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9/28/17, "Mark Felt’ Deep Throat biopic disproves this one Watergate scandal myth," marketwatch.com, by Tom Teodorczuk, Entertainment writer
"The new movie “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House” stars Liam Neeson as the FBI Associate Director revealed as Deep Throat, the most celebrated anonymous whistleblower in U.S. political history who helped orchestrate President Nixon’s downfall by leaking information on the Watergate scandal.
But the movie’s director, Peter Landesman, tells MarketWatch that he was keen for the film to challenge a key tenet of Watergate history, namely that Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were central to President Nixon’s resignation. The Woodward and Bernstein/ Deep Throat story was most famously chronicled in Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 Oscar-winning drama “All the President’s Men,” starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
“Mark Felt,” which also stars Diane Lane, Tony Goldwyn and Tom Sizemore and is co-produced by Ridley Scott, contains scenes in which Felt leaks information about the Watergate break-in to a Time magazine journalist and doesn’t even feature Carl Bernstein as a character.
“I think the mythology that Watergate is about Woodward and Bernstein is not the whole picture,” says Landesman. “It’s not even a big piece of the whole picture. The system that brought down a corrupt presidency involved dozens and dozens of hardworking people. Felt was the only one who had his hands on the absolute truth of what was happening and he was doling it out to at least 3, maybe even 4 or 5 journalists, including Woodward and the Washington Post.”
“The biggest mythology that’s being pierced is the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were the sole recipients [of information] which is not all true. Felt was puppeteering a number of people to help him to do the job,” Landesman says.
So why, when it comes to Watergate, has so much attention been lavished on Woodward and Bernstein? “I think those guys got out of the gate first with a book and then a movie starring at that time the biggest movie star in the world and maybe even the second-biggest movie star in the world [Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman]”, says Landesman, himself a former journalist for the New York Times.
“Once that film hit the movie theaters, that became the knowable history of Watergate,” he adds. “The truth is it’s much more complex and it’s much broader, the context is much deeper but largely they beat everybody to the punch.”...
Felt retired from the FBI in 1973 and finally admitted to being Deep Throat in a 2005 Vanity Fair interview. In 1980, he was convicted of authorizing break-ins during the Nixon administration’s search for suspected members of the Weather Underground but was pardoned by Ronald Reagan. He died in 2008....
Landesman, whose previous movies “Parkland” and “Concussion” deal with the aftermath of JFK’s assassination and brain damage in football players, respectively, adds: ”Mark Felt is the answer to the greatest political question of our time, if not all time, in the United States.”
“But what’s interesting about him is actually how unknown and unknowable he was. People were expecting Deep Throat to be somebody big and I think it was an anti-climax when he confessed,” he says."
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9/28/17, "Mark Felt’ Deep Throat biopic disproves this one Watergate scandal myth," marketwatch.com, by Tom Teodorczuk, Entertainment writer
"The new movie “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House” stars Liam Neeson as the FBI Associate Director revealed as Deep Throat, the most celebrated anonymous whistleblower in U.S. political history who helped orchestrate President Nixon’s downfall by leaking information on the Watergate scandal.
But the movie’s director, Peter Landesman, tells MarketWatch that he was keen for the film to challenge a key tenet of Watergate history, namely that Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were central to President Nixon’s resignation. The Woodward and Bernstein/ Deep Throat story was most famously chronicled in Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 Oscar-winning drama “All the President’s Men,” starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
“Mark Felt,” which also stars Diane Lane, Tony Goldwyn and Tom Sizemore and is co-produced by Ridley Scott, contains scenes in which Felt leaks information about the Watergate break-in to a Time magazine journalist and doesn’t even feature Carl Bernstein as a character.
“I think the mythology that Watergate is about Woodward and Bernstein is not the whole picture,” says Landesman. “It’s not even a big piece of the whole picture. The system that brought down a corrupt presidency involved dozens and dozens of hardworking people. Felt was the only one who had his hands on the absolute truth of what was happening and he was doling it out to at least 3, maybe even 4 or 5 journalists, including Woodward and the Washington Post.”
“The biggest mythology that’s being pierced is the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were the sole recipients [of information] which is not all true. Felt was puppeteering a number of people to help him to do the job,” Landesman says.
So why, when it comes to Watergate, has so much attention been lavished on Woodward and Bernstein? “I think those guys got out of the gate first with a book and then a movie starring at that time the biggest movie star in the world and maybe even the second-biggest movie star in the world [Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman]”, says Landesman, himself a former journalist for the New York Times.
“Once that film hit the movie theaters, that became the knowable history of Watergate,” he adds. “The truth is it’s much more complex and it’s much broader, the context is much deeper but largely they beat everybody to the punch.”...
Felt retired from the FBI in 1973 and finally admitted to being Deep Throat in a 2005 Vanity Fair interview. In 1980, he was convicted of authorizing break-ins during the Nixon administration’s search for suspected members of the Weather Underground but was pardoned by Ronald Reagan. He died in 2008....
Landesman, whose previous movies “Parkland” and “Concussion” deal with the aftermath of JFK’s assassination and brain damage in football players, respectively, adds: ”Mark Felt is the answer to the greatest political question of our time, if not all time, in the United States.”
“But what’s interesting about him is actually how unknown and unknowable he was. People were expecting Deep Throat to be somebody big and I think it was an anti-climax when he confessed,” he says."
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3 among comments
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"Tom Grady, 9/28/17, From the article, where the author is comparing Watergate to the current situation: “There will always be corruption at the top, there will always be someone willing to sacrifice themselves and tell the truth to fix the corruption. It just so happens that these particular circumstances are similar.”
The problem is, in Watergate there was an actual crime. Here, we have the Russians trying to hack our systems, but the "Trump colluded with Russia" part was invented by Democrats."
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"Tom Grady, 9/28/17, From the article, where the author is comparing Watergate to the current situation: “There will always be corruption at the top, there will always be someone willing to sacrifice themselves and tell the truth to fix the corruption. It just so happens that these particular circumstances are similar.”
The problem is, in Watergate there was an actual crime. Here, we have the Russians trying to hack our systems, but the "Trump colluded with Russia" part was invented by Democrats."
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"Daniel Smith, 9/28/17, The Obama administration illegal spying/wiretapping/unmasking on over 300 private citizens for political gain over a six year period was hidden from congress, congressional committees and the American people. It is the biggest political scandal in American history and 10,000 times bigger than Watergate. And yet, the media suppresses the story (remember the "no proof" slam a Trump on this?) and congress is doing its best to not investigate it. If Power, Rice, Clapper, Comey, Obama and others are not held accountable for this unprecedented criminal act, there will be a wholesale change in Washington. Americans are fed up."
"Daniel Smith, 9/28/17, The Obama administration illegal spying/wiretapping/unmasking on over 300 private citizens for political gain over a six year period was hidden from congress, congressional committees and the American people. It is the biggest political scandal in American history and 10,000 times bigger than Watergate. And yet, the media suppresses the story (remember the "no proof" slam a Trump on this?) and congress is doing its best to not investigate it. If Power, Rice, Clapper, Comey, Obama and others are not held accountable for this unprecedented criminal act, there will be a wholesale change in Washington. Americans are fed up."
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"Daniel Smith, 9/28/17, I welcome this new movie...because once Obama's political spying crimes are exposed, it will dwarf anything this movie presents."
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