The Man behind the Monster.(Column)(Thom Beer)

Byline: Rich Ceppos

Thom Beers' office is a monument to high school metal-shop class. The furniture is welded together from scrap car parts and unpainted steel tubing. His desk is a small airplane wing. There are wall hangings-not your average genteel woven art pieces too nice to use underfoot-God, no. Try four-by-eight-foot slabs of thick sheet steel, cut into the shape of flames with an acetylene torch.

When Beers steps out to greet you, it all makes sense. Stocky, middle-aged and dressed in jeans with the knees ripped out, he looks like the characters in his hit show, right down to the swagger. Beers, you see, is the man who created Monster Garage. Yes, the TV show on which tattooed fabricator Jesse James has spent the last five years sawing and welding his way into the hearts of teenaged wannabes and their parents.

I've come to meet the man behind the Monster franchise-which now includes two spinoffs, Monster House and Monster Nation, plus six other series and a couple of pilots, too-to get some schooling in TV. Beers is happy to oblige. But as we tour his production facility, which occupies a large building on a nondescript side street in Burbank, California, you see how first impressions can mislead.

The rest of the place is similarly decorated in flaming craziness, and Beers' maniacal laugh echoes off the concrete floors and brightly colored walls. But despite his colorful personality and the speech pattern of a biker, Beers is anything but up from the street.

"I was an actor in New York for eight years,'' he says. "But I never wanted to be famous. I just like the trappings of fame''-like the chopper Jesse James built for him that now resides in a hallway. So Beers went to work as an executive for Turner Broadcasting, developing and producing ...