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washingtonpost.com: Style Live: Movies

The Washington Post site dedicated to the film. Includes links to other sites with information about Watergate and the film, as well as the original news story by Woodward and Bernstein.

Journalism in the movies / Matthew C. Ehrlich.

Ehrlich, Matthew C., 1962- . Journalism in the movies / Matthew C. Ehrlich. [0252029348 (alk. paper) ] Urbana : University of Illinois Press, c2004.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1995.9.J6 E38 2004

    Chapter 6 of Journalism in the Movies deals with films about conspiracy and paranoia. Ehrlich argues that the collapse of the Production Code, Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, and other factors contributed to a general feeling of mistrust and angst in the 1970’s and that this feeling was reflected in the films made during the decade. To make his argument, he focuses on movies that center around the media and with journalists as crusaders against evil and corruption. Specifically, he compares the style and content of All the President’s Men and Network. While All the President’s Men portrays the men who work for the newspaper as “a shining beacon of truth,” Network focuses on a television network that is part of a larger evil involving the rest of corporate America. Additionally, while the former film was produced in documentary style, the later is exaggerated and satirical.
    More than any other aspect of the film, the image of the two young reporters remains in the minds of those who have seen it. Yet, as has been discussed at length, there is a controversy surrounding the accuracy of the portrayal of the journalists. Ehrlich analyzes the validity of this controversy by comparing he actual events of Watergate with the account of the journalists’ role in these events in the movie. According to Ehrlich, Nixon was reelected despite Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation, and he did not run into serious political trouble until the Senate hearings that occurred a year after the first article was published in the Washington Post. In fact, Nixon did not resign until after the book by the same name as the film was published. So, Ehrlich concludes, the reporters were certainly not responsible for Nixon’s fall from glory. However, the film accentuates their role by establishing the main characters as “fearless foes of corruption” in a mysterious and believable “documentary-noir” style executed by director Alan J. Pakula. The movie is relatively straightforward in its analysis of good and evil. The office of the Washington Post is brightly lit, while most of the rest of Washington D.C. is shrouded in darkness.
    As a result of their portrayal in All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein have become the central players in America’s collective memory of Watergate. The screenwriter, Goldman, cut out parts of the book involving the senate hearings and many government figures who helped bring down the president, assuming that the audience could “fill in the rest of the story for themselves.” In 1976, this may have been the case. However, the movie has helped to determine which aspects of the story have been transferred “from fact to legend,” and the parts that we are expected to fill in become markedly less glamorous without the benefit of handsome actors and the infusion of drama through “shadowy scenes.” Even today, Woodward and Bernstein “remain securely ensconced in American mythology.”

All the President's Men (1976)

An Annotated Bibliography of the film for FILM101 with Peter Decherney, Spring 2006. Researched and written by Jennifer Klein.

Film nation : Hollywood looks at U.S. history / Robert Burgoyne.

Burgoyne, Robert, 1949-. Film nation : Hollywood looks at U.S. history / Robert Burgoyne. [0816620709 (hardcover : alk. paper)] Minneapolis, Minn. : University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1995.9.H5 B87 1997

Robert Burgoyne writes Chapter 5 about interpretations of recent American historical events in film. He uses Forrest Gump as his main example to argue the “powerful role that social memory plays in constructing concepts of nation.” Clearly, All the President’s Men contributed to the American social memory of the Watergate scandal, as Woodward and Bernstein are the first names that come to mind when most people think of this dark period in the history of the American presidency. Further, the film was made just a few years after the actual event took place, molding the memory of people who had actually lived through the media coverage of Watergate and reemphasizing the role that the journalist played, while ignoring the role of others. Watergate, as well as many events portrayed in Forrest Gump, can be interpreted through a historically accurate account, or through “the narratives of nation sustained in popular memory.” Historical films about events of the past few decades surely influence these narratives.
Films like Forrest Gump, Burgoyne argues, allow the audience to re-experience the past more dramatically and sensuously. It is their way of more personally experiencing the event – a way to more closely examine it. Through film, the viewer can feel as if the memory of the event is his own rather than a recompilation of facts and images interpreted with the benefit of hindsight. In this sense, memories “circulate publicly,” and become part of the psychology and the identity of a nation, serving as “the basis for mediated collective identification.” Ultimately, films like All the President’s Men and Forrest Gump, which deal centrally with recent cultural and historical events, help to reorganize the historical past by creating a collective memory in the form of a film.

Hollywood's White House : the American presidency in film and history / edited by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor.

Hollywood's White House : the American presidency in film and history / edited by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor. [0813122708 (Cloth : alk. paper) ] Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, c2003.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1995.9.U64 H65 2003

The chapter on The Transformed Presidency: The Real Presidency and Hollywood’s Reel Presidency studies the transformation that the job and the image of commander-in-chief has undergone. Levine spends a few pages discussing the transformation of the presidency in reality. A major change between the terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the present has occurred in the relationship of the president and the press. FDR was the first president to appoint a press secretary; today there are a slew of assistants, liaisons, writers, and spokespersons who, on many occasions, deal with the press in place of the president himself. All the President’s Men is a “testament to the change in White House-press relations,” Levine states. By attributing the “cracking” of the Watergate scandal to two journalists, the film inspired a new generation of investigative reporting. One reason that Woodward and Bernstein appear so heroic in the film is because they persist “despite the lies and the disinformation fed by the official White House press machine.” By the time Nixon was in office, the post of press secretary had evolved into a fleet of employees comprising a “press machine.”
Like Cameron, Sorlin, and Toplin, Myron Levine brings up the fact that the film belittles the contributions of people other than Woodward and Bernstein to bringing some members of the Nixon administration to justice. However, Levine states, Woodward and Bernstein played an extremely important role in maintaining pressure on other investigators and government bodies to act against corruption. The author also points out that the editor of the Washington Post, Benjamin Bradlee (portrayed in the film by Jason Robards) was extremely careful about publishing only substantiated allegations. Levine believes that this journalistic standard has also changed over time. He finds it unfortunate that, as a result of the near instantaneous speed with which news gets to today’s readers, media outlets no longer seem concerned with confirming the facts before print. Ultimately, All the President’s Men reflects the backlash against the modern White House’s attempt to strictly control the flow of information about the president and his administration.

American politics in Hollywood film / Ian Scott.

Scott, Ian.. American politics in Hollywood film / Ian Scott. [1579583059] Chicago : Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, c2000.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1995.9.P6 S36 2000

    Chapter 4 of American politics in Hollywood film looks at Action, Adventure and Conspiracy in Hollywood Political Film. Ian Scott explores the paranoid movie trend of the 1970’s and the connection between the thriller genre and political subjects. Pakula’s The Parallax View and All the President’s Men are examples of 1970’s films about “political breakdown and subservient democratic discourse being used for elitist, hidden aims.” Scott quotes Pakula stating that his movies are myths, but he uses them to emphasize aspects of reality.
    According to Scott, films of the 1970’s reflected a general cynicism resulting from political events of the first few years of the decade. Society had become paranoid as a result of conspiracy theories that sometimes turned out to be true, and this paranoia was reflected in a Hollywood style of “seedy politicians” and “dark and shadowy urban scenes.” In this sense, Scott states, a very real sense of paranoia could be written off as merely an aspect of trendy movie scenarios.
    While many movies of the decade dealt with conspiracy, All the President’s Men dealt with the process of uncovering a conspiracy. For the sake of entertainment, Woodward and Bernstein were heroized and the meetings with Deep Throat were portrayed as a perfect example of the “dark and shadowy urban scenes” that Scott mentioned as a characteristic of many conspiracy films of the 70’s. However, Scott believes that the film “made documentary political filmmaking respectable,” and that its performance in the box office (the film was one of the two top grossing films of the year with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) reflected a general but short-lived mood of anti-authoritarianism in the United States.

All the President's Men (1976)

The IMDB site for All the President's Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Directed by Alan J. Pakula.

History by Hollywood : the use and abuse of the American past / Robert Brent Toplin.

Toplin, Robert Brent, 1940-. History by Hollywood : the use and abuse of the American past / Robert Brent Toplin. [0252020731 (cloth : alk. paper)] Urbana : University of Illinois Press, c1996.
Call#: Van Pelt Library PN1995.9.H5 T66 1996

In part 4 of his book, Robert Toplin discusses movies that celebrate “the ‘Great Man’ in the Documentary Style.” He uses All the President’s Men as one of two main examples. He argues that although the movie generally maintains a commitment to authenticity, it overemphasizes the role that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein played in cracking the Watergate scandal. Focusing on the personal experiences of these two journalists helped the filmmakers minimize complexity in an already intricate story. He also mentions that the movie's documentary feel is obtained through attention to detail and the strategy of withholding information from the audience.
For the film to be interesting to the audience, it had to depict the every day tasks of the characters, phone calls, note taking, and staff meetings, as exciting and dramatic. The director, Alan J. Pakula, portrayed “typewriters, pencils, pads…as important weapons that could bring down some of the most powerful men in the country.” The movie begins with an close shot of a typewriter; each key stroke sends out “cannon shots, suggesting the power of the press in exposing assaults on freedom.” This strategy served to glorify both journalism and the protagonists. Many people other than Woodward and Bernstein were involved with bringing down the conspiracy, but the movie elevated these two journalists to the roles of primary and practically sole players in most people’s memory of this historical event. Toplin ultimately excuses the glorification of Woodward and Bernstein as a common tendency of docudrama, and he credits the film as “a bold an informed view of a significant crisis in American political life.”