My local indie theatre offered a one-time screening today of the award-winning 1976 classic,
All The President’s Men starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. It was my first time seeing the film and it was quite gripping. I confess that I knew absolutely nothing about Watergate going into the film. It was incredibly suspenseful, brilliantly written, edited, and directed, and the showing was so timely given the current political affairs. I really enjoyed it.
What was even more striking was the technological culture shock of watching the writers for a major metropolitan newspaper uncover a conspiracy without a single computer anywhere in sight. When they wanted a phone number, they walked into a room with a wall full of Yellow Pages, looked up the number, and dialed it on a rotary phone. No cell phones, no PCs… the most contemporary electronic device in the entire film was a ditto machine shared by the entire office staff, and all their notes were either handwritten or rendered on a typewriter. It’s incredible what was uncovered and pieced together from a pile of McDonald’s napkins and matchbook sleeves.
