How Washington and Hollywood Each Wag the Dog by the Tail

We were sitting in a booth at Musso’s. Outside it was drizzling. Inside, Pat Caddell was telling a story. This particular story had to do with the deep and visceral connection between Hollywood and Washington, D.C.

Caddell, you may recall, gained fame as the ridiculously young pollster for Jimmy Carter during the 1976 campaign, when the former Georgia governor, against all odds, won the presidency. Just days after the election, it seems, Carter decided to take his first tour of the White House and invited Caddell and media guru Gerald Rafshoon to trail along.

“So we are going from room to room, just looking around in wonder,” said Caddell. “And suddenly the president says, ‘You know, there’s a movie theater in here somewhere. And Hollywood will send us any movie we want to see. What should we watch?’ ”

“Rafshoon thinks about it and suggests ‘Rocky.’ The president, who knows nothing about movies, says, ‘What’s it about?’

“And Rafshoon looks at Carter and says, ‘It’s about you, Mr. President.’ ”

Caddell pauses in his story. “That’s the moment when it hit me. The connection. I saw that Hollywood and Washington were in the exact same business.”

It’s an old connection. But from time to time, speculation over its nature and depth seizes hold of the two cities. Now is such a time. On this side of the continent, it’s hard to find an industry type who doesn’t want to talk about it.

The ferment is being driven largely by “Wag the Dog,” the wicked, hilarious movie built on the proposition that Hollywood moguls and elected presidents are interchangeable parts.

“The movie describes the state of the art in regards to the connection,” said Tom Pollack, former studio chief at Universal and now chairman of the American Film Institute. “Maybe it presents an exaggerated truth. But it’s the truth nonetheless.”

“Wag the Dog” opens with an unnamed and unseen president acquiring what you might call a media relations problem. He is accused of letting his hands wander during an official visit by a group of underage girls. What’s worse, election night is only 11 days away.

Not to worry. Robert De Niro, playing a Dick Morris-type presidential fixer, issues a barrage of diversionary leaks and then jets out to Hollywood to arrange the final solution: the staging of a fake war.

De Niro finds the proper producer, played by Dustin Hoffman, and explains his wants. “It’s like a pageant,” De Niro says. “Like the Oscars.”

“I produced the Oscars,” says Hoffman.

“I know,” says De Niro.

And so they’re off. Without spoiling the story, let’s say--in the fashion of the trades--the war is boffo with the public, which forgets the manhandled teeny-bopper.

“The message,” broods Caddell, “seems to be that nothing has any consequence anymore. The line between fake and real has broken down. The movie would be depressing, if it weren’t so funny.”

But this connection between Hollywood and Washington is a strange one, no? In many ways the two towns have huge differences. In Washington, men wear socks. Limos tend to be black. That sort of thing.

Still, the connection remains, perhaps at some psychic level, and goes far beyond the occasional appearance of a movie like “Wag the Dog.”

Consider, for example, that Vice President Al Gore strolled to the rear of Air Force Two just before Christmas and claimed he was the role model for the hockey-playing Oliver Barrett in “Love Story,” the weeper made into a major movie in the early 1970s.

Even if it’s true--and, incredibly enough, it is partly true--why would the vice president of the United States need to establish his entertainment credentials?

Or consider that, also just before Christmas, the president himself was widely rumored to be talking to Jeffrey Katzenberg about taking the helm of the DreamWorks studio when he steps down as president.

Is that the modern career move for an ex-president?

“There’s more similarities between the two cultures than you might think,” said Marty Kaplan. Kaplan is proof of his own theory. He started as a White House speech writer and ended up producing movies at Disney before moving to USC as a professor of “political communication.”

“Both towns are surprisingly small,” he said. “Once inside, it’s easy to know the tribe, who the players are, what the moves are. Washington people and Hollywood people both seem to like that.

“Also, in both towns you are supposed to tell untruths. In Hollywood, if someone pitches a project that you think is horrible, the only appropriate way to respond is to say, ‘I love it.’

“In Washington, if someone says something to a policymaker that is stupid, the only way to respond is to say, ‘That’s extremely interesting. I’ll have to think about that.’

“In both places you have to lie in order to live and prosper. And the lessons of each town are transferable to the other.”

In “Wag the Dog,” De Niro relentlessly lashes his underlings to leak false stories about his employer, the president. When the press calls about the leaks, De Niro advises his people: “Deny, deny, deny.” The denials, De Niro instructs, will lead the press to believe that the lies are true.

“These two towns twist things and manipulate images for a living,” said Pollack. “That art is becoming increasingly valued by everybody. So you get this joining together of forces until it’s hard to tell who is doing what.”

One producer tells a story about himself and the Lincoln bedroom. For obvious reasons, he asked not to be named, but early in the Clinton administration he received one of the now-infamous invitations to come to the White House and bring his jammies.

“We walked into the Lincoln bedroom, and the butler closed the door,” he said. “I looked at my wife, and we both burst out laughing. We were thinking the same thing: This room could not be real. It looked like a movie set. Even when we left the next day, it felt like we had spent the night on location.”

The story also suggests that the marriage between Hollywood and Washington may contain some discontinuities. The Lincoln bedroom, after all, was real. Only the producer’s long-standing participation in illusion made it seem fake.

“A lot of the magnetism between the cultures comes not so much from affinity as it does from mutual envy,” said producer Lynda Obst. “Power is this elusive thing, and each side thinks the other has it. Hollywood has the private jets and the perks. Washington can make laws.”

Obst also suspects that there’s a low potential for crossover, at least in terms of Hollywood types going to Washington. Their personalities and personal histories simply don’t make a good match with the nation’s capital. “Almost everyone in Hollywood,” she said, “has some inhaling issue in their past.”

But can it work the other way around? Maybe. In December, the rumor about Clinton negotiating to take the chief executive’s job at DreamWorks broke mysteriously in Liz Smith’s gossip column. Juicy details were described: Katzenberg had sweetened the deal with a $3.6-million mansion for the Clintons somewhere near the beach. The offer had been presented at Katzenberg’s own mansion in Malibu during a presidential visit.

Within days the rumor had been reprinted worldwide. No one knows who leaked it. No one knows whether there’s any truth behind it. Eventually, of course, reporters called their sources at the White House and asked if the story was true.

The sources listened. And then denied everything.