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Never Seen It: Watching All the President’s Men with Memphis Flyer Editor Jesse Davis

In my semi-regular Never Seen It column, I find an interesting person and sit down with them to watch a classic (or sometimes, not-so-classic) film they have missed. This pairing of subject and object may be the most perfect one ever. Jesse Davis recently took over the reins of the Memphis Flyer from his semi-retiring predecessor Bruce VanWyngarden. Davis had never seen the greatest film about journalism ever made, the 1976 political epic All The President’s Men. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Chris McCoy: Jesse Davis, what do you know about All the President’s Men

Jesse Davis: Almost nothing. I know it’s based on a book of the same title by Woodward and Bernstein, and that it’s about their investigation into the break-in at the Watergate hotel. And that’s it.

138 minutes later…

CM: We’re on the record with Memphis Flyer editor, Jesse Davis. You are now a man who has seen All The President’s Men. What did you think?

JD: I really enjoyed it. It was absolutely excellent. It was a great story. I know Watergate and Nixon is one of those areas of U.S. history that attracts a lot of people, and for some of them, I’m sure, it’s because they have seen this movie. But it has struck me as something that was kind of like JFK’s assassination. There were a few events that are understandably interesting, but some of the people who are really, really, really into them do not … um … do not emit an aura of being really well put together.

CM: That’s diplomatic.

JD: I mean, like I said, I can understand the interest, but … 

CM: They’re obsessions of the dirtbag left, is what you’re trying to say.

JD: That might be one way of putting it.

CM: Guilty as charged.

JD: You know, there are some things where most of the people who are interested in it, you’re like, “Oh God, are you guys okay?” I think some of my first contact with people who were really obsessed with Watergate was like that. But not everyone. I mean, it’s notably interesting. The whole truth and power and accountability dynamic is just as important today as it was in ’72. So, I mean, it’s understandable why folks would be interested. But I say all that to say that I never dove really deep. I’ve not read the book. It’s absolutely interesting to see them follow the trail.

CM: It’s a journalism procedural story, which you don’t see a lot of now. I mean, procedurals are like three hours on CBS every night, but it’s always law enforcement. It’s never journalists anymore. One of the things that’s interesting to me about this film is that journalists are the protagonist. You know, Superman was a journalist. Then there’s My Girl Friday, and lots of others. Wasn’t Mary Tyler Moore a journalist for a news station? But you don’t really see that much anymore. There was Spotlight a few years ago, which was great. Maybe part of it is that it’s just people sitting around in rooms talking.

JD: Or talking on the phone!

CM: But also, part of it is, there was a shift where people don’t trust journalists absolutely anymore. Watching it this time, I think it’s interesting that a lot of what they were doing seemed to be responding to a narrative that the Washington Post and other papers were creating together at the same time. It struck me that a lot of what the disinformation plague does is to destroy the possibility of a central narrative. So you don’t have to prove that you didn’t lie. You just have to make it so the truth is not actually knowable. That’s a big question that’s hanging over this movie: Is the truth knowable? Or are these people, in fact, like you said, “not very well put together”? Bernstein is clearly not very well put together.

JD: This is true. He’s smoking cigarettes constantly — in a restaurant, in other people’s homes, in other people’s cars, in the elevator …

CM: The elevator smoking is funny. It’s the only time anyone comments on it.

JD: Whoever the cinematographer is, [ed note: Gordon Willis] is doing things to make shots of people talking on the phone visually interesting. Maybe that’s one of the main differences, but I’m sure a lot of law enforcement is actually pretty boring.

CM: Those procedurals on CBS every night, they’re just mostly people talking in rooms, too. But every now and then, they run around and wave guns at each other.

A split diopter shot from All The President’s Men. Notice the blurry region between Redford in the foreground and the group gathered around the TV in the background.

CM: I pointed out a couple of split diopter shots, which is a thing you put on the front of a lens that has two tinier lenses with different focal lengths. There was the one shot where Woodward’s on the phone in the foreground, and I guess they’re watching some kind of sports match in the background. There’s two different planes of focus in the same shot. This is not done in post-production. It was done in-camera, live. Right when Woodward gets the information he’s looking for, the people in the background cheer. It’s real subtle. You just don’t see that anymore. 

JD: It was set up under the sign for the national news desk, which I thought was nice. There’s whatever game was on the TV, and then there’s this national game going on, and Robert Redford just scored.

JD: Another thing I noticed is, when Redford’s going into the parking garage, and when they’re at work, you see all of this space around them. They’re lost in all this, whether it’s the architecture of the parking garage or the columns in the newsroom, and trying to find their way out. We know that they’re the figures we’re supposed to be paying attention to, but you see all of the Washington Post newsroom, or all of the parking garage, or a big part of the D.C. skyline. At one point, I think it was Robert Redford, maybe, walking with the Washington Monuments behind him. They’re these huge buildings, and he’s just this tiny little figure. I loved that repetition, and the difference in scales. 

CM: There’s very much a sense of millions of people going on with their lives who have no idea that what this guy is doing is going to change history. It’s going to bring down the president.

Woodward meeting “Deep Throat” in a parking garage.

JD: A line I love, early on, is when their editor says about the story, “It may just be crazy Cubans.” The idea of someone saying that about this story! As an editor, that’s a pratfall. You just don’t know. There may not be a story. 

CM: That was going to be my next question. You’ve been editor of the Memphis Flyer for what …

JD: Six weeks now.

CM: Ben Bradlee, who was Jason Robards, is just an absolute legend in the industry. What were you thinking about when you were watching him?

Jason Robards as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee

JD: In the beginning, everything is set up to make you feel like he is maybe one of the forces who wants to kill the story, for whatever reason. Then there’s a scene where they talked about how it could put them in legal trouble. And for all you know, it could. There’s a little while before he has this moment where he tells them about a time he screwed up, but he got the story right. But it’s a while before we get to that point, and all of his concerns are completely justified. He’s just like, look, you’ve got to have multiple sources, especially if these people aren’t letting us name them. You have to corroborate this. But we can’t know if that is really his justification, and it’s all in service of good reporting. If so, that’s great, but there’s a little bit of tension there — especially the more you start to think, “OK, there are some layers of conspiracy going on. How do I know that they didn’t get to him?” When [White House spokesman Ken W. Clawson] calls him panicking and says, “I got a wife and a family and a dog and a cat,” he’s on a first name basis with [Bradlee]. And you’re like, he’s editor of a big paper. Maybe pressure has been put on him. But then, once he gets to the point where he’s satisfied, he puts out his statement: “We stand by the story.” I’m going to keep these guys on it.

CM: And that was a crisis point in the story. That’s after they’ve been burned by their sources on purpose, to throw them off.

 JD: He sensed that was what was happening.

CM: What’d you think about the actual, nuts and bolts of reporting in 1972? How does it compare to what the experience is like today?

JD: Well, first of all, Memphis Flyer is not a daily, so it’s a completely different thing.

CM:  You do one layout a week. Those guys were doing layouts every day. You know, the editorial meeting scene is so fascinating to me.

JD: I love that scene. They go around, and everybody says what they’re working on, and then it’s okay, go around again. This time it’s just the really short pitch. And this is how much space you get. That was, that was great, and very different.

Hoffman, Redford, Robards, Jack Warden as Post local editor Harry M. Rosenfeld, and Martin Balsam as managing editor Howard Simons.

CM: Currently, our editorial meetings take place on Slack. But we still sit around and talk about what we’re going to put in the paper. There’s still magic in that moment, to me. There’s a romance to it, I guess.

JD: I think so, too. I mean, it’s different. They’re the Washington Post, and we’re an alt-weekly, we’re the Memphis Flyer. It’s the ’70s. It’s 2021.

CM: Not a computer in sight.

JD: When they’re going through the list of names, I thought, “Oh my God! Imagine doing this without the internet!” It’s a completely different thing. But there’s still a huge amount of talking on the phone. Now, it’s just Slack, but before the pandemic, when I was the copy editor, I walked back and forth between different parts of the office all day, every day. So there are still elements that are the same. But yeah, the editorial and layout meetings, I think are incredibly magical. They have a big enough staff that it’s like, “What things have y’all been working on that are now ready for us? What’s ripe?” There’s an element of that, but I expect you’re going to have a film review every week.

CM: There was the moment where they’ve been knocking on doors, and they haven’t produced any copy for two weeks. You know how much copy I’m expected to produce in two weeks?

JD: Oh yeah.

CM: They have an enormous amount of resources we don’t have, that barely anybody has outside of The New York Times or the Post or the Wall Street Journal has now.

JD: To just be able to send somebody on assignment, and tell them to keep going until you turn something up or don’t … If someone’s working on a cover story, sometimes there’s a really quick turnaround, but often, that’s something you are taking back and forth between the back burner and the hot burner until it’s scheduled to go. But it’s not like we don’t do research.

CM: Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that we don’t do research, because we absolutely do. That’s most of my time, really. But to be able to fly down to Miami, barge into the D.A.’s office, and demand they talk to me, I can’t imagine doing that and being treated with anything but contempt. It’s a great moment in the movie, because he plays this trick on the receptionist, but there’s no way I could get into the D.A.’s office, and then the D.A. does anything except have me arrested.

Hoffman, Penny Fuller as Sally Aiken, and Redford work the phones.

JD: Sometimes, you see, in a work of fiction, someone who’s a magazine writer or a newspaper writer, and they appear to have a huge budget and really flexible deadlines. And you’re just like, “Well, that’s fiction. That’s based on an old idea, a different time period.” It kind of makes me think of hard-boiled films and private detectives. How would Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade go over today? The industries are different, and the laws that have continued to grow up around policing and investigative journalism are different.

JD: One thing I noticed in two of the TV clips was, you’ve got someone talking about their sources and he uses the word “unsubstantiated.” In another, they were talking about the political leanings of the editor of the Post. First of all, just to have someone holding national office say the word “unsubstantiated,” that felt very strange, um, particularly after the last four years or so.

CM: Trump would have said, “Fake News! Enemy of the state!”

JD: Exactly. It’s the same with, “I think we can make a safe assumption about his political leanings.” I’m paraphrasing there, but that’s very different from “They’re the crooked Democrats, and we all know they want to take us down!” But it’s all of a piece …

CM: It’s the evolution of that rhetoric, which began with Nixon.

JD: You could say it’s based on logic, and maybe it is. Now, we have mutated or evolved this line of defense so it is just the quickest and most direct route to an emotional reaction: I’m under attack by these people, and you should — to use the phrase they used in the movie — circle the wagons. I’m going to protect my president from these rats.

CM: You got the sense that the people who were in Nixon’s inner circle, the Republicans he was ordering to take these illegal actions had a lot more autonomy back then. The give and take in this part of the drama is, are they going to do their duty to the country and the Constitution, or are they going to put party first? You know what they’re going to do now.

JD: Oh, well, of course!

CM: They’re going to put party first. Donald Rumsfeld died today, the day we’re recording this. Back in the Rumsfeld era, the ’00s, after 9/11, I used to sometimes read this blogger — it was the blogger era, too — called The War Nerd. One of the things he liked to say was, the more organized side is the one who usually wins. He also used to say, “The end of the world is what you call it when your tribe loses.” I feel like what we’re seeing today is like the evolution of that thinking, which is, frankly, pure fascism. That’s the definition of fascism: I have loyalty to this narrow in-group, right or wrong, rather than loyalty to the Constitution, or to the greater good, or to the nation. My faction is what’s more important. And I felt like it was really obvious from this film how far we’ve sunk.

JD: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s without question.

CM: And yet, in the Trump years, or so far, anyway, the same systems held that held against Nixon, pretty much. It just felt like a much closer thing this time.

JD: Yeah, I think so, too.

CM: Did it make you reflect on what your duty is as an editor of a paper?

JD: Well, first of all, I gotta get a good “shut the hell up” look.

CM: You gotta get that.

JD: That’s important. I’ve got to stay cool under pressure, and then know when it’s time to start dropping F-bombs, and just say, “Well, it’s only the fate of democracy and free speech. Don’t fuck it up, or I’ll get mad.” His responsibility to the truth, and to getting the reporting right, seemed to be the highest ideal. Obviously, how that affects our paper and our image is incredibly important. Everything flows from telling the story accurately. That seems to be his primary action in the film. So that first day you’re not reporting it well enough, I gotta tell you to dig deeper, and then recognize that we’re now in hot water. I will stand up. I’m with you guys. You’re showing up at my door. It’s late at night. You’re saying it’s not safe to come inside.

CM: I’m telling you we’re being bugged by the CIA. Do you believe me?

JD: Okay, let’s have this conversation on the lawn. I like to think that if any of our writers show up at my house and tell me that, I’m glad it’s the CIA! I’ll say, “God, we’ve got an amazing story here.”

CM: I’d say, “You’re aware you work for the Memphis Flyer, right?”

JD: In some ways, they lucked into things because of having people just take calls, which doesn’t happen now. Someone got into the rhythm of answering questions and said something they shouldn’t have. I don’t know that we’re necessarily going to get that as frequently as they did just by cold-calling people. Then there’s their little routine of casually dropping a piece of information that we want confirmed.

CM: We’ll pretend we already know it.

JD: Yeah, exactly. Or, we’ll argue about the details of something that we think we know, but we’re not sure we know. And then, if there’s no issue from your interview subject about the thing in question, it’s like, okay, now we really are talking about it.

CM: I actually had an opportunity several years ago to pull the “I’m going to give you some initials, and I want you to say yes or no” gag. I felt like such a badass! But the only reason I knew to do it was because of this movie. So would you recommend All the President’s Men to people?

JD: Oh, wholeheartedly. I think if you walk away from it feeling like, “This was a David and Goliath story, and I believe that can happen because it did happen and they were successful,” then that’s great. If you walk away from it thinking, “Those were some cool shots,” that’s great, too. If you walk away from it with “The truth matters and I want to help tell it,” well, that’s even better.

 

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

All the President’s Memories

So I’m sitting in my favorite bar last Tuesday. It’s a slow night. Just a couple of other regulars and our usual bartender, a bright, young fellow who seems to enjoy his customers’ company, despite our tendency to bloviate. On the television above the back-bar, All the President’s Men is playing silently, the dialogue running across the bottom of the screen. For a veteran journalist such as myself, it is a bloviation opportunity not to be missed. This movie is the journalism version of a Marvel superhero flick.

You know the story: The impossibly pretty Robert Redford (Bob Woodward) and his shaggy sidekick, Dustin Hoffman (Carl Bernstein), play Washington Post reporters who are on the hunt for evidence that will expose the nefarious deeds of President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate scandal.

The intrepid reporters meet with their editor to discuss leads and tips and procedures. They smoke in his office. They go out to interview a source, and they smoke in the source’s house. They meet a tipster in dark parking garage, and smoke. They smoke in the newsroom as they pound out copy on their Remington typewriters. Newspapering used to be a smoky damn lifestyle, I tell you what.

I’ve been writing an editor’s column for one publication or another since the mid-1980s, so I remember pounding out copy on a typewriter. I remember when everyone had an ashtray on their desk. I have become that guy — as one does when one reaches a certain age — a maestro of memories, a dealer of anecdotes, a chronicler of ancient customs, and no doubt a bore.

But bartenders get paid to get bored. So.

“I remember when writing a column would take me all day,” I say, warming up. “Now, I can knock one out in a couple hours.”

“Huh,” says the bartender, helpfully. “Why’s that?”

“Why is that? Why, you young whippersnapper … you have no idea what it was like back in the 1980s. You’d come up with an idea for a column, then you’d have to verify the facts to make sure you could defend your opinion. You can’t just make shit up. You have to research stuff, and in those days, that was hard work. Why, back then, I had a whole shelf of books in my office for research — thesauruses, dictionaries, atlases, anthologies, encyclopedias, and Bartlett’s Quotations — just in case I needed a pithy quote. Here’s a tip, by the way: Quotes make you sound smart.

“Anyway, sometimes, we even had to get in our primitive vehicles and drive across town to a library! When we got there, we’d have to look up book titles in card catalogues and then go search through long aisles of bookshelves with weird Dewey Decimal System numbers on the end. And then — get this — sometimes, the book we wanted was checked out! Do you even know what the Dewey Decimal System is, young fella? Well, do you? I didn’t think so. And don’t even get me started on phone booths.”

“That’s really interesting,” says the bartender, helpfully.

“I’ll have another glass of the red, please.”

“You got it.”

“Thanks. Anyway, the point is, now I don’t have to do any of that because the entire panoply of human knowledge is at my fingertips — on my computer and my phone. On my phone! Think of it, man! I have the greatest library humankind has ever created, and it’s right here on the bar. I don’t have to go anywhere. I don’t have to turn and pull a book off the shelf. Hell, I don’t even have books in my office any more. I just google. If I need a pithy quote about, say, the newspaper business, I type in ‘quotes about newspapers,’ and I got more quotes than I can ever use.”

“That’s wild,” says the bartender, as he pours a drink for another customer.

“That’s why this movie is so important,” I say. “The Fourth Estate is under attack like never before. We need newspapers more than ever. You should watch this with the sound on, sometime.”

“I’ll do that,” the bartender says.

“After all, as Napoleon once noted, ‘Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than 1,000 bayonets.'”

“You just googled that on your phone, didn’t you?”

“Maybe.”

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Politics And The Movies 1: All The President’s Men

Today, as neofascist candidate Donald Trump prepares to accept the Republican nomination, I’m beginning a new series on the Film/TV/Etc blog. Politics And The Movies will run approximately weekly until the election on November 8. I’ll be examining films whose subject or themes are explicitly political in an effort to relate them to the moment where we now find ourselves.

Dustin Hoffman, Penny Fuller, and Robert Redford in All The President’s Men

All The President’s Men was released in the election year of 1976, when Republican Gerald Ford, the only American president to ascend to the office having never received a single vote for either it or the vice presidency, faced Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter, a Naval nuclear engineer from Georgia. Ford took office upon the resignation of Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate affair, which was uncovered by the reporting of Carl Bernstien and Bob Woodward. One of director Alan J. Pakula’s best touches is the way he uses the constant drum of TV news reports of the 1972 presidential election as a counterpoint to increasingly paranoid plots taking place inside the newsroom of the Washington Post. Although the media environment of the mid-70s seems completely tame compared to the ravages of the 24 hour news cycle, the jarring tonal differences between the upbeat but sober reporting of Walter Cronkite and Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman)’s journalistic cloak and dagger shenanigans struck a chord with the filmgoing audience. Not only was it nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four, but it also made an impressive $70 million on an $8 million budget.

All The President’ Men is a story about the inevitable intertwining of politics and media.Watching it today, the first thing that jumps out at you is the complete lack of computers on the desks of the Post newsroom. Our heroes spend much of the film on the phone, including an incredible extended take where Woodward wakes up a White House official in the middle of the night and tricks him into incriminating himself. Redford’s words are controlled and flat, but his body language and subtle facial expressions steadily ramps up the tension. Hoffman is similarly superb, rendering Bernstein as a neurotic ball of energy held together with nicotine and coffee.

The film leans heavily on its ripped from the headlines context. Nixon had only resigned eighteen months before, so events that Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman mention in passing carried much more weight in 1976 than they do 40 years later. But the movie left indelible impressions on film history. The X-Files ripped off its scenes with mysterious informant Deep Throat wholesale, with Mulder frequently meeting his exposition partner Mr. X in shadowed car garages. 2015’s Best Picture winner Spotlight is practically a remake, substituting rapist priests for crooked politicos.

Hal Holbrook as Deep Throat.

But I think the greatest contribution to political discourse is it introduction of the term “ratfucker”. Bernstein tracks down Donald Segretti, played by Robert Walden, who was the head of dirty tricks for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Over coffee and cigs, Segretti admits that any underhanded tactic was in play against the hated Democrats, but defends himself by saying that he and his colleagues only did things with “a little wit”.

Politics And The Movies 1: All The President’s Men

The ratfuckers got fatally caught in the Watergate scandal, but the culture of dirty tricks and demonizing the opposition thrived in the Republican party for decades. From the October Surprise to the Brooks Brothers Riot to Dan Rather’s forged poison pill, ratfucking has been at the heart of right wing electoral success for the last half century. We take it for granted now, but All The President’s Men shows that the amoral, win-at-all-costs philosophy that brought us candidate Donald Trump was once so shocking that it cost a president his job. The film’s commentary on the power of the press to create and destroy leaders rings just as true today is it did in 1976, but its faith in the basic decency of the Fourth Estate and the Americans who follow it seems like a rosy anachronism.