Wag The Dog

In a new political era of a reality tv star president and right-wing spin spinning out of control, we screen a beloved movie classic that laid out the delicate and intricate relationship between Hollywood production and politics using “fake news” to distract the masses from the real news of political scandal and abuse of power… Wag The Dog is a timely dark comedy produced and directed by Barry Levinson, and starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. The plot centers around the President who is caught making advances on an underage Firefly Girl inside the Oval Office, less than two weeks before the election. Conrad Brean (De Niro), a top spin doctor, is brought in to take the public’s attention away from the scandal. He decides to construct a fictional war in Albania, hoping the media will concentrate on this instead. Brean contacts Hollywood producer Stanley Motss (Hoffman) to create the war, complete with a theme song and fake film footage of a photogenic orphan. The hoax is initially successful, with the President quickly gaining ground in the polls after appearing but the plot twists, turns and pivots as the attempts to cover the scandal get more exaggerated and even more and more bizarre… Fact is often much stranger than fiction, they say. Join us on Thanksgiving weekend, Saturday, November 24 at 3 pm at the New Parkway Theater in Oakland as we examine the parallels of fiction with the facts of a new political era and delicate relationship of entertainment and politics.