Wow. To see All the President's now in the wake of all we've been exposed to is truly a mind-blowing experience.I found the commentary of Knight Chair in Journalism professor Steve Doig, shown at left, to be a great introduction into the movie.
Probably like everybody else I've seen it more than once, but now seeing it in the light of ethical considerations, accuracy and double-checking info and double-checking again (and again, and again), working on deadline and everything else we've learned I was awake long afterwards absorbed in thought.
Even looking at the old clippings dressed up with the Ken Burns' effect Steve showed us in the Final Cut Pro session was something I kept thinking back to, comparing his demonstration of putting multiple audio tracks down to mingle sounds. (Dustin Hoffman and his chatting up the woman under the umbrella, for example.) How much technology has changed from the mid-70s to now!
The ending was so simple, yet powerful, with the teletype machines spitting out "Nixon resigns" then going to black. I remember how noisy these things were early in my journalism career when Laredo had two daily papers. At the Laredo News several of them sat in a separate room, clattering away. (They also spat out perforated tape which was put into a refrigerator-sized machine to produce stories on long rolls of a photographic-type paper. Somebody, I don't remember who, was in charge of replacing the developer and fixer needed for the process. I don't remember where they were at the Laredo Times.)
I was in college during the time portrayed in the move, and was working in my master's degree by the time Nixon resigned, so the television scenes brought back lots of memories. (I still have a couple of w-i-d-e ties from that era! I also had long wavy hair kind of like Dustin's, but really red.)
So, the movie and my meditations on it will continue for some time. It was interesting to see it through the prism of the Reynolds Institute.
Mark Webber
Vidal M. Trevino School of Communications and Fine Arts
http://my.hsj.org/tx/laredo/vmt
Laredo, Texas
Posts
Mark:
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you found it helpful. Based on our experiences of the past few days, I spotted a number of new things, including Woodward telling Sloan that he was a Republican to make him more comfortable and Bernstein faking a call to get the Florida DA's assistant out of pocket. These are great ethical questions for your class if you use this movie. When I have more time for a reporting presentation, I often use Woodward's last exchange with Deep Throat -- "I'm tired of your chickens--- games!" -- to illustrate a last-ditch way of dealing with a hostile source.
Steve Elliott
Arizona State University
Phoenix
While I first saw the film on my own, the last five times I have watched it, it has been while I am teaching. The students do point out quite a bit about the movie and take pretty good notes about the techniques, but I am never quite able to just sit and absorb the movie like I did last night. I saw a lot that I have missed in the past.
ReplyDeleteWhen we do watch the film in class, I spend a lot of time explaining what the students did not understand historically. I do frame the film with background information, but I need to do more. I think that I simply need to spend more time on the movie, so that it can be as effective an experience for them as it was for me last night.
Jill Bhowmik
Granite Hills High School
El Cajon, Calif.