When Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein started work on the Watergate file at The Washington Post in 1971, they were 28 and 27, respectively. Woodward was a Yale man. Bernstein had dropped out of high school. He started work at the Post as a clerk at 16.

You might not glean these things from the film. Robert Redford and Warren Beatty were in their late thirties when they starred as Woodward and Bernstein — writers who worked so closely together that irate editors called them across the newsroom floor as “WOODSTEIN!” They came at the run.

Their book, All the President’s Men (1974), chronicles both the tediousness and excitement of the investigation: endless phone calls, each of which yields only pieces of a vast puzzle, bits scribbled down on scraps and shreds of paper, the trademark tiny notepad whipped out of a coat pocket.

In one memorable interview, Bernstein must retreat to a washroom to make notes on whatever comes to hand. Back at the office, he empties his pockets of the precious names, dates and dollar amounts stored on matchbook covers and paper napkins. The film is meticulously faithful to the detail of the book — which was written to be a film. It doesn’t tell the story of Watergate so much as the story of uncovering Watergate. It tracks “Woodstein’s” every move, at libraries, in records offices, in phone booths, meeting Deep Throat in a creepy and remote and, of course, poorly lit, underground garage.

Senior editors argued over whether to either ditch the story or assign it to more seasoned reporters. Woodward and Bernstein succeeded, it is made clear, because of their youth. 
“They’re hungry!” barks a defending editor. “When was the last time you were hungry?” Reclined around the news desk, his  middle-aged colleagues smile.
If there is a film to end all newspaper films, the crème de la crème of the genre, this is it.

All the President’s Men is at the center of the Gazette’s Newspapers on Film series this fall, which explores some of the great newspaper movies and the books they spring from. The series opens with Steven Spielberg’s 2017 The Post, which tracks another story about the famous daily: the 1971 decision to publish the Pentagon Papers. The top-secret files detailed the White House’s cover-up of the true extent of the failure of its war in Vietnam over two decades.

The film, based on Post publisher Katharine Graham’s (played by Meryl Streep) memoir, Personal History, moves between her palatial Washington home and executive editor Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) on the newsroom floor. They consult moment-by-moment on the decision to publish in the face of an injunction on the New York Times from the Department of Justice.

Ms. Graham’s memoir could not be more different from the gumshoe story of All the President’s Men, but the books are of the same genre. Newspapers — “the first rough draft of history” — connect everyday life and the unfolding of history. 

Journalists tell the stories that become a matter of public record. If there’s a thrill in that, it comes with enormous pressure to get the story right, both in the sense of facts, and ethics.

The question of the Pentagon Papers balanced the freedom of the press against questions of national security. Sometimes the appeal to security is legitimate — when, for example, the former president takes highly classified government documents to Mar-a- Lago — and sometimes it may just be convenient.

When Kay Graham’s father, the financier Eugene Meyer, acquired the Post in 1933, it was foundering, one of six dailies competing for readers in the capital. It had a readership of 50,000 — just about double that of the Picton Gazette.

Within a few years, Meyer had recruited a real editorial team and more than doubled subscriptions, but the paper continued to lose money. It was the public service project of a man who, having made tens of millions of dollars elsewhere, considered such service a luxury. At their best, newspapers keep facts in view, an enterprise central to the functioning of the democratic process.  At the centre of the story there is always just one person: the reader — and voter.

The Post ends with a cheeky nod to what happens immediately after the Pentagon debacle: a break-in at the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building, the scene that opens All the President’s Men, a film made 43 years before this one. It’s a nod to a precursor, another major Washington Post story, and also to the enduring power of the press. 

The Post is now owned by another American business magnate, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. One wonders what stories could be told about this era of its history.

In December, the series screens Orson Welles’s 1941 Citizen Kane. This film stands on its own: it is considered the greatest film ever made. Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles himself, is a composite portrait of a newspaper tycoon, closely identified with William Randolph Hearst, who became publisher of the San Francisco Examiner in 1887, and went on to found a global media empire. His story is of the darker, sensationalizing, and distorting popular and celebrity press, the spirt of which continues in the viral videos and fake news of social media. The film succeeds because it is itself an act of journalism: it chronicles in order to examine the newspaper life, to uncover the secret that drives it. 

All the Details

The Gazette‘s Books on Film Club combines monthly film screenings with catered book and film discussions through fall and winter, beginning in October. Screenings are Monday evenings at 7pm at The Pilot’s Lounge at Base31. The Club meets for lively social discussion, and sometimes debate, with plenty of food and wine, on Wednesday evenings at 7:30 at the Gazette offices.

Everyone is welcome! Passes and single tickets are available on the Gazette website and at the Gazette office. A series pass, which includes three films screenings and three catered Books on Film Club meetings, is $125. Single tickets are $50.  

The Newspapers on Film series includes Steven Spielberg, The Post, Alan Pakula, All the President’s Men, and Orson Welles, Citizen Kane this fall. It continues with Howard Hawkes, His Girl Friday, Alfred Hitchcock, Foreign Correspondent, and Tom McCarthy, Spotlight in winter. The Club discussion centers on the ideas and the books behind the films.