Wag the Dog
Based on Wikipedia: Wag the Dog
In January 1998, a Hollywood movie hit theaters with a premise so absurd it practically winked at the audience: what if the President of the United States fabricated an entire war just to distract the public from a sex scandal? One month later, news broke that President Bill Clinton had been having an affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. Within eight months, Clinton ordered missile strikes on a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.
The movie was called Wag the Dog. And suddenly, nobody was laughing quite as hard.
The Tail That Wags
The film's title comes from an old English-language idiom that gets explained right at the start with a riddle: Why does a dog wag its tail? Because the dog is smarter than its tail. But if the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.
Think about what that means. In a healthy democracy, the people—represented by their elected leaders—are supposed to control the government. The dog wags its tail. But what happens when powerful interests learn to manipulate public opinion so effectively that they're actually controlling the leaders? Then the tail wags the dog. The servant becomes the master. And nobody watching can tell the difference.
Director Barry Levinson and screenwriters David Mamet and Hilary Henkin turned this unsettling idea into a pitch-black comedy starring two of Hollywood's most celebrated actors: Robert De Niro as a shadowy political "spin doctor" named Conrad Brean, and Dustin Hoffman as a flamboyant Hollywood producer named Stanley Motss.
The Plot They Hatched
The setup is deliberately over-the-top. Less than two weeks before a presidential election, the sitting President is caught making sexual advances toward an underage girl in the Oval Office. This is, needless to say, a campaign-ending scandal.
Enter Conrad Brean.
Brean is what's known in the political world as a "fixer"—someone who makes problems disappear. He's brought in by a White House aide named Winifred Ames, played by Anne Heche, with a simple if impossible mandate: make this go away.
Brean's solution is breathtaking in its audacity. He decides to invent a war. Not just any war—a war with Albania, a small Balkan country that most Americans in 1997 couldn't have located on a map if their lives depended on it. The logic is almost too cynical to articulate: give people something bigger to worry about, and they'll forget about the sex scandal. Wave something shiny in front of the American public, and watch them turn their heads like distracted children.
But Brean isn't a filmmaker. He doesn't know how to produce compelling footage of a conflict that doesn't exist. For that, he needs Hollywood.
The Producer
Stanley Motss has produced dozens of blockbuster films. He has an ego the size of a continent and a wardrobe to match—flowing scarves, tinted glasses, the whole Hollywood uniform. He's never won an Academy Award, which gnaws at him constantly, but he's widely acknowledged as one of the most talented producers in the business.
Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of Motss wasn't pulled from thin air. The character was directly based on the legendary producer Robert Evans, the man behind films like The Godfather, Chinatown, and Rosemary's Baby. Hoffman captured Evans's distinctive mannerisms so precisely—the work habits, the quirks, the oversized square-framed glasses, even the hairstyle—that Evans himself reportedly joked, "I'm magnificent in this film."
There's an amusing footnote here. Hoffman had actually wanted to do a version of this Evans impression years earlier, in the 1984 Muppet movie The Muppets Take Manhattan. He pulled out because he was worried Evans would be offended. Apparently he got over that concern.
When Brean approaches Motss with his insane proposition—help me fake a war to save the President—Motss doesn't hesitate. This is the ultimate production challenge. No budget constraints. No studio interference. Just pure, high-stakes storytelling with the entire American electorate as the audience.
Manufacturing Reality
What follows is a master class in media manipulation, played for laughs but rooted in genuine techniques that political operatives and advertising executives have refined over decades.
First, Motss produces fake news footage. He films an actress running through a bombed-out village, cradling a kitten (which was actually added digitally—the original prop was a bag of Doritos, replaced in post-production with something more sympathetic). The footage looks exactly like the kind of war reportage Americans had seen from Bosnia and other genuine conflicts. When it airs on the evening news, viewers have no way of knowing it was shot on a soundstage in Hollywood.
Next comes the theme song. Every war needs one—think of how "Over There" galvanized American support during World War One, or how "God Bless America" became synonymous with patriotic sentiment. Motss commissions a song called "Good Old Shoe," performed by Willie Nelson and Pops Staples. It's catchy. It's emotional. It sounds like something your grandfather might have sung.
But here's the clever part: they artificially age the recording. They press it onto old vinyl, scratch it up, make it sound like it was recorded decades ago. Then they plant it in the Library of Congress archives, where a "researcher" conveniently "discovers" this forgotten patriotic anthem. Suddenly a brand-new song has the weight of tradition behind it.
The shoes themselves become a symbol. The President's team starts throwing old shoes into trees near the White House. The gesture spreads. Soon shoes are hanging from power lines across America, a grassroots expression of support for the troops fighting in Albania.
Except there are no troops in Albania.
This technique—creating the appearance of spontaneous popular movements that are actually orchestrated from above—has a name. It's called "astroturfing," because it's fake grassroots. The term was coined in the 1980s, and the practice has only become more sophisticated since. Every time you see a hashtag "trending" on social media, it's worth asking: did real people make this popular, or did someone manufacture that popularity?
The Hero Who Never Was
Just when the Albanian war gambit seems to be working, disaster strikes. The Central Intelligence Agency, also known as the CIA, learns about the hoax and confronts Brean. Worse, the President's political opponent gets the CIA to announce that the war is over. Peace has been declared. The media circus moves on.
Brean needs a new distraction.
Motss, ever the creative genius, has an idea. What if there was a soldier left behind enemy lines in Albania? A hero, abandoned by his country, waiting to be rescued? The American public loves nothing more than a prisoner-of-war story. Think of the emotion surrounding the release of American hostages from Iran in 1981, or the wall-to-wall coverage whenever a military pilot gets shot down.
They invent a soldier named Schumann. They ask the Pentagon to find them a real servicemember with that name, someone they can build a narrative around. The Pentagon, not knowing the full scope of the deception, complies.
Motss stages the whole thing like a movie. There's suspense. There's a rescue mission. There's that old song "Good Old Shoe" playing on loop across every radio station in America. The public is riveted.
Then everything goes sideways.
When the Lies Collapse
The real Sergeant Schumann turns out to be a criminally insane convict. When Brean's team tries to bring him back to Washington for a triumphant return, their plane crashes in the middle of nowhere. They survive, but Schumann—the centerpiece of their entire fabrication—is killed when he tries to assault a gas station owner's daughter.
A lesser producer might give up. Motss pivots.
He stages an elaborate military funeral, complete with full honors. The official story becomes that Schumann died from wounds sustained during his heroic rescue. A random farmer who witnessed the crash gets fast-tracked for citizenship because it makes a better story. The truth is buried, and the narrative rolls on.
The President wins re-election. The campaign's success gets attributed to a bland slogan—"Don't change horses in mid-stream"—rather than to Motss's masterpiece of deception.
This is where ego becomes fatal.
Motss can't stand seeing other people take credit for his greatest production. He's a man who has never won an Oscar despite a career of brilliant work. Now he's pulled off the most incredible feat of his life, and nobody knows. He demands recognition. He threatens to go public.
Brean offers him an ambassadorship, a bribe to keep quiet. He warns Motss that he's "playing with his life." Motss doesn't care. He wants what every artist wants: acknowledgment.
The next morning, news reports announce that Stanley Motss has died of a heart attack at his home.
Life Imitates Art
Here is where Wag the Dog crosses the line from clever satire to something genuinely unsettling.
The film was released in December 1997. One month later, in January 1998, the world learned that President Clinton had been carrying on a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The scandal consumed American politics for the next year.
In August 1998, while Clinton was testifying before a grand jury about the affair, he ordered missile strikes against a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, claiming it was producing chemical weapons for terrorists. Many observers, including prominent journalists and political figures, questioned the timing. Was this a genuine national security action, or was it a distraction?
The phrase "wag the dog" entered the common vocabulary almost overnight.
Four months later, in December 1998, the United States launched a sustained bombing campaign against Iraq. This happened to coincide with the House of Representatives voting on Clinton's impeachment. Again, critics asked whether the timing was coincidental.
Then, in spring 1999, the United States intervened militarily in Kosovo—which, in a twist that seemed almost too on-the-nose, bordered Albania and contained a significant ethnic Albanian population.
The filmmakers hadn't predicted any of this. They had simply understood something fundamental about how power operates: when leaders face domestic crises, foreign conflicts offer a convenient escape. Rally-around-the-flag effects are real. People do set aside their grievances when they perceive an external threat. This isn't a new observation—it goes back at least to ancient Rome, where the phrase "bread and circuses" described how emperors kept the populace docile through food and entertainment.
What Wag the Dog added was the modern dimension: in an age of mass media, you don't actually need a real war. You just need a convincing production.
The Craft Behind the Camera
The making of Wag the Dog itself became a minor controversy, one that illuminates how Hollywood really works.
The screenplay was originally written by Hilary Henkin, adapting Larry Beinhart's 1993 novel American Hero. When Barry Levinson signed on to direct, he brought in his friend David Mamet—one of the most acclaimed playwrights and screenwriters in America—to do a rewrite.
Studio executives at New Line Cinema wanted to give Mamet sole screenplay credit. The Writers Guild of America, which is the union representing film and television writers, stepped in to arbitrate. They ruled that Henkin deserved first-position credit, meaning her name would appear before Mamet's in the credits. The Guild found that Henkin had created the screenplay's fundamental structure, along with much of the story and dialogue.
Levinson was furious. He threatened to quit the Writers Guild entirely, though he ultimately didn't follow through. He claimed that Mamet had written all the dialogue and created the key characters of Motss and Schumann from scratch. The Guild disagreed.
This kind of credit dispute is common in Hollywood, where scripts go through multiple drafts by multiple writers, and determining who deserves recognition becomes almost philosophical. What matters more: the underlying structure of a story, or the specific words characters speak? The person who had the original idea, or the person who polished it into final form?
The answer, according to the Writers Guild, is that original writers deserve protection from having their contributions erased by more famous rewriters. Whether you agree or not, that's the system.
A Score for a Fake War
The film's music deserves special mention because it operates on two levels simultaneously.
Within the story, there are the fake patriotic songs created for the manufactured war effort: "Good Old Shoe," "The American Dream," and "God Bless the Men of the 303." These songs are intentionally cornball, the kind of music that manipulates emotions through sheer familiarity of form. They sound like patriotic anthems because they've been engineered to hit every note we associate with patriotic anthems.
Meanwhile, the actual film score was composed by Mark Knopfler, the British guitarist best known as the frontman of Dire Straits. Knopfler's contribution is subtle, almost invisible—the kind of instrumental work that supports scenes without calling attention to itself. His music provides emotional texture without the sledgehammer sentimentality of the fake war songs.
The contrast is deliberate. The songs written to manipulate a fictional American public are obvious and heavy-handed. The real film score is sophisticated and restrained. Levinson is showing us exactly how crude propaganda can be while demonstrating the difference between manipulation and art.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Critics loved Wag the Dog. Roger Ebert, arguably the most influential film critic of his generation, gave it four stars out of four and ranked it among his ten favorite films of 1997. He compared it to Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick's classic Cold War satire, noting that both films "make you laugh, and then make you wonder."
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Hoffman for Best Actor, acknowledging a performance that transformed a real Hollywood figure into a fictional character without ever becoming mere impersonation. Both Henkin and Mamet received nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, a diplomatic solution to their credit dispute.
The film made money, too—$64 million against a $15 million budget, a healthy return that demonstrated audiences' appetite for smart political satire.
But Wag the Dog's true legacy lies in how completely it entered the political vocabulary. When politicians are accused of manufacturing crises to distract from scandals, people invoke the film. When military actions seem suspiciously timed to coincide with domestic troubles, commentators reach for that phrase: "wagging the dog."
In 2020, Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday named it the twelfth greatest political movie ever made. Not because its craft surpasses every other political film, but because its premise proved so durably, disturbingly relevant.
The Dog Still Wags
There's something almost quaint about Wag the Dog when viewed from the present moment. The film imagines a world where manufacturing a fake war requires Hollywood expertise—soundstages, professional actors, high-end post-production. You need Robert De Niro's gravitas and Dustin Hoffman's showmanship to pull it off.
Today, anyone with a smartphone and basic video editing software can create convincing disinformation. Social media algorithms amplify emotional content regardless of its truth value. Nation-states employ troll farms to flood online discourse with propaganda. The tools of manipulation have been democratized.
At the same time, the film's central insight remains sharp: in a media-saturated democracy, controlling the narrative means controlling reality. If you can make people believe something happened, it doesn't much matter whether it actually did. The emotional response is real either way. The political consequences are real either way.
Brean and Motss understood this intuitively. They knew that most people experience world events through screens, not firsthand observation. They knew that images are more powerful than facts, that stories trump statistics, that emotion overwhelms analysis. They exploited these tendencies without apology.
The film doesn't offer solutions. It doesn't tell us how to be better citizens, how to resist manipulation, how to distinguish genuine crises from manufactured ones. It just shows us the mechanism with such clarity that we can't unsee it.
And then it leaves us alone with the implications.
The Dog and Its Tail, Twenty-Five Years Later
In 2017, twenty years after the original film's release, reports emerged that Barry Levinson and Robert De Niro were developing a television series based on Wag the Dog for HBO. The project was to be produced by De Niro's TriBeCa Productions and co-created by Tom Fontana, known for groundbreaking television like Oz and Homicide: Life on the Street.
The timing made a certain sense. Donald Trump had just been inaugurated as President, bringing with him an unprecedented approach to media manipulation, a constant stream of scandals, and a phrase he popularized: "fake news." The conditions that made Wag the Dog feel prescient in 1998 had only intensified.
As of this writing, the series hasn't materialized. Perhaps the premise is too close to daily headlines to function as entertainment. Perhaps the gap between satire and reality has collapsed so completely that there's nothing left to exaggerate.
Or perhaps, like so many Hollywood projects, it simply got stuck in development. The town is full of announced productions that never make it to screens, ideas that seemed brilliant in one meeting and impossible in the next.
Either way, the original film stands. It remains a precise, funny, horrifying diagnosis of a disease that has only grown more virulent. The tail is still wagging. The question is whether we've noticed, and what we intend to do about it.