Despite Changes, ‘Dog’ Is a ‘Hero’ to Its Master

Film producer outraged that writer is concerned with commerce, not artistic integrity! Is this a man bites dog story? A producer bites writer story? No, it’s a “Wag the Dog” story.

Clifford Rothman wrote an article for Calendar that explained that the producers of “Wag the Dog” would not let the publishers of “American Hero” do a tie-in edition of the book, even though the movie credits say, “based on the novel ‘American Hero’ by Larry Beinhart” (“ ‘Dog’ Wags Ethics,” Calendar, Nov. 9).

One of the film’s producers, Jane Rosenthal of TriBeCa, and Barry Levinson, the director, apparently were upset about the article. They wrote back to point out that the publishers, the author’s agents and the author--that’s me--were concerned “not . . . with ethics, artistic rights or a writer’s integrity” but with “commerce,” i.e. selling more books (Calendar Letters, Nov. 30).

Contractually, I am not permitted to have artistic rights, let alone get upset about them. My contract with the producers contains a standard clause called “waiver of droit moral,” which expressly states they can do whatever they want with my book, even if it is a “mutilation” (the actual word used in the contract) of my work.

Which it is. Probably creating a better movie thereby than they would have if they had tried to make a literal adaptation (I saw the movie last week; it was wonderful). So this is real ambiguous territory.

There are three great similarities between my “American Hero” and “Wag the Dog,” with a screenplay by David Mamet and Hilary Henkins, which opens Dec. 25.

One is the premise: A president in trouble hires a Hollywood agent-producer to create a war so that he will be reelected. (In “Wag the Dog,” the spin doctor is played by Robert De Niro and the producer by Dustin Hoffman.)

The second is style. They are both satires that succeed and support themselves with a meticulous sense of realism. My novel, which is about George Bush and the Gulf War, does this in a very “literary” way, with extensive “documentation” and “footnotes.” The movie, which is about an imaginary president who creates an imaginary war, uses a “real style” of the sort we might expect from the creator of television’s “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

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The third similarity is that both the book and the movie are quite funny. In terms of plot, character, dialogue, they are, without doubt, very different.

Rosenthal and Levinson’s letter claims that the reason for their stand is because they do not want to mislead the public. If this were the reason, Rosenthal, or anyone from New Line, could have picked up the phone and said, “Hey, we’re concerned that misled patrons will run screaming into Barnes & Noble demanding a rewrite! Do you think there is some way that we can do a tie-in that makes it clear that they are very different?”

They didn’t do that. They sent a harsh lawyer’s letter. They refused to return phone calls from my publisher, my agent and me for nine months.

Ironically, the movie itself may contain the truth. In the end, even though it might mean his death, Dustin Hoffman’s character hysterically insists, “It’s not about the money. It’s about the credit!”

Are my complaints commercial? You bet. Is that a simple statement? No. Today, art and commerce are completely intertwined. A motion picture tie-in is one of the few ways for a book, however great, to break out of the pack.

It was a more or less reasonable expectation that a tie-in would ensue. Especially if the titles were the same. But New Line, et al, have gone to great lengths, choosing the title “Wag the Dog” over “American Hero”--a strange choice indeed--in order to insist, in a manner that mimics Dustin Hoffman’s final scene, that no, no, the movie is not based on the book.

But it is.