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Even at 30, 'All the President's Men' reverberates

Robert Redford reflects on the 1976 film's significance and why it remains a symbol of journalism at its best.

NEW YORK - All the President's Men, the classic 1976 film about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's unraveling of Watergate, opens with hammering typewriter keystrokes that sound like gunshots.

Thirty years later, those shots - forged by relentless digging by two unlikely Washington Post reporters - still reverberate.

Today, when scandals over inaccuracy and allegations of softness plague the media, All the President's Men is frequently referenced as a beacon of a bygone era when journalists were seen as heroes.

Woodward and Bernstein, in real life and as played, respectively, by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, were sharp-witted reporting sleuths, pursuing and exposing one of history's biggest governmental cover-ups.

"It was really a thriller. There was danger out there," Redford says. "The film was using the typewriter and the telephone and pencil on paper as weapons."

All the President's Men remains one of the touchstones in Redford's career, which includes other socially conscious films such as The Candidate and Three Days of the Condor.

Three decades after it was made, the movie arrives Tuesday in a two-disc special edition DVD. It includes a commentary from Redford and a featurette on the recent revelation of the identity of Woodward's secret informant, Deep Throat: former FBI agent W. Mark Felt.

For Redford, 69, it's an unusual opportunity to look back on a film he remains proud of. Redford, who co-produced, was largely responsible for the movie getting made.

He spent several years on President's Men and first approached Woodward and Bernstein while they were still working on their book by the same name. It was even Redford's idea to tell the story from the journalists' perspective, which the reporters quickly adopted, refashioning their book to focus more on their experience.

"Nixon had already resigned, and the held opinion (in Hollywood) was, "No one cares. No one wants to hear about this,"' Redford says. "And I said, "No, it's not about Nixon. It's about something else. It's about investigative journalism and hard work."'

Soon, director Alan Pakula and Hoffman signed on, as did Jason Robards, who won an Oscar for his legendary, "Woodstein!"-shouting performance as Post editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee.

Redford and Hoffman spent weeks researching their roles, hanging out with Post reporters at work. Extreme lengths were taken for realism, including building a replica of the paper's newsroom, even littering it with real Post paper trash.

More important than the unmasking of Deep Throat, Redford says, are the similarities of Nixon's coverup to the secretive nature of the Bush administration.

Watergate, he says, "is happening every day. It's pretty transparent. It's not something you have to reach for or exaggerate. You can go right down the list ... of things like Watergate happening almost on a regular basis with this particular administration."

Today's instant news coverage and the wealth of information, he says, prevent a scandal such as Watergate from keeping the spotlight.

"I'm not sure you can have an event like that anymore," Redford says. "When we made the film, as you can see, we had dial phones, there was no Internet, there was no cable, there was no computerization of our culture. And so one event like this - one scandal - could command that kind of attention."

[Last modified February 17, 2006, 02:41:20]