"All the President's Men" - again.
Who would play the part of George W.
in a remake of this film? Can anyone act that ignorant and
reactionary?
Will Robert Redford get to remake “All the President’s Men” -- about George W. Bush? Certainly, he would love to. He started chasing down Woodward and Bernstein before their tale was complete, before Nixon was brought down. “I was making The Way We Were in 1972 and following Watergate in the newspapers,” he recalls. “And in July and August there were these small articles that began to appear with these two names on them, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward...Then I read a story about who these guys Woodward and Bernstein were: one was a Jew, the other was a Wasp, one was a radical liberal, the other a Republican. They didn’t like each other but they had to work together. I thought that’s a pretty good character study, maybe it will make a nice little movie.”
He got on the phone but neither Woodward nor Bernstein would take his calls – something Hollywood stars, even as defiant a non-celebrity as Redford, wouldn’t be accustomed to. “I didn’t realise, of course, that they were very frightened,” he says. “They were under surveillance. They didn’t trust anyone and they didn’t think it was me. They thought it was a set-up.” When Woodward did agree to meet, it was at a secret location in Washington. Redford, who is still friends with the reporter, chuckles at the memory. “Even that was kinda like Deep Throat.”
The precision of Redford’s recollections and the anger of his political views make for compulsive listening. He values All The President’s Men, he says, because it was made when journalism was at the height of its power. “The role those journalists played in saving our first amendment was a wonderful thing. Now 30 years later I’m watching very similar patterns emerge in American politics: stonewalling, not telling the truth, putting people under wire taps and surveillance."
"But where is the press now?”
Posted: Thu - July 21, 2005 at 07:59 AM