The De Niro that Wags The Dog

NEW YORK -- Are you laughing at him? It happens occasionally, and Robert De Niro is proud of those moments.

For instance, the Midnight Run bounty hunter is one of De Niro's favorite roles. So is his upcoming media spin doctor in Barry Levinson's Wag The Dog, which opens Friday.

He's amused enough about comedy that he's even considering doing the Boris character in a Rocky and Bullwinkle live-action feature of the cartoon.

Are you laughing at him? Don't. He's serious. "It would be fun," he says, smirking the De Niro smirk.

In fact, he's so serious that his production company might produce the Rocky-Bullwinkle film, just as it did Wag The Dog, which stars long-time friend Dustin Hoffman.

In Wag The Dog, Hoffman is a movie producer who helps De Niro's media manipulator distract the public away from an American president's indiscretion by faking a verge-of-war crisis with Albania.

Both Hoffman and De Niro are funny without trying to be in the satire which caustically skewers politicians, the movie industry, the media and the inhabitants of those worlds.

"Personally," notes De Niro in his trademark halting conversation style, "I, uh, tend to be less, uh, cynical about things than the movie. I tend to take things at, ah, face value."

He also says the real, uh, media would not be manipulated so completely.

"Everything seems to come out these days," he says, smirking again. "That's the only good thing about the media stuff, in a sense.

"It's like a big dinosaur that knocks everything down with its tail."

De Niro smirks again. He's smirking this time because he appreciates irony even when he speaks it.

The last few years the usually private actor has had his share of "knockdowns" from the press over his very public divorce from model Toukie Smith and the subsequent custody battle over their 15-month-old boys born through an in vitro fertilization of a surrogate mother.

On the other hand, professionally, he's never been better. He received good reviews for his more serious small-time hood role in Jackie Brown. And he will likely get decent notices for another tough guy part in the modernized version of Charles Dickens' classic, Great Expectations, which will be released later in the month.

So what's left for De Niro to accomplish? Just the kind of pop quiz De Niro loves to stammer over.

"I, uh, can't, ah, umm," says De Niro. "Well, let's, ah, see, uh, I, uh."

Okay, so how about this? Can a guy like De Niro lead a regular life here in the Big Apple?

"Uh, ah, umm, oh, I, yeah, oh, umm."

Can an icon like De Niro lead a regular life on the set?

"Uh, ah, umm, oh."

Do you ever give advice to young actors?

"Uh, ah, umm, don't, uh, ah, give advice."

If you did, what would you tell a young actor?

"After, uh, The Godfather Part II, I was still collecting, ah, unemployment insurance."