-eared son, Bongo, and a fez-wearing gay couple—who may or may not be identical twins—named Jeff and Akbar. It found its way into the Los Angeles Reader and then LA Weekly, in 1986, and eventually caught the attention of James L. Brooks, writer-producer of Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and writer-director of the film Terms of Endearment, among others.

Gary Panter, friend of Matt Groening's, cartoonist: The people I knew who were doing the mini-comics at the earliest were Matt, Lynda Barry, me.… Matt's earliest comics were about language.… He did a whole series of Life in Hell called "Forbidden Words." He would just name all these phrases that were overused in culture and forbid them from being used again. His comics were very ambitious, and his drawings very simple, but beautifully designed; it has clarity, and Matt's a great writer, and understands human psychology.

James Vowell, founding editor, Los Angeles Reader: Matt was always trying to sell Life in Hell as an idea to me for a weekly cartoon in the paper. He'd draw these little pictures on paper napkins … and occasionally I'd say, "Matt, why don't you make that chin a little smaller." He didn't need me to edit his cartoons, I guarantee you.… They became super popular almost immediately.

Polly Platt, production designer, Terms of Endearment: I was nominated for an Academy Award for Terms of Endearment, and I wanted to give Jim Brooks a thank-you gift. [Matt] did a cartoon called "Success and Failure in Hollywood." So I called Matt and I bought the original. [Jim] was thrilled! He just laughed and laughed, and hung it up on his wall in his office. It was a brilliant cartoon. Success and failure come out to exactly the same thing in the cartoon. I think it's people shooting each other.

My suggestion to Jim was that I thought it would be great to do a TV special on the characters that Matt had already drawn; I never envisioned anything like The Simpsons.

At the time, Brooks was looking for a cartoon short to place before commercials as minute-long "bumpers" on The Tracey Ullman Show, a sketch-comedy series that Barry Diller, then C.E.O. of Fox Inc., had asked him to produce in 1987 for the new and struggling Fox network.

Jay Kogen, writer-producer, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–89), The Simpsons (1989–93): They really wanted Life in Hell. But Matt was making a good bit of money on mugs and calendars from Life in Hell, and Fox wanted to own the whole thing. He said, "I won't sell you this. But I have this other family, called The Simpsons, that you can have." And then he proceeded to draw something on a napkin that legend has it he just made up on the spot. And they said, "O.K., we'll do that!"

Polly Platt: What's funny now, because he's so rich, is that I was driving home from my office at Paramount, very shortly after that, and I saw Matt sitting at the bus stop. He didn't even have a car. I had no idea he was so poor. I stopped my car and said hello and offered him a ride. We were going in different directions, or he was too proud, or whatever.

Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist, Maus: I pleaded with Matt and advised him strongly from my elder-statesman position to not work with Fox. "Whatever you do, don't work with those guys! They're gangsters! They're gonna take your rights away!" He's never let me forget it.

Gabor Csupo, original animator, The Simpsons (1987–92): When Jim Brooks originally saw Matt Groening's drawings on his wall, it was all black-and-white, just the line drawing, no color or anything. And that's how he wanted to do the show. And we said, "You know what? We gonna give you color for the same price." And all of a sudden the eyes lit up and he said, "O.K., you guys are on." The characters were so beautiful but, let's face it, primitively designed that we thought that we could counterbalance that design with shocking colors. That's why we came up with the yellow skin, and the blue hair for Marge.

Michael Mendel, associate producer, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–89), The Simpsons (1989–92): Matt would just show up with a two-page script and go, "Here it is. This is the cartoon we're doing this week." It was sort of guerrilla-style animation. We would hang out on the stage of Tracey Ullman, and in between block and rehearsal, we would grab [the actors] and record their lines. It was me and Matt and the animators and a couple directors—a really small group of people working on this little one-minute cartoon every week.

Wally Wolodarsky, writer-producer, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–89), The Simpsons (1989–93): The Simpsons were viewed as poor relations by the writing staff of The Tracey Ullman Show, and we secretly always felt that The Simpsons was the funniest part of the show.

For the voices of Homer and Marge, the producers used Dan Castellaneta and Julie Kavner, actors who were already regulars on The Tracey Ullman Show. (Marge's rasp is Kavner's normal voice, almost uninflected.) Yeardley Smith, who auditioned using her own voice for Lisa, was a struggling actress with some Broadway and TV-movie credits. She had originally auditioned for the role of Bart, while voice actress Nancy Cartwright tried for Lisa. When they switched, Cartwright—who had followed the advice of her mentor, Daws Butler, the voice of Yogi Bear, to move to L.A. and try voice acting—attempted a version of a voice she had used on My Little Pony and The Snorks, and Bart was born.

The bumper episodes were amusing snippets of the dysfunctional family's daily life, focusing mostly on the kids being kids, and the grief they caused their parents: Bart and Lisa engage in a burping contest; Bart directs the pallbearers at a funeral as if he were the foreman on a construction site.

Though critics liked The Tracey Ullman Show, the series wasn't a big hit; but, then, neither was much else on the network. Still, Diller saw that the big-three networks were getting old and tired—they were losing viewers to cable and independent networks—and he was eager to experiment. In early 1988, he launched one of television's first reality programs, America's Most Wanted (Cops would follow in 1989), while taking the sitcom in lewd new directions with Married … with Children. When Brooks approached him with the idea of making The Simpsons into its own series, Diller eventually bit, thinking that the show might be, as he later put it, "the one that can crack the slab for us."

Barry Diller, former chairman and C.E.O., Fox: Everything was failing at the time, all those half-hour sitcoms: Mr. President, etc. We all thought the Simpsons were really cute, but their shorts weren't making any noise, nor was The Tracey Ullman Show, for that matter, which was unfortunate. I never saw it as a series. What made the difference was Jim Brooks. I know it was originally Matt's drawings, and I'm sure [executive producer] Sam Simon made his contribution, but the show never would have happened, or have been successful, without Jim Brooks.

Rupert Murdoch, C.E.O., News Corp.: I was at a program meeting with Barry Diller and the people at Fox Network, and afterwards Barry said, "Come into my room, I want to show you something." And he had a tape there, of about 20 minutes in length, of all the little 30-second bits that had been through The Tracey Ullman Show. And he played it, and I just thought it was hilarious. I said, "You've gotta buy this tonight." He said, "No. It's more complicated than that." So we went forward from there.

Michael Mendel: Barry Diller just wanted to make specials and Jim [Brooks] put his foot down and said, "It's a series or nothing." The network wanted to play it safe, and they weren't sure if this was going to work. I don't think that happens today. I don't think anyone gets on the phone with Barry Diller and says, "Take it or leave it. It's a series."

Barry Diller: I wanted to do anything that did not involve making a commitment of 13 episodes. But Jim said, with six months of lead time, it wouldn't work any other way.

Michael Mendel: It was like, "I love them as one-minute cartoons, but as a whole half hour, I don't know." I didn't think they'd be able to hold people's attention. Great prediction on my part.

Rupert Murdoch: You look at it in today's figures, the risks [of making The Simpsons its own series] weren't that great. But at the time, we were very conscious of how much money we were spending on productions. It was certainly tremendously important in establishing the use of brand of the network.

Brooks's man in charge of developing the show was Sam Simon, a writer-producer who had worked with Brooks on Taxi and Ullman. Simon would depart The Simpsons after its fourth season, leaving behind much acrimony between him and Matt Groening over creative differences and compensation issues. Simon's lawyers negotiated a lucrative deal for him; he left without much severance, but retained a piece of the show. (He has made more than 10 million dollars a year since.) Many of the original staff remain loyal to Simon, crediting him with taking Groening's crude characters from The Tracey Ullman Show and making them into the Simpsons that the world knows and loves. Simon recently told 60 Minutes, "Any show I've ever worked on, it turns me into a monster. I go crazy; I hate myself." For his part, Groening has said, "I think Sam Simon is brilliantly funny and one of the smartest writers I've ever worked with, although unpleasant and mentally unbalanced."

Colin Lewis, postproduction supervisor and producer, The Simpsons (1990–97): Sam had problems with Matt from the beginning. The stuff with Matt, anyone will tell you, in terms of them feuding and not talking … that was consistent from the beginning.

Polly Platt: Matt did not get along with [Sam]. Nobody got along with him. He's kind of an awful person. If he was at any meeting, it just seemed that everyone would turn on each other.

Barry Diller: I was totally aware of their problems and often mediated them on behalf of everyone. For a while it was not a happy place. But I think it ultimately made the show better.

Michael Mendel: A lot of the foundation for the show and the reason why I think it's successful was laid down during those tumultuous times.

Jay Kogen: It was clear that there was animosity back and forth. It was a tough position for Sam to be in, because Matt was getting all the accolades. I would think that if you were pouring your life's blood into something and getting none of the credit, it would be irritating. If you look at the original Simpsons cartoons, those are closer to Matt's drawings, but Sam reshaped them and re-drew them. He had experience in sitcoms. He had also worked in animation. He's also a very talented cartoonist himself. He's really smart, and handled storyboards and all that stuff.

Brad Bird, supervising director, The Simpsons (1989–92); feature-film director, The Incredibles, Ratatouille: I think the unsung hero has always been Sam. I was in the room when he took some pretty mediocre scripts and just sat there in his chair, with all the writers in the room and a cigar, and went through, line by line. And he would get people to pitch lines … but 9 times out of 10 he came up with the best line. And if someone came up with a genuinely better line, he'd put that in.

Jay Kogen: Matt wasn't always in the room. So it's hard to fight with everybody and have a real say if you're not there. He's also a very pleasant, easygoing guy, and the writers' room can be a tough place. But, you know, ultimately Matt got what he wanted. When he pitched stuff, he got what he wanted.

With the enlarged scope of a series, a cast of characters outside the family was needed. There were Patty and Selma, Marge's spinster sisters, and Grandpa, Homer's neglected father. Moe the bartender, Homer's enabler, is the bitterest man in town, while the local-TV kiddie show is hosted by Krusty the Clown, a Friars-era showbiz hack. Homer's boss is the 104-year-old nuclear-power-plant owner, Mr. Burns, a throwback to the robber barons (with some Charles Foster Kane, Rupert Murdoch, and Barry Diller thrown in). To voice the supporting roles, the performing cast was filled out with veteran improv actors Hank Azaria (Chief Wiggum, Moe, Apu) and Harry Shearer (Principal Skinner, Mr. Burns, Kent Brockman). The late Phil Hartman helped create some of The Simpsons' best moments voicing the charmingly incompetent litigator Lionel Hutz and washed-up actor Troy McClure.

Josh Weinstein, writer–executive producer, The Simpsons (1991–98): When Jim and Matt and Sam first assembled a group of actors for the show, they didn't go for voice-over actors, people who did kids' voices and cartoon shows. They went for real actors and actors who had a lot of comedy, improv experience. Sometimes some of the best moments came from the actors themselves, and not from the script.

Hank Azaria: The hard stuff was the first two or three years, where we were finding the tone, sensibility, even specifically the voices of the characters. There was a lot of finding it in fits and starts. We would record all day long.

Michael Mendel: Fox had this really huge A.D.R. stage, and everybody [not just the actors] was in the room with the microphones. You couldn't make a noise while they were recording or you would ruin it. It was always a challenge to not laugh on top of these actors' takes because they were so funny. So people would be, you know, crawling under their desks not to ruin the take.

roducing the volume of animation needed for the 13-episode first season was another hurdle. One problem was that much of the actual work would have to be farmed out to studios in Korea, which were used to animating Transformers and not sophisticated comedy shows. Another was that most of the staff—including Brooks and Groening—had little experience with animation.

Kent Butterworth, director of first Simpsons episode: Gabor Csupo had escaped from the Iron Curtain with a couple of his animator friends.… He had never done that volume of work, and had not worked with overseas studios, and he was concerned about his ability to deliver.

Michael Mendel: The first show came back from Korea and it was a complete disaster. It was unairable. We had to re-cast some voices. The director just went off and did a bunch of stuff on his own.

Gabor Csupo: It was a very, very raw first assembly of the scenes, and some of the scenes were still missing, didn't come back, wrong colors, wrong angles. So it was a disaster. Jim sort of got into it, started to laugh for the first five minutes, and then all of a sudden his face started to turn green and yellow, match the Simpsons characters almost. He got really disappointed because none of the jokes worked or nothing, and then all of a sudden he started to scream and yell, saying, "What is this?" He just went off and he even started to demand extra camera angles, which was the funniest thing ever—he never did animation in his life. He asked for coverage like when you're shooting a live-action movie. "So where are the other camera angles?" And [my producer] and I were just looking at each other, "O.K. … "

I was just so angry and embarrassed at the same time that they forced us to show this raw footage before we could even correct it. Jim was screaming and yelling that "this is not funny!" And I said, "Well, it may be not funny because you didn't write it funny." And then everybody looks at me: "Oh my God! You dared to say that to Jim!" But I felt I had nothing to lose.

Kent Butterworth: It was not fun. It was decided [by Brooks] to shelve this episode and get back to it later. Meanwhile, he would contact Fox and let them know that the delivery of the series would be delayed in order to get the quality they needed. Needless to say, my employment on The Simpsons was over!

The next episodes, directed by David Silverman and Wesley Archer, were less problematic.

Barry Diller: I remember when we screened the first episode, for a number of Fox executives, we all went down to their bungalows over at The Simpsons, and not a single person in the room was laughing, except for me and Jim Brooks. No one had done an animated sitcom since The Flintstones, and it was just like, "What is this?" But we put it on, and it became more and more successful every week.

The show hit a ratings high at the end of its first season, in the spring of 1990, cracking the Top 10 (the only Fox show to do so that year). Fox struck a deal with Mattel, and talking Bart Simpson dolls began disappearing from department-store shelves. Bart T-shirts were selling at the rate of a million per day in North America. His catchphrases, such as "Underachiever and proud of it" and "Don't have a cow, man," became staples of early-90s lexicon. Bootleg merchandise was soon as ubiquitous as the real thing. "Black Bart" T-shirts were a popular phenomenon in African-American communities, with Bart's catchphrases altered to "Watch it, mon!" and, without irony, "You wouldn't understand; it's a black thing."

Matt Groening found endless amusement in these imitations.

Conan O'Brien, writer-producer, The Simpsons (1991–93); host, Late Night with Conan O'Brien: Friends of Matt's would be traveling and they would find bootlegged Simpsons merchandise. Sometimes they were funny and sometimes they were disturbing. Like a Marge made out of a lizard's skull … or T-shirts that were from some country—recently liberated from the Iron Curtain—that had Bart saying weird phrases that were mildly threatening or racist. I remember Matt cracking up once. "Did you see what they just found? Ceausescu had this in his basement."

Jay Kogen: I had not been a part of anything that was that huge, ever. Literally, people were selling T-shirts of the show I was working on on freeway off-ramps. Instead of oranges off the freeway, they were selling Simpsons T-shirts. All people were talking about was The Simpsons. It was gigantic!

With Bart omnipresent and Fox expanding its programming schedule from three nights a week to five, a bold plan was hatched: beginning with the show's second season, in the fall of 1990, it would be moved to Thursday nights, where it would take on the reigning television champion, NBC's The Cosby Show.

Barry Diller: We were at a scheduling meeting, so there were about 15 people there, and we were figuring out what to put up against Cosby on Thursday nights at eight o'clock. Cosby had been the biggest thing on TV for God knows how many years. Rupert leaned over and whispered to me, "What about The Simpsons?" And I stood up and went over to the board and moved the little magnet that said "Simpsons" to Thursday night at eight. And it took a solid minute before someone said, "You know what? That could work." And it was a big deal, little Bart Simpson going up against big Bill Cosby. So it was a dragon-slayer story.

Rupert Murdoch: We were sitting down with Barry, reviewing the schedule. We look at it and I said, "We gotta be more aggressive … Let's put it up against Cosby. Cosby must be coming to the end of his run—he's been there forever." And everybody in the room was horrified and sort of laughed at me. Except Barry Diller, who said, "No, let's think about this."

Wally Wolodarsky: None of the writers cared [about the scheduling move]. It was just an opportunity to make fun of Cosby and be impudent about it. The writers never had a stake in the ratings; you never cared about that. That was always viewed as a business decision.

Rupert Murdoch: And so we did it. And at the end of the first year, Cosby announced his retirement. We started behind him, but I think we'd caught up by the end of the year; certainly the writing was on the wall. [The shows were close in the ratings most of the season, with The Simpsons occasionally edging out Cosby.]

Donick Cary, writer-producer, The Simpsons (1996–99); creator, Lil' Bush: They invented a network. In a lot of ways, the Fox Network wouldn't exist without the longevity and the amount of viewers that The Simpsons has consistently brought to Fox.

Barry Diller: In terms of ratings and financial terms it really built the network, but also in terms of giving Fox its attitude. Some of that was already there with Married … with Children, but The Simpsons is by far the most successful show.

The writers' room, assembled by Sam Simon, would come to be considered one of the great temples of comedy. Many of the original writers—including Wolodarsky, Kogen, John Swartzwelder, and the team of Al Jean and Mike Reiss—had substantial television credits. But Simon also found spectacular new talent in non-traditional locations, beginning a trend that would continue long after his departure. (David Mirkin, who ran the show in its fifth and sixth seasons, hired a mathematician and a lawyer.) Perhaps his key find was George Meyer, editor of a humor zine called Army Man—distributed sparingly in Hollywood in the late 80s—of which Simon was an enormous fan.

In 1991, Conan O'Brien, one of the many Harvard Lampoon veterans on the staff, and the writing team of Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein would be the first writers to be added to the original room.

Conan O'Brien: It was as if that first Olympic Dream Team, with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson … it was like getting the call, "Do you want to come shoot baskets with us?"

Josh Weinstein: It was like walking into the pantheon of comedy gods.

Colin Lewis: If you talk to a writer on any show, somehow he'll guide you towards, "What do you do? What show are you on?" And with the Simpsons writers, it was the opposite. They were guys who were having fun, doing what they were doing and making a good show, but they were the geekiest, most unassuming guys.

Donick Cary: A lot of these guys had written on the Lampoon together in college, so they were sort of falling back into their college routine—which was, basically, to hang out all day and entertain themselves.

Bill Oakley, writer–executive producer, The Simpsons (1991–98): From Season 2 to Season 8, there was never a time that there were less than 80 percent Harvard Lampoon graduates on the staff.

Conan O'Brien was fresh from Saturday Night Live when he joined The Simpsons. When not cracking up his fellow writers, he managed to craft memorable episodes such as "Marge vs. the Monorail" (a takeoff on The Music Man in which a straw-hatted shyster sells Springfield a dilapidated monorail) and "Homer Goes to College" (Homer lives out his college fantasies, which have been informed entirely by 80s Animal House rip-offs).

Conan O'Brien: I was very nervous [when I started]. They showed me into this office and told me to start writing down some ideas. They left me alone in that office, and I remember leaving after five minutes to go get a cup of coffee. And I heard a crash, and I walked back to the office, and there was a hole in the window and a dead bird on the floor—literally in my first 10 minutes at The Simpsons, a bird had flown through the glass of my window, hit the far wall, broken its neck, and fallen dead on the floor. And I remember George Meyer came in and looked at it, and he was like, "Man, this is some kind of weird omen."

I think when I first got there I stood out a bit, because everyone sat still in the room and thought, and I don't think it was too long before I was climbing on furniture. I would pitch the characters in their voices, and I thought that's just what people did, but then Mike Reiss told me nobody does that.

Wally Wolodarsky: Conan used to do this thing called "The Nervous Writer" that involved him opening a can of Diet Coke and then nervously pitching a joke. He would spray Diet Coke all over himself and that was always a source of endless amusement amongst us.

Conan O'Brien: Everyone heard the news [when he was hired to replace David Letterman on NBC in 1993], and John Swartzwelder—he looks like someone who would arrest an anarchist for throwing a bomb at Archduke Ferdinand's carriage—was sitting there and smoke was trailing off his cigarette. He doesn't say much, and then he just looked at me and he said, "I'd watch your show." And that meant a lot to me, because he's not a guy who will say something he doesn't mean.

Some executive at Fox—who I don't remember, and that's probably for the best—said, "No, no, no. He still owes us money on his contract." And it was like a year's salary or something. So I think NBC paid half, and I paid half. I actually had to pay my way out of Fox, which always felt a little strange. I'm sure Simon Cowell has that money now. He's using it on hair gel.

George Meyer is still with the show, considered the godfather of the writers' room and the unofficial show-runner. In a 2000 profile of Meyer, The New Yorker claimed that he has "so thoroughly shaped the program that by now the comedic sensibility of The Simpsons can be seen as mostly his."

Richard Appel, co–executive producer, The Simpsons (1995–99): One thing George does, in any room he's in, he sets the bar high just by being in it. One of the best things to have in a writers' room is a sense that you're trying to make the best person in the room laugh. And George was always that at The Simpsons in my time there, and I don't think it's presumptuous to say that's what he was before I got there and after I left.

Conan O'Brien: George Meyer has just such a discerning comedy mind, your biggest fear is saying something hacky or contrived.

Wally Wolodarsky: There's a darkness and lightness in George, both of which are surprising. For someone who could pitch such dark material, he also had a kind of hippie lightness of spirit that you wouldn't necessarily think go together.

Richard Appel: George did the most, of anyone I know, to sustain the voice of the show. And I think he had a huge hand in defining the voice of the show, but so did Jim Brooks and Matt and Sam Simon. I have heard everyone say it's just a thrilling experience to be in a room with Sam, and I think George really thinks the same things of Sam, and for me, my Sam was George.

John Swartzwelder has written far more Simpsons scripts than anyone—upward of 50, including classics such as "Krusty Gets Kancelled," "Rosebud," and "Bart Gets an Elephant."

Bill Oakley: If you look at the Swartzwelder scripts—it's like he comes from another dimension. He is a genius—his material is so strange you almost wonder how his brain works. The ultimate Swartzwelder joke that I still remember appears in the episode "Whacking Day." Homer is letting people park on his lawn, and he has a sign that says, parking: $10 per axle. And this foreign guy in this crazy foreign car, with like eight axles, drives up, and Homer goes, "Woo-hoo!" and the foreign man goes, "Hooray!" God, it just makes me laugh.

Wally Wolodarsky: Swartzwelder seemed to go directly from being a homeless person to a writer on The Simpsons. He was a little bit older than us and had, I think, seen a little bit more of the world, in terms of being up and down. He did have interesting preoccupations. I know for a while he was collecting wanted posters. Real Patty Hearst wanted posters.

Jay Kogen: One time, I remember, [Swartzwelder] bought a painting that Hitler had painted. I was like, "Really? You want to buy a Hitler painting?" But he loved historic artifacts.

Animation had opened up a whole new world—the world, in fact—to the creative staff. Not only could they take their characters anywhere, physically and emotionally, but there were no adorable actors to become tangled up in pubescence, no live studio audience to pander to, no laugh track. (Even when Seinfeld premiered, in 1990, certainly a step forward for the sitcom, the viewer was still being told when to laugh.) Another advantage was the cover that a cartoon provided for humor that could never be permitted in live action.

Donick Cary: We'd have episodes where it starts with Homer's car crashed into the front porch, 'cause he drove home drunk. If an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond started with Ray Romano's car crashed into the front porch, there'd be a lot of chat about that.

One factor keeping the show's writing fresh has been the lack of network influence. Fox executives are forbidden to give notes to The Simpsons.

Larry Doyle, writer-producer, The Simpsons (1997–99): When you have a table read with a regular sitcom, you go in there and there's always a sense of fear, because those people [at the network] are unpredictable. They can come back and say, "No, we don't want you to do that," and then you'll have a day to write a new script. That never happens to us.

Josh Weinstein: Working on The Simpsons then felt like being in the graduate school of comedy, or a great comedy lab, where you could try and do anything and no one would stop you, as long as it was good or funny. That had an amazing feel.

Brad Bird: There were discussions [with the network], but they were over pretty quickly. I think people felt good being under the titanium shield of Jim Brooks. The studio might get upset and they might make notes, but we didn't have to take them unless Brooks said we had to take them.

Barry Diller: Anything with Jim Brooks has a level of independence in it, but it's not exclusionary. Jim's not about being exclusionary, and in this case couldn't be—there was just too much strife going on [between Sam Simon and Matt Groening]. Were we engaged in the early development of it, Fox network people? Yes. Did we give line notes? Not ever. I never gave line notes in my life.

Colin Lewis: David Mirkin was the first [show-runner] who said, "Why do we have to change it? We're The Simpsons. We're in control because they want their hit show, and I will get to Saturday night and I won't deliver them a show, and then they will have to air what I give them."

What is striking about the early episodes is how sweet, and at times dramatic, they can be. "The question was: could you make cartoon characters that looked this weird and grotesque and actually make you feel some real emotion," Groening has said. The Simpsons faced legitimate problems: Homer lived in fear of losing his job; he had trouble connecting with his daughter. It was only in later years, to keep the writing interesting, that the characters became more exaggerated, as did their situations—Homer went to space; Maggie shot a man; the family created an international incident with Australia.

Conan O'Brien: Homer's a real temptation. We had so much fun trying to make him dumber and dumber and dumber that there was one time where Homer's brain got angry at him because he was so stupid, and so you heard the brain say, "That's it, I give up," and walk down a corridor and slam a door. I loved it—but it's like, "Wait, if his brain is his consciousness, who's his brain walking out on? And who is his brain angry with?"

Donick Cary: I think we got to times where it felt like Homer was just being dumb, like literally he's on the floor eating out of the garbage. And you're like, "Hmm. Is this really the best place to take this character?"

Conan O'Brien: There is a strong lack of sentimentality on The Simpsons, but something that Sam and Jim and Matt stressed was: this is a family. And that kind of talk can start to sound pretty treacly, but you can't have an episode where Homer sells Bart, or harvests his organs. So I think one of the things that works is respect for that unit was always kept intact.

Wally Wolodarsky: I think that Sam had helped to create such a vibrant world that once he left, his vision was in place, and I don't think that that ever really changed.

Donick Cary: At Letterman [where Cary had been a writer] it was always like, "We need material for tonight! What are we gonna do? We need jokes!" I got to The Simpsons, and I was like [speaking rapidly], "All right. Homer's under the table—and he's eating butter, and he's running around. And Homer … " And people are like: "Dude … we got nine months to get a joke together."

Conan O'Brien: By the time an episode came out, you had maybe heard the script read through like 20 times, and if for some reason the joke wasn't getting a laugh on the 21st time, you had to rework it. Sometimes your first pitch is your best pitch, but over time, if you revisit it constantly, you'll grow weary of it, it will start to wilt, and then you're just coming up with a different pitch that's maybe not necessarily better.

Donick Cary: So you go out—you write like crazy, your script. You bring it back in. And then the room would spend a week rewriting it.… If it was a story that was close to your heart, it could be a very painful process. Suddenly there's 15 opinions on why it's good or bad.

Josh Weinstein: The table read is a very exciting, nerve-racking event for a writer or show-runner because that is the first time that you hear your lines, like the opening night of a play. And there are also a lot of outside factors that can affect the table read. If it's raining in L.A., or if there's bad traffic, and people come in a bad mood, that can affect a table read as well.

Larry Doyle: A lot of the Fox "offices" are actually trailers that they just never moved, and one of them where the table reads were while I was there was a big double-wide trailer, and it's got a giant wooden table and the writers and actors sit at the table and then the entire room is lined with chairs that are always filled with everyone else who works on the show, and sometimes guests and sometimes various celebrities come in to hear a table read … they'll bring their kids. I remember once we had a couple Make-A-Wish kids. Ron Howard brought his kids. Stephen Hawking came to a table read.

As Bartmania cooled off, and the series moved toward institutional status with its fourth, fifth, and sixth seasons, the show's quality miraculously refused to drop. It got funnier, smarter, richer in allusion and parody. The producers changed animation studios from Klasky Csupo to Film Roman in the fourth season, updating the rudimentary look with slicker designs and a more varied palette.

After Simon had left, in 1993, different writers were promoted to fill the role of show-runner. Al Jean and Mike Reiss took over first. Then the producers brought in David Mirkin, who had written for Three's Company and created Get a Life, with Chris Elliot. After Mirkin came longtime writers Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, followed by Mike Scully (who stayed in charge for four seasons—the unwritten rule had been that show-runners stay for two years), before the show was given back to Al Jean, who has run The Simpsons since 2001.

Jay Kogen: Those years with Al [Jean] and Mike [Reiss] running it were pretty darn good. And then the ones after that maybe not so much … some people ran it better than others.

Wally Wolodarsky: We left during the fourth season, and at that point we were already running out of childhood anecdotes. And I think as a result the show got crazier and crazier. Because all the stories we had experienced, or seen other people experience, had been exploited. And to see the show go on is mind-boggling to me.

Colin Lewis: [Under David Mirkin] it stopped being like the geeky guys from college writing the show and became people who just really wanted to be comedy writers, and wanted to be Hollywood, so they could say, "I work on The Simpsons." That's when Homer sort of became stupid.

Rupert Murdoch: The show's had its ups and downs. It had a couple years there where it grew a bit dark, but we sort of got them out of that.

As the series relinquished the emotional grounding of the early years, it became more topical. Later episodes seemed increasingly tailored to guest appearances—a forgivable sin, concerning the impressive list: Mick Jagger, Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, Steve Martin, Elton John, Ludacris, Ricky Gervais, Elvis Costello, Stephen Hawking, Tony Blair, Frank Gehry, Susan Sarandon, Tom Clancy, and J. K. Rowling (to name a few). Even the earliest seasons had been graced by Michael Jackson, Penny Marshall, and Elizabeth Taylor, who voiced Maggie's first word, "Daddy." (Taylor said "Fuck you" to Matt Groening and stormed out of the recording session after he made her read the line more than 20 times. He said it kept sounding "too sexual.")

Hank Azaria: They sent me down to greet Mick Jagger [when he arrived to record his part], and I said, "Hey, Mick, we're all thrilled to have you here." And he kind of blew right by me like I was the greeter, and went [dismissively], "Yeah, we'll get it," which I knew was going to be awkward, because I was about to walk upstairs and record with him. And it also made me a little bit annoyed. So before I even thought, I went, "No, I don't think we'll get it—I'm just glad you're here." And he kind of turned around and looked back at me like, What the fuck did you just say to me? And I was just like, "Hi. I'm Hank, I'll be recording with you." So that was slightly awkward.

Tim Long, co–executive producer, The Simpsons (1999–present): Mr. T [another guest] was telling me the scenes that happened in Rocky III, where he lost. The reason he lost was because his mother needed money for an operation, and so he was paid to take a dive. And I said, "Well, I don't remember that in the movie." And he just looks at me right in the eye and says, "Things you don't see!"

I said to him, "I remember you put out a record called Mr. T's Commandments." And somehow he heard that as "Mr. T, please sing 'Mr. T's Commandments.'" So he sang me the whole song. And I just thought, If I'm killed by a sniper tonight, well, my life would have ended beautifully, because I have been sung to by Mr. T.

Ricky Gervais, guest writer and voice, The Simpsons (2006), creator and star, BBC's The Office: We had a lunch with Matt and Al Jean and all the writers and producers and everything, and at the very end, I was doing the nerdy thing, asking Matt to draw me a Homer. I was jealous of Moby's. I saw a Cribs, and it was Moby and he said it was his prized possession—I think the first Cribs where you actually saw a bookshelf. Matt said, "Would you like to be a guest voice?" And I said, "What are the hours?" And he said, "The hours are really good." I went, "Of course I would."

One battle the network decided to fight was against the actors who provided the voices on the show. According to a former producer, up until 1999, the actors were paid only about $25,000 an episode, while the Seinfeld cast had been making $600,000 per episode each. Negotiations that year for new contracts turned bitter. Though show-runner Mike Scully refused to participate, Fox began auditioning replacements.

Colin Lewis: There was a day, there was an actual moment when the actors, who are normally just friendly, sat down and started talking more in depth about contracts.… They asked us to give them some time alone, and it was like, "Alone? You guys don't hang out alone." They literally, like, closed the door.

Hank Azaria: You know, the show has made so much money, in so many ways. Eventually, we just wanted to get our piece of the pie. And Fox is tough. They're very tough negotiators. Their business model is not to give money away. So it got a little intense at times.

Larry Doyle: The actors actually didn't come to work for a while. Their contract expired, and we weren't recording them for I think a month. Fox had started to audition people. The actors got their deal because of a last-minute thing, some sort of bonus. And it turned out that they weren't going to get [the bonus money] until 2005 or something. So it was a real, like, Fox-studio "Fuck you," where the fine print means, "We're going to deliver that, in pennies, after you're dead." So Harry [Shearer], for the longest time, came to every table read wearing a T-shirt that said, you'll get it in 2005. The suggestion being that he wasn't going to do anything but work to contract.

Rupert Murdoch: The voices, who have been there since the very beginning, are now getting very large salaries … I'm not saying whether they're worth it or not. Or whether you could replace them or not, but Jim [Brooks] wouldn't hear of that, because they're all his friends.

Larry Doyle: I doubt that's what Jim Brooks said—I think that Jim Brooks might have been friends with some of them, but he wasn't really good friends with them. And he is first and foremost a businessman. If he was saying he didn't want to replace them, it was because he thought the show would tank, and I think it probably would have. Had they replaced Homer, I think that would have been the last year of the show.

Hank Azaria: I think that Fox, and even our own representation, didn't realize how much these voices couldn't just be replaced. And also, by the way, you don't animate first and then stick in voices. You're animating to the vocal performance, so that means comic timing and inflection and character all comes first, and then you animate. Bottom line is: they tried to replace us and couldn't.

A second contract dispute in 2004 spilled into the press when the cast demanded equity positions. This too was resolved—the actors now make more than "a hundred thousand dollars" an episode, according to Murdoch—and the show has kept rolling on. It has been renewed until 2009, and on July 27 of this year, the characters will make the jump to the big screen. While debate over the show's quality will rage (mostly on the Internet), what is significant is that it has persevered. Over 18 years, however, the relationship between Matt Groening and Jim Brooks has apparently deteriorated. "Jim and Matt hardly talk to each other now. They can't stand each other," Rupert Murdoch told me. But one former producer says that this is not quite accurate: while relations between the two have at times been strained, they are working together on the movie, and are far from not speaking.

Tim Long: [Matt Groening's] involvement with the show lately has kind of been in an advisory role. If this were a sort of medieval farming situation, he's like a benevolent feudal lord. He allows us to till the ground the way we want.

While The Simpsons' glory days passed a decade ago, the show is still reliable for some intelligent laughs, and comfortably sits in its eight-o'clock Sunday spot, watched by 10 million viewers every week. The writers' room is nearly as vibrant as ever, continuing to draw from Harvard and the cream of the young comedy-writing crop. (A rare exception came in 2006, when show-runner Al Jean allowed his wife, who had been a personal trainer, to write a script.)

Donick Cary: It seems like it's gotten a little simpler—it goes a little more topical. And … it's a little easy, you know? But, at the same time, they're in Season 18—so, what the hell?

Rupert Murdoch: I can't say I've watched every episode, but I watch it at every opportunity. And I think it's still as brilliant as ever.

Ricky Gervais: The longevity is astounding. Four hundred episodes. I had to have a lie-down after six [episodes of The Office]. I imagine the show's influence is as a paradigm of excellence. People go, "Would that pass in The Simpsons?" Because it's timeless and universal. But I don't know if it's changed the way people make TV. I don't know if many things do that outside technology and law.

Wally Wolodarsky: I see it in a continuum that starts with Martin and Lewis, Your Show of Shows, Honeymooners, early Carson, early Letterman, Get Smart, early SNL and just keeps moving. I don't see it as a revolution. I see it as a natural continuum of all the stuff we really loved.

Tim Long: I'd like to think that we prevented the president from invading Iraq and we kept Bush from being re-elected … Oh, whoops, we didn't do any of those things. I think that you can overstate the importance of comedy. At best I think comedians tend to be like that guy standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square—I think that you're actually flattering yourself if you think you're actually affecting anything.

Conan O'Brien: For the last 14 years of doing my show, I've been working hard on this comedy, but it's pretty disposable. I could light my arms on fire on the show tonight and you might see it for a couple of days on YouTube, but then it's gone. I'm constantly, no matter where I go in the world, running into people who know which episodes of The Simpsons I worked on, and they're quoting lines to me. I think long after my Late Night show is gone, I feel like the Simpsons episodes I worked on will always be in the ether. People will be watching them on some space station, like, 200 years from now. That's a nice feeling.

Jay Kogen: We thought we were really writing these really funny, smart, special shows that were chock-full of jokes every few seconds. And then someone showed us this study Fox had done: the No. 1 reason why people liked The Simpsons was "all the pretty colors" and they liked it when Homer hit his head. We were writing the show for ourselves—we always made it funny for ourselves—but who knows why America likes it. Maybe they like the pretty colors and when Homer hits his head, but I hope it's for more.

Also on VF.com: A Q&A with former Simpsons writer Conan O'Brien and our picks for the top 10 episodes ever.

John Ortved is a Vanity Fair contributing editorial associate.