As idealistic as he was photogenic–my favorite Letterboxd comment in the wake of Robert Redford’s Sept. 16 death was “r.i.p … you were fine as hell”—the actor, movie star, director, and activist believed in the power of the press.
Redford lived enough years, 89 of them, to see mass media in its least fraught, least scrutinized, least questioned, and most profitable glory years. He was here for the other side, too, where we are right now. We’re in the middle of something, something pretty ominous and, by and large, institutionally unchecked.
And as a nation in the middle of something, we don’t seem to have enough investigative reporters on the hunt for everything under the surface of our current administration’s experiment in a democracy-optional democracy.
It’s not all new, this stuff: Nixon, among others, gave it a try. His downfall was made possible, in part, by two Washington Post reporters, their editors, and their publisher, at a time when two-thirds of the country, according to Gallup polls, expressed a “great” or “fair to good” amount of trust in the media. In that era, a movie—two of Redford’s finest hours—could lionize free-press crusaders with the full faith and credit of a mass audience.
Redford’s Wildwood Enterprises, Inc., which he co-founded, produced the film version of the bestselling nonfiction account “All the President’s Men” in 1975 with Warner Bros. distributing. The studio thought, well, prestige flop, if we’re lucky. Where’s the money in a gabby tale of gabby men, even if they’re played by Redford and Dustin Hoffman, typing and dialing?
Everywhere, as it turned out. The movie was a hit, rendering recent history in a sleekly mythologized fashion, not always lucidly (it was a pretty complex web woven by some unqualified spiders), but with narrative purpose and gorgeous craft.
Director Alan J. Pakula worked extensively on revised drafts by an increasingly exasperated screenwriter, William Goldman, a friend of Redford’s since they struck it rich with “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” in 1969. Years after the success of “All the President’s Men,” Redford claimed the finished version was 10 percent Goldman’s. A controversial claim, though Redford and Pakula did hunker down for a month prior to filming and, with input from, among others, from here, from there, and from the man Redford was playing, fledgling Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, they made their changes.
Two of the 1975 Goldman drafts floating around online indicate the movie’s structure was always there, doing its job. Authorship aside, what didn’t make it onto the screen, or even into these two script versions, indicated Redford’s and Pakula’s priorities: human interest, secondarily, and a process story foremost.
What didn’t make the cut? A fair amount of the quippier, Butch-and-Sundance banter and wise-assery. A scene featuring newspaper publisher Katherine Graham (played by Meryl Streep nearly 40 years later in director Steven Spielberg’s “The Post”). A scene between Woodward and Martha Mitchell, D.C., hot potato and wife of Attorney General John Mitchell. Scenes cooked up by Goldman featuring the sidelined women in the consumed lives of Woodward and his fellow Post reporter Carl Bernstein, played by Dustin Hoffman.
The focus stayed elsewhere: on the journalistic crusaders on a mission for the truth, beginning with the odd, inept surveillance bugging attempt by some peculiarly well-connected burglars who broke into the Watergate Plaza office of the Democratic National Committee. I remember that building; our eighth-grade bus trip to D.C. in the fall of 1974 included an impromptu Watergate drive-by, and somewhere I have a blurry, yellowing Kodak Instamatic photo of the scene of the crime, as seen from a Greyhound.
Everybody knew Watergate then. Watergate was a celebrity, and 85 percent of U.S. households watched at least part of the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee hearings on what happened there, and what happened after that. The hearings had been on the air for a full year by then. Mia Farrow, Redford’s co-star in “The Great Gatsby,” has claimed their lack of chemistry during filming had to do with Redford’s obsessive, I’ll-be-in-my-trailer-watching preoccupation with the Watergate hearings.
In the wake of Redford’s death, how many uncountable millions around the world have re-watched “All the President’s Men” or caught up with it for the first time? It’s a heartening thought, though the film’s hardly flawless. It has its contrivances, and moments when Goldman and company can’t quite keep the particulars straight. Or they take an expedient, flattering shortcut for the sake of momentum. You don’t hear or see much, if anything, about Woodward and Bernstein revealing the identity of a key confidential source. And while The Post was in a tense, long-distance race with The New York Times for Watergate scandal dominance, the movie leaves the impression that it was a two-movie-star job.
Bernstein and Woodward didn’t do it on their own, of course. Second-term U.S. President Nixon, whose cover-up went about as well as the break-in necessitating it, was sunk the minute the incriminating White House tapes went public. And, in a cruel reminder of what is not politically possible in 2025 America, fully bipartisan support for Nixon’s impeachment (a political career-ender back then; those were the days) took it home. With his Republican support gone, so was Nixon.
“All the President’s Men” did a number on us future daily newspaper employees back then. It was the heyday of journalistic swagger and ink on paper on doorsteps, when papers far and wide enjoyed scads of ads, on many pages in many sections. Back then, even if you put out a good newspaper, you made money. My college paper, the Minnesota Daily, was one of the probable dozens, hundreds, at which “All the President’s Men” was considered a holy thing, like “The Ten Commandments” as written on manual typewriters.
Time has been kind to it. But a re-watch of “All the President’s Men,” shadowed by Redford’s passing, comes with some side effects generated by our current American times, not the movie’s.
Commenters online this month have responded to the film and the man who got it made. They mention everything from its celebration of patient, painstaking yet swiftly paced fact-gathering and puzzle-piecing, to the script’s occasional, inarguable expositional thickets, to the scenic wonder, Redford. (A lot of young first-timer viewers on Reddit and such wonder why the hell the movie didn’t just go ahead and make it a gay romance between two workplace frenemies with A Secret.) Elsewhere, it’s all about the actual filmmaking, led in many astonished eyes by the startlingly effective cinematography of Gordon Willis—the ’70s prince of expressive, dark shadows.
A throughline connects the more ruminative and, I think, illuminating comments. “The Watergate scandal looks like the theft of a cookie from a jar in comparison to what is happening now,” one first-time viewer wrote on YouTube. Another viewer, on Letterboxd, called it “a deeply cathartic watch in an age where we have 5 Watergates a month.”
I admit, catharsis eluded me this time around. Maybe it’s the 5 Watergates a month part. “All the President’s Men” may be the only ‘70s conspiracy thriller with a happy ending, but happy is relative. Spurred by Redford’s passing, a re-watch has a way of feeling like a mirage out of reach today, a memory of what was possible then, both in Hollywood and in the media.
“Nothing’s riding on this,” editor Bradlee says to his crusading reporters at the end of the movie, “except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.” It’s the film’s thesis line, a masterstroke of sarcasm, tapped into our memory banks just so by the matchless Jason Robards.
But the line I haven’t quite shaken after my own re-visit is not that line. The one for me is basically a nothing, a throwaway, in the middle of my favorite scene and my favorite single shot (six minutes in length). Redford, as Woodward, is on the phone, in the bright light of his newsroom. In one half of a brilliantly composed and sustained split diopter image, keeping the background hubbub in deceptively clear focus, Woodward talks to Kenneth Dahlberg, a nervous secondary player in an unraveling history pageant.
He’s the Midwest Campaign Finance Chairman for the Nixon reelection committee. A $25,000 check with Dahlberg’s name on it has turned up in the bank account of one of the Watergate burglars. How? Why? The man won’t say and hangs up. Then he calls him back. As context, confession, or maybe moral justification for the story behind that money, he says to Woodward:
“I’m caught in the middle of something. And I don’t know what.”
A half-century later, we’re all Kenneth Dahlberg.
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