LOS ANGELES – A good old boy president from Texas becomes guest judge on a TV talent show in the midst of his war in Iraq. A trailer-trash contestant fixates on the show as her ticket to fame. A Middle East terrorist is torn between martyring himself or trying to win the show himself.

Just another day in America according to filmmaker Paul Weitz, whose “American Dreamz” is a satirical romp through our pop-culture obsessions and geopolitical anxieties.

“I think that comedy can act like an anesthetic, so you can talk about relatively painful things and have it be palatable,” said writer-director Weitz (“American Pie,” “About a Boy”). “In terms of the best things someone could say about the movie, at the first public screening, a guy said, ‘I’m stressed out about all these things on a daily basis, but for an hour and a half, I found myself laughing at them.'”

“American Dreamz,” which opens Friday, stars Dennis Quaid as a George W. Bush-esque president, who awakens one day and decides to read a newspaper rather than take his usual morning dose of TV. Soon, he’s holed up in the White House and reading obsessively, jolted out of his lifelong mental fog with the realization that “there’s a lot of stuff in here.”

To get him back in the public eye, his puppetmaster chief of staff (Willem Dafoe) signs up the president to appear on “American Dreamz,” an “American Idol”-type TV show hosted by a cynical Brit (Hugh Grant).

Thrown into the mix is a pudgy, rural nobody (Mandy Moore) relentlessly pursuing stardom on “American Dreamz” and her main competition, a reluctant terrorist (Sam Golzari) who adores show tunes and is assigned to blow himself and the president up during the show’s finale.

“It’s really a story that makes as much fun of the body politic as any particular politicians,” said Dafoe, whose chief of staff character resembles Dick Cheney and acts like a Karl Rove behind-the-scenes kingpin. “It makes fun of how we got to this place where there’s a lot of politics in entertainment and a lot of entertainment in politics.”

Weitz said the idea hit him while awaiting the release of his last movie, “In Good Company,”. He wondered if he could make a comedy about all the things Americans obsess over.