All the President's Men (1976) on Netflix
R19762h 18mBiographyDramaHistory
Five men are caught inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. The Washington Post puts Bob Woodward on the assignment, and Carl Bernstein joins him.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.9/10139,418 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes94%
Trailer
Plot summary
On June 17, 1972, a break-in at the Watergate complex brings police to the Democratic National Committee headquarters, where they arrest five men. The Washington Post gives the courthouse story to Bob Woodward, a reporter new to the news desk, and treats it as minor. The men had bugging equipment and an expensive attorney, and one of them, James W. McCord Jr., says in court that he recently left the CIA. Woodward's anonymous government source, whom he calls Deep Throat, suggests the break-in belongs to something larger. Carl Bernstein, another reporter at the paper, works the story alongside him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about All the President's Men (1976)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The MPAA first gave the film an R rating for its many uses of the word "fuck"; Warner Bros. and Robert Redford appealed, the Appeals Board reclassified it as PG, and MPAA president Jack Valenti later said it would have received a G if not for the profanity.
- The film introduced the catchphrase "follow the money" in relation to the Watergate case, and the line did not appear in the book or in any Watergate documentation, having been invented for the screenplay.
- Because the Post denied the production permission to shoot in its newsroom, set designers measured and photographed the paper's offices, and boxes of the newspaper's trash were gathered and transported to a $200,000 recreation of the newsroom on two soundstages at Hollywood's Burbank Studios.
- A 2015 Hollywood Reporter poll of Academy members found that, given a do-over, they would hand the 1977 Best Picture Oscar to All the President's Men rather than to the film that actually won, Rocky.
- Redford asked for suggestions on the script, and Bernstein and his then-girlfriend, writer Nora Ephron, responded by writing their own draft; Goldman later called Redford's acceptance of the Bernstein-Ephron draft a "gutless betrayal".
- Redford first selected Al Pacino to play Bernstein, then changed his mind, later deciding that Dustin Hoffman was a better fit for the role and recasting the part.
- Redford bought the rights to Woodward and Bernstein's book in 1974 for $450,000, with the idea of adapting it into a film with a budget of $5 million.
