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Chapter One - The Wag The Dog Story

Chapter One


Wag The Dog, like any good satire, succeeds because it reveals a hidden truth by detailing hypocrisy in life. The project began with the novel American Hero, a satirical thriller that proposes President George Bush faked the Gulf War to bolster his mediocre presidency.

Author Larry Beinhart supports his fable with sources ranging from studies like Triumph Without Victory to articles from The Nation. Beinhart's conclusion: the presentation of the Gulf War to the public were highly suspicious, the pageantry too great and so full of showmanship that it cast doubt on the event's actual occurrence.

Occasionally, a satire is so close to the truth that the events satirized are soon produced in real life. However, the release of Wag The Dog was uncannily timing. Just as the movie was released, a media storm was ignited when President Clinton was accused of having an affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. The picture of Lewinsky hugging the President at a rally was so strikingly similar to the photograph of Wag The Dog's President hugging a "Firefly Girl" that audiences were left wondering if the moviemakers knew something they didn't.

In fact, updating the movie from the Gulf War to the Clinton White House shows simply that the filmmakers had their fingers on the pulse of America.

Chapter Two - Hollywood & the Media: Beginnings

Chapter Two


The main premise of Wag The Dog (creating a war in the press) is not as unusual as one might think. Nor is its second premise, that Washington would hire Hollywood to do it. Publisher William Randolph Hearst created the Spanish-American War partly for public consumption.

"You supply the photographs, I'll supply the war," he told his reporters when he headlined the rumor of the Spanish sabotage of an American ship in the Havana harbor. That rumor launched a war that netted the U.S. the Philippines and made America a world power; it also helped elect Teddy Roosevelt president.

The line between news and propaganda has always been a thin one. During World War I, the U.S. government hired director D.W. Griffith to "document" the war. The only filmmaker allowed on the front lines, Griffith staged and filmed several battle sequences that he brought back as newsreels to help the war effort.

During the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian filmmakers including Eisenstein and Vertov worked with Editor Esther Schub to create attacks on imperialist culture by re-editing Western newsreels with footage shot of the Czars at leisure. The filmmakers inverted the meaning of the original footage to create their own political broadsides.

In World War II, Frank Capra headed a team of prominent Hollywood directors employed by the government to produce newsreels. Using Russian techniques, Capra reedited German and Japanese propaganda footage to create pro-Allies newsreels for his "Why We Fight" series.

But filmmaking about the war produced a new awareness of fact versus fiction. One of the most brilliant films to come out of the war was director John Huston's documentary The Battle Of San Pietro, which Huston Internationally begins with the title card "Shot at the Front Lines." Aware that audiences were becoming suspicious of staged footage, Huston took the stance that actual footage would have affected morale no less than manufactured propaganda.

It was Hitler and Goebbels who realized the important role propaganda would play in wartime. They understood early that by combining staged events with a charged narration; audiences could be swayed beyond reason through their emotions. By manufacturing documentaries of enormous Pro-Nazi rallies, by the now legendary German director Leni Reifenstahl, they turned German people into a mass of common visionaries who would, as Goebbels put it, "obey a law they did not even know but which they could recite in their dreams."

Chapter Three - Capra's America

Chapter Three


During the Great Depression, Hollywood battled America's harsh realities with a combination of mindless entertainment and revealing satires. Frank Capra, working with screenwriter Robert Riskin, created some of the most compelling comedies about the battle between corporate greed, corrupt politicians and the common man for the soul of America. Their incision of a satirical scalpel into the workings of our country was more telling than any news report. Together, they created some of the most lasting images of an ideal America: capable of justice, able to right all wrongs.

In Meet John Doe, a gullible Gary Cooper is turned into a media puppet and used to bilk hundreds of thousands of dollars from an unsuspecting public. Realizing what's happening, Cooper is brought to the point of suicide just before Barbara Stanwyck talks him down. In Mr. Smith Goes To Washington Jimmy Stewart becomes a senator who discovers political corruption and fights it with the help of an army of newspaper delivery boys.

Cynical handlers and corrupt politicians seem all too familiar today, but in the politically charged '30's; it might have seemed more of a revelation. In Capra's movie-world, it was also possible that there would be salvation, that there was hope for change.

Hollywood has been reporting with vehemence on its journalistic brethren since the dawn of movies. Perhaps the most famous is Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday, a remake of The Front Page; it is a relentless send-up of the insensitive fourth estate, shamelessly selling papers about human suffering.

Chapter Four - Citizen Kane

Chapter Four


Orson Welles knew the value of the Russian editing techniques and their impact on newsreels. In Citizen Kane, the story of a Hearst-like character is framed by the story of a news service trying to get the "truth" of Kane's life. The opening scene is an editorial meeting, with journalists looking for the right angles or leads to make their newsreel sing.

The movie follows them into the field. What the newsmen discover is Kane's misuse of power and compromised ideals through his national web of newspapers and radio stations. They reveal a dark soulless wizard who could not comprehend what he was doing. Isolated by a mountain of pointless wealth, Kane dies a lonely, confused man.

It's the great American story. Interestingly, although the reporters discover the truth, they decide that it is not enough of a hook to hold the audience. They kill the story.

Chapter Five - The 50's: Film Noir

Chapter Five


Welles' dark vision in Citizen Kane was a harbinger of things to come in American movies, but World War II interrupted the evolution. The explosion of atomic bombs reverberate America forever. Victory had a dark price-an undercurrent of cynicism and uncertainty that bordered on despair.

Hollywood's response was film noir, a genre populated by hapless detectives and down-on-their-luck ex-cons trapped in an immoral world. These B-films dove more deeply into the soul of America than any A-picture, uncovering more disconcerting images of an alienated society than many cared to see.

The prosperous 1950's were ushered in by the McCarthy hearings. These witch-hunts provided the country with an enormous dose of paranoia that was broadcast as the first television news spectacle. These hearings were ignored by Hollywood A-pictures, but not by the noir tradition, which stayed at the front lines of this paranoia and political intrigue.

Some filmmakers would return to skewering the press and the media, especially television, to warn the American public that what was happening in their papers and on the evening news could have dire consequences.

Billy Wilder's Ace In The Hole features Kirk Douglas as an out-of-luck reporter struggling to get back into the major leagues of journalism. When a local mine disaster traps a miner, Douglas keeps him there to milk the situation for headlines. The miner dies, but not before the tabloid culture is exposed as uncaring manipulators. On the cusp between an era governed by newspapers and controlled by television, TV crews were only on the film's periphery.

Elia Kazan's A Face In The Crowd, scripted by Budd Schulberg, takes us into the world of radio and television. A charming rural gospel singer, played by Andy Griffith, is discovered by a group of ruthless broadcasters who give him a pulpit on national TV. As his popularity grows, so do his power and lust for control. The film planted a seed of doubt in viewers' minds about the power of television, making it impossible to look at preachers and politicians in the same way again.

Chapter Six - The 60's: The Whole World is Watching

Chapter Six


By the early 1960's, television's ability to bring awareness to current events had eclipsed movies' ability to deliver news. Primaries, conventions and even space travel were happening on TV, not in the movies.

Documentary film crews began gaining access to the behind-the-scene aspects of politicking. Cinema-verite crews led by Robert Drew, Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker brought us reports from the political front, showing the battles being fought by Kennedy, Humphrey and Goldwater. But once politicians recognized the enormous power of the media to shape an election, this access was quickly terminated, not to be revived until the Clinton era.

Movies responded by creating fictional realities that portrayed the disastrous possibilities of the age. John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate captures the fever of anti-Communism that still lingered from the 50's. The film features brainwashed GIs trained to kill at the sight of a playing card. The movie shifts into an almost documentary mode. Made before the assassination of President Kennedy, the film was too prophetic ending with an assassination at a political convention.

The assassination of Kennedy combined with the escalation of the Vietnam War destroyed what was left of a promise of a happier future, turning the decade into one of violence and paranoia that left the country divided. It got worse. The revolution may not have been televised, but the assassinations of Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were competing with mass murders for slots on prime-time news.

Vietnam was the first "living-room war," as Michael Arlen pointed out in The New Yorker. The evening news had turned the very real, horrifying drama of war into an episodic movie, a cliffhanger every night. This had an immediate, profound effect on society.

Lyndon Johnson's dilemma over whether to run again for president was complicated by both the public perception of the war being created by television and by the perception of him created by angry protesters, who were also broadcast on the news. It was a pageant, with the tragic downfall of a leader at its center.

"The whole world was watching" the violent Democratic convention in Chicago via television. To keep up with the news, moviemakers were inspired to bring the real world into their stories.

Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool combined actual reporting of the convention with a scripted story. It was story, a satire and a documentary. It was also a seething indictment of the media's indifference to social upheaval and political strife.

Chapter Seven - The 70's: The Return of Film Noir

Chapter Seven


In the 70's, the paranoia that had defined 60's politics deepened into an atmosphere in films where satire was buried and film noir returned framed within political thrillers like The Parallax View and Winter Kills.

Films made in the more traditional noir genre like Chinatown, Night Moves, Klute, and Three Days Of The Condor were suffused with political awareness bordering on hopelessness. And All The President's Men was history as noir!

Two films took the media to task: Capricorn One, about the disastrous fabrication of the first manned landing on Mars, and Network. Network was Sidney Lumet's wake-up call that media itself was spinning out of control. The prophetic film centers on an anchorman gone mad, who is kept on the air to bolster ratings. Network defined an era and is a clear predecessor to Wag The Dog.

When the film's refrain, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore," is shouted from the rooftops, it is the last time for years that movies make such an overt statement.

Watergate created a political void in America. Hal Ashby's Being There recognized that void in a brilliant send-up of the media's and public's ability to distinguish a bona fide president from a simple gardener. We had lost our ability to challenge preconceptions once those preconceptions became "news."

Chapter Eight - The 80's: An Actor in the Whitehouse

Chapter Eight


Ronald Reagan ushered in an era in which the evils so many films warned us about not only came true, but were embraced. The 80's were A Face In The Crowd starring Chauncey Gardiner. Perhaps this was made possible by a new generation of reporters and politicians who were no longer looking at each other like strangers, but as classmates agreeing not to tell on each other.

Reagan's "common man" act, consisting of sound bites and a lack of real information, created self-promoting imagery that was too often mistaken for news.

By the time the Iran-Contra scandal broke, the public and Congress were too weak and too numb to pull the trigger the way they had with Vietnam and Watergate. By attributing the most revealing information to alarmist left-wingers, the press watered down Iran-Contra to a war between kooks and crooks, concluding that there wasn't much you could do about either of them.

Chapter Nine - The 90's: Truth, Justice, and Special Effects

Chapter Nine


With modern computer and video technologies, it is now possible to electronically composite reporters on virtual sets, even virtual locations. The war may be raging around them, but the reporter is actually safe in a studio.

The traditional static graphics behind the newsreaders can be replaced with movie-like opening credit sequences. Smart bombs can carry nose cameras. No casualties are displayed. No enemy is seen. The war has a beginning, a middle and an end, and the good guys always win. It is easy to doubt the messages from the media because news seems so "produced".

As technology has improved, the gathering and analysis of news has become less detailed and meaningful. Reports in our era are truncated to headlines offset by sound bites, and no story on television is much longer than 74 seconds. The near absence of analysis prevents questioning those headlines or challenging the sound bites. The quantity of the same headlines on countless channels is overwhelming, and the quality is numbing.

By the time the 1992 presidential campaign was underway, independent filmmakers were responding to the widespread acceptance of media truths by documenting the ways in which stories were being disseminated by the candidates themselves.

In documentaries like The War Room and Feed, filmmakers pulled the curtain back and revealed a ragged wizard made out of spin doctors, satellite feeds and savvy politicians, all contributing to a circus of information over which no one had any real control. Out of this, a new and refreshing cynicism was born.

In Wag The Dog, Brean is relying on a disinterested public. He knows that if he can just entertain them, he can distract them from the actual events. He knows they will never explore the realities because they rely on a press hell-bent on ratings and compromised by its entertainment values.

Perhaps one of the reasons Wag The Dog might have more validity than the live television coverage of the Gulf War or the Monica Lewinsky story is that we, the audience, know we are watching a story. We know that this is not meant to be real, but that it is about reality. The filmmakers have taken time to slow down the speeding information that flies at us from our televisions and shape it into something more meaningful.

The (Thin) Line Between Truth & Fiction Index

Index

Chapter One - The Wag The Dog Story
Chapter Two - Hollywood & the Media: Beginnings
Chapter Three - Capra's America
Chapter Four - Citizen Kane
Chapter Five - The 50's: Film Noir
Chapter Six - The 60's: The Whole World is Watching
Chapter Seven - The 70's: The Return of Film Noir
Chapter Eight - The 80's: An Actor in the Whitehouse
Chapter Nine - The 90's: Truth, Justice, and Special Effects