Wag The Dog (USA)
Also Known As: Bite the Bullet (working title)
1997
Director: Barry Levinson
Writers: Larry Beinhart (book), Hilary Henkin (screenplay)
Awards: nominated for 2 Oscars
Major characters:
Dustin Hoffman ... Stanley Motss
Robert De Niro ... Conrad Brean
Anne Heche ... Winifred Ames
Denis Leary ... Fad King
Willie Nelson ... Johnny Dean
Andrea Martin ... Liz Butsky
Kirsten Dunst ... Tracy Lime
William H. Macy ... CIA Agent Charles Young
John Michael Higgins ... John Levy
Suzie Plakson ... Grace
Woody Harrelson ... Sergeant William Schumann
Michael Belson ... President
Suzanne Cryer ... Amy Cain
Jason Cottle ... A.D.
David Koechner ... Director
Read and be ready to retell the following text, discuss the example of some other famous actor or actress who had kept fame at arm’s length until they starred in a blockbuster hit.
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Lee Hoffman (born August 8, 1937) is an American actor who has had an active career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. Respected for his versatility, Hoffman has won two Academy Awards, six Golden Globes and many other awards.
Hoffman was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Lillian and Harry Hoffman, Hoffman was named after stage and silent screen actor Dustin Farnum. He graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1955. He enrolled at Santa Monica College with the intention of studying medicine but left after a year to join the Pasadena Playhouse.
Hoffman began acting at the Pasadena Playhouse with Gene Hackman. After two years at the playhouse, Hackman headed for New York City, and Hoffman soon followed. He worked a series of odd jobs, including coat checking at restaurants, while getting the occasional bit television role. To support himself, he left acting briefly to teach. He worked as a professional fragrance tester for Maxwell House. He also did the occasional television commercial. An often-replayed segment on programs that explore actors’ early work is a clip showing Hoffman touting the Volkswagen Fastback. In 1960, Hoffman landed a role in an off-Broadway production and followed with a walk-on role in a Broadway production in 1961. Hoffman then studied at the famed Actors Studio and became a dedicated method actor.
Between acting jobs, Hoffman also made ends meet by teaching acting at a community college night school, and by directing off-broadway and community theater productions.
Hoffman continued to appear in major films over the next few years. Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? Straw Dogs, and Papillon were followed by Lenny in 1974, for which Hoffman received his third nomination for Best Actor in seven years.
Hoffman’s next starred in Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer as workaholic Ted Kramer whose wife unexpectedly leaves him to raise their son alone. Hoffman starred alongside Meryl Streep in the film, which earned Hoffman his first Academy Award. The film also received the Best Picture honor, as well as Supporting Actress (Streep) and Director. In Tootsie, Hoffman portrays Michael Dorsey, a struggling actor who finds himself dressing up as a woman to land a role on a soap opera.
In director Barry Levinson’s Rain Man, Hoffman starred as an autistic savant, opposite Tom Cruise. Levinson, Hoffman and Cruise worked for two years on the film, and his performance garnered Hoffman his second Academy Award. Upon accepting, Hoffman stated softly to his fellow nominees that it was okay if they didn’t vote for him because “I didn’t vote for you guys either.” After Rain Man, Hoffman appeared with Sean Connery and Matthew Broderick in Family Business. The film did relatively poorly with the critics and at the box office.
More recently, Hoffman played theater owner Charles Frohman in the J. M. Barrie historical fantasia Finding Neverland, costarring Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. In director David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, Hoffman appeared opposite Lily Tomlin as an existential detective team.
Hoffman co-starred with Barbra Streisand, Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller in 2004’s “Meet the Fockers”, the sequel to “Meet the Parents”. Hoffman won the 2005 MTV Movie Award for Best Comedic Performance. He was featured in cameo roles in Andy Garcia’s The Lost City and on the final episode of HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm’s fifth season. In 2006, Hoffman appeared in Stranger than Fiction, played the perfumer Giuseppe Baldini in Tom Tykwer’s film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and had a cameo in the 2006 film The Holiday.
Hoffman is still good friends with actor Gene Hackman, who was with him during their years as starving actors.
A political liberal, Hoffman has long supported the Democratic Party and Ralph Nader. In 1997, he was one of a number of Hollywood stars and executives to sign an open letter to then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, published as a newspaper advertisement in the International Herald Tribune, which protested the treatment of Scientologists in Germany.
Read to answer the following questions:
Is Dustin Hoffman’s career typical of many actors?
What films with Dustin Hoffman have you seen?
What were those films about?
What traits of character help people become successful professionals?
Read the text and to be ready to retell and discuss it in class.
Robert De Niro
De Niro was born in New York City, the son of Virginia Admiral, a painter, and Robert De Niro, Sr., an abstract expressionist painter and sculptor. De Niro’s father was of Italian and Irish descent, and his mother was of German, French, and Dutch descent. The son of artists, De Niro was raised in New York’s Greenwich Village by his mother after his parents split up when he was two. Nicknamed "Bobby Milk" for his pallor, the youthful De Niro joined a Little Italy street gang, but the direction of his future had already been determined by his stage debut at age ten playing the Cowardly Lion in his school’s production of The Wizard of Oz. Along with finding relief from shyness through performing, De Niro was also entranced by the movies, and he quit high school at age 16 to pursue acting. He is considered, by many fans and critics alike, to be one of the greatest film actors of all time.
De Niro’s first film role in collaboration with Brian De Palma materialized in 1963 at the age of 20, when he appeared in The Wedding Party; however, the film was not released until 1969. De Niro on the set of Raging Bull with Jake LaMotta he gained popular attention with his role as a dying Major League baseball player in Bang the Drum Slowly (1973). The same year, he began his fruitful collaboration with Scorsese when he played a memorable role as the smalltime hood “Johnny Boy” alongside Harvey Keitel’s “Charlie” in Mean Streets (1973). In 1974, De Niro played a pivotal role in Francis Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II, playing young Don Vito Corleone, having previously auditioned for the roles of Sonny Corleone, Michael Corleone, Carlo Rizzi and Paulie Gatto in The Godfather. His performance earned him his first Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actor, although Coppola accepted the award, as De Niro was not present at the Oscar ceremony. He became the first actor to win an Academy Award speaking mainly a foreign language, in this case, multiple Sicilian dialects (although he delivered a few lines in English). De Niro and Marlon Brando, who played the older Vito Corleone in the first film, are the only actors to have won leading-role Oscars portraying the same fictional character.
After working with Scorsese in Mean Streets, he had a very successful working relationship with the director in films such as Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), and Casino (1995). They also acted together in Guilty by Suspicion and provided their voices for the animated feature Shark Tale.
In many of his films, De Niro has played likeable or sympathetic sociopaths. Taxi Driver is particularly important to De Niro’s career; his iconic performance as Travis Bickle shot him to stardom and forever linked De Niro’s name with Bickle’s famous “You talkin’ to me?” monologue, which De Niro improvised.
Praised for his commitment to roles (stemming from his background in Method acting), De Niro gained 60 pounds (27 kg) and learned how to box for his portrayal of Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull; ground his teeth for Cape Fear; lived in Sicily for The Godfather, Part II; worked as a cab driver for three months for Taxi Driver; and learned to play the saxophone for New York, New York. He also put on weight and shaved his hairline to play Al Capone in The Untouchables.
He directed The Good Shepherd (2006), and costarred with Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie. The movie also reunited him onscreen with Joe Pesci, with whom De Niro had starred in Raging Bull, Goodfellas, A Bronx Tale, Once Upon A Time In America and Casino.
De Niro has won two Academy Awards: Best Actor for his role in Raging Bull, and Best Supporting Actor for The Godfather, Part II.
De Niro is a supporter of the Democratic Party, and vocally supported Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. De Niro publicly supported John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. In 1998, he lobbied Congress against impeaching President Bill Clinton. De Niro also narrated 9/11, a documentary about the September 11, 2001 attacks, shown on CBS and centering on video footage made by Jules and Gedeon Naudet that focused on the role of firefighters following the attacks. While promoting his movie The Good Shepherd with co-star Matt Damon on the December 8, 2006 episode of Hardball with Chris Matthews at George Mason University, De Niro was asked whom he would like to see as President of the United States. De Niro responded, “Well, I think of two people: Hillary Clinton and Obama.” On February 4, 2008, De Niro supported Obama at a rally at the Izod Center in New Jersey before Super Tuesday.
Answer the following questions:
Can we name DeNiro a dedicated actor? Why?
What films directed by Robert De Niro have you seen?
Does Robert De Niro take an active part in social and political life?
What is your favourite role of Robert De Niro?
Read and translate the text and to be ready to retell and discuss it in class.
History of Elections
By federal law since 1792, the U.S. Congress permitted the states to conduct their presidential elections (or otherwise to choose their Electors) any time in a 34-day period before the first Wednesday of December, which was the day set for the meeting of the Electors of the U.S. president and vice-president (the Electoral College), in their respective states. An election date in November was seen as useful because the harvest would have been completed (important in an agrarian society) and the winter storms would not yet have begun in earnest (a plus in the days before paved roads and snowplows). However, in this arrangement the states that voted later could be influenced by a candidate’s victories in the states that voted earlier, a problem later exacerbated by improved communications via train and telegraph. In close elections, the states that voted last might well determine the outcome.
A uniform date for choosing presidential Electors was instituted by the Congress in 1845. Many theories have been advanced as to why the Congress settled on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The actual reasons, as shown in records of Congressional debate on the bill in December 1844, were fairly prosaic. The bill initially set the national day for choosing presidential Electors on “the first Tuesday in November,” in years divisible by four (1848, 1852, etc.). But it was pointed out that in some years the period between the first Tuesday in November and the first Wednesday in December (when the Electoral College met) would be more than 34 days, in violation of the existing Electoral College law. So, the bill was amended to move the national date for choosing presidential Electors forward to the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, a date scheme already used in the state of New York.
In 1845, the United States was largely an agrarian society. Farmers often needed a full day to travel by horse-drawn vehicles to the county seat to vote. Tuesday was established as election day because it did not interfere with the Biblical Sabbath or with market day, which was on Wednesday in many towns.
Note down from the text the sentences containing the following phrases and word combinations and translate them into Russian.
to conduct presidential elections
to determine the outcome
a uniform date
to be amended
the Biblical Sabbath
Also Known As: Bite the Bullet (working title)
1997
Director: Barry Levinson
Writers: Larry Beinhart (book), Hilary Henkin (screenplay)
Awards: nominated for 2 Oscars
Major characters:
Dustin Hoffman ... Stanley Motss
Robert De Niro ... Conrad Brean
Anne Heche ... Winifred Ames
Denis Leary ... Fad King
Willie Nelson ... Johnny Dean
Andrea Martin ... Liz Butsky
Kirsten Dunst ... Tracy Lime
William H. Macy ... CIA Agent Charles Young
John Michael Higgins ... John Levy
Suzie Plakson ... Grace
Woody Harrelson ... Sergeant William Schumann
Michael Belson ... President
Suzanne Cryer ... Amy Cain
Jason Cottle ... A.D.
David Koechner ... Director
Read and be ready to retell the following text, discuss the example of some other famous actor or actress who had kept fame at arm’s length until they starred in a blockbuster hit.
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Lee Hoffman (born August 8, 1937) is an American actor who has had an active career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. Respected for his versatility, Hoffman has won two Academy Awards, six Golden Globes and many other awards.
Hoffman was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Lillian and Harry Hoffman, Hoffman was named after stage and silent screen actor Dustin Farnum. He graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1955. He enrolled at Santa Monica College with the intention of studying medicine but left after a year to join the Pasadena Playhouse.
Hoffman began acting at the Pasadena Playhouse with Gene Hackman. After two years at the playhouse, Hackman headed for New York City, and Hoffman soon followed. He worked a series of odd jobs, including coat checking at restaurants, while getting the occasional bit television role. To support himself, he left acting briefly to teach. He worked as a professional fragrance tester for Maxwell House. He also did the occasional television commercial. An often-replayed segment on programs that explore actors’ early work is a clip showing Hoffman touting the Volkswagen Fastback. In 1960, Hoffman landed a role in an off-Broadway production and followed with a walk-on role in a Broadway production in 1961. Hoffman then studied at the famed Actors Studio and became a dedicated method actor.
Between acting jobs, Hoffman also made ends meet by teaching acting at a community college night school, and by directing off-broadway and community theater productions.
Hoffman continued to appear in major films over the next few years. Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? Straw Dogs, and Papillon were followed by Lenny in 1974, for which Hoffman received his third nomination for Best Actor in seven years.
Hoffman’s next starred in Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer as workaholic Ted Kramer whose wife unexpectedly leaves him to raise their son alone. Hoffman starred alongside Meryl Streep in the film, which earned Hoffman his first Academy Award. The film also received the Best Picture honor, as well as Supporting Actress (Streep) and Director. In Tootsie, Hoffman portrays Michael Dorsey, a struggling actor who finds himself dressing up as a woman to land a role on a soap opera.
In director Barry Levinson’s Rain Man, Hoffman starred as an autistic savant, opposite Tom Cruise. Levinson, Hoffman and Cruise worked for two years on the film, and his performance garnered Hoffman his second Academy Award. Upon accepting, Hoffman stated softly to his fellow nominees that it was okay if they didn’t vote for him because “I didn’t vote for you guys either.” After Rain Man, Hoffman appeared with Sean Connery and Matthew Broderick in Family Business. The film did relatively poorly with the critics and at the box office.
More recently, Hoffman played theater owner Charles Frohman in the J. M. Barrie historical fantasia Finding Neverland, costarring Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. In director David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, Hoffman appeared opposite Lily Tomlin as an existential detective team.
Hoffman co-starred with Barbra Streisand, Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller in 2004’s “Meet the Fockers”, the sequel to “Meet the Parents”. Hoffman won the 2005 MTV Movie Award for Best Comedic Performance. He was featured in cameo roles in Andy Garcia’s The Lost City and on the final episode of HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm’s fifth season. In 2006, Hoffman appeared in Stranger than Fiction, played the perfumer Giuseppe Baldini in Tom Tykwer’s film Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and had a cameo in the 2006 film The Holiday.
Hoffman is still good friends with actor Gene Hackman, who was with him during their years as starving actors.
A political liberal, Hoffman has long supported the Democratic Party and Ralph Nader. In 1997, he was one of a number of Hollywood stars and executives to sign an open letter to then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, published as a newspaper advertisement in the International Herald Tribune, which protested the treatment of Scientologists in Germany.
Read to answer the following questions:
Is Dustin Hoffman’s career typical of many actors?
What films with Dustin Hoffman have you seen?
What were those films about?
What traits of character help people become successful professionals?
Read the text and to be ready to retell and discuss it in class.
Robert De Niro
De Niro was born in New York City, the son of Virginia Admiral, a painter, and Robert De Niro, Sr., an abstract expressionist painter and sculptor. De Niro’s father was of Italian and Irish descent, and his mother was of German, French, and Dutch descent. The son of artists, De Niro was raised in New York’s Greenwich Village by his mother after his parents split up when he was two. Nicknamed "Bobby Milk" for his pallor, the youthful De Niro joined a Little Italy street gang, but the direction of his future had already been determined by his stage debut at age ten playing the Cowardly Lion in his school’s production of The Wizard of Oz. Along with finding relief from shyness through performing, De Niro was also entranced by the movies, and he quit high school at age 16 to pursue acting. He is considered, by many fans and critics alike, to be one of the greatest film actors of all time.
De Niro’s first film role in collaboration with Brian De Palma materialized in 1963 at the age of 20, when he appeared in The Wedding Party; however, the film was not released until 1969. De Niro on the set of Raging Bull with Jake LaMotta he gained popular attention with his role as a dying Major League baseball player in Bang the Drum Slowly (1973). The same year, he began his fruitful collaboration with Scorsese when he played a memorable role as the smalltime hood “Johnny Boy” alongside Harvey Keitel’s “Charlie” in Mean Streets (1973). In 1974, De Niro played a pivotal role in Francis Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II, playing young Don Vito Corleone, having previously auditioned for the roles of Sonny Corleone, Michael Corleone, Carlo Rizzi and Paulie Gatto in The Godfather. His performance earned him his first Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actor, although Coppola accepted the award, as De Niro was not present at the Oscar ceremony. He became the first actor to win an Academy Award speaking mainly a foreign language, in this case, multiple Sicilian dialects (although he delivered a few lines in English). De Niro and Marlon Brando, who played the older Vito Corleone in the first film, are the only actors to have won leading-role Oscars portraying the same fictional character.
After working with Scorsese in Mean Streets, he had a very successful working relationship with the director in films such as Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), Goodfellas (1990), Cape Fear (1991), and Casino (1995). They also acted together in Guilty by Suspicion and provided their voices for the animated feature Shark Tale.
In many of his films, De Niro has played likeable or sympathetic sociopaths. Taxi Driver is particularly important to De Niro’s career; his iconic performance as Travis Bickle shot him to stardom and forever linked De Niro’s name with Bickle’s famous “You talkin’ to me?” monologue, which De Niro improvised.
Praised for his commitment to roles (stemming from his background in Method acting), De Niro gained 60 pounds (27 kg) and learned how to box for his portrayal of Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull; ground his teeth for Cape Fear; lived in Sicily for The Godfather, Part II; worked as a cab driver for three months for Taxi Driver; and learned to play the saxophone for New York, New York. He also put on weight and shaved his hairline to play Al Capone in The Untouchables.
He directed The Good Shepherd (2006), and costarred with Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie. The movie also reunited him onscreen with Joe Pesci, with whom De Niro had starred in Raging Bull, Goodfellas, A Bronx Tale, Once Upon A Time In America and Casino.
De Niro has won two Academy Awards: Best Actor for his role in Raging Bull, and Best Supporting Actor for The Godfather, Part II.
De Niro is a supporter of the Democratic Party, and vocally supported Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. De Niro publicly supported John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. In 1998, he lobbied Congress against impeaching President Bill Clinton. De Niro also narrated 9/11, a documentary about the September 11, 2001 attacks, shown on CBS and centering on video footage made by Jules and Gedeon Naudet that focused on the role of firefighters following the attacks. While promoting his movie The Good Shepherd with co-star Matt Damon on the December 8, 2006 episode of Hardball with Chris Matthews at George Mason University, De Niro was asked whom he would like to see as President of the United States. De Niro responded, “Well, I think of two people: Hillary Clinton and Obama.” On February 4, 2008, De Niro supported Obama at a rally at the Izod Center in New Jersey before Super Tuesday.
Answer the following questions:
Can we name DeNiro a dedicated actor? Why?
What films directed by Robert De Niro have you seen?
Does Robert De Niro take an active part in social and political life?
What is your favourite role of Robert De Niro?
Read and translate the text and to be ready to retell and discuss it in class.
History of Elections
By federal law since 1792, the U.S. Congress permitted the states to conduct their presidential elections (or otherwise to choose their Electors) any time in a 34-day period before the first Wednesday of December, which was the day set for the meeting of the Electors of the U.S. president and vice-president (the Electoral College), in their respective states. An election date in November was seen as useful because the harvest would have been completed (important in an agrarian society) and the winter storms would not yet have begun in earnest (a plus in the days before paved roads and snowplows). However, in this arrangement the states that voted later could be influenced by a candidate’s victories in the states that voted earlier, a problem later exacerbated by improved communications via train and telegraph. In close elections, the states that voted last might well determine the outcome.
A uniform date for choosing presidential Electors was instituted by the Congress in 1845. Many theories have been advanced as to why the Congress settled on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The actual reasons, as shown in records of Congressional debate on the bill in December 1844, were fairly prosaic. The bill initially set the national day for choosing presidential Electors on “the first Tuesday in November,” in years divisible by four (1848, 1852, etc.). But it was pointed out that in some years the period between the first Tuesday in November and the first Wednesday in December (when the Electoral College met) would be more than 34 days, in violation of the existing Electoral College law. So, the bill was amended to move the national date for choosing presidential Electors forward to the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, a date scheme already used in the state of New York.
In 1845, the United States was largely an agrarian society. Farmers often needed a full day to travel by horse-drawn vehicles to the county seat to vote. Tuesday was established as election day because it did not interfere with the Biblical Sabbath or with market day, which was on Wednesday in many towns.
Note down from the text the sentences containing the following phrases and word combinations and translate them into Russian.
to conduct presidential elections
to determine the outcome
a uniform date
to be amended
the Biblical Sabbath
Последнее изменение: Вторник 16 Февраль 2010, 12:56