“The Washington Post” reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the details of the Watergate scandal that leads to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

IMDb

“William Goldman, who died a week ago, had already written three Robert Redford movies when the actor contacted him in early winter of 1974 and asked him to write a fourth: an adaptation of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, a firsthand account of the two young Washington Post reporters’ Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of the Watergate scandal. Redford was the one doing the asking because he was producing the movie under the aegis of his company, Wildwood Enterprises—Redford was among the first wave of post-studio-system, post-auteur-movement movie stars who, in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, began taking direct control of their careers, forming companies that would choose projects; select co-stars, directors, and writers; and participate in the casting, writing, and promotion of their movies. But Redford’s involvement in “All the President’s Men” was unusually complex and deep, predating not just Goldman’s involvement but also the conception of the book itself. By most accounts, Redford is a big reason why the book—which launched Bob Woodward’s iconic career as the first modern “star” reporter and permanently changed the public’s understanding of journalism—assumed its innovative form, focussing on the reporters and the Post rather than Nixon and the White House. But it was Goldman, in the crowning achievement of his long, successful career as a novelist and screenwriter, who used his screenplay to forge the modern myth of the reporter as hero.

The Watergate investigation was still ongoing, in 1972, when Woodward received a surprise phone call from Redford. “He was interested in the personal story of trying to figure out what happened, and our quest,” Woodward recalled, in a 2006 documentary about the making of the film. Dick Snyder, of Simon & Schuster, had purchased the book rights to the reporters’ story through the agent David Obst. The blockbuster fifty-five-thousand-dollar deal, as Michael Korda, the former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, wrote in his memoir, “transformed [nonfiction] book publishing into a red-hot part of media.” Redford, according to most accounts, influenced the crucial decision to focus the narrative on the reporters themselves. “When we sat down to write a book, the book that we started to write was not about us; it was about Watergate,” Bernstein said. “Woodward came up to me one day and said he’d gotten a call from Redford, and I said, ‘What the hell about?’ And he said, well, he thinks the story is really us.””