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Wag the Dog
During the final weeks of a presidential race, the President is accused of sexual misconduct. To distract the public until the election, the President's adviser hires a Hollywood producer to help him stage a fake war.
1997 · Directed by Barry Levinson · 97 min · Comedy · Drama · Screenplay in the scene database · 5 frames
Tagline
A comedy about truth, justice and other special effects.
Plot
The President of the United States is caught making advances on an underage girl inside the Oval Office less than two weeks before the election. Conrad Brean, a top spin doctor, is brought in by presidential aide Winifred Ames to take the public's attention away from the scandal. He decides to construct a fictional war in Albania, hoping that the media will concentrate on this instead. Brean contacts Hollywood producer Stanley Motss to create the war, complete with a theme song and fake film footage of a fleeing orphan to arouse sympathy. The hoax is initially successful, with the president quickly gaining ground in the polls.
When the CIA learns of the plot, it sends Agent Charles Young to confront Brean about the hoax. Brean convinces Young that revealing the deception is against his and the CIA's best interests. But when the CIA, in collusion with the president's rival candidate Senator John Neal, reports that the war has ended, the media begins to revert its focus to the president's sexual misconduct scandal. To counter this, Motss invents a hero who was left behind enemy lines in Albania.
Inspired by the idea that he was "discarded like an old shoe", Brean and Motss ask the Pentagon to provide a special forces soldier with a matching name (a sergeant named William Schumann is identified), around whom a POW narrative can be constructed. As part of the hoax, folk singer Johnny Dean records a song called "Old Shoe", which is pressed onto a 78-rpm record, prematurely aged so that listeners will think that it was recorded years earlier and sent to the Library of Congress to be "found". Bream and Motss fling pairs of old shoes into a tree outside of the White House grounds. Soon, large numbers of shoes begin appearing on phone and power lines and a grassroots movement to bring home Schumann takes hold, completing a successful astroturfing.
Plot summary from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.
Crew
- Screenplay: Hilary Henkin, David Mamet
- Cinematography: Robert Richardson
- Edited by: Stu Linder
- Music: Mark Knopfler
- Production design: Wynn Thomas
- Produced by: Robert De Niro, Barry Levinson, Jane Rosenthal
Cast
- Dustin Hoffman as Stanley Motss
- Robert De Niro as Conrad Brean
- Anne Heche as Winifred Ames
- Woody Harrelson as Sergeant William Schumann
- Denis Leary as Fad King
- Willie Nelson as Johnny Dean
- Andrea Martin as Liz Butsky
- Kirsten Dunst as Tracy Lime
- William H. Macy as CIA Agent Charles Young
- David Koechner as Director
Production
- Country: United States of America
- Language: Albanian, English
- Studios: New Line Cinema, Tribeca Productions, Baltimore Pictures, Punch Productions
- Budget: $15,000,000
- Box office: $64,256,513
- Themes: gulf war, central intelligence agency (cia), rape, usa president, washington dc, usa, government, war veteran, election campaign, presidential election, staging
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