All the President's Men

Plot

On June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a security guard at the Watergate complex finds a door's bolt taped over to prevent it from locking. He calls the police, who find and arrest five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters within the complex. The next morning, The Washington Post assigns new reporter Bob Woodward to the local courthouse to cover the story, which is considered of minor importance.

Woodward learns that the five men—James W. McCord Jr. and four Cuban-Americans from Miami—possessed electronic bugging equipment, and are represented by a high-priced "country club" attorney. At the arraignment, McCord identifies himself in court as having recently left the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the others are also revealed to have CIA ties. Woodward connects the burglars to E. Howard Hunt, an employee of President Richard Nixon's White House Counsel Charles Colson, and formerly of the CIA.

Carl Bernstein, another Post reporter, is assigned to cover the Watergate story with Woodward. The two young men are reluctant partners but work well together. Executive editor Benjamin Bradlee believes that their work lacks reliable sources and is not worthy of the Post's front page, but he encourages further investigation.

Woodward contacts a senior government official, an anonymous source he has used before and refers to as "Deep Throat". Communicating secretly, using a flag placed in a balcony flowerpot to signal meetings, they meet at night in an underground parking garage. Deep Throat speaks vaguely and with metaphors, avoiding substantial facts about the Watergate break-in, but promises to keep Woodward on the right path to the truth, advising Woodward to "follow the money".

Woodward and Bernstein connect the five burglars to corrupt activities involving campaign contributions to Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP or CREEP). This includes a check for $25,000 paid by Kenneth H. Dahlberg, who Miami authorities identified when investigating the Miami-based burglars. However, Bradlee and others at the Post still doubt the investigation and its dependence on sources such as Deep Throat, wondering why the Nixon administration should break the law when the president is almost certain to defeat his opponent, Democratic nominee George McGovern.

Differences from the book

Unlike the book, the film covers only the first seven months of the Watergate scandal, from the time of the break-in to Nixon's second inauguration on January 20, 1973. The film introduced the catchphrase "follow the money" in relation to the case, which did not appear in the book or in any Watergate documentation.

Production

Redford began asking about the Watergate break-in while promoting The Candidate, then read Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate stories in The Washington Post, while waiting to start filming The Way We Were. Redford first spoke with Woodward in November 1972, after the reporters' well-publicized mistake about Hugh Sloan implicating Haldeman in his testimony to the Watergate grand jury.

Redford bought the rights to Woodward and Bernstein's book in 1974 for $450,000, with the idea to adapt it into a film with a budget of $5 million. Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, realized that the film was going to be produced regardless of his approval, and believed it made "more sense to try to influence it factually". He hoped the film would show that newspapers "strive very hard for responsibility".

Redford hired William Goldman to write the script in 1974. Goldman has said that Woodward was extremely helpful to him but that Bernstein was not. Goldman wrote that his crucial decision regarding the screenplay's structure was to discard the second half of the book. After he delivered his first draft in August 1974, Warner Bros. agreed to finance the film.

Redford was not happy with Goldman's first draft. Woodward and Bernstein read it and also did not like it. Redford asked for their suggestions, but Bernstein and his then-girlfriend, writer Nora Ephron, wrote their own draft. Redford showed this draft to Goldman, suggesting that it might contain some material he could integrate, but Goldman later called Redford's acceptance of the Bernstein-Ephron draft a "gutless betrayal". Redford later expressed dissatisfaction with the Bernstein-Ephron draft, saying, "A lot of it was sophomoric and way off the beat." According to Goldman, "In what they wrote, Bernstein was sure catnip to the ladies." He also said that one of Bernstein and Ephron's scenes was included in the final film; a bit in which Bernstein deceives a secretary in an attempt to see someone, which was not factually true.

Alan J. Pakula was hired to direct and requested rewrites from Goldman. In a 2011 biography, Redford claimed that he and Pakula held all-day sessions working on the script. Pakula spent hours interviewing editors and reporters, taking notes of their comments.

Casting

Redford first selected Al Pacino to play Bernstein, but later decided that Dustin Hoffman was a better fit for the role.

Jason Robards was always Redford's choice to play Ben Bradlee. However, Bradlee had recommended George C. Scott for the role, and he was somewhat unimpressed when Robards visited the Post offices to develop a feel for the newsroom. In advance of the shoot, Bradlee told Robards, "Just don't make me look like an asshole." At first, Pakula was worried that Robards could not carry Bradlee's easy elegance and command authority. Karl Malden, Hal Holbrook (who would ultimately play Deep Throat), John Forsythe, Leslie Nielsen, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark, Christopher Plummer, Anthony Quinn, Gene Hackman, Burt Lancaster, Robert Stack, Robert Mitchum and Telly Savalas were also considered for the role.

Character actor Martin Balsam played managing editor Howard Simons. According to Bradlee, Simons felt that his involvement with the real story was greatly diminished in the script.

Bradlee teased Post publisher Katharine Graham about who would play her in the film. "Names like Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Patricia Neal were tossed out — by us — to make her feel good," Bradlee said. "And names like Edna May Oliver or Marie Dressler, if it felt like teasing time. And then her role was dropped from the final script, half to her relief."

Redford and Hoffman divided top billing, with Redford billed above Hoffman in the posters and trailers, and Hoffman billed above Redford in the film itself (in precisely the same manner in which James Stewart and John Wayne had divided top billing for John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in 1962).

Filming

Hoffman and Redford visited The Washington Post's offices for months, attending news conferences and conducting research for their roles. Because the Post denied the production permission to shoot in its newsroom, set designers took measurements of the newspaper's offices and took many photographs. Boxes of trash were gathered and transported to sets recreating the newsroom on two soundstages in Hollywood's Burbank Studios for $200,000. The filmmakers went to great lengths for accuracy and authenticity, including making replicas of outdated phone books. Nearly 200 desks were purchased for $500 each from the same firm that had sold desks to the Post in 1971. The desks were painted the same color as those in the newsroom. The production was supplied with a brick from the main lobby of the Post so that it could be duplicated in fiberglass for the set. Principal photography began May 12, 1975, in Washington, D.C.

Release

All the President's Men was initially assigned an R rating by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) due to multiple uses of the word "fuck" and its derivatives. Warner Bros. Pictures and Robert Redford appealed the decision, arguing that the film's subject matter and historical importance warranted a lower rating. The MPAA Appeals Board, requiring a two-thirds majority to overturn a rating, agreed and reclassified the film as PG (the PG-13 rating did not exist at the time, as it was created in 1984). MPAA president Jack Valenti later stated that the film would have received a G rating if not for the profanity. According to MPAA official Richard Heffner, the Appeals Board considered the language to be contextually appropriate given the film's journalistic and educational significance. The decision exemplified the MPAA's ability to exercise discretion in its ratings process, particularly for films regarded as culturally or historically important.

Reception

Box office

All the President's Men grossed $7,016,001 from 604 theaters in its first week, placing it atop the U.S. box office. It eventually grossed $70.6 million at the box office.

Critical reception

All the President's Men has received near-universal acclaim from many film critics, both on its release and in the years immediately following it. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 95% based on 76 reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "A taut, solidly acted paean to the benefits of a free press and the dangers of unchecked power, made all the more effective by its origins in real-life events." On Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 84, based on reviews from 18 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

At the time of the film's release, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film 3½ stars out of 4, writing: "It provides the most observant study of working journalists we're ever likely to see in a feature film. And it succeeds brilliantly in suggesting the mixture of exhilaration, paranoia, self-doubt, and courage that permeated The Washington Post as its two young reporters went after a presidency." Variety praised the "ingenious direction [...] and scripting" that overcame the difficult lack of drama that a story about reporters running down a story might otherwise have. Gene Siskel gave the film four stars. In his Chicago Tribune review, he wrote, "Director Alan J. Pakula duplicates the surprise and suspense of his Klute while avoiding the overstatement and pandering paranoia of his more recent political thriller, The Parallax View. Pakula's greatest achievement is the way he unobtrusively weaves outside events into narrative of the reporters' story." Siskel also named it the best film of 1976 on his year-end list.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, "Newspapers and newspapermen have long been favorite subjects for movie makers—a surprising number of whom are former newspapermen, yet not until All The President's Men, the riveting screen adaptation of the Watergate book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, has any film come remotely close to being an accurate picture of American journalism at its best." Rex Reed wrote, "Just to think about Watergate (and there are those, I'm told, who prefer not to) is to chatter the brain with a million details, telephone conversations, notebook jottings, investigations and technical problems that could be very dull indeed on film. Awesomely, and with tremendous intelligence, Alan Pakula, the director, has assembled each element with the panache of a mystery novelist. The result is a movie that literally keeps the audience glued to the edge of the seat with nail-biting tension and excitement." Kathleen Carroll of the New York Daily News gave the film a full four-star rating and wrote that it "offers a rousing argument for the preservation of freedom of the press that precious right that allows reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to ferret out the truth." Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it "quite beyond anything else, an engrossing mystery movie, with atmosphere, suspense, surprise, conflict, danger, secret messages, clandestine meetings, heroes, villains and a cast of leading and supporting characters that might have emerged from an unlikely collaboration of, let us say, Gore Vidal and Raymond Chandler."

Accolades

In 2015, The Hollywood Reporter polled hundreds of Academy members, asking them to revote on past controversial decisions. Academy members indicated that, given a second chance, they would award the 1977 Oscar for Best Picture to All the President's Men instead of to Rocky.

It became one of the seven films to win Best Picture from three out of four major U.S. film critics' groups (LA, NBR, NY, NSFC), along with Nashville, Terms of Endearment, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, The Hurt Locker and Drive My Car.

In 2007, Entertainment Weekly ranked All the President's Men as one of its 25 Powerful Political Thrillers.

In 2006, Writers Guild of America West ranked William Goldman's screenplay 53rd in WGA’s list of 101 Greatest Screenplays.

American Film Institute

AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills – #57

AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains:

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – #27 Heroes

AFI's 100 Years...100 Cheers – #34

AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies: 10th Anniversary Edition – #77

"All the President's Men" Revisited

Sundance Productions, which Redford owned, produced a two-hour documentary titled "All the President's Men" Revisited. Broadcast on Discovery Channel Worldwide April 21, 2013, the documentary focuses on the Watergate case and the subsequent film adaptation. It simultaneously recounts how The Washington Post broke Watergate and how the scandal unfolded, going behind the scenes of the film. It explores how the Watergate scandal would be covered in the present day, whether such a scandal could happen again and who Richard Nixon was as a man. W. Mark Felt, deputy director of the FBI during the early 1970s, revealed his identity as Deep Throat in 2005, and this is also covered in the documentary.

Footage from the film is included, as are interviews with Redford and Hoffman, as well as with real-life central characters, including Woodward, Bernstein, Bradlee, John Dean, Alexander Butterfield and Fred Thompson, who served as minority counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, in his first major public appearance. Contemporary media figures, such as Tom Brokaw (who was NBC News' White House correspondent during the scandal), Jill Abramson, Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart are also featured in the documentary, which earned a 2013 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special.