Wag the Dog is a 1997 black comedy where a spin doctor and Hollywood producer made a war to distract voters from the president's sex scandal. It was produced and directed by Barry Levinson, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. Scenarios by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet are loosely adapted from the novel Larry Beinhart American Hero .
Wag the Dog was released one month before the Lewinsky scandal broke out and the subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan by the Clinton administration, which prompted the media to draw comparisons between movies and reality.
Video Wag the Dog
Plot
The President was caught making progress of the underage Firefly Girl inside the Oval Office, less than two weeks before the election. Conrad Brean, a spin top doctor, was brought in to divert public attention from the scandal. He decided to build a fictional war in Albania, hoping the media will concentrate on this. Brean contacted Hollywood producer Stanley Motss to create a war, complete with a fictitious theme song and footage from a photogenic orphan. This lie was initially successful, with the President quickly gaining a spot in the poll after it emerged.
When the CIA learned of the plot, they sent Agent Young to confront Brean about the trick. Brean assures Young that revealing the fraud is against his best interests (and the CIA). But when the CIA - in a conspiracy with a rival candidate for the President - reported that the war took place but ended, the media began to focus again on the sexual harassment scandal of the President. To counter this, Mots decided to create an abandoned hero behind enemy lines in Albania. Inspired by the idea that he was "thrown away like old shoes", Brean and Motss had the Pentagon provide a team with a soldier named Schumann around whom the POW narration was built, complete with T-shirts, patriotic songs and, faux-grassroots demonstration of patriotism.
When the team went to retrieve Schumann, they found out he was actually a crazed criminal army convict. On the way back, their plane broke down on a trip to Andrews Air Force Base. The team survives and is saved by a farmer, who kills Schumann after he attempts to rape his daughter. Seizing the opportunity, Motss staged an elaborate military funeral for Schumann, claiming that he died of wounds suffered during his rescue.
While watching a political talk show, Mots was frustrated because the media credited the presidential rise in the poll to the campaign slogan "Do not change the horse in the middle" rather than the hard work of Mots. Despite earlier claiming he was inspired by the challenge, Motss announced that he wanted credit and would disclose his involvement, despite Brean's offer of ambassadors and a terrible warning that he "played with his life". After Mots refuses to step down, Brean reluctantly orders his security staff to kill him. A news broadcast reported that Motss had died of a heart attack at home, the president was re-elected, and the Albanian terrorist organization has claimed responsibility for the recent bombings.
Maps Wag the Dog
Cast
Production
Title
The title of the film comes from an idiomatic idiomatic English expression "dog wagging tail", referenced at the beginning of the movie with a title that reads:
Why does the dog wag its tail?
Because dogs are smarter than their tails.
If the tail is smarter, it will wiggle the dog.
Mots and Evans
Hoffman's character, Stanley Motss, is said to have been based directly on renowned producer Robert Evans. Similarity has been noted between Evans' character and work habits, behavior, quirks, clothing styles, hairstyles and large rectangular framed spectacles; In fact, Evans is actually said to be joking, "I'm amazing in this movie." Hoffman never discussed any inspiration that Evans might give for the role, and claimed in the comments path for the DVD movie release that many of the Mots characterizations were based on Hoffman's father, Harry Hoffman, former prop manager for Columbia Pictures.
Write credit
The credit writing award on the film became controversial at the time, due to objections by Barry Levinson. After Levinson became attached as a director, David Mamet was hired to rewrite Hilary Henkin's scenario, loosely adapted from Larry Beinhart's novel American Hero .
Given the close relationship between Levinson and Mamet, New Line Cinema requested that Mamet be given a single credit for the scenario. However, the Writer Guild of America intervened on Henkin's behalf to ensure that Henkin received a joint scenario credit first, discovering that - as the original screenwriter - Henkin has created scenario structures as well as many screen and dialogue stories.
Levinson then threatened to (but did not) quit the Guild, claiming that Mamet had written all the dialogues and created the characters of Mots and Schumann, and had started most of the scenes set in Hollywood and all the scenes arranged in Nashville. Levinson connects many similarities between the original version of Henkin and the final shooting script for Henkin and Mamet working from the same novel, but WGA disagrees in its credit arbitration ruling.
Music
The film features many songs made for fictional campaigns performed by the protagonists; These songs include "Good Old Shoe", "The American Dream", and "The Men of the 303". However, none of these pieces made it into the soundtrack CD. The CD only featured the title track (by British guitarist/vocalist Mark Knopfler) and seven instrumental Knopfler.
Reception
At Rotten Tomatoes,
Roger Ebert awarded the film four of four stars and wrote in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, "This film is a satire that contains enough realistic weight to be a sensible flirt, like Dr. Strangelove , it makes you laugh, and then it makes you wonder. "
Accolades
The film was nominated for two 70th Academy Awards: Dustin Hoffman for Academy Award for Best Actor, and Hilary Henkin and David Mamet for Best Adaptation Scenario. The film also entered into the 48th Berlin International Film Festival, where he won the Silver Bear - Jury Special Prize.
TV series
On April 27, 2017, Deadline reported that Barry Levinson, Robert De Niro and Tom Fontana were developing a TV series based on the movie for HBO. De Niro's Tribeca Productions will co-produce with Levinson and the Fontana company.
See also
- Astroturfing, a controversial public relations practice depicted in the film
- Canadian Bacon and Incorrectly , movies about the American war started for the same reason
References
External links
- Wag the Dog on IMDb
- Wag the Dog at Rotten Tomatoes
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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