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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Bulwark Movie Club. I'm very excited to be talking with Jonathan V. Last and Jonathan Cohn filling in for Sarah Longwell today. I'm a little bit disappointed, Jonathan, because usually when I see you on video, you have an enormous poster of all the President's Men right behind you, right behind your head. And now you're in some sort of fancy room full of books. I don't understand. I don't understand what's going on.
- [00:26]
B
This is crushing me. I mean, I have that poster up. It was like this. This movie was such a formative experience in my life. I've had that poster since I was 20 years old. And I happened to be on the road this week, so I'm in a public library, which looks very August, which I am not. And I'm just dying because that poster is always there and I always want someone to ask me about it. And now finally I get to talk about this movie and I'm not there. So, you know, we'll just have to imagine. Or maybe they can do a screenshot of one of my old videos.
- [00:56]
C
Yeah, we'll add it in post.
- [00:58]
A
Yeah. We'll get the video team to Photoshop it into the whole thing. And this is gonna take two weeks to edit while they do it frame by frame. All right, so let's. I actually, this is, this is funny though. You say you've had it since you were 20. Was this a dorm room poster?
- [01:10]
B
Did you.
- [01:11]
A
Were you. You know, everybody's got their taxi driver poster and their, you know, Clockwork Orange poster. You know, you've got, you've got all the President's men up there.
- [01:21]
B
Yeah, well, so dorm with an asterisk that it was for a while I had when I was like, you know, one of the editors at my college newspaper. It was, ha. Hanging there. And then it went back to my apartment afterwards, of course.
- [01:32]
C
Did you talk to the reporters at your college at paper like you were Ben Bradley, where, you know, some, some little 18 year old is like, well, I was at the basketball game and they lost by seven. You're like, how many sources do you have? You didn't get the story? No. You didn't do that?
- [01:52]
B
Yes. And I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to my former college newspaper reporters to whom I did that. Thank you for putting up with me and indulging me while I tried to imagine I was Ben Bradlee.
- [02:06]
A
All right, so let's, let's talk about this movie as a formative experience because this is the movie. I think that you will get most cited by folks who, if they say they got into journalism because of a movie, it was this one. For some, you know, there aren't that many great journalism movies to choose from. There are a lot of journalism movies. I don't know how many great journalism movies there are. We can discuss that maybe toward the end of the show. But this is. This is like the defining journalism movie, in part because it is one of the defining journalism stories of the 20th century. The story that brought down a president, the story that, you know, made the. The. The two. Two journalists at the Washington Post amongst the most famous writers in the country, of course, turns into a movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
- [02:59]
C
I gotta say, I. I think you're underselling it. I think that all the President's Men is the founding myth of all modern journalism.
- [03:11]
A
I think that's basically right. I think that's not one of the most.
- [03:15]
C
Like. This is the story which modern journalism tells about itself, to understand itself.
- [03:23]
A
Well, let's. Let's get into this. So. So Jonathan, you are. You're at school. You. You love this movie. Got the poster up on the wall. What was it about all the President's Men that either the book or the movie or both, that inspired you? That were. You were like, I gotta. I gotta do this. This is what I gotta do with my life.
- [03:40]
B
Yeah. Yeah. So I was actually, before we were getting ready, I was trying to remember when I would have seen the movie first. So I'm just at the age where I would have seen this as a kid in middle school in the early mid-80s. And just to sort of set the timing for our younger cohorts that might be. Which maybe includes the two of you. Please don't tell me. You know, I remember we were one of those houses that we took forever. We were like, had black and white TV for the longest time. Then in one big burst, we got a color tv, we got a video recorder, and we got cable all at the same time. And like, one of the first movies.
- [04:14]
C
You're like, Encino Man.
- [04:15]
A
Yeah.
- [04:16]
B
And we had like a. We had a vhs. Remember, there's Betamax and vhs, the two formats, you know, back then. And one of the first movies that popped up on, like, HBO was All the President's Men. So this would have been. Been out a couple years, and I recorded it, and I did not. I knew that they. I mean, I knew about Watergate kind of politically, you know, I was one of those kids who, like, was kind of A political junkie. So I knew the whole story vaguely. I had not read the book and the movie. What, you know, I mean, it's a great movie and I'm sure we'll talk about why it's a great movie. But the thing that kind of resonated with me was this sort of feeling of these guys are the underdog fighting for the little person and kind of prevailing at the end. And there's like these, like, layers of underdog, right? Because I mean, obviously it's the sort of the journalist as the kind of, you know, truth teller and much of it mythical, which I. Hopefully we'll talk about also what you were saying before jvl. But, you know, there was the newspaper as the sort of underdog in this system, the journalist, but then also the Washington Post as the underdog to the New York Times. And even, like, how Woodward and Bernstein were like underdogs in the newsroom. You know, they were the local reporters, right, who were on this story and trying to scrap for something while the national reporters were too busy off, you know, following the campaign. And like, I was like an underdog kind of person. And that just sort of like, resonated. I was like, oh, this feels right. You know, this feels like something I want to do. And it just, it. It hit on that kind of emotional level that whatever else was true about it or not true about it in the story and whatever it got right or wrong about journalism, like, that impulse to me is what made me feel like that what about a journalism appealed to me and I think for a lot of other people.
- [05:59]
C
So, like Caddyshack, this is a classic slobs versus snobs story for you.
- [06:06]
B
It really was. And I've actually always said that, like, I've always thought of like, you know, what's, you know, the difference between journalists and lawyers, right? And I grew up a lot, you know, I was around a lot of people who became lawyers. Some. Nothing against lawyers. It's. It's, you know, but. And some great lawyers and doing wonderful things. But, like, the difference is, like, the journalists were always kind of the misfits, right? They were the ones who couldn't, you know, they wouldn't quite work in the sort of orderly world of law or a law firm. They were unkempt, they didn't dress as nicely. They talked kind of funny. They were socially awkward. And you get some of that in the movie, right? I mean, especially in the Dustin Hoffman character and their interactions with each other. It's just kind of a slightly dysfunctional place. And that dysfunction to me is part of what makes journalism fun and interesting. You don't get paid as well as the lawyers typically, and the job security is more, you know, you don't have that. And you know, but you know, you're also, you're kind of running around rabble rousing and you have a kind of a license to do that which feels like you're coloring outside the lines.
- [07:07]
A
It is very funny. Hey, look, again, I've spent my entire career in journalism in various various newspapers from Roll Call to the Weekly Standard. Like I bounced all around, online, print, whatever. And it's always been very funny to think of this movie as the foundational journalism movie because, I mean, say nothing of Robert Redford, who is arguably one of the most attractive people in the history of cinema, the country, whatever the world. Being the archetypal journalist is just always been. That's been very fun. But even like even Hoffman, much more charismatic than your typical journalist in Washington D.C. no offense to our good friends in Washington D.C. of whom certainly more.
- [07:53]
C
Charismatic than the real life Carl Bernstein.
- [07:56]
A
I. No comment. Never met him. I don't know.
- [07:58]
B
Never met him either.
- [08:00]
C
So you know the Art Garfunkel of, of the Washington Post.
- [08:05]
A
No, but it's, it's just always, it's always been a little bit funny that this is, this is the, the kind of archetype. But it does. It's so funny. Re watching this movie now in the year 2025, again, after having spent my entire career in journalism, but in a journalism that. In an era of journalism that was defined by computers, defined by being able to access information more easily, like just being able to lay out the actual physical new. So I. For instance, here's Jonathan. This is a question you might be able to answer for me. What are those machines that they are using to create the words on the paper? Is that. No, I. All right. Typewriters. Typewriters. Typewriters are great. Typewriters are great. I love typewriters. But there was one. There's a very specific part of that that is kind of interesting and unusual for me as somebody who has used a typewriter is the paper itself. The paper itself that is on there, which has like kind of red borders on the side. And I'm watching it and I'm thinking to myself, oh, this is so they know how many column inches they're taking up. This is like a. This is like a physical trick to teach them, you know, how much space they are taking up in the newspaper, which is again, just Kind of, you know, interesting and neat on a physical, manual level.
- [09:21]
B
Yeah, Yeah. I mean, I should say I am just old enough. Just. I want to emphasize just. I am just old enough that when I was on my college paper, we were at the sort of end of the. Still laying out the newspaper, physically. Like, we would. We had computers, so we would type the articles, but then they would get sent to this special printer that would, you know, print out these long strips of copy that then we would cut with razor blades and we put wax on them. We'd put them on a piece of cardboard and, you know, we would do things like, it's too long. And you had to come up. You know, you became expert at, like, how to take out the one. You know, find the paragraph that has one word at the end that's like taking up a whole line and figure out in the previous three lines and. And. Or something you could take out. And then you're sitting. I mean, that's like my era. And I actually. I learned to type on a manual typewriter. And one of my favorite little tells. That's great. So there's that scene at the end, right. I think it's like one of the most famous scenes in the movie, right? So they've been, you know, they got the story wrong about Hugh Sloan. You know, the details are important. There's a scene where basically, because they're afraid of being bugged, you know, Woodward turns on the music and they're typing on the typewriter to each other, right. To type messages. Because that way the electronic surveillance won't pick up what they're saying. At the end of a sentence, Bernstein types an exclamation point, but there's no exclamation point on the keyboard. So what he has to do is he types an apostrophe and then a period. Or maybe it's a period and then apostrophe, I forget. But that's how you should do it on a manual typewriter and all that stuff. You know, aside from it being fun to kind of watch now, because, I mean, I remember, like I said, learning to type on a manual typewriter, the form drove the content so much because you had to fit everything, right? Things had to fit. And you really had to be disciplined about getting the important stuff up top because you didn't know what kind of column inches you'd had at the back. And that stuff had to get up there front. You can ask Sam Stein whether he wishes. Who edits me, whether he wishes we still had that constraint on writing or on length, at least. But that was. That so much of that drove the way you wrote. And I think also about the fact that, you know, you edited by hand, you know, and I actually knew. I don't. Do people still use those symbols? I mean, I knew all the printer symbols like these sort of. The. Sort of. The curlicue. And some of them are sort of still used. But, you know, nowadays you can just copy and paste so easily and move copy around. You couldn't do that back then. It was actually quite hard to do. And, you know, the. The ability to both write more cleanly on your first take, but then also to be able to re. That was a whole skill that's. You don't necessarily need anymore, I think. I don't know.
- [11:55]
A
Well, that's one of the great sequences in this movie, is where Bernstein comes in and just kind of starts taking Woodward's copy and rewriting it to, like, all right, you get. You got to get this part up here. We gotta hit this. And then you gotta get. And at first, Woodward's like, what are you doing, man? What are you doing? And then he reads it like, all right, this is better. This is. You got it.
- [12:14]
C
Can I ask you guys. And this is not going to be a broad interest, so I don't want to spend more than a minute on it. But it has always been my thesis that the word processor rewired our brains in how we write, period. And so we are different writers than the people who did the craft and the discipline either in longhand. I mean, George Will famously used to do all of his columns in a yellow legal pad by longhand. Right? Wrote it at one take, or the people who typed things. And the ability to word process and delete and go back and move copy around has just taught us to approach writing in an entirely different way. So that it's barely even the same discipline in terms of how all the wires in your brain work. Yes or no? Does this sound crazy? Or.
- [13:11]
A
Jonathan, why don't you. I actually have a theory on this.
- [13:13]
B
But I think it's true. I absolutely think it's true. And I think, you know, I think, like, so many changes in technology, it has changed what skills matter in the sense that back then you actually had to be able to do it in one take. You did. I mean, that was a skill. Again, I'm old enough to remember that when I learned I was writing, you know, a summer intern at the Times Begin in New Orleans, like, and we actually had word processor, but it had. They had these they were like, yay big and there was like two lines of text you could see, so you couldn't see the whole thing at once. You had to just be able to sequence in your head beforehand because there just was no way to keep going back and forth. And if you didn't have that skill, you could be a journalist or you wouldn't be a good journalist. Nowadays, you don't need that skill as much. Right. And there's other skills. I actually have thought a lot about that recently, just in the context, and I definitely don't want to get off on this topic, but, like, when we think about AI and how it might change things or what skills in journalism are going to be important 10 years from now, as opposed to what skills are valuable now, I think that could have an even greater change. But, yeah, I do. I do think it's changed us.
- [14:18]
A
My thinking on this is that it has not just changed how we write and how we think about writing. It's also changed the form of the style of writing that is kind of preferred. I mean, I think now you have so many people not doing, strictly speaking, a Hunter S. Thompson or Tom Wolf thing, but there's so much more free association in writing that you can then go back and change and fix. You know, you just start typing and you're like, well, where am I going with this? Oh, here, I found. I found the thread and this is kind of what draws it together, which I think leads to a lot of, frankly, sloppiness and, you know, a lot of self. And not that I am ever sloppy or self indulgent, but I certainly see in my own writing sometimes, like, what am I. What am I doing here? Why. Why have I gone down this rabbit hole? It's because I don't actually have to, like, sit there and sketch out a. You know, here's.0.1.2.3.
- [15:09]
C
All right, so you guys want to talk about a qua movie?
- [15:12]
A
Yes, I would like to talk about it. Movie. Qua movie. So this is a. This is a movie. It's funny, I went back and reread William Goldman's section on this movie in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, and he makes the point that I have always. I've always totally agreed with that there's. This is not a story that should necessarily work as a movie. And it doesn't work as a movie for, like, business reasons. Like, distributors don't like movies about politics. Right. They. They don't like movies about journalism. There's no, there's nothing inherently Cinematic about journalism. There's, it's, it's, you know, there are issues of partisanship, whatever, like the, the. This should not work as a movie. And I sat down and I watched it on the Criterion channel this weekend or, you know, last weekend, whatever. And it is riveting from start to finish in a way that simply should not. Should not work. And there are several reasons for that. One, it is very well written. Good. Very, very good job, Mr. Goldman. You did. You nailed it. But. But the real reason is Robert Redford, and this is one of the reasons we're doing the show. Robert Redford recently passed away. Robert Redford is compelling on screen no matter what he is doing. And a lot of what he is doing in this movie is holding a telephone by his ears, eye acting, making a. Making a face when somebody says something interesting that he's like, oh. And that guides the viewer from moment to moment, from piece of information to piece of information in a way that I'm not going to say no other actor could do lots of. I'm sure there are many other. But he does it with such. With such ease and magnetism and like, movie star charm that it is compelling in every single moment. Yeah.
- [17:01]
C
I mean, so just to lay out very clearly why all the President's Men should not work on the screen. It is a story that everybody knows. Everybody knows how it ends. And nothing happens. Nothing happens. All of the action has already happened after five minutes of the movie. And nothing else happens after that. Every. And. And what you have is you have people making a series of phone calls and then calling other people and then having conversations about those phone calls. And it. Goldman. So Goldman is my favorite screenwriter of the last 50 years, and I think I've read every word he's ever written. Like, there are very few people I could say about this. I think I've read every book, every essay, everything he ever published. And he talked about this in the process for this and how hard it was precisely because of that. And you can. I think all the President's Men succeeds as a movie purely because of him. And Redford helps. But the structure that Goldman imposes and the way he moves the story makes it work in ways it has no business succeeding just as a piece of visual entertainment that is really engrossing to watch. And I think it works whether you know everything about Watergate or know nothing about Watergate. I've watched this with my kids. This. And my. My younger kids were. Were totally like, uh, what is this? But the older kids who know very Little about it, were very interested and they didn't follow everything and they wanted to, like, ask a bunch of questions, but they were not bored. They were like, ooh, this is kind of cool.
- [18:51]
A
Jonathan, you mentioned earlier the way the film ends on a mistake. It ends, you know, it ends on a story not being precisely right in terms of what was reported as having happened in a grand jury meeting and what actually happened. And it's interesting to look back on because this was Goldman's effort to defeat the, you know, everything that happens in this story problem. That's one. One of the reasons. There's another. There's another in his initial draft of the screenplay, this kind of random and interesting. It opens with the failed first attempt to break into the water grade because the. The Watergate break in was not. They didn't just, like, waltz in there and do their thing and get caught. They made multiple efforts to get into the building and were not able to do it. And this was kind of how he started the movie. And he did this for a very precise reason, which is, as JBL says, to get around the, you already know this story problem. Now, they ended up cutting that. They ended up cutting that from the movie because, you know, nobody. It was already too long. They needed to get cut to the chase. But it's kind of a smart way to think about this because I do think that, you know, we all kind of. We all know what happened in Watergate. And I watched this movie and I'm like, oh, yeah, I forgot about that. I forgot that that's what happens here, which is, you know.
- [20:16]
B
Well, and also, I mean, it ends with a mistake. And it ends. I mean, it ends in the middle of the story, right? I mean, the important parts, you know, the actual action of, like, Nixon's downfall, you know, starting with the hearings in front of Congress, that all happens both, you know, that's in that montage at the end where we see the sort of the teletype machine typing out the wire stories for each event. And that's part of the. A lot of that is in the book, by the way. Right? The book goes all the way up through when those hearings start. It doesn't go to Nixon's resignation because that's the sequel book, the Final Days also, which I actually think, as a book, actually has always been. I've actually preferred that as a book. But, you know, it ends kind of like, okay, we got through this. You know, we made this mistake and then we realized it and now we're going to correct it. And Ben Bradlee is going to stand behind us and we're going to pursue it. And then, oh, by the way, off, you know, here's. Here's a kind of list of things that now is going to happen in the next few months ending with Nixon's resignation. That should not work. But I think it's incredibly compelling. And also it's nice. There is a kind of I am not the movie guy. So just to be clear, I not want to talk about artistic touches here, but you know, the very first scene of the movie, right, Is that is the typewriter hitting the page right, of the date of the, of the, of the Watergate burglary. And the very end is Nixon resigns, period. And then just fade to black. And I always felt like that was a kind of nice full circle on it.
- [21:45]
C
Two other things that I think really help succeed, help make the movie succeed despite all those limitations. The first is that it never relies on music to manufacture emotion or tension when there isn't. So this is one. I hadn't really clocked this until my most recent screening of it. There is no music until about 34 minutes in. And the first time you get any semblance of a score is when we are in the main reading room of the Library of Congress and you get this long pullback shot, which now would just be a drone or God help us, done by cgi. But you know, it starts with. With the two of them over a table going through and just pulls back, pulls back, pulls back, pulls back until you get to see the entire reading room. It really holds the score off until, I think, I think there was almost never a score happening. While there is dialogue happening. When we get score, it is because there is non verbal stuff happening. Like somebody's running to catch a car, or we are getting long tracking shots pulling back to show Washington, which is another great thing. As the two of them go to get into a car, we begin with then another big pullback. And that must have been a helicopter shot until you. You see, not only I think it's M. No, I guess it wouldn't be M. I think it's like 17th and 18th street, or maybe it's 14th and 15th street all the way down to the title basement. So it never relies on music to manufacture emotions, which is. Which is a very powerful thing to do. And in lesser hands is what a director would have done. A director would have said, oh, this is intense enough. We gotta up the stakes. Give me some dramatic music in it. But the other thing is that none of the characters in the movie know what they have. And that is inherently interesting because we know how this story ends. But not only do they not know how the story ends, they don't even know what the story is. Right. I mean, they're pulling on a thread. And there is never a moment when Woodward and Bernstein are looking at each other going, you know, maybe we're going to be able to get Nixon with this. Nixon barely exists. Right. He's so far away. They don't have any sense that it could have anything to do with him. They're just pulling at stuff and pulling at stuff. And their obliviousness to the situation makes us more engaged in the situation, I think, and makes us care more about the story because we're finding out while they find out, even if we already know.
- [24:24]
B
Yeah. I feel like that's one of the ways it both builds drama and also did. Why I do think it's such a wonderful journalism movie for all of the flaws and misconceptions in it. Because when you're a journalist, and I don't. I'm not an investigative journalist. This is not what I tend to do. But when you're an investigative journalist or really any kind of journalist, you're trying to find out what's going on. You don't know as you're going through it. There is this suspense and. And it builds this suspense of. These guys don't know what they have. And. And you can feel the insecurity, right? You can. I mean, they're doubting themselves. They're not sure. And. And that's how it is. And I. Few really good journalism movies out there. And I do hope we'll do our pantheon later, because I have one, of course. Capture that. And then those two scenes you describe, I think they're like such important scenes. So the one in the Library of Congress. Right. And they're sitting there going through the card catalog. You know how we used to sort of. You know, the checkout slips that. Like how it used to be done in the library. And then that one where you pan back into seeing all of Washington. On the second one, when they're panning back to sound to look back at Washington. I'm pretty sure I might be confusing this with another scene. I don't think so. Is they're kind of talking about the list of names that are. They've gotten a list of names of CREEP employees and they're kind of. You know, it's one after another. And you just get the impression, you know, it's like Abbott and ABBA this. And then, aka, you know, you're going alphabetically, right? And I think one of the really things that the movie does, one of the things the movie really does well, which was. Which is tough, which is. It captures the tedium of journalism. So much of journalism is tedious, right? You're calling 10 people, or you're emailing nowadays 10 people, and you're going through records, and it takes forever, and it's boring. And the problem is, if you convey that on film, it's also boring. And those two scenes did such a great job of just in fairly brief moments that again, with the music added and the sort of the way the camera pans, I think you get that impression. You understand that, like, wow, this took a lot of grinding, boring work to figure out how to build this story together. And I think that's really important. And that, to me, is something that was. I don't know how much that was intentional or not, but so it is.
- [26:37]
C
If I could just jump in here. So William Goldman calls this problem that. You're referring to the fallacy of imitative form, which is when you have to convey to viewers and the audience something that is boring, but you have to do it in a way that isn't boring. And this is a. This is a classic screenwriter problem. And it's something he wrestled with in all the President's Men, and I think for all the reasons you say, just he succeeded wildly.
- [27:03]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, this is. This to. To kind of sum up all of these points, this is not really a journalism story, if you were looking at genre, right? It's a mystery, it's a noir. This is this. This movie. The structure of the screenplay and the way the kind of story unfolds reminds me much more of Chinatown than it does even like Spotlight, which has its own kind of mystery elements to it, or like Shattered Glass or something like that. This is. This is a movie where they. They think they are chasing down one story and it turns into something else entirely about two thirds of the way through. And you're like, oh, this is the movie I'm in now. This is. This is a different. This is a different story entirely. And it is. It's funny. Again, just to go back to Goldman, who, you know, he's like, as a writer, I always lived in fear of getting the call that they were going to call Robert Towne, of course, who is the screenwriter of Chinatown. The one last thing, just on a purely visual level, this movie, it does kind of capture that kind of 1970s paranoid thriller style with so many different ways. I mean, my favorite shot is one of the shots in the news room where you, you have the, you have kind of a split diopter thing going on, which, where you have the stuff in the background is in focus the same as the stuff in the foreground. And it's, it's a shot of, I'm pretty sure it's Robert Redford typing away at his computer. And then in the background you have all the reporters looking at the returns coming in, which, again, is the thing that everybody actually cares about. They care about the primaries, they care about this election that's going on. They want to be out on the road chasing these stories down. And he's just sitting there banging away at his keyboard, writing the story that everyone will remember that become the actual, again, kind of foundational myth of modern journalism. But on top of that, like, it is, I don't, I don't know, I, I don't know how you guys felt about this. There is a, A, A, a scene now that is a little bit funny where Robert Redford is kind of like running in the darkness and he turns around because he thinks somebody's chasing him. And it's, it is, it is, it is aping this. Again, the 19, the 1970s paranoid thriller style is something like Three Days of the Condor or Marathon man or this, this idea of kind of like omnipresent shadowy forces all around coming, coming after, coming after them, which is. I get something they were worried about at the time for good reason. You know, there's lots of, lots of bad things happening. But it was, but it is, it is, it is one of the few moments in the movie that does feel like a movie shot as opposed to a real life shot. Does that make sense? Am I right, jbl? You look a little more skeptical.
- [29:52]
C
You're like, no, this is, I think that's right. I think that's right. That's a moment where we step out of the, oh, it's a documentary into this is a movie. Because there are big stretches of it where it does feel almost like this is a hidden camera documentary where we are simply seeing the internal dynamics of how a newsroom works, where we are unobserved observers. And in that it switches to. You're an audience watching a movie. But that's fine. Doesn't bother me.
- [30:27]
A
It's a movie. It is a movie.
- [30:29]
C
So can we talk about the time capsule aspects of this thing? Because Jonathan and I are almost exactly the same age. We may be a year apart. And so we have similar backgrounds. When I first got my. When I got my first job in journalism at the Weekly Standard, we did have in the office a set of phone books. Not for, like, the whole country, but just a lot of phone books. Because if you wanted to find somebody's phone number or address, that was the way you did it. And there, you know, there. There are payphones everywhere. My kids didn't even know what those were. My kids were like, what's that thing? And did you have to explain the.
- [31:13]
A
Rotary dial to them? All right, so you put your finger at the number and you gotta spin it.
- [31:17]
C
Yeah. And they were like, but it takes forever to dial the number. Like, yeah, it does, doesn't it?
- [31:23]
B
So, but.
- [31:24]
C
But of all those things. So I would say this, first of all, also Washington of 1976, I guess, this movie shot in 75, 76, that Washington still looked a lot like the Washington I came to in 97 when I got to Washington. So I arrive in early 1997, and the city still looks very much like it does in this movie now. It's unrecognizable. Like, if you were to get shots of D.C. now, it could be Austin. You know, it's a totally different place. But the much bigger thing is the idea that a. A newspaper can matter if people are just going to talk to you like, I'm from the Washington Post. I think the Washington. Bernstein says, I think the Washington Post deserves the same consideration as blah, blah, blah, and he means it. That's not said cynically or sardonically. And the Florida attorney, who. Attorney General or whoever he is, who hears that, well, it strikes him as like, yeah, well, I guess the Washington Post does deserve that sort of courtesy, I guess. And you could say, I'm from the Washington Post. And that means they're going to take your call and they're going to. They're going to listen to you and you can make a difference in the world. And there are people who are going to be scandalized if they find out the truth. And that is a foreign country in ways that I think make no sense to anybody anymore. Am I overstating this?
- [33:01]
B
I mean, I'm not as pessimistic. I mean, I feel like there's been erosion of the New York Times, and obviously we can get to the. And there's the internal erosions at places like the Washington Post because of ownership and what's happening there. But I don't know, at some point, a, I still feel like the New York Times, the Washington Post, cnn, whatever, they still carry cachet. People still care about them. Donald Trump cares about them. Right. He talked. He wouldn't be so angry about the coverage he gets from them if he didn't still care about them. And I'm also, I will say I'm also, not to get off on a tangent, but I'm like, I'm also one of these optimists who thinks that as we get into more questionable content and fake content from the AIs of the world, et cetera, that actually will circle back a little bit to the time when people will be looking to authorities they trust and the sort of places like the Post of all the President's Men, which not only have the institutional stamp, but also when people can be confident that there were people there editing. And in fact, I actually think that's going to make a comeback at some point. Admittedly, that may be a naive hope, but that's what I'm hanging my hat on.
- [34:18]
A
I want to split my response into two streams, into two, two different, two different avenues here because I think they're, I think, I'm sure there has been some erosion of, you know, official fear of the Washington Post, New York Times, whatever. But I do think that if you, if you are working in a, in a professional setting and you get a call from the Washington Post and they're like, we need, I need to ask you questions about this. At the very least, your first thought is, oh, fuck, you know, you are not sure where this is going to go. You, you don't. Your, your, your response to that is more serious than getting a call from Joe Blow, whoever, getting, getting a call from Streamer, Destiny, whatever. You know, that is different, I think, from the public response to these, to these stories and to this reporting. Right. So it's funny again, I was rewatching Three Days of the Condor the other day, and that movie, spoiler without spoiling too much, it ends with Robert Redford outside of the headquarters of the New York Times building and he is saying to his antagonist in this film, I have told them my story and they are going to tell the world and that's going to bring down your enterprise. And this is on the heels of all the President's Men and Watergate, et cetera. And there is this sense of a story told story reported out and read by the public and, you know, kind of filtered through. All the rest of the media would have that sort of impact, would have a world changing, life changing impact. I think that from today's perspective, that feels very quaint. That feels very. Looking at, looking at the, the modern media landscape that we have now and thinking like, yes, reporting out this story and having the public hear about it would result in great change. And the, the guilty being punished does not feel like a true thing. Does that, is that, does that kind of square your circle?
- [36:26]
C
Jbl no, you're, you're, I think you're, you are underselling it. It isn't that even that change wouldn't come. It's that public opinion wouldn't even move. Like, I mean, forget real world consequences, people wouldn't care. And I don't even know that we need to litigate this. I think it's just. Qed. Three weeks ago, the New York Times put out a massive story about the Trump administration and the crypto deal it did with chips and Qatar. And it was $2 billion, and President's agents were in the room negotiating basically both things at the same time. The kind of thing which next to Watergate is an unimaginable scandal. And it was a big story. And it was just like, we're doing Watergate every day. We're doing Watergate every day, and nobody cares. Nobody cares. Even the people who hate Trump don't particularly care. They're just like, yeah, that's right. We're doing Watergate every day. What are you gonna do? And this is just the reality of the world we live in. And this gets to a deep question I'm gonna ask you guys towards the end. I'll just float it right now. At the end of the day, was it better for America to have known about the corruption? I don't know. I don't know.
- [37:48]
B
So I'm going to. I'll leave that till later because I want to ponder that. I'll just say this, which is I agree that this problem that. Do people care? People don't seem to care. And we are having a Watergate every day. I mean, what was Watergate? If you pan back as, as I guess you would in the film all the President's Men, you know, what, what is Watergate really about? Right? It's about using a big. Part of what was going on was using the power of the state for a personal political agenda. Right? I mean, that's exactly what we're seeing now. We saw it. That's, you know, it's in another form, what we saw with Comey, all of this stuff, except it's actually. You don't need an investigative journalist to suss this stuff out because it's like, right in front of You. They're announcing it. They put it on.
- [38:30]
C
They announce it. It's the policy.
- [38:32]
A
It is.
- [38:32]
B
It is the policy. The one thing I would say is that I'm not so sure that how much of that is a journalism failing in the sense that. And here we get into the founding myth of all the President's Men, which is as great a story as that is of journal and how important that coverage was to the development of the Watergate scandal. I mean, so much that was about Congress getting involved, right. And investigating, and so much that was about Republicans standing up at certain points and saying, no, we won't tolerate this. You know, we. This is too far. Lines have been crossed. And I. That is such. So I. When so much of what people care about is going to be taking cues from leaders. And that's why we need this. You know, it's so. This is why it's so important. What I think the thing that depresses me most about this moment is that we just. We don't have those people anymore. I don't see them anywhere. I mean, there's such a small handful. I mean, there's the Mike Pence during January 6th and a handful like that, but they're just few and far between. And that's what scares me about this moment and the founding myth of all the President's Men. I mean, if you watch the movie and you didn't know anything else, you would think Woodward and Bernstein brought down Nixon. They played a role. That coverage was incredibly important and it was wonderful journalism and deserves to be remembered as wonderful journalism. But there was a lot more going on than just these two reporters in the Washington Post.
- [39:46]
A
Well, this gets us back to the episode we did last week, jbl, where we were talking about clear and present danger. And like you forget about that movie, the kind of inciting, the thing that moves everything else is Jack Ryan's fear of a Congressional oversight committee, Right? It's like he is worried about getting called in front of Congress. And because he has already testified, he has testified under oath that we do not have troops fighting this drug war in South America, and oops, turns out they're there, he's got to figure out what the deal is, otherwise he could be in a lot of trouble. He could be in a lot of trouble, but nobody cares about that anymore.
- [40:27]
C
So, look, this is a circular chicken and egg question. I understand we can't resolve it, but what Jonathan is asking here, Jonathan is saying the problem is that the elites have abdicated their responsibilities within the institutions and that is certainly true. I would simply ask, is that what has happened? Because the public no longer demands that they uphold their responsibilities. Because that's what I think it is. I think that the public became rotten. And this gets to my question of is it better to know or not know? Because if you don't know that Watergate is happening, then you can at least tell yourselves that you care about this stuff and that you expect upright behavior from your public servants. And you can know in the back of your head that you're not always getting it and sometimes they're crooks. But the baseline accepted thing by everybody is, we're not going to take that. Once you have it, there's an initial recoiling, which is what you get in Watergate. You get the Republican senators who go to NIXON and say, Mr. President, we're sorry, but the votes aren't there there. You're going to have to step down for the good of the country. That happens once, but after that, everyone gets habituated to this shit real quick and the public just retreats their corners and is like, eh, I'm okay with it. I'm okay with the corruption, actually. And once people are willing to say that out loud, all of public morality starts shifting. And this is. I forget who it was. Maybe it was. Jonathan Rauch wrote a piece about how the backlash of all of the good government reforms of the 1980s and 1990s was to eliminate a bunch of political graft. And that the political graft was actually how legislation happened, that it was the corruption which allowed people to buy votes by building some stupid thing in some district. And so, yes, money was wasted, but on the whole, government was more efficient. And I wonder if one of the downstream effects of Watergate is that, yes, we stopped the corruption of the Nixon administration. And the ultimate price for that was that we, over the long haul, destroyed in the public any appetite for good conduct by the government and the President.
- [43:14]
B
I guess I have more faith in the public. I'm an. I'm a hopeless.
- [43:18]
C
Have you met the public, Jonathan?
- [43:21]
B
I do. I mean, I mean. So my theory on this is that people have always been, you know, this sort of mix of, you know, fine, we don't care about, you know, this ambivalence about these sort of things. Well, so unpack a few things. First of all, what you said about sort of cleaning up government earmarking is actually like a longtime hobby horse of mine. Like, I actually think earmarks, like, we need more earmarks. Like, that's how you get legislation done.
- [43:43]
A
Bring earmarks Back.
- [43:45]
B
Yes, yes. I actually once did. One of my favorite articles I ever wrote early on was like, in defense of Pork Barrel spending and I'm going to die on that hill. Just. I wanted to.
- [43:53]
C
I remember that piece.
- [43:56]
B
But I think, you know, people are always this mix of motives and there's, they have their idealist side, their, their cynical side, their, their, their, their beliefs that it's all corrupt, it doesn't matter. And this, no, no, I do care about this. I want government to be responsive and I care about people kind of getting rich on the public trough or, you know, using power in abusive ways. And, you know, it's chicken and egg. But, you know, I put, I just put a lot more blame on the elites and the leaders, you know, for not, you know, both in the, in the sort of sense of, you know, in the immediate, you know, this sort of people not standing up to their own party when their own party does wrong and not showing that there's a principle beyond partisanship, but even at a deeper level, just not delivering. I mean, I think part of this is a much larger story about people just feel like government no longer delivers for them, it no longer does what they want it to do, and they just sort of tune it out. But I don't think they.
- [44:49]
C
Have they not noticed, like, the 60 years of peace and prosperity since the Second World War? Jonathan, did they not notice that the Cold War was won without the American military having to fire a shot against? I mean, this is a hobby horse of mine, this idea that, like, oh, well, everything is terrible and these elites didn't deliver in the way that previous generations of elites did. I'm sorry, is this not the richest country in the world? I mean, like, have, have we not navigated an incredibly fraught period of 80 years better than anybody could have possibly hoped? Previous elites, they gave us the First World War and the Great Depression. I think we've had a pretty good fucking run. And it just seems to me that the American government has delivered for people over the course of certainly since World War II in ways that are at least as good and probably significantly better than it has at any other time in our nation's history.
- [45:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, on the grants, sure. I mean, and I think part of it is, you know, it's. This is. You can see this in a sort of. On large scale or a small scale. You pick your issue. I've been thinking a lot lately about, like, vaccines, right? And people take vaccines for granted and, you know, you know, they forget like, you know, what it was like to have people dying of polio and measles all the time, you take that stuff for granted. But I do think there is a sense that people who have struggled in various ways and, you know, you get into very specific political circumstances here, but, you know, you know, Midwestern industrial workers, etcetera, Feeling like they've been abandoned, no one's listening to them, you know, from either party. I feel like that's real. I feel like there was a kind of taking them for granted. I think there's a lot else going on there. That's not the only reason these people are upset. But, you know, I get that. And I. I do put some blame on. On. On.
- [46:44]
A
On.
- [46:45]
B
On elected officials and leaders for not. For either not taking it seriously or not. Or not delivering. With the caveat that a lot of that's because the institutions of American government that I feel like are sort of rigged in a way to make action, that kind of action difficult nowadays. But that's a whole other conversation. And now we're getting away from the movie, and I feel bad.
- [47:04]
A
My only thought on this is I do think that we have gotten to a point where everyone says, well, what about what the other side did? Yes, okay, fine, you can. This prosecution is good or bad or whatever, but what about this one over here? And the. The what about ism has just led to a total collapse in any sort of rigorous standard of right and wrong, which is a separate problem. And kind of gets to JBL's question of is it better to know? Because once you know everything and you see it all kind of play out, it is. It's a little bit depressing. Little bit. Little bit hard. Do we want to. Do we want to do the journalism movie pantheon here? Do we want to. Do we.
- [47:49]
C
Hell yeah.
- [47:50]
A
I don't want to do. I don't want to do like a draft or anything. No, nothing too fancy like that.
- [47:54]
C
That's for another show. There's another show where we do drafts. What show is that? We're not gonna tell you.
- [47:59]
A
That's enough. Different show, different show. But we could just do our top three here. Jonathan, do you wanna. Do you wanna do your top three?
- [48:08]
C
Sure, sure, go for it.
- [48:09]
B
And I will say I know a lot of people sometimes. Well, I don't know if people do, but you mentioned earlier Shattered Glass, and I'm gonna recuse myself from that one. Cause, you know, I was there for that at the New Republic, so not enough distance to judge that as a movie. So my two favorite, along with all the President's Men, which I absolutely would put in the pantheon. I put Spotlight there as another movie that again, also not entirely. I mean, I guess it works as a movie and it's been a while since I've seen it, but again, does a really nice job of capturing both the tedium and also the lack of glamour. I loved that. I remember when I had my first summer internship and I. And so I was. I was in New Orleans at the Times picu and I got sent to like a little suburban bureau. And I'm all excited, this young, eager beaver, you know, reporter to go into the newsroom. But first, you know, they sent me and it was like in a strip mall, right? And this like, literally, like I just looked like they bought it two months before. There's a bunch of desks. There's like a hole in the ceiling. This is not. I mean, the Washington Post, they made it look messy. You know, the famous story, right? They actually brought, you know, trash to. They. They replicated, you know, so they're like, originally, they. The set was too neat and they made it look. It looks messy, but it's kind of. It's got a certain majesty to it, right? It's got the big expanse. You got the. And this was just literally looked like a hole. Like it could have been an insurance agency or something. And spotlight. The room they're in, the team that's doing the spotlight stuff is in one of those kind of rooms. So I love that. And it really. The kind of the. Again, the grind of journalism. And then my other one is this is. I feel like now I'm not a movie person. So Sonny, you have to help me out here. But I feel like this is an underappreciated movie for quality of cast, quality of script and performance. And it's not realistic. It's kind of apocryphal. But it's a movie called the Paper from. I don't know if you know, but it's Michael Keaton, Glenn Ko's, I mean, incredible cast, Robert Duvall. And it's, you know, it's a. It's not realistic, right? It's not a real story, first of all. And it's not. It's meant to be a kind of dramatized, not Aaron Sorkin esque, but, you know, a kind of funny, you know, and it has a kind of manufactured plot. But I feel like the way it kind of seems, it does capture the sort of upstart underdog ethos, especially of like you're sort of, you know, not, you know, this Is like a New York. It's set in a New York tabloid that's like almost going out of business. And there's this great scene where the guy, Michael Keaton's being, you know, recorded by the equivalent of the New York Times. And he walks in and they're all wearing suits and they're talking foreign languages. I just, I love the vibe of that movie. And I feel like in terms of the gestalt of newspaper journalism as it used to be. I don't know if it still is. It kind of, really kind of captured that.
- [50:43]
A
Yeah, that, that, that came up the other day. I had a writer for New York Mag on the phone talking about all of Ron Howard's movies. And that was his pick for favorite. Was, you know, the paper is. It's great. Everyone, everyone loves the paper. Jbl, Your, Your top three.
- [50:59]
C
My top three first. All the. In no order.
- [51:02]
B
Order.
- [51:02]
C
These are not in order. All the President's Men. I mean, I'm sorry, I know we just talked about it, but this is like saying, you know, give me your. The best movies, but you can't say the Godfather. No, the Godfather's in there. I'm sorry. It's the best. The Insider, which is a Michael Mann movie about the 60 Minutes fight with Brown and Williamson tobacco. It is just a sensational movie. Top to bottom, it's about broadcast news, which is very, very different. Very different type of journalism, but it's great. And if you haven't seen the Insider, treat yourself to that. And the third one is Wes Anderson's the French Dispatch. This is not journalism in the way that we have been talking about. This is. The French Dispatch is a movie length love letter to the New Yorker. And if you are the type of person who likes general interest magazines, which is all I ever wanted to do, I have never once in my life had any desire to be Bob Woodward or to work at the Washington Post or. That is not the kind of journalism that appealed to me. I looked at Mr. Sean's New Yorker days with Joan Didion and just Updike and all of these great, great writers who would go out and find just crazy stories, long form stories to tell. That's what the French Dispatch is about. And if you like that sort of journalism, this is your movie.
- [52:34]
A
The French Dispatch is the only movie I've ever seen to perfectly capture the experience of submitting an expense report at a journalistic outlet. It's the. And this is, you know, you will. I say this and it sounds insane. It sounds like an insane thing. To say. But the, the French Dispatch is. I remember we talked, we talked about it once, JBL on, on another show. And we, we were just like. I don't understand how anyone who has not worked in an intellectual journal can understand what's happening in this movie, can appreciate it on like a very fine level, like somebody who spent their entire career there, because that is, it gets to not just the actual act of putting such a thing together, but all of the various personalities. The guy who is employed there and has not written a story in 17 years, you know, the guy who lives on his expense account, the, you know, the copy editor who's running around trying to make everything fit and come in on time, et cetera, et cetera. It's so good. I love it. But you picked it, so I'm not going to include it. But I'll just go with three. I'll go with three movies that are all a little bit more dyspeptic about journalism because I am a dyspeptic person. Ace in the Hole, of course, is a, is a great Kirk Douglas movie from the, from the 50s or 60s. I forget exactly what year that came out. Shattered Glass, which I do love. Jonathan. I know I won't. We can talk offline about, about that movie. But Shattered Glass does capture. It is very much like the French Dispatch in that it captures a very certain sort of thing about a very specific milieu. And that is one that I was very close to which like, again, just like Washington D.C. all three of us were. Right, right, right, right. Well, all three of us live.
- [54:25]
C
Shattered Glass story.
- [54:26]
A
No, no, no, no, I know, I know, but the, the idea of Shattered. Shattered Glass captures like a very perfect sort of idea of DC long form opinion journalism in a way that I have always found much more relatable than frankly, all the President's Men. I didn't know a lot of Robert Redford, but I knew a couple Hayden Christensens and it was a different experience. And then the last one.
- [54:53]
C
I'm sorry for people who may not know this but who know Shattered Glass story but haven't followed all the way. Shattered Glass is made even more poignant by what happened after the movie and what happened to Stephen Glass. Because we got a piece about this. I don't know if you remember about 10 years ago he went to law school, he sort of had a failed legal career. And what happened to him is he got married and his wife got sick very, very early on. And he basically spent his adult life as a full time caretaker for the love of his life, who has had terrible, terrible health issues. And it is. It's just such an interesting end of that story in ways that take this guy who you think couldn't possibly be redeemed, and redeem him in a way that you couldn't possibly have imagined. That's all. We could throw a link in the show notes. Do you remember that piece?
- [55:51]
A
Sure. It's neither here nor there. That doesn't have. You're trying to introduce pathos into this, and I don't appreciate that.
- [55:58]
C
Okay, I'm sorry.
- [56:00]
A
And the last is Nightcrawler, the Dan Gilroy movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal, about a video. Like a freelance videographer who runs around Los Angeles just getting footage of car crashes and that sort of thing.
- [56:14]
C
I was very disappointed in that movie. I thought it was an X Men spinoff. No, not very, very disappointed when I showed up to that theater.
- [56:21]
A
Not about Kurt, what's his name? The Bamfing mutant? No, but I love Nightcrawler and all these are great movies. So nobody mentioned the Killing Fields.
- [56:34]
B
That would be the other one I would. I would. Thought about putting on my list. I'm surprised that didn't come up.
- [56:38]
C
Is that Tommy Lee Jones?
- [56:41]
B
It's. What's the guy's name? He was Sam Waterston, right? Or what's.
- [56:45]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [56:45]
C
Oh, Sam Waterston.
- [56:46]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [56:49]
A
The Insider is so good, too, because it is. It's very much a Michael Mann movie where you have, like, Al Pacino shot in silhouette against a beach. And it's like, oh, this could be Miami Vice. This could be, you know, he. It could be any of those movies, but it's a journalism movie. Parting thoughts on all the President's Men. Anything you want to leave folks with as we. As we head off here. What does all the President's Men teach us about our moment?
- [57:13]
C
Jvl it teaches us that this is a debased country with a decadent people who no longer are interested in corruption. And I'm not sure where you go from there. That is what civilizational suicide looks like. And watch all the President's Men to understand why America was what it was, why it was able to win the Cold War, and why it is now in terminal decline.
- [57:45]
A
Okay, Jonathan, do you have something slightly less depressing to send us out on.
- [57:50]
B
End of America or not? No, I do have something slightly less depressing to say, which is, I think you should watch all the President's Men to remember what can happen when you have institutions and people at institutions who believe in Principle who stand up to power and authority. And that's still possible. I believe it is still possible. I refuse to believe it's not. And although I am very concerned that we, we both are losing those institutions and at the institutions we do have, we're losing the people behind them. The Washington Post, unfortunately, apparently being one of those institutions in jeopardy.
- [58:33]
C
I'll.
- [58:34]
A
I, I will go again. Pull pure movie, full movie here and just say I miss a time when you could have something like at the. Did you guys notice on the title, the title card of this movie? This was. This is a Robert Redford and Alan J. Pacula movie. This is how it is kind of presented. It's not. I didn't remember that.
- [58:52]
C
Was he produced.
- [58:54]
A
Usually you say. Usually it's an Alan J. Pacula film. This was a Robert Redford and Alan J. Which is. It just. It's, it's an interesting little touch. And it is a reminder of a time when people used to have enough sway to get a movie like this made by a major studio and spend a lot of money and time on it. It would be a big. Be a big hit. This movie was a big hit. Made a lot of money. Made a lot of money. And people went to go see it and won awards. And we. It would be nice to have a star system that allowed things like this to get made again. That would be.
- [59:24]
C
It's no conjuring, Sonny.
- [59:26]
A
It's no. The conjuring Last Rites. It's no Demon hunter.
- [59:32]
C
Weapons.
- [59:33]
A
You know, movie. Hey, weapons. We can discuss weapons another time. But it's the. Anyway, it's all depressing. So anyway. All right. Bulwark Movie Club. Jonathan Cohn, thank you for being on the show today. Thank you for sitting in for Sarah. Really appreciate it.
- [59:48]
B
Oh my gosh. Thanks, Ryan. This was so much fun. Thank you.
- [59:52]
A
And once again, this is gonna take like three weeks to put out. Cause we're gonna photoshop that poster into every frame of this film. Jbl, thank you for being on the show today.
- [60:01]
C
Yeah, I can't wait for next week where we're gonna do Margin Call.
- [60:04]
A
Should we. Do you keep wanting to do Margin Call?
- [60:07]
C
I'm just gonna say it until we do it know.
- [60:09]
A
All right. Okay, fine. And remember to hit like and subscribe. Make sure to share this with your friends. Send it. If you got folks who like movies and they're tired of politics. It's also boring and dreary and depressing. Give them this show which will cheer them right up. It's a wonderful time.