Bulworth

It's not a MacGuffin, really, but it's a trick, is that we have this character who is dressed in black, wearing sunglasses, carrying something tubular under his jacket.

And he is the one that we, through Bulworth's eyes, are asserting is the assassin, the would-be assassin.

For the first half of the movie...

Really, almost two-thirds, yeah, quite a while.

Can we talk about this?

I think that's a fair point.

We meet Nina early in the film when Bulworth goes to a church to speak at the church, right? She's somebody in one of the pews just sitting there listening to what's going on.

Provocatively sucking on a lollipop.

And that was on the soundtrack to the movie.

Do you remember this movie? Bullworth with Warren Beatty and Halle Berry? No.

Should have.

Loved Halle Berry.

Hotel Rwanda.

For me, he is in the movie Bullworth.

which I know I've brought up at least once, but it's a movie Warren Beatty made.

It's quite funny.

All right, well, that is it for our conversation about Wag the Dog.

Next up, we are wrapping up our Smoke and Mirrors series with Warren Beatty's Bullworth about a politician who decides he's done with it all, he's going to hire a hitman to kill him, and then he decides, he realizes, you know what, I want to start telling the truth.

It's going to be a really interesting one to wrap this series up.

Let's do our ratings.

And what we've seen is in markets where Garner's now getting more and more market share, It happens pretty fast that if people stop showing up to the doctor, the doctor started asking, where did all my commercial patients go? And they start saying, what do I have to do differently? Like pretty quickly, if you flip even just a few percentage of the volume.

So one of my favorite movies is called Bullworth.

I don't know if you've seen it, but it came out in the late 90s, starring Warren Beatty.

And the idea is it's this disillusioned politician who has a crisis and then just starts telling the truth and becomes really popular in the process.

I think maybe has some interesting parallels to what we're seeing today.

But I wonder if you, Nick, might ever have a version of your own Bullworth moment where you just say, you know what? I'm gonna just publicly share this entire data set.

And back to our ProPublica example, way for anybody, any consumer, whether they have an employer or not, to be able to search this database and find out what Ghana thinks about the physician that I'm about to go see.

Do you think that's ever in the future? Or would it just fundamentally not fit with the model of what you're trying to create that maybe is a little bit more subtle in how you change the sort of relationship and the incentive structures around how physicians provide care?

There's one public face, and sometimes there's something worse just out of frame.

We're covering this, Barry Levinson's 1997 Wag the Dog, and Warren Beatty's 1998 film, Bullworth.

It's interesting that they all ended up being films from the 90s when I built this series, but as I was looking at film options, they just seemed like really sharp and pointed films to discuss as it related to politics at the time.

And all still feel relevant today.

No, I don't have an answer for that.

Is that film called Bulworth?

Oh.

Like '98, '99, with Warren Beatty?

Yeah.

I just wish he had, like, something in, like, the late '90s, early 2000s that would've, like, crossed generations.

But yes, Bulworth is the movie you're thinking of, Tim.

Is it, like, Dick Tracy?