The Press Box - The April Issue: The 50th Anniversary of 'All the President’s Men' With Sean Fennessey

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

It’s time for the April issue! Bryan is joined by Sean Fennessey to talk about 'All the President’s Men' in honor of its 50th anniversary. They start by discussing how this movie plays in today’s climate politically and journalistically. Then they talk about all the major players that are involved in this movie—from the stars, including Robert Redford (10:56) and Dustin Hoffman (49:10), to the filmmakers, including Alan Pakula(1:00:14)—and some of their favorite cameos (53:47). Host: Bryan CurtisGuest: Sean FennesseyProducers: Bruce Baldwin, Isaiah Blakely, and Sarah Reddy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello Media Consumers, welcome to the April issue of the press box. Brian Curtis here, along with producers Isaiah Blakely and Bruce Baldwin. Today we come to celebrate the birthday of a movie. The movie is All the President's Men, which turns 50 years old this week. Since I've been in journalism, I've met reporters that think of all the President's men as their hype song that were inspired to get into reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein or maybe Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. I've also met reporters who think of all the president's men as a slick exercise in mythmaking that say the movie makes it seem like Woodward and

Bernstein alone brought down Richard Nixon. Now what I'd like to do on the movie's 50th birthday is look at how this inspirational mythic thing came together because it turns out that all the president's men has a lot of bylines. As we'll see, Robert Redford's impact on Woodward and Bernstein's book was profound, and Woodward and Bernstein and their colleagues of the now embattled Washington Post had a big impact on the movie that got made. Now, there's nobody I'd rather knock on doors with at night

than Sean Fennessey who knows a thing or two about journalism and how great movies get made. Welcome to the April issue, the men behind all the president's men. Sean Fennacy. Hello. The editor who famously said that people lie during the day and tell the truth at night.

Happy to be here. Glad you're here. There's no one I want to share a byline on this with rather than you. Oh, that's a nice way of thinking of a podcast. I'm not sure if I ever thought about it that way. We don't use old terms like that anymore, do we? Authorship. Can one be the author of a podcast?

Well, I got a lot of notes down here, so let's give it a whirl. Okay. So many things to say about all the president's men on its 50th birthday. But I thought we'd start here. How does this movie play in the... age of Trump and the age of the downsized Washington Post. Well, it certainly makes it seem like a much bigger and more powerful institution in 1976 than it is in 2026.

And I guess there's something a little bit depressing about that. But by the same token, a lot of the tension of the movie is this idea that getting the story wrong would somehow imperil the future. and that that is, there's something delicate in the balance between Washington and its strongest local newspaper that doesn't really seem to operate in the same way. And I think because a lot of newspapers have become much more consumed by nationalizing their audiences and then ultimately becoming imperiled by that, that, you know, there's just no way to imagine the Post being a character in a movie in the way that it is in this movie. But I, I think, I think,

I think there's also something kind of absurd about Trump's Teflon existence that there's not really anything or anyone that could possibly take him down in the way that Nixon is taken down in this movie. So it's an artifact of a time and it makes us nostalgic for something I didn't even live through and it feels very impossible right now. Nixon resigned. Trump will never resign. Well, probably not. I'm working on something, Brian. I've got a scoop. Oh, my goodness.

I can't wait to see what that is. But what's funny is how that reflects in the journalist. Because we just read this giant slab of journalism from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan about all the war planning before Iran. And I think about that with journalists. Because if you write the great muckraking piece about the CEO of the company and the CEO resigns, versus you write the right, the great muck-wracking piece and the CEO doesn't resign. That's a lesser achievement, weirdly, within the business. It shouldn't be.

It's the same piece. It's the same facts. But somehow, you know, we can deny it all we want. Yeah. But it is a lesser merit badge. So it's funny when we have all these stories about Donald Trump. Trump's not going anywhere. Donald Trump's not hurt in a material way by those stories.

And I do think that plays differently within the business. And I think that that point of view that we understand that Trump learned from Roy Cohn of the sort of never relent, never give in, never apologize, has poured it over to a lot of different modes of life. So the modern condition is much more sort of like posting through it, like never acknowledging that you are amidst a scandal. And if you do, you just deny, deny, deny, deny. And that doesn't seem possible in the world that this movie creates.

You know, it is very possible in the actual execution of the story in the way that Nixon moved through the story and that sort of like extended efforts over a long, period of time for this story to play out. It's something that's, I think, a little bit forgotten is just how long it took these reporters to unpack this story, other reporters participating in the work on this story over time, and just how sort of like slow-moving car crash the Watergate fall felt. And there was a lot of denying. Yes. But the dam did break, right? Eventually it did work, and Nixon did resign and disappeared into a kind of fit of drunken anonymity. And, And so that feels impossible now, like I said, but I do feel that other companies, other people, other organizations have kind of picked up on a lot of Trump's moves and strategies over the last 10 years.

And so that this level of journalism actually just feels more difficult than it did 50 years ago. I always smile when Carl Bernstein these days goes on CNN and says, this is, quote, worse than Watergate. And he's not wrong. Yeah. But there's a lot of worse than Watergate. Watergate in the universe, as you say, without many consequences. The post is also interesting to me, because this is more in the background of the movie than the foreground, but the post was always number two.

It was, if I may venture a metaphor, the Mets. Now it's more like the A's, but in the day it was like the Mets. And so, you know, you have this paper that's always chasing the times. They get them, right? They win the Pulitzer for their Watergate coverage because they stay on the story where other papers were kind of intermittently in and out of the story. And now with the downgraded post, it's this glorious history that kind of hangs over the whole place. You know, Shoemaker and I talk about all the time about these old media organizations, almost haunted by their past.

When is, you know, when is Walter Cronkite coming back to rescue Barry Weiss's CBS? This works like that a little bit with the post. Yeah, I think if you wanted to extrapolate that out, I think you could say that that is the case for almost any legacy media institution. You know, we're at this critical moment where Paramount and Warner Brothers are going to merge. We've seen the kind of desecration of CBS News over time. I think ESPN is going through like a really difficult period of transition right now. And a lot of people, ourselves included, are a little hung up on our own nostalgic feelings about that network and what it represents and what it has become. there's not really anything in terms of legacy structures that is operating in exactly the same hallowed way that it did.

And, you know, like technology is a factor in that respect. I do think that the political climate of the last 10 years is a pretty significant factor there because it doesn't feel like anything, nothing moves the needle anymore. Like there's not, and that's related to a larger monocultural conversation too about how everyone's kind of in their own little pods, their own little universes of interest. So you put all those things together in a movie like this, which seem to communicate so many big things about the way the power operates and can be upended, the way that journalism can and should work. And also it really gratifies a lot of mythology of Hollywood, stardom and creativity and articulating the craftsmanship behind making movies.

It's such a rich text in that way that it's just kind of become this museum piece because it all feels so difficult to understand in our modern context. Remember the line in Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, where they're talking about the British service during World War II, and it's like, Englishmen could be proud then. I look at this movie, like, posties could be proud then. Yeah. We had an M.O. We knew what to do.

That's such an interesting point about the movie, too, though, because the way that these guys are framed, and this is mostly true, is that they're upstarts who don't know what they don't know, And that most of the institutionalists who have been living and working in Washington newspapers for 30 or 40 years are like, these guys are fuckups. Like this isn't going to work out. And there's that great moment late in the film where after a budget meeting kind of three chief editors are sitting around the table. And the one editor is like, I just don't believe this story, period. And I think that indicates something about how this is like a flashpoint moment in time.

The Washington Post has done amazing work over decades, but that this is kind of a once-in-a-lifetime moment. The other thing, too, is that in the 70s in America, there was this sense that a younger generation of people were maybe changing the world, right? In kind of the aftermath of 68 and Summer of Love, and this convulsive moment after all these 60s icons are killed, like there's this big down moment in the 70s.

And this story and the kind of like expansion of this story, I think like revived a potential for a kind of like, maybe we can change the world and maybe the people who have been sitting in power in the aftermath of all this sadness in the late 60s, maybe we can grab it back. Now, it turns out that that was not the case at all. In fact, the second half of the 70s

really undermines that feeling. But there's something very aspirational about this. And I don't think we think of reporters as rock stars in the same way that we used to. I actually don't know what the identity of the crusading reporter is to most Americans now, because it seems like most Americans have such a fraught relationship to the media. Yeah, and it's not just a straight conservative liberal thing either.

To mention Maggie Haberman one more time. Who's madder at Maggie Haberman right now? Is it the left or is it the right? Yeah. Is it Donald Trump or is it, you know, the dyed in the wool Democrat, liberal Democrats who subscribe to the newspaper? The guy on blue sky who's really, really angry. I thought what we could do today is.

is go through all the presence men and look at the various creators of this movie, one by one. Sure. Let's start with Robert Redford. Agree that he is the most important creative force behind the movie. The producer of the star and clearly one of the shadow authors of the whole story. The first person to see that there was a movie in Woodward and Bernstein's story, he got interested in them in 1972. This is an amazing period for Robert Redford. 73, he would release The Sting and The Way We Were.

pretty much at the top of Hollywood at that point. So if he had his pick of projects, what kind of projects would you say Redford was interested in? You know, we did a Hall of Fame episode about him last year on the big picture. And I rewatched almost everything that he made. And there are a lot of recurring themes in terms of what fascinates him. I would say a kind of swaggering nobility is probably the thing he's most interested in. And that evolves as he gets into the 80s.

90s and starts to recognize his own age. But there's something about flawed but not unlikable men who have strong chins and have a moral and ethical core that kind of dominates that period of time. And there's gradations inside of that role. The way we were is also a movie about social change in a lot of ways. It's a romance, but it's about the kind of like warring ideals of these two strong-minded people. Three Days of the Condor is about a guy who's not really.

a political thinker who finds himself ensnared in a much more ornate political spy-laden world. And so he's always kind of playing someone who's like, this doesn't seem right. Why is this not right? Let me see if I can change the not-rightness of this world that I find myself in. And that extends to his activism, his interest in ecology and the environment, his interest in independent filmmaking and like breaking systems as a public person. really fascinating guy. I mean, you know,

The Candidate is another movie he made around this time, which we've talked about before on the show, which is this really circumspect look at what motivates people to get into public life. And he's a person who,

you know, you see William Goldman writing about this and his relationship to Redford over the years because they worked together in the late 60s and then he reencounters him in the early 70s

when his star has fully risen. And he's a very shrewd guy, Redford, and he kind of like, you can see he kind of closes down all the opportunities to get in, side of his world. And so the only real way that he communicates about what he believes about the world is his

public activism, which is fairly straightforward in terms of what interests him. And then the movie characters, the people that he picks to play. And this is probably one of the least controversial, most iconic and most definitional, I think, for the kind of movie star that he was. You and I were looking through some old magazines. Did you read the story he tells about how he got interested in Woodward and Bernstein? Remind me what was it? So Watergate has happened.

He is promoting the candidate and he's around a group of reporters. This is how he tells the story. And he says, you know, he's asking them, hey, what is it about this Watergate? And he finds these reporters to be very cynical and almost to have this attitude of it doesn't matter. Nixon's going to win in a romp as Nixon does in 1972. Nothing's going to happen. Nothing's going to come of this. And he finds that almost disturbing because he says, wait a second.

You know, if they broke the law, if they were, you know, up to these dirty tricks, why isn't that something that should have consequences? So then he reads a story about Woodward and Bernstein. I read one account where this was actually in a Utah newspaper since he's living in Utah. Sure, yeah. And he gets interesting. He's, oh, these are the guys that are actually thinking about the story in the way that I prefer. and he gets interested in them.

So he calls Woodward by many accounts. Woodward blows him off. Woodward is kind of busy. He keeps calling. He calls Woodward back in October 1972. That's after they've screwed up the Bob Haldeman story, which is a big scene in the movie. Yes.

And says, hey, still interested in you guys. I don't understand the blowing off Robert Redford part of this story. Is that possible? Like, we are four years after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at this point. I mean, we are, like, deep into Robert Redford is a very famous person. And what, if, if, if who's it, who's a, you know, let's just say Austin Butler called you and was like, hey, Brian, I'm really interested in the world of journalism and stories that you've been telling. Do you have any time for me? In what universe would you be like, I'm not, I'm busy.

It's funny. You should mention that because I don't. Austin. Hello. Yeah, he's not interested in making. a movie about a media podcaster, but we can investigate that further. You never know. Now, did that happen? Maybe

not. Woodward and Bernstein were very, very skeptical about people's interest in the story because they were trying to be newspaper guys. Sure, sure. They were being accused of being anti-Nixon, right? Here's Redford, who has some activism, as you say, in his life. You know, are they trying to keep that at a distance?

Are they trying to just concentrate on what's before them, which is this huge unfolding story? They're making their careers. It's a good question. What we do know happens, is in the spring of 1973, and I think I was actually able to pinpoint this date, Redford meets Woodward. Now, at this point, Woodward and Bernstein have signed a contract to write the book that becomes all the president's men. The problem is they are struggling to write it because they are writing a very straightforward book about all the president's men. They're writing a Nixon book and about Nixon's henchman.

And Redford meets Woodward at a screening of the candidate. I believe this happened in April 1973. I believe that Ted Kennedy was present for the screening of the candidates. So just, you know, assemble this scene in your eyes. It was like a Robert Altman movie. And at this meeting, Redford tells Woodward,

you're writing the wrong book. The book is not about Nixon. The book is about you and Bernstein reporting on Nixon. Yeah. Spoken like a movie star. Spoken like a movie star. And in this point, he was thinking about a movie. And Woodward said he had seen

in the movie in his head already. But this is amazing to me. And this is an undercover part of this story. Because Robert Redford is not just doing a movie about Woodward and Bernstein. He is performing what we call in the business a top edit. Oh, yeah. On this book. He's acting like a producer of the book.

And that's really what a producer of a movie does is he looks at a script and he says, the aperture is not wide enough here. Or it's too wide. And I think there's something really interesting about that. And I will say this is one of the very first examples of what we now call parasyciality, that shifting the perspective from the kind of ink-stained, wretch, hard-bitten news copy that could have defined the book to becoming a kind of like ride-along, a personal exploration of how we did something, and making ourselves characters, which is something that the media is defined by now.

That actually if you don't do that now, it's very difficult to be successful. And unless you got in in the Maggie Haberman generation, you don't find a lot of rising reporters. Like, you've had, like, folks like Aestead, like on the show who just like know that, like, branding is a part of the work now. Pablo Tori was the first name that came into my mind. Here is how I reported the story about Bill Belichick and Jordan Hudson. And this, you can say, is kind of a signal event in using that strategy to, you know, not just make yourself more famous. though I do believe that Woodrow and Bernstein were very conscious about their own personas and fame throughout this process, even in the 70s. But that it actually aided the story.

It aided the book. It aided the reportage. It all kind of worked together because this underdog story, which everybody loves, the underdog story, is part of what makes this so compelling, that these two guys, relatively inexperienced, kind of annoying, honestly. Like when you really, even when you look at how they're characterized in the movie, they represent kind of the best. best of reporters, which is like a kind of an active annoyance, they're very, the least likely people to have pulled the government down from the outside in. And it makes it work so well. And the fact that Redford nudged it into that direction is fascinating.

Absolutely fascinating. But as you say, it makes the movie about David rather than about Goliath. Yeah. It also solves a problem, which is how do you portray Richard Nixon in the 70s on the screen? We saw this in the 90s. Anthony Hopkins, Oliver Starr. It's a good movie. But when you watch it, you're like, is that Richard Nixon? Do I believe this man is Richard Nixon? Now, imagine trying to do that in 1976 when Nixon is fresh in everybody's mind. Here you keep him off screen, right? It's about these reporters.

Nobody knows what they look like. Nobody knows what they sound like. And you keep all Nixon and all the henchmen in archival footage, essentially. Yeah, I think, not to take us too far afield here, but you invoked Altman before. And I think the best representation of Nixon in movie history is Secret Honor, which is a very small, brilliant movie, like a play out of starring Philip Baker Hall about the aftermath of these events effectively, like what happened to him when he moved to San Clemente and was, you know, trapped in his own office, muttering into a microphone about his own broken legacy and incredible performance in that movie.

But that is almost like a ghost story. And it tells you a little bit about how hard it is to capture the like living political cartoon that Nixon is. When we go back and look at him now and all of his gestures and his turns of phrase and the fact that we've kind of lost sight a little bit of like what a gifted statesman he was, but what an evil kind of, I don't know, kind of like ugly person he was deep down to and his psychology. And the movie makes this brilliant choice to just dispense with all of that to just be like, you'll see him a couple times on screen in newsreels and that's it. That's the only time he's a meaningful part of the movie.

A couple of bits of amazing trivia here. one is that Dustin Hoffman, whose brother was a Washington economist, also tried to buy the rights to Woodward and Bernstein's story. Oh, wow. And was told that Redford had beaten him to it. So imagine if Dustin Hoffman had been the driving creative force to this movie. I don't know, the movie actually would have even gotten made if that had happened.

Well, he had a lot of juice at that time. It would have been a very different ride on the merry-go round if Hoffman had been calling the shots rather than Redford. Yeah. And I think you can make. the case that the lasting kind of power rankings of Woodward and Bernstein might shift if in fact

it is Dustin Hoffman's movie because he can only play Bernstein. Bernstein's back, baby. He's number one on the list. The other interesting fact I found I did not know this at all. So I spent a wonderful afternoon in the motion picture Academy archives. Yeah. Because

Alan Pakula's papers are in there. They were kind enough to have me in and I was able to look through all these memos. Was it the Herrick Library? Is that right? Exactly right. And it was wonderful. These memos. and he went to Washington and all and stuff. We'll get into some of this later. There's a note in there, unconfirmed, but a note that Bob Woodward,

when he was considering whether his book should become a movie, called Pauline Kale for advice. I want you to wrap your mind around that conversation between Bob Woodward and Pauline Kale. People would be surprised to learn how common occurrence that was where stars and producers reached out to Pauline Kale to get her perspective because she wrote so assiduously about films. So Warren Beatty doing it?

I can believe. Bob Woodward calling Pauline Kale. Are there any more different journalistic beings on this earth? They're both journalists, right? They are. They are both journalists. I don't know. I do think there is some common cause.

And she's got some years on him too. And she knows this business really well. So that's an interesting thing. I'd like to hear that conversation. So that's Redford. Let's talk about Woodward and Bernstein themselves. Sure. When they start working on the Watergate story in summer of 72, they have a lot in common.

Woodward's 29. Bernstein is 28. Woodward is divorced Bernstein is very nearly divorced. Redford though sees this as a story of two opposites. It's almost a buddy comedy. I'm a couple.

These are the basic differences. Woodward wasn't a good writer. Bernstein was or could be in certain instances. Woodward knew how to handle his bosses. Bernstein drove his boss's nuts.

Woodward was Mr. Nudson's and bolts. Here's what we know. Bernstein was the big picture concepts guy. So what you have, at least in Redford's mind, is these are two very, very different people that are coming together. They have totally different strings. And that's why they were able to achieve what they achieved in Watergate. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a useful archetype for a movie and bookwriting strategy, like how actually true it was. Maybe maybe 100% maybe 50% true.

You know, I think it's useful to create differentiation for characterization. If they weren't, if they were more the same, the movie doesn't work as well. You need them to have these conflicting things. Even the type of star and type of performer that Redford and Hoffman are, one is anxious, always moving around, touching something a little shorter, always searching for something, kind of like an emotional quester. And another performer is very still. Very, very, his posture is very stiff and upright.

He's always, he's on the move, but that move is very graceful. And so there's something in the archetyping that I think benefits a lot of this stuff. But don't, I mean, look at the books they've written or haven't written in Bernstein's case since then. It's true. It's true. I mean, they are very different creatures. Yeah. Yeah.

How many books has Bernstein written? You know, single digits. Interesting. Yeah. Whereas Woodward is like working on another book right now. There's this great moment when the post layoffs happened and somebody reached out and Woodward did not provide a statement for like two days and then said, I cannot say anymore because I am finishing a book. Wow. Which is a great Bob Woodward thing to say.

No, just about something else. Do you see yourself as an organized, Uber productive Woodward or a freewheeling, occasionally brilliant Bernstein? I think you know the answer to that. You're Woodward? I'm way more Woodward in many ways. have Robert Redford's looks. But I do... Do you have Bob Woodward's looks?

Probably. I think I probably share something in common with him. I don't, what are you? I think I project as a Woodward, but I see myself as a Bernstein. Yeah. Yeah, a ladies man. Well, I've had my moments. Nora Effron also had a really interesting thing.

So she was interviewed by Alan Pakula while he was putting together this film too. and she said that when you look at their differences, that they recognized the thing the other one had that they needed. Woodward needed Bernstein to be this kind of nudge to be pushy, whereas Bernstein needed Woodward to be the guy who could actually talk to the bosses and keep them in good stead at the post. And Ephrains, who we should note became Carl Bernstein's second wife. Yes.

said they hated each other because of this. It was one of those interesting psychological things where it's like, I know that's the part, I know I need that quality that I do not possess. Yeah. But the fact that I don't have that quality, that you have it, that I need it, almost makes me hate you a little bit,

which is a fascinating tension between them. Another thing that I think is completely manifest in modern media that most times when you have pairings in debate culture on television, they're opposites. They're very rarely the same temperamentally. ideologically, that you're looking for that differentiation so that you can create friction and create energy, which makes something really exciting. In this case, it's a much more focused act that they're doing, trying to gather information, accumulate all of it, and then make it

coherent in a, like, fit the puzzle pieces together. But I think even just them spending time together, like how many years did they actively report together? I would say about 72, 76 is when their second and final book comes out. So about four years together. Yeah. Because that's the thing. It's like these things can't last if there is a real tension and aggravation. And why does this person get to do this? And I don't get to do this feeling around everything.

And also just, I think success makes people feel like they need to, you know, let me show the world that I can do this on my own, I think, is a component that comes into it. Sure. But yeah, it's interesting that they helped each other. I mean, I don't know if it's my favorite scene in the movie, but one of my favorite scenes in the movie is when Bernstein snatches Woodward's. copy and he rewrites it.

And he shows it to Woodward. And he tells him what's the mistake about, you know, not having the dominant information at the top of the story and not putting it in the lead, but keep bearing it in the third graph, the key name in the story that they're reporting. And the way that Redford looks at it, reads it, comes back into the frame, stares right at Bernstein and says, yours is better. But he says it in a very knowing way, like, I see that we have something together.

that like this can be something meaningful for me. It's like a breakthrough. And it's very, it's not subtle per se, but it's unspoken. And I think it's a really nice summation of kind of what happens, I guess, in that four-year period between them. The book, All the Presidents Man, comes out in June 1974. It is, you'll notice the bylines, Bernstein and Woodward. Interesting. The only time that that happened in their book writing career.

And alphabetical, you'd think that'd be the way it would go. You would think so. It comes out in June 74. Nixon resigns less than two months later. later. So that is another fascinating part of the whole Woodward and Bernstein story. W. Joseph Campbell has written about this because he writes about media miss all the time. The book arrives. It's on the best sell list and suddenly Nixon is gone. So we think Woodward and Bernstein and Woodward and Bernstein alone are the people that

nudged Richard Nixon out of office. Do you want to know how much Woodward and Bernstein made from the book? I certainly do. For the paperback rights, they got in a modest advance for the hardcover. For the paperback rights, which sold even before the hardback came out, they got $1 million in 1974. It's about $6.7 million today. They didn't get all of that, probably about half of that, but they got a lot of money. That's a lot. Redford, during this period, paid them $450,000 for the movie rights, about $3 million today. Again, they didn't get all of that, but they became rich people in 1974.

for. And that rights fee turned out to be very important because once Redford had paid $450,000 for the rights, the studio was like, actually, you wanted to make a smaller film. Redford had talked about making like a black and white, almost documentary style film about these reporters. And they're like, the film's in color. And you have to be one of the reporters. So that changes the whole nature of all the president's men from like a small passion project that Redford might have to be. been thinking about to, no, no, no, this is a big story vehicle for us. Yeah, it's unusual, too, because you think of Redford as this gifted understander of how this sort of thing is supposed to work. But, I mean, a black, I mean, it's a bestseller. Like a black and white documentary style approach on this movie would have made no sense. And he probably thought that before it was a bestseller. Remember, he's talking to them. They don't have a book. He's in early. He hasn't come in with the top edit yet. Yeah. So they don't have a book yet.

Let's talk about William Goldman, the screenwriter. I know a favorite of yours. Yes. This was his fourth time working with Redford. They'd made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They'd made a movie called The Hot Rock, which I have never seen. An exceptionally fun bank heist comedy or thievery comedy with Redford and George Segal. I highly recommend people track it down. And they made the great Waldo Pepper.

Yes. Also, interesting movie, not as successful. What are the hallmarks of a Bill Goldman script? I think unusually gifted at characterization and relationships. his movies have a kind of breezy fun to them. There is a meta-textual quality where he's very interested in genre and kind of unpacking and rebuilding genre.

This is the western with Butch Cassidy. Yes, Princess Bride. I just recently watched this with my five-year-old and she and I were kind of talking about, you know, the ways in which it's kind of scratched her interests as a young princess girl, but also the ways that kind of like breaks a lot of those ideas up at the same time.

He does this in a lot of his novels as well, and he did it later in a lot of, lot of his writing about how Hollywood works where he's a kind of a demythologizer, I would say, as a storyteller, but never at the expense of fun. And almost all of his movies are just like kind of a blast to roll through. They've got great pace. They always have great dialogue. One of the interesting things about this movie in particular is, you know, that his script was reportedly a little too funny, like too many jokes. You wrote a lot of jokes if you read his columns over the years in New York Magazine or you read his many books. You know, he's got he's got a zinger.

every page. And it's interesting that he's associated with this hallowed period, a very serious Hollywood cinema, because he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a fun writer. Yeah,

maybe pairing him with the whole paranoia that Alan Bakula was interested in, right, is a good combination. Totally. Because you have paranoia, you have dark streets in Washington, D.C., and then you have funny dialogue.

Yes. The kind of things that people that work at newspapers say to each other. Yeah, that Robards and, and, uh, Carl Maldon and Jack Warden can kind of like, roll off the tongue. He has two

great contributions to all the President's men Bill Goldman does. One is, and he wrote about this in his book, cracking the structure. This is a hard book to adapt. People know how the book ends. So what he does is he starts with the Watergate break-in and he ends when Woodward

and Bernstein screw up. Yep. And then he has this great sort of ending, right, where they're typing away on their typewriters. They're trying to get back in the game. And then we see the Telex spelling out all these stories. Nixon resigns being the last one. And of course, You want to talk about media myths, right? Oh, okay.

So they went back to work and then they got rid of Richard Nixon themselves. Not with the judiciary, not with everybody else. Sure. They did it themselves. You mentioned the script being too funny. The people that thought it was too funny were the people that worked at the Washington Post. They all read this script. Bernstein read it.

And they were like, hey, that kind of trivializes our business a little bit. So a very funny thing happened. Goldman wrote about this too. Robert Redford allowed Carl Bernstein and his girlfriend, Nor Ephron, to take another stab at it. How common is that in Hollywood? Well, it's very common.

However, I would say the way in which this plays out is less common because scripts are rewritten all the time. Goldman writes about this ad nauseum in his books, this kind of paranoia that he lives with as a writer for hire where he always thinks that the draft he submitted is not good enough or disliked and is going to be torn to shreds or he's going to be immediately fired off the piece and rewritten. It's going to be rewritten by somebody else. He does pour a lot of time into adapting this very ornate and complicated story.

And as you say, he cracked it. So once he cracks it and Ephron and Bernstein come in to rewrite it, he learns of this because Redford calls him over to his house and shares the screenplay with him at that moment and says, you know, Nora and Carl are here and look what they did for us. Isn't this great? Which is obviously, I mean, imagine that. Imagine if you wrote a piece and I called you over to my office in 2017,

and I was like, I'd like to introduce you to Brian Phillips. I've had him rewrite your copy. Weirdly, that was the name that came right to mine. I don't know why. You wouldn't love that. And so there's obviously something very, I would say downright offensive about it. Redford would occasionally play mind games like this.

I don't know how much he particularly transgressed here. It clearly broke the relationship in a way between Redford and Golden. They'd made several movies together at this point. The thing is, it sounds like the Ephron and Bernstein version was not very good. Goldman didn't ultimately get to it until some time because he knew well enough not to read it until after basically he had been signed off by a lawyer because the notions of authorship in Hollywood and the arbitration that can sometimes play out through Writers Guild is very complicated.

And so he eventually reads it. And obviously, like, they don't use very much of what Bernstein and Ephron needed or felt was necessary inside of the story. And it seemed like there was a lot of romantic swashbuckling from Bernstein that was added. There was some romantic swashbuckling. They also apparently added that very funny scene

with Ned Beatty in the movie. Yes. Where Bernstein tricks, as Martin Dargis, right, is secretary so he can get into the office and get this key piece of information. great scene, but... It didn't happen. So it's weird.

You put the screenplay in the hands of the journalists and they invented a scene, which is very fun. Does that make you nervous at all about the veracity of all the president's men? Maybe just a little. And to your point, what Goldman said too about this was, it's not like I got replaced by Robert Town, another A-list screenwriter. I got replaced by a couple of journalists. Because Nora Effron wouldn't Nora Effron at this point.

She was Nora Effron, the star journalist. but she was not, you know, the maker of one Harry Metzalley, right? Or, you know, you've got mail on that kind of stuff. So he's, you know, he's very, very turned off. Offended, yeah, he's clearly offended by this. And the thing is, most movies, I'll tell you, I'll put it this way. In the 90s, when I started really getting into movies and started really getting into movie culture, I did what a lot of people do, which is I went out and I bought screenplays.

And I valorized the great screenwriters. And so I bought books that had Robert Town screenplays in them. I bought books that at Goldman screenplays. I was really into Quentin Tarantino. I remember vividly buying the screenplay for swingers because it had this great mythology of John Favreau writing himself into stardom. You know, he couldn't get jobs as a leading man in Hollywood. And so I would read these screenplays.

And they were interesting to understand the mechanics of how movies are made, but the words that were on the page, the dialogue that was on the page, to me that was the thing that was so crackling and profound. And then the more you go through learning about how films work, and there's a lot of material about this. a lot of it is made up on the day, or a lot of it is made up a month beforehand, and it's not pulled from this blueprint.

And they're blueprints. They're not sacred texts. This movie in particular, you can see, Bukula, on the day is just like, let's do it totally differently. A lot of filmmakers work this way. I had this fascinating experience talking to Paul Thomas Anderson a couple times about one battle after another last year,

where he just very loosely is just like, yeah, I had this whole idea, and then we just threw it out. Benicio del Toro came in and we just completely rebuilt the whole movie around something that he thought would be a cool idea. So I think a lot of the texts around this movie do a really nice job also of demythologizing our expectations around what a screenwriter does. And Goldman, to his credit, is comfortable kind of underlining this despite the fact that these are Academy Award winning texts. Yes. And it would be fascinating for me to know how much of the original Goldman texts survived. Not just because of the process you outlined, but in the specific case, screen screen.

play kind of gets taken away from him. Then he comes in and does a bunch of rewrites of Pakula. Yep. Pekula and Redford add lots of information that they learn from the real Woodward and Bernstein, from the post. Yep. They just sort of throw all these things in. And then you get this amalgamation, which you should say is not unusual in Hollywood, but in this case has some beats to it, or at least we know the beats.

Mm-hmm. And then a funny thing happens. Bill Goldman wins the Academy Award for the screenplay for all the president's men. You want to hear his acceptance speech? sure I had all kinds of cute, humble things to say and they're all gone somebody ought to mention

Gordon Willis who did an extraordinary job as cinematographer I really do believe the acting level of the movie all the way through for a large cast was remarkable and that's the work of Alan Picoula and finally this movie has been from the very beginning

the obsession of Robert Redford thank you is it weird to win an adapted screenplay Oscar and not mention the authors of the book that you adapted? How many times does that happen in Oscars history? Well, that would be, that's a really interesting question. I wonder, for example, PTA, who won last year did mention Thomas Pinchon.

We learned that the pronunciation is Pinchon, by the way, from Paul, who I presume knows Thomas Pinchon. But the year before was Conclave, and I wonder if Peter Strawn. Ooh, that's a good one. Did he utter the name of the author of Conclave? I'm not so sure. You might be surprised to learn that it's not as routine as it seems. Speaking of authorship, another funny thing is Norman Mailer handed the Oscar to Bill Goldman there. Different time in Hollywood.

Just completely strange. Another author of this movie, maybe an unlikely one, Deep Throat. Hey, oh. We now know Deep Throat was Mark Felt, former deputy director of the FBI. But when you and I were growing up, his identity was a mystery. His identity was a mystery for 30-plus years. I was just just his memory as a kid of watching whenever there would be an anniversary. Woodward and Bernstein would go on Meet the Press.

Tim Russer would say, right now let's clear it up. Who was the mysterious Deep Throat? And they would have to push him away. But the fact that we don't know Deep Throat's identity is like... I'm just imagining Pablo doing that every 10 years with Steve Balmer, you know? Who is the CEO of Asperation? Don't give him any ideas because he might actually take you up on it. The fact that we don't know his identity in this movie.

adds so much to this text. Yeah. So much to this text. I mean, you and I grew up with JFK, where we were the young investigators, the young Jim Garrisons who were going to watch the movie and be like, now I will solve the JFK mystery, which is not a mystery and has already been solved.

Yeah. This was a genuine mystery. People did not know who this was. And to me, you watch the movie. Oh, my God, there's Hal Holbrook. Who is that guy? Am I, can I watch the movie and forget the book? Forget the actual, you know, reportage around who this might be.

Can I watch the movie and learn something about this gentleman's identity? Well, it's one of the only things in the movie that feels very movie-ish. In general, I revisited the movie last night, and I just saw it two months ago. And I revisited it again last night, and I couldn't. It's so odd structurally. And it's so remarkable to me that it was an immediate success, identified in its greatness, publicly popular. Because it is such an odd duck. but the one thing that feels like

a paranoid conspiracy thriller from the 1970s is the deep throat stuff the way that Hal Holbrook has photographed the way that his character is written the idea of the man with the knowledge who hides in the shadows that's a very that's a sexy spy novel concept it's something that you know

date back going to the crusades going thousands of years there's always this one character behind the scenes who has all the information So that part of the movie being not only true, but also shrouded in mystery, obviously makes it a much sexier story, a much more exciting story. Now that we know what we know about Mark Felt and that we're 20 years on from that information, you know, he was like a bureaucrat. Like he was just a guy with a high-ranking but anonymous job in Washington who had tremendous access to information and clearly had some sort of moral core. I don't know about that

Well tell me Well this is there's a great book about him called Leak by Max Holland And if you assemble all the information and you think about his career There's a great great convincing case to be made that he just wanted to be director of the FBI So he is not leaking because he thinks Nixon has done anything wrong He thinks these leaks will unleash a series of events that will put him in the big job And and that did not turn out to be the case did not turn out the BDs. He never became director of the FBI. He was one of the many Hooverites who was sort of fighting for that job under Nixon. But his whole idea is if I do this, if I do that, it will discredit the leadership of the FBI. And maybe I can sneak in it. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. And it was very, very funny. And, you know, Nixon and those guys were aware of him and also aware that he might be the leaker, which is fascinating. He was fingered as a possible deep throat for a period of 30 years before he finally unmassed himself in.

Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair, which is still a strange sentence to come out of my mouth. Yeah, I think that maybe that, considering that information, just the idea of personal vanity is something that really powers a lot of this story, you know, that obviously Nixon's own vanity and desire to triumph over all doubters, the young hot shot reporters who really want put themselves on the map. The old and grizzled newspaper men who also know that this could vault their Washington paper into a kind of national prominence. This bureaucrat who thinks he sees a glide path for himself to the highest ranking position in all of, you know, federal crime busting government. It's really interesting how it's like that. It really drives a lot

of people's motivations around things like this. If you had to pick one seedy how Holbrook performance. Would you pick this one or the firm? Well, they're both wonderful. I'll point listeners to a very little seen movie called Natural Enemies. It is a domestic drama from the late 70s. A little hard to track down. Fun City Editions,

a great physical media company issued a version of this movie some years ago. That is a dark, Hal Holbrook. Okay. Okay. So that's the answer then. Well, the firm is pretty dark. And they're sort of, they're kissing cousins, right? The firm in this movie, they got something in common.

Do you think the real Mark felt was standing cinematically in the shadows? We've taken so many pains to meet in this parking garage. Do we have to be in the shadow in the parking garage? That's Gordon-Pillis right there. Sort of lighting the way. I love that component of it because it is, we don't want to even know too much what Hal Holbrook looks like because then it would insinuate that that is what Mark felt looks like. There you go.

Let's talk about the actors. Robert Redford is Bob Woodward. We mentioned Redford's stardom. He's living on Fifth Avenue and at a ski resort in Utah. Not a bad existence. There's a hilarious note in Goldman's book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, that he was writing a script for Redford, but Redford would not give him his phone number.

Yes. Because he did not want to be contacted. Yes. What do you make of Redford's performance as Bob Woodward? It's unusually. nervous for Redford. I think he is not really an actor who is very good at vulnerability. And Woodward is a little behind the ball at times in this movie.

And I would say he does not have the general cadence that I see in most effective reporters, which is that annoying quality that you have to have, that willingness to be unliked. A pest. Yeah. Most movie stars are actually quite the opposite. They want to be venerated. They want to be celebrated. They want to be loved.

That is a key part of it. And it is the one thing that distinguishes, I think, this conversation between great actor and movie star. Movie star wants to have a halo around them. And, you know, Woodward is kind of annoying. He's like, he's asking people questions. He's trying to work them psychologically. And Bernstein, we can talk about this when we talk about Hoffman, is way more comfortable, pulling all the tricks, making all the moves.

And so it actually puts, it's a little bit of an outlier in terms of the way that Redford performs in the film. But I think he's quite good. I mean, a little too beautiful. Definitely a little too beautiful. I wondered if his performance was constrained by him trying to do Bob Woodward. Perhaps. Bob Woodward is not a party animal. If you've ever heard him on the, on Tim Russert or on any television show.

He has kind of a Kermit the Frog-esque vocal intonation. He does. you know, when Redford was studying him, he said he found he had this interesting quality. We'd be very polite to you in person. He was raised in Illinois and had kind of an upright upbringing. But that he felt behind the veneer he was like just kind of sizing you up and was impatient with you. But would never quite show his face very, very stoic. And I don't know.

I mean, it's a very effective performance. I don't know that it's a great performance. You know, it's more to me kind of functional. It certainly works within the context of the movie. but you're right. It's a weird fit with Redford in a lot of ways. I mean, Redford just doesn't have a lot of range as a performer in general. You know, famously only nominated one time for an acting Academy Award,

and it was for The Sting, which is an odd Academy Award nomination. That's not really what he did. That's not really what he brings to a movie. I think he brings the veneer of seriousness. Which Woodward has? 100%. And so that's meaningful in a match. he's just, I'm not seen a reporter that looks like Robert Redford in my life.

I don't know. I'm trying to think. Who's our handsomist reporter right now? Patrick Ridenkeef? Not a bad looking gentleman. He's a handsome. I guess I don't think of him as a newspaper man. I'm like, that's a successful author.

Let's actually not make this list. I already talk myself out of it. I will make it and send it to you in private. Dustin Hoffman is Carl Bernstein. Yeah. According to Rolling Stone, the producers looked at Al Pacino and Robert De Niro for this role. Hoffman had made the graduate in Midnight Cowboys. You pension, he's a really big deal.

Did a lot of very, you know, sort of I want to live in Bernstein's shoes moments. He went to Passover at Bernstein's house, Bernstein's from the Washington, D.C. He wore Bernstein's watch while making the movie. Bernstein's actual watch. What do you make of this performance? Stellar, definitely among his best. I think that there is something. Hoffman's legacy is fascinating, right?

Because the last 10 years or so, there have been a lot of revelation about things that he may or may not have done in the act of getting the performances that he wants that sometimes reads a little ugly and complicated. And he is like an immersive actor, but not a method actor in the way that we think of the, you know, Daniel Day Lewis's of the world. But he does try to really get deep into the psychology of the figures that he's performing for. And it sounds like he's very difficult to work with.

But that is kind of a character trait of Bernstein in the movie. And so it's a perfect match for what he needs to do. And he has that extraordinary scene with Jane Alexander. Oh, so good. Where he barges his way into her home and convinces her sister to get him a cup of coffee. And he's finding the right way to ask her questions that will get her talking, even though she knows she should not be talking. And you feel like it's coercive, but not wrong. Very well said.

And that's such a unique and difficult place to get to. And you need an actor who has this unusual balance between intelligence, and a kind of like, there's a little smarm going on with Bernstein, but he is like, he is pushing in the right direction, and we know he's going in the right place, so we're willing to forgive some of the things

that you have to do to get information from people who feel uncomfortable. There's another scene later in the film where he's trying to get information of Lindsey Krause's character in the newsroom, and you can see that he is pushing too hard, and that Woodward identifies it, and that Woodward very shrewdly pulls him back,

which allows Woodward to get information and later in the film. Movies are very good about showing that there's no perfect way to pursue these things, but Hoffman is very precise as an actor and makes a lot of choices as an actor, whereas Redford, you don't really feel him making a lot of choices.

He kind of lands on what he's doing in every scene, and he just goes towards it. And Hoffman's kind of busyness, I think, really helps psychologize Bernstein. It's such a good point. And Bernstein told this great story in Rolling Stone, where he said, what they would do often is when they were shooting the movie,

they would call their real life counterparts and say, we're doing something, is this right? Would you say it this way? Is this the right terminology? And he said one time he called Carl Bernstein. Bernstein remembers on the East Coast they're shooting this movie in Los Angeles. And he says, and Bernstein's like a sleep or something like that.

And he's like, I just got one question for you. One question. You just thought, okay, okay, one question. He answers the question. And then he asks a follow-up question. And Bernstein's line was, you fuck or you're finally learning. You're a journalist. Just five minutes.

Five minutes. If I could just get five minutes, I just love that so much. Yeah. You just internalized exactly what you're talking about. How do you pry information? How do you do that? How do you keep going when other journalists would have walked out the door?

Yeah. And given up. It's such a weird job. You know, there's really nothing like it. It's not because it's a public act. Whatever you're doing is meant to be shared ultimately. It's not like working in Spycraft where you're trying to do the same thing. You're trying to extract information from someone who doesn't want to give it to you

or determine where it exists and steal it. But there's like, there will always be consequences to your actions as a reporter. You will always have to reckon with the public acceptance of what you have put out into the world. And so some people thrive on that. I think some people are very comfortable not being liked. And some people really want to be liked and accepted. And you can look at every reporter and the way that they were raised and what it was. what they were like in school and how their parents treated them.

All these things go into this stew of whether or not you're good at this job. I've worked in journalism for a long time. I'm not one of these people. I don't think I would be comfortable doing what the Carl Bernstein character in the movie does. It doesn't mean that it's wrong. It actually might have saved democracy, not to put too fine a point on it. But you have to have a certain psychology to be able to get to that place with people. The movie does maybe the best job ever of examining how you do that.

Other actors, Jason Robards is Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradley. Do you ever work for a scenery-chewing editor in your career? I work for some big personalities and some really strong-minded people. You know, I worked for Daniel Smith-ad Vibe, who was like a very big and powerful thinker and someone who really had high standards in terms of copy. My editor at vibe was John Caramanica, who's now pop critic at the Times. He's got a big personality. He's got a big personality as well.

And John was very exacting about the quality of writing when he was working as an editor. I've worked for Bill Simmons for 14 years. He's a swaggering guy. Yeah. I would say not as in the weeds as Ben Bradley is historically. I love that scene. I'm not sure if I love any scene more in movie history than when he takes a look at their copy, the first piece that they, and he pulls the red pen out of his coat jacket.

Oh, my God. Is that like every journalist you just feel for them in that moment? I mean, it's just, it's just so real. Like, I have absolutely turned a story in and sat there and had that done to me. And, you know, it creates this incredible, like, frustration and resentment and insecurity, but it is, it's a lesson. Like, you literally learn from it. And that's a little lost, I think, in journalism now.

We just don't live the same way because nobody's writing anything down with their hands anymore. It's a Google doc. Yeah. Yeah. But I've worked for a few tough editors not like this, though, because I was never a newspaper person. And newspaper is different because the deadline. It's happening very quickly.

It's happening. So the noose around your neck, it feels like sometimes with these guys. Get some harder information next time. What about you? Well, I mean, one is, I mean, Simmons, of course, but, you know, Jack Schaefer over at Slate was a big one in my life. And I was 22 or 23, and he was smart as hell and funny as hell. and also just a gigantic personality in the office.

And I remember, I don't know if it was the first day I worked for him or the first week I worked for him. I just peeked into his office. And I said, hey, coach. And he looked at me and he goes, why are you calling me coach? Yeah. And I was like, I don't know you can remind me of Vince Lombardi. I still call him coach for this day. But he definitely filled that role in my life.

I don't know if I've ever talked with you about this, but I worked at GQ for about a year and a half before I came to work for Bill. at Grantland. And my favorite thing about working there was the ideas meetings and the budget meetings because it was a room full of the smartest people that I'd ever come across. And Jim Nelson was the editor at that time. And Jim was an exceptional story editor, like really the 1% of the 1% of story editors. And to watch them reject something that like this isn't good enough for us was a sight to behold. Oh God. And those meetings are so performative to. Yeah. Yes. There's the great, like, let's, you know, figure out a story. Let's break it down, as you say. But then there's also the, I'm here, right? I'm showing off to everybody. Yeah. It was sort of like a private podcast in a lot of ways where everybody got to kind of be like, here's my take on this.

Just like a podcast. You're trying to tell people how smart you are. Exactly. Exactly. But it did always kind of, it would all filter back to Jim because you could have a really strong take. And if he disagreed, good take, but who cares. Yeah. We're doing the story or we're not doing the story. The story's dead. Yeah. And so that is also something. that I think is a little, it's hard to cultivate a culture that can do that now in the time of Zoom meetings and, you know, not get digging into the copy the same way that we do and this idea of like you're competing with AI to get your peace out into the world. Like, it's just a totally different environment. And this movie shows us the way that someone like Bradley could do that. And then,

you know, Bradley has that great scene later where he tells the story about being the emissary for Lyndon B. Johnson's news about trying to get Hoover out in the FBI. And, you know, it's like a small anecdote that tells the entire arc of a person's career. Some other great performances. Jack Ward and Martin Balsam is post-editor's Harry M. Rosenfeld and Howard Simon's fantastic. Amazing. I don't know anybody could tell you after watching the movie what those people, who they are or what they do. But the short sleeve button down with a tie.

Yes. Such a fantastic 70s newspaper look. Yeah. I actually thought about this with the movie. And maybe we can do this experiment with Jack Sanders or some young. and here at the ringer. But watch this movie for the first time. Somebody has never seen this.

Watch it for the first time. Watch it once. And then tell me what was the Watergate scandal about? What news did Woodward and Bernstein break? What did Nixon and his henchmen do? I'm not sure that all that is especially clear in this movie. Well, it also feels to your earlier questions about Trump, so small, so modest in terms of this was the thing that tore this apart. It wasn't the continued existence in Vietnam for years that ripped this president to the ground?

Like, it's this like piddling break-in with the expectation of like trying to win an election that you were going to win in a landslide anyway. Like the whole thing is so obtuse. And you can you can certainly feel the psychology of Nixon and his highest-level cronies at work in the, like, the smallness. of the enterprise that they're so paranoid about every little stupid thing that they would pursue something this stupid. But the movie, I think because it's existing in its time, and we knew. Like, we just knew what it was dramatizing. So it didn't have to over-explain.

And I think if you compare it to any number of HBO made for TV movies from the late 90s all the way through the 2015s, those movies like recount, they dramatically over-explained the circumstances. You always had a character come in. And this is kind of this organization, I think, of a movie. movie screenwriting, they just over-explained both the, the events and the stakes,

where you would say, like, this is the most important moment in the history of democracy. In this movie, when Ben Bradley does it, it's a sarcastic comment. Like, it's not really meant to, you know, lift your spirits in any meaningful way. Some amazing cameos in here.

We mentioned Ned Beatty. You mentioned Jane Alexander. Oscar nominated for her two scenes. Amazing. Meredith Baxter is this movie. Lindsay Krause, you mentioned. F. Murray Abraham is briefly in this movie, which is really mind-blowing. I want to talk to you about the filmmakers. Alan Pakula is the director. They looked at John Schlesinger, who did Midnight Cowboy and Costa Gavris, did Z.

They both would have done interesting versions of this movie. This is the third leg and the paranoid stool of Pakula after Clute and the Parallax View. He did something interesting, which is as soon as he gets hired, sets up shop in Washington at the Madison Hotel. And he just interviews everybody. Yes. Woodward Bernstein, Nora Ephron, Bob Woodward's second wife. I mean, just all these people.

He takes, Robert Redford took Seymour Hirsch out to breakfast. They just talked to everybody they possibly could to get documentary style information. Yeah, you used an interesting word when we were talking about doing this conversation earlier this week, which as you said, they re-reported the story to do the movie. And they did. can tell that they spoke to as many people as they could who were proximate to the execution of this story, which is just not something you could, I'm sure there are instances of it happening now, but that level of commitment to getting things not right in the factual

accuracy department, but in the feel. You can see that a lot of what they're interested in is like capturing the environments, the tonality that people had at that time, and the way in which people moved. Like a lot of these apartments that they find themselves in late at night, these townhouses, they feel like real places.

And you can feel the work that they did going into it when you watch the movie. And I think it's feel and facts, too. I think this is an interesting combination of both. Of course, there is some fudging

like there isn't any movie. But I think they were hemmed in. We'll talk about that a little bit in a moment. But Kula, I did not know, was kind of a Kubrick character in terms of constantly asking

for rewrites from Goldman, constantly asking for takes of the movie, which Hoffman apparently loved and kind of drove Redford nuts while they were making the movie. How would you describe Kulah's style and all the president's men? Extremely exacting and specific. I think he has an interesting match with his cinematographer Gordon Willis, because Willis is a very dramatic stager of scenes. You know, the way that he lights in darkness, the way that he's using split diopter shots,

often in bold, fluorescent light in the office spaces, the way that he has to serve both movie stars who are demanding of center frame action. You know, somebody like Robert Redford was like, I need a moment here. Or Hoffman who's like, I need a moment here, big egoed actors. But the movie, and you heard this in Goldman's remarks, he gets these great performances out of all of these people you've never seen before. This is Lindsay Krauss's first movie performance. Jane Alexander's maybe done three movies.

up until this point, and they're so memorable, and they feel so essential. You know, Stephen Collins, you know, has admitted some terrible things, and so we no longer talk about him in the public sphere, but this is a very early performance for him, and he's very, very good in this difficult part of Hugh Sloan. And so you have all these incredible performances,

and he gets this in all of his other films. The previous movie he directed Clute, Jane Fonda won an Oscar four for playing a call girl who becomes ensnared in a murder mystery. The parallax view, I think, is probably, if not my favorite of his movie is the one that I find to be the most interesting structurally and also about a reporter also about a reporter who's lost inside of a conspiracy but he does a couple of things in this movie that you can see him really

expanding upon in the next movie which is he does sometimes shoot like it as a nature documentary where the sort of like the slow zoom but especially the big pull away to show the massive there's that overhead shot when they're in the live library and researching. So good. It's already, looks like it's at 10,000 feet, and then he pulls back again.

And he shows you this vast world of information that these men are trapped inside of like ants. And he's just a very intellectual filmmaker who had a nose for commercial stuff, which is pretty much my favorite thing in the world. I mean, he's just a filmmaker that means a lot to me. Even when he was working in, I think,

much more tired material in the 90s, I still have time for the devil's own and the Pelican brief and consenting a, And that stuff is like a little bit junkier than the high tone stuff that he did in the 70s and 80s, but just a fascinating figure. And then the other thing I think to remember that is useful for him, and this is part of why I think Redford got excited about him, is that he was a producer before he was a director, which is something that was a lot more common back in the day where you had people. He produced movies for Robert Mulligan, who directed to Kill a Mockingbird and was Academy Award nominated for that. So he learned how making a movie works, not what I have to know to envision what the movie should. be, but actually those nuts and bolts that we were talking about as a reporter are also

important to him as a filmmaker, which is how he knows he can kind of push buttons and say, like, we need more time here. This scene isn't working. I don't like how this looks. What if, you know, Goldman tells this great story and adventures in the screen trade of just how creative, Pekula was, that he actually just came up with a scene in real time on set and just that Goldman acted as a stenographer to the scene that he created. Now, you know, I don't know if that's like ego or inspiration or what's happening there, but that's rare to be able to sit with like the hallowed screenwriter of his era, writing a scene for the movie star of the moment and just being like, we're going to do it this way.

And that's, I think, from having 15 years of experience at that point in making movies. You mentioned Gordon Willis, a cinematographer. This quote from Robert Redford to Gene Siskel piqued my interest. In the morning, Washington is possibly the most secure city in the world. The buildings are very impressive and solid looking, but at night everything changes. You feel very insecure. The streets are deserted. There's this overwhelming feeling something's terribly wrong.

Yeah. I think it's because we have an inherent distrust of politics and politicians. And so that is the base for all the mischief that's being rendered upon us. And so I think Willis is super smart about the way that when he's shooting in light, everything feels monumental. mental and like it is like crushing down upon us. And when he's shooting in dark, it's like a series of unknowable hallways and corridors and and quiet spaces. There's that one moment when Deep Throat and Woodward are having a conversation in the garage

might be the third meeting that they have. And there's a we hear a siren or a whistle and they just stop talking. And it's not for five seconds. It's for 25 seconds. There's no dialogue. It's just holding on their faces in shadow until this sound just goes away. very patient movie, very patient people making this movie, very comfortable letting you sit in discomfort. The last character, and I think creator of this movie I have for you, is the Washington Post itself.

So most strikingly, Warner Brothers creates the Washington Post in Los Angeles, the newsroom. This is shocking. I think the very first time I saw this movie, I just assume they shot in the Post newsroom, which the Post, by the way, did not allow. Warner Brothers and George Jenkins, who won an Oscar. He's the production designer, came to L.A. and spent... $200,000 to recreate the newsroom out here. They did some amazing things like taking trash from the actual Washington Post and putting it in their L.A. Potemkin Washington Post newsroom. They actually put the books that are in Ben Bradley's real office in his office in Los Angeles, which is crazy. Apparently,

I read something they had the daily papers from the days the events were happening so that people would understand like this is, you know, October or whatever, 1972. Let's have that. that day's paper sitting around in our recreated post newsroom. It's amazing. First of all, it just looks incredible. Yeah. It feels like a newsroom, too, doesn't it?

It does. And it makes you wonder why they felt the need to do that. We know why, because it worked for the movie, right? We bought into what this was. But this is a situation where I think anybody with less actual interest in this story who was working on the movie would have said, why are we spending all this money doing this?

The thing that actually literally feels like it would not happen today is spending $200,000 on the set just to make it look like a newsroom. Well, there's something Redford said throughout the process, which was we want to make a movie about the news and about newspapers that feels like it's really about what happens. We're coming out of this era of the front page. If we want to go back further, Deadline USA, these big dramatic Hollywood movies, which are many of which are good. I'm not going to cape for the front page here, but everything else. Really good movies. Because he's like, that's just all Hollywood stuff. We want to make this as documentary and as real as humanly possible.

Yeah, I think it's interestingly compared to Spielberg's The Post, which is also about the Washington Post and also about many of these people. And is a movie that because of the particular style that Spielberg has as a filmmaker and the way that his cinematographer works, Janusz Kaminsky, it feels more fantastical in a way. The way that the camera moves, the way that the light works and the way that color operates with the design of the production, it doesn't feel real.

It feels almost like a fable. Yes. And so, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's a different way to tell that story. Well, there's kind of something wrong with it. It's just not very good. To me, it's because it's a period piece that is so far gone. And this is the opposite.

This is an attempt to recreate something that just happened. So I think there's like a there's a rose-tinted glasses almost literally feeling while watching the post. Which commenced to his cinematography. I totally agree. And so, and that kind of cloudiness that he has as a filmmaker, this is the exact opposite. This is, it's not just that the garbage is the real garbage from the Washington Post. It's that, you know, the color of every wall feels like the right color. You know, the clock seems to be at the right time on the wall that it would be in the sequence. there's all of these very specific choices that are made.

Very few movies try to do this. Like accuracy is something you hear a lot about in movie productions, but actually physically replicating the place is extremely rare. And they were really intent on getting that right. I mentioned all the lunches they had, all the interviews they did. When I was looking at the Pakula archives, I found a memo that Redford had solicited from, wait for it, Mike Barnacle of the Boston Globe.

He had written to him and said, please read the screenplay and tell me what you think. Is this accurate? So why is this so important is a really interesting question? Because is it a meta-textual ode to the work of reportage that you would then try to accurately re-report this entire experience in movie form? And was that Redford's big idea or the idea that he landed on with Woodard and Bernstein? Is it something different? He was interested in that.

I think he wanted to demystify reporting a little bit, which we could certainly use now probably more than we could in the 70s. I know, but I don't think it does that. I don't think it, I mean, it shows you the specific. but it makes it seem more powerful. Well, I just think if you go back to his top at it, it's like, how did you guys do this? This is the idea. I mean, we could pick up this first edition again. Look at the inside thing here.

All America knows about Watergate here for the first time is the story of how we know, right? Like the whole thing is explaining, you know, you understand the scandal, you understand Nixon going down. What did reporters do to advance this story, even if they didn't bring him down by themselves? I think that's the interest. I mean, this is a lot of work, honestly. And there is. And it's funny because I also found this memo that Redford wrote to Pakula at some point, 1974, right when they're about to make the movie and said,

hey, by the way, we're now, I'm kind of feeling hemmed in here by the truth. We're trying to please the Washington Post. We're trying to please Woodward and Bernstein. We're trying to make this as accurate and use real things and real incidents. And we are forgetting the cinema of this. So we need to also now like tack the other way and make sure we're making a movie. Sure. Yeah.

And not just rewriting all the president's men in the book. Yeah. Yeah. Satisfying the Washington Post feels like a fool's errand generally. Dude, but like they're, Woodward and Bernstein submitted script notes. They submitted notes about the rough cut. See, to me, I think them participating is different from the newspaper. The new, working in service of an institution like that, which has all of its own biases and can't really see itself clearly, I think is very dangerous.

Woodward and Bernstein, they're being made to be movie superheroes. I'm sure they had a lot of notes and they got to approve the way in which they were perceived. But it was their thing, right? They broke the story. They wrote the book. They had to, the book had to be optioned from them. the newspaper? I don't know.

Do what you want. You're the movies. But this is what's so funny. And Bradley had a great line about this to Redford in time. Because Ben Bradley's like, whatever I do in my career, people are only going to remember the version of me that's in the movies. They will not remember real me. Right. They will remember a movie me.

And he says this to Redford. He said, just remember, pal, that you go off and ride a horse or jump in the sack with some good looking woman in your next film. But I am forever an asshole. True, right? That's the power of the movies. It is, and yet it worked out for him tremendously well. Movie comes out in April 1976. It is hard to describe how much publicity there was for this movie. Cover of Time Magazine, cover of People magazine, cover of Rolling Stone.

The late great Gene Siskel went to Washington, and he did this, Sean. He wrote a feature about the film and then separate features about Woodward and Bernstein and Bradley and Kay Graham. Wow. That's how much copy was extracted. for this movie. The filmmakers have been worried that the press would receive this badly

because they would screw it up, right? They would make a Hollywood version of a media movie. In fact, the press loved it and covered it crazily. Filmmakers were also worried

this movie would not make money because it was too political. As you mentioned, it made a ton of money. It's one of the highest grossing movies of 1976. Hoffman said this, I thought this was funny.

The real reason for the success of the picture is that Hoffman's back and Redford's got him. It's what the public always wanted. That beautiful wasp finally wound up with a nice Jewish boy. Dustin Hoffman in People magazine. Hoffman also told people this about the finished product. Here's a different day of journalism.

When you could make a movie and actually confess to a reporter that you weren't totally happy with it. I'm not as ecstatic as the critics are about all the president's men. It could have been a lot better. They cut some of the best scenes. I told Bob he was drying the picture out. I said he should add a scene where Woodward and Bernstein were really having it out, but he didn't. I would have fought more, but by the time I saw the film, it was too late to make radical changes I wanted. In my opinion, the film was a little too smooth.

I would have left a few hairs on the lens. That's so fascinating because I feel the exact opposite about it. It's incredible how many seemingly disconnected incidents there are in the movie. This feeling of like, there's not narrative momentum in the movie. Like even as they are getting the story, you're still like, who are they talking about right now? You know, like it is a somewhat confusing feeling. It's not confusing to understand where they're headed, right? But it's meant to be this, it's meant to be seen from a great distance

because it is about all of these little tiny pieces that have to come together. And so it never feels like there's a moment where the two reporters look at each other and say, aha, we have done it. and that great choice that you talked about that Goldman makes at the end of the film is another sign of kind of like the comfort in 70s cinema of not spelling everything out for you of being able to and also being comfortable in

failure being seen as success you know the film ends on a failure but we know that success is really there and it's so funny to take a shot like that at the movie. In People Magazine. Alicia Shepard who wrote a great book about Woodward and Bernstein noted that

Bernstein was played in the movies by two men Dustin Hoffman and I don't know Jack Nicholson and Heartburn Oh of course Not a bad duo Of course Well he does not come off very well in that one

First one was a little more of a positive portrayal You say it's funny You're right there is not a moment in the movie Where it's like aha we did it I think the closest is when Bernstein's chasing the car Woodward's car down the street Wordward out of the blue Yeah yeah

They have plenty of fun phone calls Where you know where they're like Dollberg I just talk to him You know like we get a couple of those but it's like, who the fuck is Dahlberg? Yeah, I know. And he's never heard from again. Some business man in Minnesota.

Oh, and he has this great little scene on the phone and we never hear from him again. Woodward and Bernstein wrote the final days. They published that in 1976. Alicia Shepard notes that in 76 they had the number one movie at the box office. They had the number one bestselling paperback, all the president's men, and the number one bestselling hardback, the final days. And then they didn't work together anymore. And that was it.

That was, again, that was 50 years ago. And we consider them a duo. We will always consider them a duo, but they did not share bylines after that. What did we lose? You know, it's an interesting thing to think about because they both went on. Obviously, have amazing careers and are still very well known to this day. But did they ever reach this mountain top again? Woodward, you could argue.

He had big scoops. He had big scoops. He remained a figure. He remained a superstar journalist. Yeah. and a guy who's selling a ton of books. Yeah. Did he ever reach this mountaintop again?

I think probably not. Yeah, I think there's something really complicated about this world too, where when you become bigger than the story, it sometimes becomes difficult to get stories. And you become, now you get tapped on the shoulder as the person who gets to break a story.

I feel that Woodward has had this. Or because of his long, deep connections in Washington over the years, you can see moments when someone decides, you know, in a kind of Adam Schaefter style way where it's like, you will be the one who will share with the world, X, Y, Z.

And that's how a lot of this stuff works, obviously. But this feels like a case of them, starting with nothing. Yes. Like, they started, you know, they got a phone call in the middle of the night, and they went down to a court hearing. And that's where this starts.

Like, it is, it is a ground level building from the bottom because nobody knew who the fuck they were. This is about what they didn't know. This is about, you know, how naive they were, and they're just trying to go for these little kernels. Whereas Woodward's other books are about, I know everything and everyone. Yes.

Paul is is burning up my phone. I'm getting the inside story. Doesn't I feel like I'm, doesn't that feel older than all the president's been that history? Do you know what I mean? The Gulf War? Yeah, just that that era of leadership. It just feels so small and so significantly less iconographic. You know, there's like that just feels like stuff that happened and this feels like stuff that matters. Why is that? I don't know. I mean, maybe because it was a, a more frivolous time in journalism or in political leadership or I don't know. Or we just don't have the right movies about it. Could possibly be.

We don't have a movie that's specifically like this or that pick the right heroes or pick the right storytellers. Could possibly be. It could be that filmmakers on the order of Robert Redford were less interested in it. You know, George Clooney, I think, is an actor who feels very in concert with the Redford model, the Redford approach. And he made one of these, but it was good night and good luck, which went way into the past, you know.

Yeah. And not quite as, yeah, not quite as successful. as this one. All right, Sean Fentissie. You're going to go back to the big picture and the rewatchables. I'm going to go back to exposing rat shit in restaurants. This might be here at the Ringer. Thank you so much for joining me.

He is Sean Fentasy. I'm Brian Curtis. Pretty much by Isaiah Blakely and Bruce Baldwin. Friday on the press box, Mel Kiper Jr. is going to join me and Joel. Mel Kiper Jr. Wow.

Talking about his career covering the draft, we're actually going to have him list off legendary Jets draft bus. Thanks for doing that. the corner. Appreciate you doing that. Can you just, can you just sit? Actually, we'll be in the different studio. But can you sit over there in Studio 5?

I'll sit in the booth. Wait, so, but let's just, before you wrap, you know, the Jets do own the better of the two Cowboys picks in 2027. And I'm feeling great about that. I just want you to know. And I hope everything's fine with the Cowboys. How dare you, sir? How dare you, sir? You can check out David Shoemaker's excellent cover for the April issue on our Instagram page at PressBoxwinger.

Back on Friday with more. Form takes about the media. See you that.