Twenty-five years after its release on Christmas Day 1997, the political comedy Wag the Dog—centered on a fake war cooked up to distract from a presidential scandal—can’t help but still resonate in a world where shifting realities do daily battle on the media landscape. “There’s always been a relationship between Hollywood and politics and we wanted to have some fun with it,” says Jane Rosenthal, who produced the film with star Robert De Niro. “But as proud as I am of the movie, it makes me very sad that you couldn’t even make up some of the shit that’s going on right now.”

Starring De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and a wide range of stars and future stars, Wag the Dog made $64 million at the box office worldwide (back when audiences would actually leave the house to see that kind of thing), earned two Oscar nominations, and seemed so prophetic about the scandals of the Clinton administration that news trucks wound up parked outside director Barry Levinson’s house. But it was also a true Hollywood story of behind-the-scenes negotiations, hastily wrangled celebrity cameos, and, eventually, controversy over who deserved credit. 

Wag the Dog started with the kernel of a literary concept that was then developed through an adaptation process and evolved into what many argue was a completely fresh interpretation from Pulitzer Prize–winning writer David Mamet, only to be explored and improvised with abandon on set. Production was squeezed into a tight 30-day window, yielding a mad-dash scramble to find and deploy all the right pieces for what would become one of the most enduring, and still-biting, political satires Hollywood has ever produced.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been part of a more prescient film,” says Hoffman, who received an Oscar nomination for his performance as an eccentric Hollywood producer. “It’s kind of crazy.”

Below, in their own words, cast and crew members discuss the experience—and the legacy—of Wag the Dog, 25 years on.

1. “We’re gonna do WHAT?”

Larry Beinhart (Author, American Hero): I was watching the Gulf War on television and I basically made a joke: “This is a made-for-TV movie.” And I did not get the laughs I expected. So, I felt I needed to expand on it. I don’t think it was manufactured, but I do think that the Gulf War and all its elements were very consciously presented as World War II 2: The Video. Everybody got cast in certain roles. I sat down, I said, “If I wanted to make a satirical, exaggerated version of it, I’d get a pretend director like George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. What would that have been like?” And that’s what the book is.

Jane Rosenthal (Producer): There were a number of things in the book that we were attracted to, but I just liked the idea that Hollywood was going to create a war. Bob and I are always politically inclined. So, I sold the book to De Luca at New Line.

Michael De Luca (Former President of Production, New Line Cinema): I thought the book was an ingenious satire. I laughed out loud a lot, even though it can get pretty dark at times.

Robert De Niro (Producer/“Conrad Brean”): I didn’t actually read the novel. I know I should say I did, but I didn’t.

Beinhart: By the time it went through the pitch and sold, [Bill] Clinton was president. With the [Wag the Dog] script, they made a Clintonian version of it. Instead of going out and actually having a war that would appeal to the American people so as to fix domestic political problems, they manufactured the illusion of a war. It was a very apt update.

Rosenthal: We hired Hilary Henkin to do a draft of the script. She had written a script for me and Bob called Stolen Flower and I had always been looking for something else to do with her. Her draft was a faithful adaptation of the book.

Hilary Henkin (Screenwriter): The kernel of the book was certainly inspirational, but we left much of it behind early on. Jane was the ideal producer for this material, because she saw the far-reaching implications of the piece. I remember I had a little postcard with a wonderful line from Citizen Kane: “If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.” I think that’s really quintessential. I went to various image-makers, military personnel, administrative types, and it was made very clear to me that to control the perception of a war, the images that arrive at the public’s door have to be disseminated with care. But where is the intersection between shooting an actual war and using it to your advantage, and simply creating those scenes yourself? I remember sitting across from people saying, “Where do you want your war? We’ll put your war wherever you want it.” So, that’s where my writing took me.

De Luca: That script and the book is what caught the attention of Barry Levinson.

De Niro: I was shooting Heat on a weekend. We were shooting the bank heist in downtown LA with the CAR-15s and all that stuff. Barry came in and we talked about the movie and that’s where it started.

Barry Levinson (Director): I didn’t like the screenplay. I thought there was something there about politics and media manipulation, but it didn’t excite me. Then I read the book and I said, “To be honest with you, I like why you’re interested, but I don’t particularly like this version either.”

Rosenthal: Barry got Dustin involved. Barry had Sphere that he was going to be doing with Dustin, and that got delayed. So, he was basically going to do this quick little movie before starting prep on that. And Bob and Dustin had been trying to do a movie together.

Dustin Hoffman (“Stanley Motss”): The first time I met Bob is, I had a supporting part in a film Barry did called Sleepers. I was an attorney. I was just doing it as a favor. It was barely a supporting role. But I remember that I learned something, because De Niro was on the witness stand, and he had his lines tucked under his leg that he would refer to between takes. Then we’d do another take, and he couldn’t get them all out. He’d just sit there with a smile on his face and say, “I don’t remember it.” But there was no fear. Coming from the theater, I somehow unconsciously feel that you don’t get a second chance. If you forget the lines on stage, you’ve got to regroup very quickly. And here I was realizing there’s nothing wrong. It’s just a take! I learned that from him. 

Levinson: It was Bob and Jane and Dustin, and we were all sort of talking. I said, “I don’t respond to this, but the thing that’s interesting is, if you deny something that never existed, it can take on a life of its own.” It would be like saying, “The trip to Seattle has nothing to do with the B-3 bomber.” And then the press is saying, “What B-3 bomber?” I was just giving it as an example of how you can create the beginning of a buzz by throwing out something that the media starts chasing, how you can keep sliding information and changing the topic of the story. Bob said, “Why don’t you have a conversation with David Mamet?” So, I called David and we started to talk.

Through his attorney, David Mamet declined an interview for this story.

De Luca: Mamet came up with his own take on a satire involving the minions of a president ginning up a fake war to take attention away from a scandal. He tried to think of the wildest thing that could never happen as a point of departure and came up with the scandal for the script. I went to San Francisco and heard his pitch over the phone with De Niro and Jane and Barry. We all loved it.

Rosenthal: Then we realized Hilary wasn’t going to continue with it. David went away and very quickly wrote a script in three or four weeks. I remember him calling me and saying, “Janie, I have the script and I’m going to send it in.” I was like, “David, maybe you should take a little more time.” He said, “Look, I can tell you I’m going to take some more time, I’m going to put it in my desk drawer and then after the time passes, I’ll send it to you. Or I can send it to you now.” And I said, “OK, send it to me now.”

Levinson: David’s work was very sparse. It has a real motor to it and an efficiency of language. It was a lot of fun. I remember saying to him one day, when we had one of the drafts, “We’ve got the producer, and we’ve got our guy, our media manipulator. I think we need the other person.” He said, “What other person?” I said, “The person that keeps saying, ‘We’re gonna do what? What do you mean we’re gonna start a war?’ That person.” He took two seconds, he says, “Got it.” He hung up and went back to doing some work on it, and that’s how [Anne Heche’s character] came about. David’s great that way. If an idea makes sense to him then he’s off to the races.

De Niro: Mamet is a wonderful writer, though he has certain things that are eccentric. Like, “I give you the script and that’s it.” You don’t get a rewrite [from him], as far as I’ve ever experienced. [Former US diplomat] Richard Holbrooke was a friend of mine and he went over the script and gave his thoughts about it. He wrote about “the office behind the Oval Office.” We used that in the movie, along with other things he contributed.

Hoffman: This was a producer character that had been done quite a few times and I didn’t think I could do it in a fresh way. I turned it down at first because, as written, he was somewhat of a cliché. He was overweight and he was by a Beverly Hills pool smoking a cigar and I said, “Barry, I can’t do this. I don’t even know where to begin. Get someone closer to this.”

De Luca: To make the budget, everybody had to work under their quotes, and it was my job to close those deals. They were all closed except we were haggling with Hoffman. I had to reach deep down and find the courage to act like a studio boss to Robert De Niro and get him to lean on Hoffman, in his capacity as a producer, to get him to close his deal. It was very hard for me, because when you grew up in New York in the ‘70s on De Niro’s movies, he’s God, basically. I kind of stammered and stumbled my way through trying to sound authoritative, like, “You have to go get this done or else the movie is not happening.” He had mercy on me and let me off the hook and got Dustin to basically agree to his deal. There was some very nuanced, kind of intuitive humor on that call, because he knew what I was struggling with, which was that I revered and worshiped him.

Rosenthal: Part of the way we got people—we got Bob Richardson and Rita Ryack, all of our extraordinary people below the line, Wynn Thomas—we said, “We’re going to do this quickly, so we’re going to give you your full weekly rates, but it’s just going to be a shorter movie.” 

De Luca: Barry Levinson, man, he had to make that movie in an insane number of days, because he had to go into Sphere, which was a big Warner Bros. adventure movie based on the Michael Crichton novel.

In October of 1996, New Line parent company Warner Bros. shut down Sphere in the pre-production stage, reportedly to allow for a closer examination of the film’s special-effects budget and time to tweak the screenplay.

Beinhart: I don’t remember what my original sources are, but I believe this to be true: Barry Levinson was set up to do Sphere, and Barry decides that the budget they were going to give him was a couple of million dollars short. In the meantime, he’s been having conversations with Hoffman and De Niro about doing what became Wag the Dog. He’s negotiating over the Sphere deal and they said they’re not going to give him the money, and he says, “OK, I’ll go do something else.” He calls up Hoffman and De Niro and says, “Look, I got this hole in my schedule, you’ve got holes in your schedule,” bing, bing, bing, and Wag the Dog is scheduled to go. The studio calls Levinson. “What’s going on?” He said, “I told you if you didn’t give me the money, I was gonna go do something else.” They said, “We thought that was just a negotiating tactic!” At this point, Barry’s got a film lined up to do with De Niro and Hoffman. Who’s going to walk away from that? So, he makes a deal with Sphere that they’re going to shoot Wag the Dog as scheduled, then shoot Sphere and edit Sphere, and not edit Wag the Dog until after Sphere.

Levinson: I can’t remember all the details, to be honest. There was an issue about the budget of Sphere and it did go on hold for a short time.

Rosenthal: Whether Wag the Dog had to come out before or after Sphere, frankly, from my point of view, I didn’t care. I wanted to get this movie made. And it was different anyway. But I just remember the arguments that Barry had to make, and him thinking it was crazy that they were not letting him go make a movie. I remember him saying, “Instead of going on vacation, I want to make a movie.”

Levinson: I had a meeting with [former Warner Bros. cochairman and co-CEO] Terry Semel and I said to him, “Look, Sphere is a big vehicle and this is a small piece. You’ve got to hit the ground running all the time.” And he said, “Well, what are we talking about?” And that’s when I said, “I think we can shoot the movie in 30 days.”

Rosenthal: Warner Bros. finally relented and said, “OK, go do both.” It was a little movie. New Line believed in it. But they were taking chances. Look at the movies they were making at that time. They were making edgier, quirky movies.

De Luca: We tried to have two tracks for New Line. We tried to have what we considered to be elevated genre films with new stars—Rush Hour, Austin Powers, Menace II Society, the Friday movies—and then, almost like a Miramax/Dimension split, we would also do the slightly specialized films like Boogie Nights and Magnolia and Wag the Dog.

Rosenthal: We were just trying to prove you could go fast and have fun making a movie. What a surprise!

2. “We’re just gonna blow this thing out of the cannon and see how it goes.”

The story Mamet and Levinson conceived would feature De Niro as Conrad Brean, a Washington, DC, spin doctor summoned by presidential PR advisor Winifred Ames (Heche) with an election looming 11 days away. They enlist the aid of Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Hoffman) to conjure and package a fake war in Albania in order to distract the public from a scandal involving the president’s sexual advances toward an underage “Firefly Girl.”

Actors Denis Leary, Willie Nelson, and Andrea Martin would fill out the roles of Motss’ creative nucleus, along with Suzie Plakson as Motss’ personal assistant, while John Michael Higgins and Suzanne Cryer would star as a press secretary and White House intern, respectively. Comedians David Koechner and Harland Williams, as well as an up-and-coming Kirsten Dunst, would show up in small roles as part of the Hollywood movie-magic machinery. Levinson’s old pal Craig T. Nelson would play the president’s election opponent, while longtime Mamet collaborator William H. Macy would drop in with a cameo as a CIA agent sniffing out Brean’s gambit. Finally, Woody Harrelson would nab the pivotal role of Sergeant William Schumann, an American “hero” conjured out of thin air who adds one final wrinkle to Motss’ plan.

Oh, and Jim Belushi would star as…himself. But we’ll get to that.

Ellen Chenoweth (Casting Director): I think the fact that we had to do it so quickly really helped things, because there wasn’t a lot of time to spend trying to make decisions about who this character was, who that character was.

Debra Zane (Casting Director): They did a table reading together just to get the idea, that it could happen.

De Luca: That was a legendary read through. I thought it was just magic. But Dustin’s last concern was he was struggling to find the character.

Chenoweth: At that point, Bob and Dustin were pretty much in and they wanted to hear it, and Barry wanted to hear it. I know Anne Heche was there. I brought her in to read this part, which was originally written as a guy.

Levinson: As I was hearing her read it, I went, “Oh, this is better than three guys. It’s a whole other dimension at work.” So, that reading brought on Anne, and to be honest, I don’t know that David said, “Well, I have to rewrite it for a female.” I don’t think we did anything. There might be a line somewhere that we had to fix, but otherwise, it worked perfectly. And she was just right on the money.

Hoffman: I remember saying to Barry, actors are reluctant to step on other actors’ lines. But in life, many times, you don’t let the person finish. By the time they’re in the middle of their sentence, you know where they’re going and you come in. There’s so much more overlapping. I thought we should do this that way. He agreed and that was kind of the plan, and Anne just caught that immediately. I really think she was one of the best, and certainly would have proven herself, with more films, to be one of the best comedic actresses that we have. She was that good.

Zane: After that, we just jammed. It was days full of auditions. Barry was extremely decisive and energetic. I was just glancing at Metacritic at all the reviews, most of which were so positive, and this guy from the San Francisco Examiner said it was a testament to what happens when the right ingredients come together. I would add, “at the right time.” It was really weird that I had time, Ellen had time, Barry had time, Dustin had time, Bob had time. I’ve never worked that fast.

Levinson: We were lucky that a lot of the names we mentioned were free for the time frames that we needed them. Willie Nelson was free. Denis Leary was free.

Denis Leary (“Fad King”): I knew Bob and Jane for a while at that point. He wanted me to meet Michael Mann for Heat, which I did, but I couldn’t do the movie because I was already booked. I got famous, like, one of those overnight things, and I had like three movies in a row. I was booked to do a film with Chris Walken called Suicide Kings, which was shooting in LA, and they said, “Fuck it, we’ll work the schedule out.” So, I shot Wag the Dog and Suicide Kings at the same time, meaning I was working with Bob, Dustin, and Chris Walken in the same two-month period. At certain points, Chris was like, “Hey, listen, I got an envelope. It’s a message for Bob. Will you take it when you go to Wag the Dog tomorrow?” It was crazy.

Andrea Martin (“Liz Butsky”): I remember it being a really exciting, high-profile job where all these wonderful actors were going to be in it and somehow that elevated me into, Wow, I’m in a real movie! I don’t know if the script made as much impact as the actual package to me, because I hadn’t really done many movies at all. I had never seen the movie, by the way. I don’t watch anything I’m in. So, I watched it three nights ago. I thought it was really good!

Zane: We definitely leaned into more comedic actors for all of the supporting parts. David Koechner, John Michael Higgins. Barry really has the self-confidence to just go for it with people like that.

Chenoweth: Harland Williams. Barry loves funny people. Even if it’s a drama. Like Avalon, he cast Kevin Pollak in one of his first movie things because we saw him on The Tonight Show. He just likes that energy that they bring.

Zane: They always get the timing right. They know how to pace it. And I think when there is a time limit, for a lot of artists, the game comes right up. Some people can’t work like that, but I really think we nailed all the right people. Everybody understood that we’re just doing this, like, right now.

David Koechner (“Director”): It was the first movie I had ever done. I was on SNL the year before, so I’d never been on a movie set or a studio soundstage. I was kind of figuring things out. But I did meet Harland on that film, which was fantastic.

Harland Williams (“Pet Wrangler”): I remember my girlfriend at the time, who was a very serious actress, being kind of jealous. Here I am, I’m barely acting, and now I’m working with De Niro and Hoffman. She just kind of looked at me, like, You prick.

William H. Macy (“Mr. Young”): It was a pretty thrilling time. I had been a journeyman actor in Chicago and New York for 15 or 20 years. Every once in a blue moon I would get the leading role. But I spent most of my early adult life onstage. After Fargo, it was really over a year before I started to feel the residual benefits of having been in such a magnificent film and getting a nomination and all of that. Around Wag the Dog and Boogie Nights, I started to say, “Oh, I’m at the grownups’ table now.”

Suzanne Cryer (“Amy Cain”): I think everybody who did it, nobody cared what the size of their role was. You just wanted to be part of it.

John Michael Higgins (“John Levy”): The whole thing was described to me as a bit of a stunt, because we were going to shoot it in 28 days or something like that. And to me, that didn’t sound like a stunt at all, because all of my movies were shot in 28 days at that time! But I think it gave the film a quality. It wasn’t a sort of slumming-it quality, but it was a quality of, Let’s put on a show in the barn. An Andy Hardy quality. We’re just gonna blow this thing out of the cannon and see how it goes.

Hoffman: If we would have had 100 days, I don’t think it would have been the same movie. We were in a hurry, as the movie is, in a sense. We’re playing catchup constantly.

Leary: I’m supposed to be Dustin Hoffman’s right-hand man. When we got to the rehearsal stage, it was me, Dustin, Barry, Anne, and a small cadre of producers, with a tape recorder. We would improvise and if Barry liked stuff, he was going to have it typed up into pages. And I don’t know Dustin. I’m just a fan of the guy. So, I’m sitting down next to Dustin and we start doing improvisation, and it’s fucking all over the place, his character. I mean, he’s got different accents, he’s using different rhythms. I can’t fucking key in at all. And nobody seems worried! Nobody seems concerned. We’d just try another scene and another scene.

Hoffman: I was so bad. It’s the worst experience I ever had. I didn’t know what to do. I never come into it the first day with a so-called “character.” I just show up and think that something will happen. In the theater, you rehearse three or four weeks, and you go out of town and you’re finding and defining the role in that period of time. Even after opening night, you can keep refining it, because it’s a different audience that comes. So, the character is built from the ground up. In film, you don’t get a chance to rehearse. There were two exceptions: Mike Nichols on The Graduate, which was like a month, and then ironically the film after that, Midnight Cowboy. John Schlesinger did the same thing. Waldo Salt had a tape recorder and he used to tape everything that [Jon] Voight and I did, which was just improvising. Then he’d take it home, build it into dialogue, and he won an Academy Award.

Leary: We tried, like, three hours’ worth of stuff and then we took a break. I went outside to smoke a cigarette and Bob came out to make a phone call. I looked at him and I went [shrugs] like that, and he went, “I don’t know, man.” I’m like, Oh, this is great. I’m finally working with two hall-of-famers and one of them I can’t figure out and the other one’s like, “I don’t know!” So, that was day one.

Levinson: It was great for Denis to come aboard because he’s so quick and fits right in with what David had written. Sometimes he would go off and play around with some particular thing and if it worked, we might use it, and if it didn’t, we’d just discard it. Andrea was terrific in her costume-designer role. It was a very good, very quick-on-their-feet cast.

Rosenthal: The other thing was, who should be president? We couldn’t find anybody that Barry thought was right, [who] wouldn’t take you out of the movie.

Zane: We went through a list of movie stars and everyone kind of zeroed in on a name-y actor that we thought would be good. We got that person’s agent on the phone and they got really excited. We sent the script by messenger and it was going to be on the guy’s doorstep, because he was shooting something. The agent was going to prep him to read it quickly and blah, blah, blah. Then we hang up, and we keep talking, and I guess it was Barry or somebody [who] said, “What if you never see the president?” Like, over the shoulder, side of the back of the head. You’d never see the face, but you’d know that’s the president. And I was like, “Oh my God, that is so much better.” So, we had to call the agent back and put the brakes on that. He went completely ballistic. He was furious with us, even though he hadn’t even connected with his client yet. It happened within the span of an hour or less, that the whole thing changed. But then, the Clinton thing was on the heels of this and there was that amazing imagery that was prescient.

Rosenthal: It became almost that same shot of Monica Lewinsky in her beret looking up at Clinton, where we only see the back of the president.

Chenoweth: Barry and Craig T. Nelson were old writing partners.

Levinson: We started out together. We met in an acting group in 1968 and we used to do a lot of improv stuff together. He was married and he was working in a bank, and I was working in a deli or parking cars. It was one of those things where we were both sort of beginning. He’s a very talented actor, in dramatic and comedic. So, when Wag the Dog came up, I just gave him a call to see if he wanted to jump in and play around.

Craig T. Nelson (“Senator John Neal”): I think I was there maybe half a day, but it was very easy. Barry’s technique is very relaxed, very easy going. There’s not a lot of pressure. It’s one of those things where we couldn’t believe what had happened, career-wise. At some point you can’t help but remember where you both came from. It was like being able to see an old friend and reunite and then just have a good time, joke around. I didn’t take a credit because why would I take credit for like two minutes? It doesn’t matter. It’s just fun to be there. You don’t need to bump it, you know? What the heck.

3. “When it’s cooking, it’s cooking.”

Koechner: I thought everyone was going to really have great reverence for this script, right? Like, you don’t improvise Mamet. You hit every comma, every period, every exclamation point. That wasn’t the case.

Leary: Thank God David wasn’t on set. The one day he did come was when we were in the recording-studio scenes. It was a real mixture of stuff we had improvised and stuff that David had written, and he was laughing his ass off. I think he just let it go because he heard it was going well. Otherwise, that would have been a pain in the ass. But even with whole scenes that were basically improvised, you’re still turning a corner into your next scene, and there’s a big chunk of what David wrote.

Macy: All those pauses and beats that he puts in, he doesn’t give a shit about that. He writes it so that it makes sense to the person reading it, but he doesn’t hold anybody to that stuff. As a matter of fact, I’ve heard him say several times, when someone struggles with a line, “Oh, well, I must have written it wrong,” and he’ll change the line. I find Dave to be very forgiving and very patient, because I think he is aware his shit is hard to memorize, man.

Martin: It was like Barry was an actor with us. He would throw out lines. I think one of the lines he threw at me was, “I can’t vote in small places.” He could accommodate everybody’s acting style and it felt like we were all turned on. Robert De Niro was an introvert and Dustin Hoffman was an extrovert, but when they got on camera, they met each other on the same energetic plateau. It was fascinating to watch.

Leary: It’s still so vivid in my brain, how bumpy the beginning of that process with Dustin was. And then how great it was when he came in with that haircut, and he pulled those glasses out. Afterwards I was talking to Barry and he said, “When he walked in with that haircut that third day, I knew.”

Michael White (Hairstylist for Hoffman): Dustin and all the big stars were going to Cristophe [Schatteman] in Beverly Hills, for his personal hairdresser. So, he was trying hairdressers out and Cristophe wanted to make sure that whoever was going to do this was as good of a hairdresser as they were someone who could style hair. I went to Dustin’s house and Cristophe was there. He blow-dried Dustin’s hair, then I blow-dried his hair. Then Dustin came out and he says, “You have the job.” Then he tried on all these different glasses and he got drawn to the kind that Bob Evans wore. Dustin said to me, “Can you kind of tune my hair up to be big and perfect and blow-dried and sprayed and have that shape?” And that’s how we ended up with that look. It was more that he wanted someone who technically could do that hairstyle. He didn’t want it set. He didn’t want it looking like it was in hot rollers. If you look at Evans, his hair is very perfect and sprayed and all that. I kind of just realized that the guy never was anywhere without looking perfectly groomed, and in every shot of the film, Dustin is perfectly groomed.

Levinson: There was a period of time when everyone would say Dustin was doing Bob Evans. Dustin used to imitate Bob Evans when he was telling stories about him, but that was completely different than what Dustin was doing in the film. We had picked a pair of glasses that looked too small, because his hair was so big. So, we needed bigger glasses, which got a little closer to Bob Evans. And then Evans said, “They’re copying me!”

Leary: Everybody was so keyed in after Dustin keyed in. Then we started to develop a rhythm. We would shoot a scripted page and then we would have pages from those improv rehearsals that Barry had saved. And then we would always do an extra take or two that was just coming up with ideas as we went.

Suzie Plakson (“Grace”): Dustin wanted to improvise a little to show Barry what his and my relationship would be as his personal assistant. And because I’m a foot taller than him, we sat him on my lap while I pretended to be taking a phone call. It got a little vaudeville. It was a blast. It lasted about two minutes. The set photographer gave me a photo of that bit as a momento.

Hoffman: They were going to have my character having a massage or something. I think it was Barry’s idea to get the tanning bed, and that to put me in that was more interesting, to be able to talk while I’m in there. And the costume people don’t get the attention that they should get, because sometimes they’re on a production two months before you even get a script and they’ve kind of got your character down, at least in a way they see it. The idea of wearing a silk robe rather than just a terry cloth robe, I wasn’t even aware of it at first, and then I realized on that first day, Wow. My father, who always wanted to be successful—and he wasn’t, financially—he wore a silk bathrobe. But the kind that a very wealthy person would wear. He had beyond what’s called “chutzpah,” and you could satirize him very easily, which I used to do when I was growing up, before I even thought about acting.

Rita Ryack (Costume Designer): Dustin wrote an inscription on something to me and it said, “I thank you and my father thanks you.” I never knew what that meant until now. His clothes were very expensive, as they should have been. He wanted everything to make him laugh a little bit. The first thing he put on, he said, “Oh, this makes me giggle.” I went, “OK, now I see where we’re gonna go.” It’s always so fascinating to see how different clothing, different shapes, work on different actors. I could never have dressed Dustin Hoffman the way I would Robert De Niro.

Leary: I walked in and [Rita] had that jacket. I had never seen a jacket like it before. She had it on a hanger and she said, “This is the Fad King.” Costume designers can have such an eye for the material. She hit a nerve that summed the guy up. I’ve never seen a jacket like that. I kept that jacket, by the way.

De Niro: I had seen people from Washington, DC, always wearing bow ties. I thought that was kind of interesting. And the hat. The casualness of the character belied, if you will, what was the real intention of the character. I even see people today, like Steve Bannon, with the sloppiness and all that. He’s an operator. No matter what he looks like on the surface, there’s an agenda with a person like him and he’s trying to move it forward however he can. There’s nothing formidable about their look. It’s about what they do.

Ryack: I don’t think I’ve ever seen Bob in a bow tie. I couldn’t believe it was him after Casino. His look was very collegiate, which was a little bit ironic for a guy who really had a lot of power in that story. A very bright, quick-thinking guy, and no matter what the crisis was, he responded. We did it right away, because Bob likes to know who his character is going to be, what he’s going to wear. It just really helps.

Robert Richardson (Director of Photography): I came into the film with very little time to prep. I had to leave U-Turn with Oliver Stone a few days early, so much of the look had been designed by all involved prior to my arrival. I do not recall that it was hectic. Everyone was extremely prepared and tight. I was thrown into the fire, and having just finished a rapid-day-count film with Oliver, I was extremely tight in mind.

Levinson: We didn’t have a lot of money, so we had to be really nimble on our feet and shoot and move, shoot and move. Bob Richardson was fantastic in that he could just pick up, boom, we’re over here, shoot here, boom, move on. And no one felt rushed. There was always enough time to do the work that had to be done, and there was a real efficiency of how to set up and how quickly we could do something.

Leary: Almost all the time, Barry had two cameras going on dolly tracks. So, he was constantly doing at least two passes, and sometimes a third camera that was handheld. You didn’t know when you were going to be on camera, or even when he was moving in close. He’s like, “I’m coming in close, but you guys, you have to play this whole scene. Everybody’s in it, because I’m moving around.” He just kept that energy up.

Cryer: The crazy thing about Barry was, he was doing this in 28 days, and yet, he was so fucking relaxed! I don’t remember him ever seeming stressed out. So many directors seem constantly stressed out when they’re trying to get shit done, but Barry was just completely charming and chill and chatty and just kind of knocked through this stuff. 

Macy: If memory serves, Barry is not an out-front director. He’s relatively quiet. His notes were direct and clear and the vast majority of them had to do with the filmmaking. Or perhaps he just thought I was on it and didn’t need anything. He talked to De Niro a good bit, but they talked privately. I remember Bob Richardson was wonderful to watch, too. I thought my scene was really pretty. I love the way he lit it. The bane of a lot of actors is when the lighting and camera setup takes so much time that by the time you finally get to act it, you’ve lost the will to live. And you look at it and go, It doesn’t look that different than it did four hours ago. This moved along with dispatch. There was not a lot of waiting around.

Rosenthal: That scene was scheduled for two days and they finished it in half a day.

De Niro: I have a very long monologue with Bill Macy, and I learned it verbatim, because it was so well written. There was no reason to change it. Maybe a word here and there. But it was the cadence. Mamet has a very specific rhythm that you can’t beat.

Macy: I remember Bob was not good on those lines. He did close to it, but what David wrote was so much better than De Niro’s approximation of it. He was tense, or I should say intense. He understood what an important scene that was and how difficult it was.

Rosenthal: I remember it was the rainiest, coldest January in LA. We wanted that mansion [for Motss’ house] because it had spectacular 360-degree views of the city, and we got there, and it was socked in with fog the whole time. We literally got this because we wanted the view, and there is no view. Barry decided to just go for it and use it.

Levinson: It was up somewhere in the Palisades and there was a fog bank that came in. It was kind of sweeping across the property. It looked beautiful. I said, “Willie, can you get your guitar and sort of just walk in that fog bank?” He said, “What do you want me to do?” I said, “Well, you’re working on the ‘guard the American border’ song that they’re all going to do in Nashville.” Richardson got the cameras quickly in place and we just shot him walking around in a fog bank. I also said to him one day, if we were doing some particular scene, “If you ever hear something that sounds like you could have it in a song, just break into song, using whatever someone might say. See what happens.” So, there was a point where Dustin was talking about some political cartoon in the paper, something about “sit on my lap.” And that’s when Willie sang, “Sit on my lap if you love me.” Those little moments that came up throughout, it was worthwhile to try things out, even though we were working under the pressure of having to shoot at that kind of pace.

Wynn Thomas (Production Designer): That house was owned by a business guy who did investment plans for businesses and schools and colleges and that sort of stuff. He had built this estate for him and his wife. The story I remember is that as soon as the house was finished, the wife divorced him. So, here was this man who had built this huge house and wasn’t using it, which is why he allowed us to come in to shoot there.

Rosenthal: Dennis Tito. He was the first American civilian to go up into space with the Russians.

Thomas: The interesting thing is the house was beautifully decorated, which was helpful for us because we were on a short schedule and I didn’t have the time to replace all the furniture. So, we used a lot of the existing furniture. The other interesting thing was he had this incredible house and beautiful grounds, and he only used his bedroom and the kitchen. The rest was for show.

Plakson: We were all expressly instructed by the ADs not to touch this spectacular, pristine grand piano sitting in the middle of the room. It reeked of never having been played. Well, at some point during the shoot, Dustin heads on over to the piano, sits down, lifts the lid, and begins to play. I sat down next to him and together we did a very soft snippet of some standard. For me, it was a scrumptious little interlude made all the sweeter because there ain’t no way in hell anybody was gonna yell at Dustin Hoffman to stop touching that piano! 

Leary: This is something I’ll never forget. We were hanging out. We’ve got like 20 minutes for the lighting setup. Nobody’s going back down to the trailers, because they’re way down at the bottom of this hill through this neighborhood. Willie comes out. He’s got his guitar, because his character has a guitar. Now he’s just Willie Nelson. He’s sitting there strumming and he goes, “Anything you guys want to hear?” I can’t remember who said it, but somebody went, “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” That’s one of my favorite songs of all time. It’s nighttime and the stars are out, and he just sings and plays “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” Then he gets done and he’s like, “What do you want to hear next?” I was just sitting there, like, “I can’t fucking believe I’m getting paid to do this.”

Rosenthal: You’d sit there and go, “There’s fucking Willie Nelson!”

Leary: That first day, in between shots, Dustin and Bob were standing over in a corner and I literally hear Dustin Hoffman go, “I can’t believe we’re doing a scene with Willie Nelson. This is crazy.” And Bob was like, “I know. Crazy.” It doesn’t go away!

Plakson: Listening to that exquisite, riffing loveliness played on that legendary guitar by one of the groovier gods on Mount Olympus—well, I’m pretty damn sure that’s what ambrosia tastes like.

Chenoweth: Pops Staples was a whole other story. So, Pops is going to fly in. We’ve got everything all arranged. We’ve got a special trailer for him. We don’t think he can drive, so we’ve got someone who was going to drive him around LA and take good care of him. It was all in place. We’re excited. Pops Staples! Legend! I go into my office and my assistant is white as a sheet. She said, “Mavis Staples called and said Pops isn’t coming.” I just about had a heart attack. Because he was supposed to fly that day. Ten minutes later, Pops called my office. “Don’t listen to Mavis. I’m coming.” I think she was just worried about him. Then he gets there and he’s in his trailer and he goes, “You must have been worried about me. I don’t need all this!” Merle Haggard is also in it, which you can’t see that well, but he actually did a little concert, Farm Aid thing that they’re watching on the plane.

Rosenthal: We had good music in that movie. We were talking about who could do the score and I said to Barry, “What about Mark Knopfler?” I was friendly with him so I called him.

Mark Knopfler (Composer): I wanted to just put together a little bit of music that would stand up by itself. In a way, the pace of it, the stripped-down thing, sort of worked. The big chest-thumping electric guitar, that comes from my immersion in a British group called The Shadows, and Ennio Morricone. There’s just a touch of Exodus about it, a touch of “Biblical.” Then in the heartland, my national steel guitar stuff, it’s more the folk, blues influence. And in terms of Wag the Dog, the song itself, I felt that doing it like a dance-pop thing was OK. You know, the Watusi or the Wolly Bully or the Jerk and the Fly—it was that this week and then next week it was the Hully Gully, wasn’t it? Whatever it was! I was trying to make light of it, that it was something manufactured.

4. “This is nothing! Piece of cake!”

Koechner and Williams reunited on Williams’ podcast Harland Highway in August 2022 to reminisce about their time together on Wag the Dog. A portion of this back-and-forth is taken from that conversation.

Koechner: I’m playing a TV director and we’re staging a scene as if it was in Albania. The first shot was a Steadicam shot, which I’d never been part of. So, I didn’t get what was happening. The camera just went away, and I didn’t know I was supposed to walk along with them to stay in the shot. And also, Dustin Hoffman jumped three of my lines. I didn’t know what to do!

Williams: And you can’t say anything because it’s freakin’ Tootsie!

Koechner: Yeah, “You jumped me a little bit, bro.”

Williams: “Hey, Dusty. Roll it back a notch.”

Koechner: “Easy, Tootsie.”

Williams: I remember having trouble saying the name of the dog, because I’d never heard of a Lhasa Apso or whatever, and it’s like trying to say “Massachusetts.” I remember Corky [Koechner] always laughing at me because I said it so stupid. And it was a mangy dog. I wanted a nicer dog.

Koechner: He fucking made me laugh so hard right away, the way he said it. I was like, Oh my God, I can never be this funny.

Williams: A lot of times when you shoot a movie, it’s this guy and this guy in the bedroom scene, and that guy and that guy in the dining-room scene. But what was cool about my spot in the movie is that almost all the cast had to be together in that warehouse and you could just see and hear everybody. It was this big, open kind of thing. 

Chenoweth: Kirsten Dunst was there shooting that scene. She was probably 13, 14, something like that. Debbie and I went and watched that day.

Levinson: Kirsten was wonderful. That whole thing, as I remember—unless there’s a cut in there somewhere—it’s really one camera move. It comes into the studio and it comes around to her and she’s talking, and then there’s something else that gets in the way, and then it comes back to her again. I’m pretty sure that’s all one shot. If you can do something in one shot, I always like it if you can’t quite figure out that it must have been done in one.

Williams: Dustin, he wasn’t snobby or anything, but he had no reason to get chatty with me. I was a nobody. I think we were there three days, maybe, and the first day or two, he just didn’t say anything to me, even though we were standing together most of the day. Then on my last day there, he brought his son. I think his son was 14 or 15 or something, and I look up, and I see them pointing at me like Invasion of the Body Snatchers from across the soundstage. Then he came running across with his son, with a starstruck look in his eye, and they’re like, “Were you the cop in Dumb and Dumber that drank the pee?” I was like, “Yep.” After that, he just wouldn’t leave me alone. It was so funny. He just kept chatting and wouldn’t stop talking. Then when I wrapped, he wanted to give me a big hug. It was like we were best friends. I guess everyone loves that movie. I’m sure he probably had a good father-son experience watching it with his kid.

Thomas: Dustin, at some point or another, talked the guards at the White House into opening the front gate so that it would look like our actors were walking out. Initially they were walking along in front of the White House.

White: No, you can’t just convince a guard at a gate at the White House to film there, whether you’re Dustin Hoffman or Tom Cruise. There’s too much security. What I heard was Bill Clinton came by to visit them or he was nearby and they went out to lunch. Dustin said, “We’ll get that shot at the gate at the White House,” and Clinton said—Dustin called him “Bill”—that if we need anything, you know, “the president will make it happen.” They wanted the gate to open up and they would walk out. It wasn’t just, Oh, let us shoot here. Because I remember Dustin was taking credit, you know, “See? I told you Bill would let us do it!”

Rosenthal: Bob actually has a picture of Dustin trying to explain what the movie is to Clinton during that lunch.

Levinson: I can’t remember who said it, but someone mentioned that Jim Belushi is of Albanian heritage. So, we reached out to him about doing a little cameo.

Jim Belushi (“Himself”): David Mamet was a cohort from Chicago. I did Sexual Perversity in Chicago and I think he knew we were Albanian. At that time I didn’t ever really want to play myself, you know? I’m an actor. But the script was hysterical, so I was like, “Absolutely.” They sent me an audiotape of the speech they wanted me to give in Albanian. The girl that did the speech on the tape was Albanian and at the end she said, “Mr. Belushi, we are so very proud of you as an Albanian-American. Thank you for all that you do.” The sweetest little voice! Because there were only three famous Albanians. There was Mother Teresa, my brother John, and me. Now they’ve got a couple singers that are really good. Rita Ora, Dua Lipa. I drove up to the set and there were these television camera-like things. I was supposed to deliver my statement, but I didn’t understand a word of Albanian that was on that tape, so I did pidgin Albanian. I said every Albanian word that my grandmother said to me and I put it all in a sentence. I basically used all the foul language that I had learned and stuff like, “Don’t talk to me.” “You give me a headache.” “Do you want trouble?” “Shut your pie hole.” And nobody knew what I was saying! I was improvising. Real Albanians are gonna go, “What is he talking about?” But my favorite line was Willie Nelson’s. “Belushi is Albanian?” He nailed it!

Levinson: Woody Harrelson was perfect. The way he would look at things or when he would be staring at somebody, we’d think, Holy shit, is he gonna blow up at any given moment?

Hoffman: My God, was he good.

Chenoweth: I don’t remember who read that part in the table reading, but I think we just made a short wish list for this guy who was a soldier and had gone off the deep end and taken all these meds.

Woody Harrelson (“Sergeant William Schumann”): The thought of working with two legitimate legends, I was very excited by that prospect. But I also just loved the idea of it, because I definitely have, over the years, seen a lot of wagging the dog going on, or getting into war and justifying it by making shit up. I knew this guy had to be a little bit, shall we say, intellectually challenged. I wanted to get some teeth for him and just have a kind of weird way of talking. It was all in the spirit of fun, but I do think it worked for the piece. After the plane crash, I’m in that big tractor or harvester between De Niro and Hoffman, and in the front is the guy who’s the farmer. I said to him, “There’s some people who can brag about Brando reading off their forehead, but you’ve got De Niro and Hoffman reading off your back!” They had to resort to putting the script on his back because it was just so many words they had to memorize in such a short time.

De Luca: I was just having breakfast with Steve Mosko, who runs Village Roadshow. We were telling the worst horror stories, because we were colleagues at Sony once. He always quotes the scene when they’re on the plane and the whole plan is going to crap, right before the plane crashes, and Dustin is like, “This is nothing! Try meeting with three Italian actresses whacked out on Benzedrine and grappa and they haven’t read the treatment!” I still hear that on some sets. “This is nothing!” It’s a great producer in-joke.

Harrelson: I don’t think this ever made it into the movie, but we were in that store, and I was wanting to get some candy or something and I ended up scrambling on the floor. I always think in situations like this, you gotta just go for it. I do sometimes tend to go over the top and rely on the director to tell me “OK, that’s too far,” but in this case, just because of the character, it was hard to go overboard. So, we do the scene and Barry’s like, “Yeah, OK, we got that.” The time thing was always a real issue. And I’m like, “Can I do one more?” And I remember Dustin was like, “You go for it, buddy! You go for it!” He was psyched that I’m asking for one more when Barry had already said he got it. I’ve thought about that many times since. He was great that way. So supportive.

Rosenthal: Between Willie’s trailer and Woody’s trailer, you could get very high, just from what was going outside.

Harrelson: Well, I never smoked while I was working. But I did always smoke after!

Levinson: At one point it got back to me that they screened Wag the Dog at New Line when we finished it, and they were less than thrilled about the piece. The comment was, “Just what we need is some kind of fucking political comedy.” That’s what got back to me. Anytime you’re sort of pushing this way or that way or whatever, you’re always going to get some kind of resistance.

De Luca: We did think it could compete in the awards corridor.

In September of 1997, Warner Bros. announced plans to push Sphere from its planned December release to February of the following year. This left an opening for De Luca and company to complete post-production on Wag the Dog and position it for Academy Award consideration with a limited Christmas Day release.

Hoffman: I remember I knew I was not going to win the Oscar, and that was a relief when I went. When you know you’re not going to win, it’s kind of fun to go. As Good As It Gets, I remember I saw that, jealously, because I thought it was a great part. But Jack [Nicholson, who won the best-actor Oscar] was wonderful in it.

5. “For once in my life, I won’t be pissed on. I want the credit.”

In the final weeks before the December 1997 release of Wag the Dog, the matter of screenplay credit reared its head. According to Rosenthal, Mamet sought sole credit from the Writers Guild of America (WGA), while Henkin argued that her work constituted an amount commensurate with shared credit. The guild went the extra step of awarding her first-position shared credit, and reportedly as a result, Mamet refused to attach his name to any movie for which he was not the sole writer going forward. The issue would come up the very next year with the release of John Frankenheimer’s Ronin, also starring De Niro, which ultimately carried a pen name for Mamet alongside original writer J.D. Zeik.

Levinson: I don’t believe David actually read Hilary’s script, because I said it’s not the movie I want to do, so there was no reason for him to read it. Whether he did, I don’t know. We never talked about it. It was never, ever mentioned. But what Wag the Dog is, is from the mind of David Mamet.

Rosenthal: David would joke, you know, “he and his writing partner who he’s never met or talked to,” because they were nominated for an Oscar together. A lot of what goes on in deals is economics. If you get sole credit, you get more money. If you get shared credit, you get additional money. But Barry was ready to resign from the WGA.

Levinson: Absolutely. There is no way in the world that you could read David’s script and look at the other draft and say that David shouldn’t have first-position credit. Because that script is so different from what you see. It’s night and day. It’s not, like, Oh, we changed this and changed that. It’s a different movie!

Henkin: I thought Mamet’s work was wonderful. They did their draft and created a great film. These are exemplary filmmakers who I admire and in one instance had worked with before. There are similarities between the drafts and certainly a great many differences as well, but that kind of focus really takes away, for me, from the movie itself. I’m happy to have the movie be what it is. I think it’s an extraordinary film and I was glad to have been a part of it.

De Luca: What complicated it for the WGA was they were both based on the same source material, which is something that they look at when they’re deciding whether to give the first writer credit.

Rosenthal: Contractually, because it was the deal we made with Beinhart and his agent, we had to say, “based on the book.” But there’s nothing there that’s based on the book except they create a war. And Jay Leno appears in both the book and the movie. They wanted to rerelease the book and, for the cover art, use the movie. I said, “That doesn’t make any sense. If you want to be really technical, it’s ‘inspired by.’”

Beinhart: I saw a letter from the movie people’s lawyers to the publishers saying, “You can’t change the title of the book to match the title of the movie and you can’t even say ‘a tie-in edition.’” What it looked like to me is the publisher rolled over without a whimper. It was a really weird thing. The reason it was not protected in the contract was nobody ever gave it any thought. Back then, bookstores were still important. So, having a tie-in with movie art would have given you 10,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 little mini-posters for the movie all over the world. Refusing to do that didn’t help anyone. It didn’t help the movie. It didn’t help the book. It didn’t help me. As far as I can tell, it didn’t help Mamet.

De Luca: I don’t remember that, but what I’m guessing happened is—not to pass the buck—but if the filmmakers or if anyone in that group felt that since the script had nothing to do with the book, they didn’t want to be associated with the book, I would have deferred to the filmmakers. And I thought the book was great. That’s what got us rolling. But it just wasn’t the movie.

Beinhart: The stake that the publisher had in accepting the movie people’s refusal was this: Ballantine, the publisher of American Hero, was also the publisher of Michael Crichton, and Sphere, for them, is a much bigger deal than my book. They very much want the film company’s cooperation on Sphere. So, rather than make mortal enemies over doing a thing with Wag the Dog, they say, “OK,” and roll over. That sequence is pure speculation, but it’s the only way that I’ve ever been able to make sense out of it.

Levinson: I have to hand it to David. I was so angry about it and he said, “Ah, you know, whatever.” He wasn’t that bothered by it. I’m a writer. I believe it’s important for writers to be acknowledged for the work that they do. But I have never gotten over what I believe is a real injustice in that particular case. I think the Writers Guild, unfortunately, takes this kind of position at times. They can do a better job than what they have been doing over the years.

Beinhart: Eighteen years later, when American Hero had gone out of print with Ballantine and I had the rights back, I was being edited by a guy named Carl Bromley over at the small and obscure Nation Books Publishing. He said, “Let’s republish it as Wag the Dog. Fuck this. Who’s gonna stop us?” And he did. But they made a great movie, with which I am forever associated. I had a choice of feeling all upset and fucked over or just say, you know, I got a big chunk of change. More than any book was going to pay me. Do I want to whine or enjoy it? On balance, I’m luckier than 99.9% of writers in America.

6. “You just feel like a hole is left in the universe.”

On August 5, 2022, Anne Heche was critically injured in a Los Angeles car accident. She died six days later. Her costars and collaborators, interviewed after her death, remember her life and legacy on the screen and off.

Zane: There are so many actresses with careers, but so few that are as genuinely talented and fearless as Anne Heche was. She was so reliable and yet surprising, so incredibly real and believable and funny and touching and emotional. I was really shaken by that horrible story.

Chenoweth: She almost had a Ros Russell kind of thing with Mamet’s snappy dialogue, which couldn’t just be done in a sort of throwaway way. And she was so great with those two guys. That could have been intimidating to a young actress, but she held her own. I can’t think of too many who could have done it. It’s a huge loss.

De Niro: She was terrific to work with. I was very, very sad to hear, to say the least, what happened to her. I liked her a lot.

Hoffman: I didn’t know her before we started shooting, but there was a range there that I was very obsessed with. She was very believable and had great instincts and timing. I think we lost a terrific talent. I looked at the film again last night and this morning and I was just saddened by the fact that she’s no longer with us.

Levinson: She was an immensely talented woman and a wonderful person.

Rosenthal: She was so excited about being there and she would stick around on set a lot. She would watch Bob and Dustin. And just the sound of her voice in the film, the way she would say things. Clearly smart, yet scattered.

De Luca: She was so unique and fresh and she played off those guys brilliantly. It felt like a Ben Hecht/Howard Hawks road comedy. They have such great chemistry.

Higgins: You see these films with these two giant towers—Heat or Dirty Rotten Scoundrels or something. Inevitably what it needs is somebody in the middle to mortar those two bricks together, and boy, she just crushed it. I’ve never seen anything like it. But her performance has a lot of variety in it, too. She had things that she could draw on that were unusual.

Harrelson: I had a great time working with her. She had a tremendous sense of humor. Women are always better than the men in a movie. I don’t know why that’s true, but I’ve always been amazed by it as a general phenomenon. Whether I was working with Juliette Lewis or Courtney Love or Demi Moore, they were always better, always more interesting. And that was certainly true of Anne. Any scene she was in, she was just so compelling. She was made for this. A great entertainer.

Cryer: There was something very electrical and magical about Anne. She had an enormous femininity, but because she had that kind of puckish quality, there was something about her that sort of transcended pure femininity. I know gender things are sort of tired, but that impish quality that she had really worked well. Everything always just went to men back then. You’d read every script and it was just all men. And it really didn’t change for a while after that. So, it was great that they made the part female. I think they needed that electricity. They were playing these hardened, tired, savvy guys, and she was like this sparkler. And now she’s burned out and it’s just really sad.

Macy: Men just fell to their knees. That was the word on Anne Heche. I remember I said to my wife, Felicity [Huffman], “Oh, I just booked this thing. I’m gonna do one of Dave’s pieces, Wag the Dog. My scene is with Robert De Niro and Anne Heche.” And she said, “Oh. Anne. I’m coming to lunch.” She didn’t, but that’s the kind of power Anne had.

Martin: I was really taken by her. There’s nothing narcissistic or self-serving about the role that her character is playing. She’s there to help this along, to navigate the idea of how we’re going to save this president, and she really stands out. And also, because she wasn’t really known, it added to the truth of the part, somebody that really was in above her head.

Leary: As we started rehearsals, I could see that she was a little nervous and shy. We shared a couple of concerned glances. But that didn’t last long. Pretty early on in the process, on day one, she was not only up to speed but locked right in. She really was a fucking great actress.

Thomas: That was a big loss for me. She was just a great spirit full of love and kindness and lots of fun.

Zane: I find when someone dies ahead of their time, you just feel like a hole is left in the universe. I felt like that on that day, like some air got sucked out of the atmosphere.

De Luca: I think she is one of the main reasons the movie is entertaining and has lasted so long. When there’s mental health issues and that level of pain and trauma, the fact that someone can still bring joy and perform and have a career in the arts while dealing with all that stuff, it’s a miracle we got the years we got, and thank God we did.

Cryer: The last time I saw her, we were at an Emmys party just a few years ago and we laughed and laughed and laughed over Hollywood, basically, and being a woman in Hollywood. I think it was one of the reasons that her death hit me so hard. It was just this moment at the end of the evening when we’re in these gowns and we’re just laughing until we were crying. Then we got into our cars and went our separate ways. So, when I think of Anne, I think of Anne laughing.

7. “It’s the best work I’ve ever done in my life, because it’s so honest.”

Beinhart: My experience was like, a real estate agent came to my house, they bought the house because they liked the view, then they knocked down the house and built their own. Which, contractually, that’s what they were entitled to do. The question I’m always asked is, “How much was the film like the book?” And my standard answer is, “It was exactly like the book. All they changed was the characters and the plot.” But the real oddity is the experience of the book and the experience of the movie are really quite identical. When I saw the movie I said, “Hey, they really got it.”

De Luca: I’m really proud of the film’s legacy. Whether it’s a book or a poem or a movie or a painting, it’s amazing how storytelling can be prophetic about the culture and predict the zeitgeist. That movie was so ahead of the curve.

Belushi: Not long after that, Kosovo blew up. [The Kosovo War, fought between the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the rebel Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army in early 1998.]

Leary: It was almost like we set it up to help the movie.

Levinson: I remember my wife said, “There’s news trucks outside.” Suddenly they want to talk to me about this and I went, “Oh, I don’t even want to get involved in all of that.” It was just one of those rare things where there’s a collision of ideas that somehow get connected to a moment in time and stick. 

Rosenthal: It was beyond insane because our phones were ringing—journalists, friends, asking us, “What did you know?” And then it got crazier with Lewinsky in that picture. I was friendly with Arthur Sulzberger Sr., and I had dinner with him the night before that Lewinsky picture came out. We were talking about the bombing of Sudan and the stuff in the movie and “life imitates art.” Then the next morning, when I opened my door to get my New York Times and saw that picture, I actually thought Arthur was playing a joke on me. Also, when Boris Yeltsin wrote his book, Midnight Diaries, he talks about how the filmmakers of Wag the Dog got it right. It’s interesting now when you see it trending on Twitter because of whatever insanity.

De Niro: Even when that stuff came about, I was a little more naive about the shifting of reality and distraction. But now, of course, we see it’s more than we ever could have imagined with someone like [Donald] Trump. We got a heavy dose of every trick you could ever imagine with this guy. It’s frightening because it’s so obvious and so childish and stupid. But people sell it, and people buy it.

Higgins: There have been many times in the past six, seven years where I have thought, Oh, we did this in Wag the Dog. We already played this scene. But I’m a big student of US history as well, and almost every single president, certainly going back to Jefferson—this is baseline stuff. It’s what they do. One scandal after another.

Knopfler: It’s something you can play for a class of students in, say, a media and politics class. You could base a project or two on it, pointing to certain things that have happened. When the military invaded the Falkland Islands, they were distracting from this massive civil unrest in Argentina. They were on the verge of being ousted, and after they did this stunt, you had crowds cheering for them in Buenos Aires and kids lining up to join.

Henkin: There was a quintessential film called Tearing Down the Spanish Flag. It was just one shot and it was made in April 1898 during the Spanish-American War. It was a Spanish flag on a flagpole, and the Spanish flag is lowered and the American flag is raised in its place. It was attributed to the war, but it could have been shot in Cuba. It could have been shot in Spain. But it wasn’t. It was shot in New York City. And whether William Randolph Hearst’s involvement in that war was to sell newspapers or not, the real question is: What does it mean when these images end up being shown to the general public as truth?

De Luca: When you think about Facebook’s role in the 2016 election and Cambridge Analytica, I mean, Wag the Dog was like a pipe bomb and we’ve seen nuclear weapons deployed at this point.

Cryer: When you’re doing something great with very smart people, it’s like walking around the MIT campus. You think, This is where the important things are happening. It’s palpable on set. I felt that same way when I was doing the “Yada Yada” episode on Seinfeld. “This is going to be huge.” It’s so exciting to be part of something where you really, really feel it.

Nelson: I think it’s timeless. I really do. It reminds me a lot of Being There, in a way. It had some of the same qualities. I think the approach was such that it uncovered a lot of, I guess, the hypocrisy, and at the same time, the comedy in that. So, it’s going to remain.

Richardson: The film could have been made last month. It has not aged. The humor and the politics are tied seamlessly to history as we are experiencing it now.

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.

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.

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?

These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.