The Big Brass Ring is a 1999 drama film, starring William Hurt, Nigel Hawthorne, Irene Jacob, Jefferson Mays and Miranda Richardson (who was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for her performance).

Minnaker left the country after a scandal, but now is working on a memoir and evidently possesses compromising photos of Pellarin that could end his hopes of becoming governor and, beyond that, President of the United States.

Pellarin is already juggling the pressures of a political race with a frayed relationship with his wife Dinah, a wealthy woman with a drinking problem, and an affair with Cela, a worldly journalist.

Welles had hoped to direct the film himself in the early 1980s, and to play the role of Minnaker (not least as he has been a "New Deal" Democrat close to Franklin Roosevelt), but he was unable to attract enough funding.

None of Welles's satire of Reagan-era politics was retained in the final film, while a number of key scenes, like a charged confrontation between Pellarin and Minnaker on a Ferris wheel, were also omitted.