Why can't Seattle's foremost movie critic get any respect?

"This is Michael Medved, your cultural crusader!" says the Northwest's most influential film critic, dressed Seattle casual in a plaid shirt, wrapping his trail-friendly boots around his stool at radio KTTH-AM on Eastlake, leaning toward the mike on one elbow, barking out sound bites:

"There are 60,000 investigations that the Motion Picture Association has launchedthat's more than John Ashcroft! We're dealing with more investigations of pirated movies than suicidal Islamofascist terroriststhere's something wrong here!"

As usual, Medved is ripping apart Hollywood and the film industry, something for which he's been able to make a paradoxical, yet comfortable, living.

In a city where the movie reviewers are mostly liberals in rusty Hondas, Medved is a conservative with a house on Mercer Island and a vaster audience than any local critic could dream of. His movie reviews are heard on 300 radio stations, and he claims about 2 million weekly listeners for his political/pop-cultural talk show. He's published eight books (not counting his forthcoming memoir, Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons From a Controversial Life) that together have sold 3 million copies. The most famous of them is 1992's Hollywood vs. America, written during his 12-year stint with Jeffrey Lyons replacing Siskel & Ebert on PBS' Sneak Previewswhich, he notes, had a far smaller audience than his radio show today. Medved is the only major reviewer besides Time-film-critic-turned-New-York-Times-liberal-pundit/editor Frank Rich who has ascended from an aisle seat to the political punditocracy.

But success only makes him crave more. Breaking for a commercial, Medved notes a call from Lubbock, Texas, and fretfully asks his producer, "Lubbock! Did we just go on in Lubbock? I gave a speech there once to 4,000 people. We should get Lubbockget Laura to get Lubbock!"

Yet despite his national profile, Medved remains a shadowy presence in Seattle, where he's lived for seven years. He pontificates on Oprah, Letterman, and Rush Limbaugh and in the nation's biggest newspapers (chiefly The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, on whose board of contributors he sits), but has no local TV or print outlet. "I kind of wish I did," says Medved. When The Seattle Times needed a new film critic, "I called and said, 'Boy, I certainly respected [former Times critic] John Hartl, and I'm here.'" The Times demurred. Though he spoke at a Seattle International Film Festival forum last year, he won't be appearing this time. He's famous and invisible; connected and alienated; happy at last to be a Seattleite, yet not fully at home; an insider and an outsider at the same time.

HE STARTED OUT as an insider in the American cultural establishment. Medved went to Yale with John Kerry and George W. Bush and to Yale Law with Bill and Hillary; out-hitchhiked Kerouac (coast to coast in 76 hours, plus two trips to Seattle); and crusaded for Bobby Kennedy, Gene McCarthy, George McGovern, and Congressman Ron Dellums. But six crises made him turn right like St. Paul turned Christian: Dellums' alleged "corruption" and Stalinism; Hillary et al.'s Yale defense of Black Panther murderers; disillusionment with affirmative action programs at Berkeley; getting burgled and seeing a public defender get the perp off via "every liberal clich颻 Israel's 1973 salvation by the C5-A jet, opposed by leftie McGovern and supported by Richard Nixon and Henry "Scoop" Jackson; and North Vietnam's cruelty after America's retreat ("They were demonicask John McCain how he feels about the North Vietnamese").

Having undergone a startling personal transformation, Medved chronicled his generation's changes in the 1976 best- seller-turned-TV-show What Really Happened to the Class of '65?, a study of the cultural journey of his high-school cohorts. Another best seller, 1978's bad-film compendium The Golden Turkey Awards, made Attack of the Killer Tomatoes famous and got him a gig as a movie pundit on CNN, then Britain's Channel 4, and then Sneak Previews from 1985-96.

But for Medved, being a movie critic has never quite been enough. "You sort of wonder, is that all there is? 'You should go see this movie, and not this movie'why is this important? Is this what I prepared my whole life to do? And the answer emphatically for me is NOOOO. Basically, Jeffrey lives to recommend movies. I would find it exquisitely boring. I don't do windows, and I don't do celebrity interviews."

A quirk of Sneak Previews' schedule gave Medved a window of escape into political punditry in 1986. "We had to have 10 shows that were 'evergreen.' Roger and Gene had created the idea of the trend showthe typical Roger and Gene trend show would be 'Blond Femme Fatales.' I was adamant that we should be edgier: 'Does Hollywood Bash Big Business?,' 'Hollywood vs. Religion,' and 'Kids Know Best'I said if they renamed Father Knows Best, it would be Father Knows Nothing. After that, ABC had a show in development called Father Knows Nothing, and they didn't even pay me!

"All of this was outing me as a conservative. I knew, and I was warned, that there would be a price to pay, because once you take a political position on cultural issues that is viewed as quote-unquote right wing, you make enemies. I just thoughtit's not a Martin Luther moment, 'Ich kann nicht anders, I cannot do other.' It was just that it sounded like fun." Medved bursts out laughing.