The Big Picture
- All the President’s Men is a film that emphasizes authenticity over deceitfulness in its story about the Watergate scandal, reflecting the bleak political climate of the 1970s.
- The visual language and production design of the film, particularly the re-creation of The Washington Post newsroom down to the detail of using real trash, contribute to its immersive and atmospheric portrayal of the investigation.
- While the film takes some artistic liberties with its depiction of journalists, it streamlines the complex historical context of Watergate to effectively engage and inform audiences.
When it comes to adapting true stories to the big screen, creative liberties from Hollywood are to be expected. Truth is often stranger than fiction, but movies are predicated upon myth making and the escapism of fantasy. Mainstream cinema, being comfortable with formulaic tendencies, prefers to shape historic people, places, and events into a template. For a film such as the modern classic, All the President’s Men, the historical backdrop of one of the most scandalous political stories in American history inspired the filmmakers to emphasize authenticity rather than supply deceitfulness to a story about lies.
‘All the President’s Men’ Captures the Bleak Political Climate of the 1970s
Released only a few years following the events depicted and based upon the book of the same name, All the President’s Men chronicles the investigation of the Watergate scandal and cover-up by the Richard Nixon administration by The Washington Post, particularly from the perspective of two reporters, Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman). The film, directed by Alan J. Pakula and written by William Goldman, belongs to the long line of 1970s films about paranoia and the seediness of government bureaucracy clouding America. The film rounds out Pakula’s spiritual trilogy of paranoid thrillers, preceded by Klute and The Parallax View. With the Prince of Darkness behind the camera, cinematographer Gordon Willis, All the President’s Men visually and thematically defined what ’70s cinema, collectively known as the New Hollywood, sought to unveil within the underbelly of America.
The keen sense of agony and dystopia is heightened in All the President’s Men compared to the likes of The Conversation and Three Days of the Condor, as it is based on recent dire news. Suddenly, films are no longer providing an alternate reality but an unpleasant reflection of society. Cinema, through intention or future retrospective analysis, has a way of reflecting the current sociological landscape. All the President’s Men, a passion project that for star Robert Redford, is the most confrontational example of this phenomenon. When tackling real-life events, especially one relating to the scrutinized occupation of journalism, the expectation for historical accuracy will be substantially high.
How ‘All the President’s Men’ Re-Created The Washington Post’s Newsroom
The eerie, shadow-filled visual language was integral to crafting All the President’s Men. Pakula and Willis capture the investigation of the Watergate scandal through the lens of a nightmarish noir. The seasoned grain on the film helps it resemble the look of a newspaper. The impressive aesthetic of the film is at its most picturesque with the production design of the Washington Post‘s office. Because the filmmakers were denied the use of their real newsroom by the publication, they went ahead and underwent the laborious process of re-creating the floor where the bombshell story of Nixon’s cover-up was reported on a Hollywood lot.
In a 1975 Post story detailing the making of the film, it was revealed that nearly 200 desks at $500 apiece were purchased from the same firm that sold desks to the newspaper four years earlier. Furthermore, the desks were painted with the exact shade of color as the real-life Post office furniture. George Middlebrook, an administrative clerk for the Post, supplied President’s Men production designer George Jenkins with a brick from the publication’s main lobby so that it could be duplicated in fiberglass for the film set. The immaculate preciseness of Jenkins’ work was extreme enough to make Stanley Kubrick blush.
The arduous saga of replicating the Washington Post newsroom took a farcical turn with the film crew’s prospect into the publication’s garbage. The Post agreed to send waste belonging to reporters’ desks to be scattered across the set of All the President’s Men. The newspaper charged $1 per box sent to the production team. Reporters were encouraged to donate any remnants of trash on their desks. Crafting a great film, one that will last for ages like All the President’s Men, is backed by the minute details. Using authentic waste from the real Washington Post office, while seemingly frivolous in hindsight, helps capture the expressive, lived-in quality of the film that lingers with audiences.
‘All the President’s Men’ Set a New Standard for Journalists in Film
The story of the production of All the President’s Men is not entirely a duplication of real life to the big screen. For as meticulously crafted The Washington Post newsroom was on a Hollywood soundstage, the same exactness was compromised by the film’s mythological depiction of journalists, according to some critics. Forget the Great Hollywood Trash Lift, there is no shaking of the film’s innate Hollywood sheen that skews the reality of journalism, as Post staff writer Ken Ringle details in a 1992 editorial. Ringle identifies historical omissions of specific figures involved in the Watergate investigation and the skewed characterization of managing editor Howard Simons (Martin Balsam) as a befuddled superior. He takes umbrage with the film’s portrayal of Woodward and Bernstein as maverick reporters on the case. William Goldman’s script, which underwent a strenuous re-write process before filming, ignores the numerous other reporters, clerks, and editors, that had a hand in the journalistic investigation.
In the grand scheme of things, Ringle is forgiving of the artistic liberty of All the President’s Men. The Watergate investigation consists of an overwhelming whirlwind of names and places, so much that it caused the film’s source material to be bloated. He praises Pakula and Goldman’s manner of streamlining the tangled web of Watergate’s historical context to best serve audience consumption — only introducing the most vital details. In his story, Ringle writes, “We may not have been a better paper before Hollywood discovered us, but we were probably less pompous and we certainly had more fun.” The statement reads contradictory to his previous takedowns of the Hollywoodized tendencies of All the President’s Men, but it tracks as a way of correcting the collective image that the film industry upholds of journalism. Early on in Hollywood, journalists were more likely to be the main characters of a screwball comedy instead of a sobering docu-drama. In the wake of President’s Men and the ever-growing crisis surrounding the fate of the press and government integrity, Hollywood began taking journalism more seriously. For better or worse, real-life journalists will be stuck in the shadow of the stirring portrayals of the occupation across various films, but no portrayal will ever be as impactful as All the President’s Men.
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