I don't care if it's staged or real. As long as it's entertaining. If it was always 100% real, it would be completely boring if we got three shitty tapes like we almost did. There was no content in that dog video. Rich was smart. And they knew everyone wanted to see the clown video.
I think Jack said in that interview I mentioned earlier that there's a "lost" WotW episode in bits and pieces on RLM hard drives, because they picked three duds that day, and they couldn't even save the episode by going back for a fourth movie, and then they went off to the roundtable and tried to get a conversation going about
something, but they had nothing to work with, and then they wasted a bunch of time trying to save it in editing, but it was a hopeless lost cause so they killed it and moved on.
That would've wiped four contenders off the Wheel, without explanation. And it probably explains things like their occasional Wheel refresh. If they kick everything off and replace them with all-new videos, then they don't have to explain why certain movies disappeared.
I think they generally make three honest spins, but they spin at the start of the day's shooting, they don't space them out between viewings. If they need a fourth spin, I think that one comes if and when they need it, because they don't always need a fourth spin. For this episode, they straight-up cheated and grabbed "the clown one" because everything else was a dud today. Rich might have honestly been the one who said "fuck it" and resorted to drastic measures (which were appropriately staged) because he's the one who refused to accept that anything in this episode was worthwhile (while the others were somewhat satisfied with the improvised gay jokes).