Directed by: Milton Moses Ginsberg
Starring: Dean Stockwell, Biff McGuire, Clifton James, Katalin Kallay, Michael Dunn, Thayer David

STORY
Washington has survived scandals, political enemies, cover-ups and crises.
But it has never had to deal with a werewolf in the White House.
Dean Stockwell stars as Jack Whittier, a young Washington journalist whose career—and personal life—have become dangerously entangled with the President of the United States.
Jack has been having an affair with the President's daughter, Marion. Looking for a graceful way out of the relationship, he gets himself reassigned to Budapest, where he begins a new romance with a woman named Giselle.
Then one night, everything changes.
After a road accident, Jack encounters what appears to be a wolf threatening Giselle. He kills the animal with a silver-headed cane, but not before the creature bites him.
An old Gypsy woman gives Jack a warning involving a pentagram.
Jack hears Pentagon.
This is going to be that kind of movie.
Jack returns to Washington after the President offers him a position as assistant press secretary. He is back inside the corridors of American power, surrounded by politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, security officers and people desperately concerned with appearances.
There is just one problem.
When the moon is full, Jack Whittier becomes a werewolf.
Soon bodies begin appearing around Washington.
Jack slowly realizes that he may be responsible, but convincing anyone of the truth proves almost impossible. This is Washington, after all. Every strange event seems capable of becoming a political conspiracy, every revelation requires damage control, and every disaster creates another opportunity for somebody to cover something up.
As Jack's transformations continue, his victims become increasingly entangled with the President's political world.
The administration has a crisis on its hands.
Not unemployment.
Not inflation.
Not foreign policy.
Lycanthropy.
And the closer Jack gets to the truth about himself, the more absurd the machinery around him becomes.
There are political enemies.
There are suspicious government officials.
There is an eccentric scientist.
There are secret meetings.
There are attempts to contain the scandal.
And somewhere inside all of it is Dean Stockwell, desperately trying to prevent himself from becoming a hairy political liability every time the moon comes out.
Eventually Jack discovers that the old legends weren't nonsense.
The bite changed him.
The werewolf is real.
And Washington has become his hunting ground.
But The Werewolf of Washington has one final joke waiting.
Even after Jack Whittier's nightmare reaches its conclusion, Washington keeps going.
Politicians keep talking.
Power keeps protecting itself.
And in the film's final moments, even the President's reassuring voice begins to sound suspiciously like...
a growl.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS

THE WOLF WALKED STRAIGHT INTO WATERGATE
The Werewolf of Washington isn't merely a monster movie.
It is a political satire disguised as a werewolf movie.
Writer-director Milton Moses Ginsberg aimed directly at the Nixon-era White House. The fictional President uses phrases deliberately reminiscent of Richard Nixon, while characters and situations echo recognizable figures and attitudes from the administration. AFI specifically notes that Mrs. Captree was inspired by Martha Mitchell, wife of Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell.
Then reality caught up with the movie.
Production had begun before the Watergate scandal fully erupted, and contemporary reporting cited by AFI indicates that revisions were subsequently made as Watergate became national news.
Imagine making a political horror satire...
and then having actual Washington become stranger while you're making it.
THE DIRECTOR WAS TERRIFIED OF WEREWOLVES
Milton Moses Ginsberg didn't randomly select a werewolf for his political monster.
As a boy, he had gone alone to see Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man.
It scared him so badly that Ginsberg later recalled that he didn't see another horror film afterward.
Werewolves stayed with him.
Years later, he turned that childhood terror into a political satire and put his own Wolf Man directly inside the White House.
Sometimes the things that scare a filmmaker as a child become the movies the filmmaker eventually has to make.

TEN DAYS TO WRITE IT
This is where AIN's independent-filmmaker heart starts beating faster.
Ginsberg went to Fire Island and wrote The Werewolf of Washington in approximately ten days.
His first producer's reaction was essentially:
Are you crazy?
Ginsberg recalled being told that the screenplay was an attack on the President—and that he shouldn't come back.
So other supporters stepped in.
The movie was eventually made independently on a reported budget of approximately $100,000, with principal filming accomplished in roughly four weeks.
Ten days to write it.
Four weeks to shoot it.
Limited money.
A bizarre idea.
A recognizable star.
And somehow...
they made the movie.
Hello, independent filmmakers.
Welcome home.

DEAN STOCKWELL WAS ALREADY A HOLLYWOOD SURVIVOR
Dean Stockwell had been acting since childhood.
Long before audiences knew him from Blue Velvet, Married to the Mob or Quantum Leap, he had already lived several Hollywood lives.
By the early 1970s, however, Stockwell's career had entered a quieter period.
And then somebody handed him a screenplay about a presidential aide who becomes a werewolf.
Stockwell reportedly thought the script had a sharp political and satirical edge, and he agreed to star.
That gives The Werewolf of Washington one of its greatest assets.
Stockwell doesn't stand outside the movie winking at us.
He commits.
No matter how bizarre things become around Jack Whittier, Stockwell keeps playing the man's predicament.
And that makes everything around him even funnier.

FATHER AND SON — FOR THE ONLY TIME
Here's a beautiful little AINtoid hiding inside our werewolf movie.
Dean Stockwell's father, Harry Stockwell, was also an actor and singer.
He even provided the singing voice of the Prince in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Harry Stockwell appears briefly in The Werewolf of Washington as a military man.
According to AFI, this was the only movie Dean Stockwell and his father ever made together.
In the middle of this wonderfully strange political werewolf satire is a tiny piece of Stockwell family history.

THEY MADE WASHINGTON WITHOUT HAVING WASHINGTON
Independent filmmaking 101:
Don't have the location?
Make something else the location.
Much of the production was shot around Glen Cove, Long Island. Ginsberg and Stockwell traveled to Washington for only a limited amount of exterior photography. The filmmakers used other locations to create the world of the capital—including the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall standing in for the United States Capitol.
Even the White House bowling alley had to be recreated elsewhere.
Big Washington political satire.
Small independent-film resources.
Solve the problem and keep shooting.

THE WEREWOLF TRANSFORMATIONS WERE OLD-SCHOOL
The movie deliberately evokes the classic Universal werewolf transformation tradition.
Instead of modern digital effects, Jack's transformation is created through staged makeup changes photographed progressively so that his human face appears to become increasingly wolf-like.
Ginsberg later explained that the transformations were handled economically: as makeup was added to Stockwell, backgrounds were changed so they could efficiently photograph different stages. For the reverse transformation, they could reverse the process.
Cheap?
Maybe.
Ingenious?
Absolutely.
That's filmmaking.

THE TV NETWORKS DIDN'T FIND THE JOKE QUITE SO FUNNY
The movie's Nixon satire wasn't subtle enough to slip quietly into advertising.
AFI records that when the movie opened in Los Angeles in October 1973, ABC and Metromedia television outlets refused to air commercials that parodied Nixon's speeches.
Less provocative advertisements had to be substituted.
Think about that.
A low-budget independent werewolf movie managed to make television broadcasters nervous because its monster movie was taking swings at the White House.
That's a pretty good day's work.

AIN REASON
This may be one of the most AINLandia discoveries we've made.
Because The Werewolf of Washington shouldn't work.
It's a werewolf movie.
It's a political satire.
It's a Watergate-era time capsule.
It's a low-budget independent production.
It's Dean Stockwell running around Washington trying to keep the President from discovering that his assistant press secretary occasionally sprouts hair and murders people.
And somehow all of those things belong in the same movie.
But underneath the glorious weirdness is something genuinely important to AIN.
Milton Moses Ginsberg had an idea.
It was strange.
It was politically dangerous.

A PERFECT FORMULA for Indie Filmmakers!
Someone, the "they", essentially told Milton he was crazy for wanting to make this film.
Milton found other people who believed in it.
They raised limited money.
They borrowed locations.
They improvised effects.
They shot quickly.
And they made the damn movie.
More than fifty years later, we're still talking about it.
That is independent filmmaking.

And THAT is why The Werewolf of Washington belongs in the Treasure Chest.
Not because it's perfect.
Because somebody was crazy enough to make it.
Welcome to Fear Frenzy, Dean Stockwell.

DA' WOLF IS HOME.