“WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE IF IT’S TRUE?” The Oral History of Wag the Dog. After I linked to clips from Wag the Dog last night in response to the news of Albania’s AI-powered “minister for public procurement,” I googled around to see if I could find a “making of” article. This 2022 Vanity Fair article is a lot of fun, until of course, the last few paragraphs when the Bad Orange Man inevitably begins to be referenced:
[William H.] Macy: Dave somehow sees into the future. I think the danger—and I think Wag the Dog gets this—is not that we will be manipulated, because ever since Homo sapiens first organized themselves, there’s been manipulation of the events and the message, and there always will be. I think the big danger is if we lose faith in any information, that all the news is fake. That’s a horseshit proposition.
[Dustin] Hoffman: It’s one of those movies that, whether I’m in it or not, I like it more each time I see it. I’ve often said that if a movie makes you cry, it usually makes you cry every time you see it, and if it makes you laugh, it makes you laugh every time you see it. This made me laugh as if it was the first time. Barry called it a satire, and it certainly is. But I also think it’s a farce, which I guess means you go as far as you can and get away with it.
[Co-Producer Jane] Rosenthal: Certainly, talking about it in 2022—we had the same kind of skepticism then, but just so much has come true that it’s not to even be believed. You just sort of wonder sometimes, Is satire dead? Would you ever be able to do a political satire again?
As the title card at the beginning of the movie asks, “Why does the dog wag its tail? Because a dog is smarter than its tail. If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.” There’s a tremendous Death of Stalin-level satire that would print money just dying to be made, but there’s no way that anyone in Hollywood would admit their complicity in propping up the self-described Politburo who spent every day in power wagging the dog while occasionally sending out the desiccated husk of Joe Biden to read off the teleprompters. And everyone quoted in the above article knew it at the time of being interviewed.
Exit quote: “Through his attorney, David Mamet declined an interview for this story.”