Hacker Cinema
All the President's Men
1976 · Film · 138 min
Directed by Alan J. Pakula
During the 1972 elections, two reporters' investigation sheds light on the controversial Watergate scandal that compels President Nixon to resign from his post.
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16 comments on Hacker News
Discussion of the free-press in america or elsewhere invariably suffers from lack of historical perspective. Without oversimplifying, the press has always been biased and ideologically motivated to a degree that few appreciate. Because of "all the president's men" and other films lionizing the press' infallible, dogged, ruthless dedication to the truth, people suddenly believe that every journalist is "supposed to be" a paragon of truth-seeking objectivity, dogmatically devoted to the dissemination of "truth to power", but historically and today and even during watergate, the press was a gang of jackals doing yellow muckraking. This has its purpose and we shouldn't hate journalists for doing their job, but it's a complete category error to assume that the press is there to report honestly and objectively.
Oh wow, last night I was just listening to his commentary on "All the President's Men" (which came up a couple of weeks ago here on HN when we were talking about ratfucking).
Great movie, great commentary.
They really don't make them like Robert Redford anymore — truly one of my favorite actors who could elevate anything he was in. 89 is an impressive run — especially given how sharp he was right up til the end.
If you've never seen his movies, you can basically pick them at random and you'll find a good one. But All the President's Men is one of my favorite films of all time.
Reminder that "All the President's Men" - the film - really holds up as a film depicting difficult journalism amidst childish corruption, and depicts an interview with Donald Segretti, who brought the term "ratfucking" to prominence.
Also of note: ratfucking was employed extensively in student government elections in this era. I think it's worth considering whether that's still the case. Student governments at large state universities are far more powerful than many people realize, and corruption at that level is probably just as impactful as corruption in Washington, DC.
If you want to stick with film, you could try All The President's Men, 1976
The film was nominated in multiple Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA categories; Jason Robards won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Ben Bradlee. In 2010, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Different how? Like Lolita (1962) ? All the President's Men (1976)? Miss Saigon (1989, a play I admit, but a controversial one): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Saigon_controversy
??
I don't even know what decade you're referring to. Movies, plays, and other forms of entertainment always had politics. Some of them (like Lolita) explicitly tried to court controversy.
Or do you mean like Disney movies, like how Peter Pan (1953 Disney cartoon) has great, "non political" songs like "What makes the red man red" ??
Like, you can't escape politics. Even when you're trying to be politically neutral (like a Disney cartoon aimed at children in the 1950s), these sorts of political issues just come up... because our base assumptions of life are in fact political.
Whether we court politics on purpose (Dr. Strangelove, Lolita), or accidentally (Peter Pan 1953, "What Makes the Red Man Red?"), these sorts of things have been going on since the dawn of movies and cartoons.
Lemme leave things off with this 1940s comic by Dr. Seuss: https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb3618599q/_2.jpg
I think Soul of a New Machine could still work as some gritty All The President's Men style movie. Just make it genuinely look and feel like it's from the era and I'm down. But use the garish colors, harsh lights, and loud offices. The bad hair, smoking at the office and sexist office remarks. Just like how there's modern italo disco and synthwave bands I want it to fully escape from the now
I could only find "All the President's Men" (1976) as the source for that quote. While googling that, it seems like he never said "Follow the money" either :)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/All_the_President%27s_Men_(film)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/W._Mark_Felt
Nixon's Attorney General, the horrible, horrible man, John Mitchell, had his wife silenced by drugging and sequestering her.
"If you guys could get John Mitchell, that would be beautiful." (Quote from All the President's Men)
There's an interesting 1994 BBC documentary, "The Watergate Affair" that talks about it. Mitchell was one of the few players in that sordid saga that didn't speak on camera. They're such a bunch of smug bastards, the lot of them, except for John Dean; he's only half an ass.
But, yeah, what was the elephant doing in your pajamas?
I'm sure you can find lots of bad and shallow movies released in 1976 (e.g. a rather bad remake of King Kong) though there were also a number of good films in addition to Network (All the President's Men, Taxi Driver, Rocky). Network was particularly good though and seems rather prescient today.
> Thomas Drake and William Binney
Someone should write a book or make a movie about those two men the modern equivalent of All the President's Men.
> When Hollywood mythologizes a real story that has captured the public imagination and is emblematic of our era, it's Hollywood at it's finest. It's Hollywood doing exactly what it ought to be doing but rarely does.
The problem is that Hollywood sometimes "mythologizes" a real story in the vernacular, non-academic sense of the quoted term: It adopts a false narrative, often in the form of a conspiracy theory, which then gets embedded in our collective cultural memory for a long time. (Examples: Amadeus; Zero Dark Thirty; Oliver Stone's JFK [0].)
Another version is when Hollywood creates a false narrative, or sub-narratives, in the name of "making a catchier story line" and with the excuse of "artistic license," which unjustly damage the reputations of real people. (Examples: Spotlight and All the President's Men. [1] [2].)
[0] http://www.livescience.com/27364-oscars-innacurate-historical-films.html
[1] http://news.wgbh.org/post/how-hollywood-distorts-reality-spotlight-example
[2] http://www.mhsmantra.com/2014/04/06/history-vs-hollywood-miracle/
Mass surveillance isn't about being able to spy on everybody, it's about being able to spy on anybody. That's basically what companies like Palantir facilitate. If you work there, you may be a bad person, and you should probably feel bad.
I watched "All the President's Men" on Amazon last night. Through practically every scene, I couldn't help thinking, What if people like this had the technology to keep from getting caught?
It would (will) be a very different movie, to say the least.
Her name is Hilde? The same as the heroine Hilde Johnson in the greatest movie about journalism (yes, that includes All The President's Men IMHO), His Girl Friday? You couldn't ask for better journalism parents :).
BTW His Girl Friday, directed by Howard Hawks, is not only one of the best movies of its era, it is one of the few great movies that are truly in the public domain. You can watch it on Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/his_girl_friday
> Why are you quoting invented dialogue?
Because art both affects our beliefs and provides a nice form for expressing them.
Today's trivial "Follow the money" does not appear in the book "All the President's Men" and the relevant reporters never said or wrote it. It comes from the movie, written by William Goldman. And now "every" story about investigative journalism cites it.
"Follow the money" is Deep Throat's famous line in All the President's Men:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074119/quotes
Great article, by the way.