"some of the outlying regions of the canon"

Shakespeare Tonight sees the start of the BBC's long awaited series of adaptations of the Henriad, beginning with Richard II> under the umbrella title The Hollow Crown. The pre-broadcast reviews and trailers suggest this is going to be one of the great televisual events and there's been a suggestion that if the ratings hold up, the BBC might be convinced to produce some more, perhaps the whole lot.

In an entirely presumptuous move, especially since none of this has been broadcast yet, I wondered how the BBC might go about selecting the plays for production and assuming they continued with the entirely sensible umbrella title idea how they might be grouped together. A second series comprising the other Henriad ending with Richard III is most obvious but what about the rest, those plays who's connection is more tenuous?

The Hollow Crown
 Richard II
Henry IV, p1
Henry IV, p2
Henry V

The Hollow Crown II
 Henry VI, p1
Henry VI, p2
Henry VI, p3
Richard III

Italy
 Othello
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Merchant of Venice
Romeo and Juliet

Deception
 Much Ado About Nothing
Measure for Measure
Cardenio
The Winter’s Tale

Sibling Rivalries
 Twelfth Night
King Lear
The Comedy of Errors
The Taming of the Shrew

France
 As You Like It
Edward III
King John
Alls Well That Ends Well

Gloriana
 The Merry Wives of Windsor
Henry VIII
Sir Thomas More
Love’s Labour’s Lost

Classical World
 Troilus and Cressida
Timon of Athens
Pericles
The Two Noble Kinsmen

Rome
 Titus Andronicus
Cymbeline
 Coriolanus
Julius Caesar
Anthony and Cleopatra

Spirits
 Macbeth
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Tempest
Hamlet


As you can see I've tried to think with a television scheduler's brain, putting the better known plays at the top and bottom of each series with the wilder material in the middle, including the audacious inclusion of some of the outlying regions of the canon like Sir Thomas More and Edward III neither of which are likely to be filmed in a million years. Or Cardenio, depending on who's version of the text is used (assuming it isn't a new adaptation).

Some of my choices are perfectly obvious, as in these are all plays which have some kind of deception within or these are all set in Italy and France. I've tried to be a bit innovative so "Gloriana" features plays which have some connection to Elizabeth I (reputed to have suggest, her Dad, her Dad, potential allegory) and it's not often these plays featuring spirits are put together in quite this way.

Probably the least appetising from a modern commissioning standpoint is "Classical World" with its three collaborations and opening with a play which few people know much about to begin with.  Logistically Rome's the hardest with its five plays and many locations but there's potential casting connections between JC and A&C.  Please do let me know if you can think of any other ways of grouping the plays together.

Some of the groupings are with an eye to television production. Following The Hollow Crown's lead and boring the pants off Jonathan Miller (who went out of his way not to do this in his BBC Shakespeare's in the 80s) these will all be in period dress so it makes sense to have all the Roman plays together so that props/sets can be reused. Though of course that goes out of the window when it comes to the deception plays.

I'm under no illusions about this. Our luck no matter how well The Hollow Crown does, the BBC'll probably only see it as part of their Olympic celebrations and leave it at that. Plus if they follow this plan, it's a ten year commitment and expensive. But at least I've thought about the logistics and the logic of producing Macbeth, Hamlet and JC so soon after the recent productions and putting them late in the schedule, the best until last.

The Hollow Crown begins tonight at 9pm on BBC Two.

Shakespeare at the BBC: Beyond The Hollow Crown

Tonight sees the start of the BBC's long awaited series of adaptations of the Henriad, beginning with Richard II under the umbrella title The Hollow Crown. The pre-broadcast reviews and trailers suggest this is going to be one of the great televisual events and there's been a suggestion that if the ratings hold up, the BBC might be convinced to produce some more, perhaps the whole lot.

In an entirely presumptuous move, especially since none of this has been broadcast yet, I wondered how the BBC might go about selecting the plays for production and assuming they continued with the entirely sensible umbrella title idea how they might be grouped together. A second series comprising the other Henriad ending with Richard III is most obvious but what about the rest, those plays who's connection is more tenuous?

The Hollow Crown
 Richard II
Henry IV, p1
Henry IV, p2
Henry V

The Hollow Crown II
 Henry VI, p1
Henry VI, p2
Henry VI, p3
Richard III

Italy
 Othello
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Merchant of Venice
Romeo and Juliet

Deception
 Much Ado About Nothing
Measure for Measure
Cardenio
The Winter’s Tale

Sibling Rivalries
 Twelfth Night
King Lear
The Comedy of Errors
The Taming of the Shrew

France
 As You Like It
Edward III
King John
Alls Well That Ends Well

Gloriana
 The Merry Wives of Windsor
Henry VIII
Sir Thomas More
Love’s Labour’s Lost

Classical World
 Troilus and Cressida
Timon of Athens
Pericles
The Two Noble Kinsmen

Rome
 Titus Andronicus
Cymbeline
 Coriolanus
Julius Caesar
Anthony and Cleopatra

Spirits
 Macbeth
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Tempest
Hamlet


As you can see I've tried to think with a television scheduler's brain, putting the better known plays at the top and bottom of each series with the wilder material in the middle, including the audacious inclusion of some of the outlying regions of the canon like Sir Thomas More and Edward III neither of which are likely to be filmed in a million years. Or Cardenio, depending on who's version of the text is used (assuming it isn't a new adaptation).

Some of my choices are perfectly obvious, as in these are all plays which have some kind of deception within or these are all set in Italy and France. I've tried to be a bit innovative so "Gloriana" features plays which have some connection to Elizabeth I (reputed to have suggest, her Dad, her Dad, potential allegory) and it's not often these plays featuring spirits are put together in quite this way.

Probably the least appetising from a modern commissioning standpoint is "Classical World" with its three collaborations and opening with a play which few people know much about to begin with.  Logistically Rome's the hardest with its five plays and many locations but there's potential casting connections between JC and A&C.  Please do let me know if you can think of any other ways of grouping the plays together.

Some of the groupings are with an eye to television production. Following The Hollow Crown's lead and boring the pants off Jonathan Miller (who went out of his way not to do this in his BBC Shakespeare's in the 80s) these will all be in period dress so it makes sense to have all the Roman plays together so that props/sets can be reused. Though of course that goes out of the window when it comes to the deception plays.

I'm under no illusions about this. Our luck no matter how well The Hollow Crown does, the BBC'll probably only see it as part of their Olympic celebrations and leave it at that. Plus if they follow this plan, it's a ten year commitment and expensive. But at least I've thought about the logistics and the logic of producing Macbeth, Hamlet and JC so soon after the recent productions and putting them late in the schedule, the best until last.

The Hollow Crown begins tonight at 9pm on BBC Two.

"a mouthwatering cast of Shakespeareans"



Shakespeare Coming soon to an iPad near you, is a new production of The Sonnets produced my all my favourite organisations, Faber, Illuminations and Arden with specially filmed readings of all hundred and fifty-four sonnets by a a mouthwatering cast of Shakespeareans, including Sir Patrick Stewart, Kim Cattrall, David Tennant, Simon Russell Beale, Dominic West, Siân Phillips, Fiona Shaw, Dame Harriet Walter, Simon Callow, Stephen Fry, and poets Don Paterson and Sir Andrew Motion. James Shapiro, Cicely Berry and Katherine Duncan-Jones (the editor in charge of the text and commentary). are even in there too.

Given that I'm one of those people who doesn't have an iPad and I only tend to write about accessible things, or rather things I can access, I was going to leave the announcement to everyone else, until I noticed that brilliantly, as part of the publicity for the app, the overall publishers Touch Press, have uploaded versions of all the videos along with the texts of the poems to this website for us all to enjoy. Here's Duncan-Jones herself reading eighty-seven.  And for those of us without an internet connection which can cope with the scope of all that streaming, they're also releasing them on a dvd.

The Sonnets come to iPad, the web and dvd.



Coming soon to an iPad near you, is a new production of The Sonnets produced my all my favourite organisations, Faber, Illuminations and Arden with specially filmed readings of all hundred and fifty-four sonnets by a a mouthwatering cast of Shakespeareans including Sir Patrick Stewart, Kim Cattrall, David Tennant, Simon Russell Beale, Dominic West, Siân Phillips, Fiona Shaw, Dame Harriet Walter, Simon Callow, Stephen Fry, and poets Don Paterson and Sir Andrew Motion. James Shapiro, Cicely Berry and Katherine Duncan-Jones (the editor in charge of the text and commentary). are even in there too.

Given that I'm one of those people who doesn't have an iPad and I only tend to write about accessible things, or rather things I can access, I was going to leave the announcement to everyone else, until I noticed that brilliantly, as part of the publicity for the app, the overall publishers Touch Press, have uploaded versions of all the videos along with the texts of the poems to this website for us all to enjoy. Here's Duncan-Jones herself reading eighty-seven.  And for those of us without an internet connection which can cope with the scope of all that streaming, they're also releasing them on a dvd.

"my universal Merlin theory"

Comics After what amounted to an issue long prologue, the second instalment of Star Trek: The Next Generation / Doctor Who: Assimilation 2, has another half issue of prologue before the TARDIS team bump into the Enterprise crew and although the result is a bit of an improvement, many the narrative leakages I predicted last time are already beginning to leave stains all over J.K. Woodward’s still gorgeous artwork. It’s becoming very apparent that given the material available, two franchises filled collectively with nearly a hundred years of mythology this isn’t necessarily turning into the finest hour for either of them.  Spoilers begin here.  This review assumes you've already read the comic.

The Tipton’s script begins by given the Star Trek the same treatment as Doctor Who last month, offering the reader a prototypical TNG story of Riker, Data and Worf visiting a Starfleet mining operation uncovering important stuff for rebuilding a fleet still depleted by Wolf 359 (oh, the foreshadowing) working within a set of unbelievably specific conditions agreed with an amphibious population whose design is uncomfortably similar to the fish people from The Underwater Menace. After some astonishingly boring exposition of the kind which can be TNG's stock in trade, disaster strikes and it's quickly agreed that Starfleet should have been paying more attention to its mining colony.

The character work in here is pretty good. There’s a useful conversation at the top in which Geordi finally asks Data why he hasn’t upgraded his technology which shifts through some expected philosophical areas (though I can’t help feeling the television series would have actually mentioned Theseus’ paradox because Patrick Stewart would have asked for it to be put in) and there’s some excellent sickbay cameos on page ten. Then, like issue one, story requirements take hold and the cast are quickly shunted into the holodeck as it becomes apparent we’ve been watching the Trek side of the first issue.

My criticism of this approach still stands. Unless both of these explanatory prologue sections actually become relevant to the story, neither is specifically required. Doctor Who fans probably don’t need to be told what a ST: TNG story looks like because during the wilderness years, along with Babylon 5, it’s what most of us were watching. Similarly there can’t be many Trek fans who don’t at least have a passing notion of Doctor Who. The holodeck opening is nice idea and would have been just enough before we’re scooted into the adventure and what we really want to see, the mating of these two classic franchises.

Indeed perhaps the holodeck material could have been stretched out across a whole issue, the Doctor mixed up in a Dixon Hill mystery coming ever closer to the Riker and the rest but forever missing them ala Partners in Crime or even working with some of them entirely unaware that they’re real beings within a virtual environment. Unfortunately as Allyn Gibson predicted in his review of the first issue that’s all dispensed with in a few, admittedly fun pages. The final image of the TARDIS sitting in the holodeck grid is as bracing as we anticipated. Structurally it would have been the perfect end of an issue. But it’s not over yet.

Finally though we’re into what we’d all be hoping for, the Doctor vs. Riker etc and with credit to the Tippets for all the structural issues, the characters do sound exactly as they should and more importantly the different characterisation styles of the different franchises contrast nicely. Unlike the precision of Trek, the Doctor’s words spill out of him as he excitedly comments on everything (like an early Data perhaps) and his companions seem amazingly British up against the prosaic Americanisms of the earlier series; I don’t remember anyone saying “Hi” or “Hullo” in the 24th century at least not in this way.

Of course, we’re also now into the uncertain territory of whose adventure this is. It’s trying to have it both ways, the Doctor reacting to his new locale in the way the Doctor always reacts to his new locale whilst simultaneously the Enterprise crew are trying to come to terms with these intruders. Often we’re watching a room full of protagonists and at this point it's Amy and Rory who’re worst off, sometimes wordlessly swanning around the edges of the frame, only now and then speaking up. Unless they get they’re own storylines later they’re rendered superfluous in a way which wouldn’t happen in a story told from their POV.

While we're on the topic I'm wondering if a better strategy might even have been to publish to different comics simultaneously, each telling the same story from the Doctor's POV and the Enterprise crew's POV, in other words what we've been given in this opening issue but carefully plotted around each other.  Marvel have used similar strategies before, notably way back during Secret Wars II when an Avengers annual and a Fantastic Four annual which otherwise seemed entirely unconnected suddenly came together at the climax in which the same layouts were rendered by different artists.

There’s an interesting moment when the Doctor recognises Worf, or at least recognises he’s a Klingon. Along with his bang-on insights into Data, it seems for a moment that we’ll be reminded that Star Trek is a known television series in the Doctor Who universe with loads of spin-off references but also lately in the television series, notably in The Empty Child and Closing Time (see this Wikia entry) (and this one) with the TARDIS team realising that the fictional universe actually exists in this alternate reality with all the metafictional implications that has. Unfortunately in skipping time tracks, the Doctor, Rory and Amy have entirely forgotten Star Trek exists.

Instead we have the intriguing notion that the Doctor’s gaining memories, remembering events which never happened to him, including knowledge of Klingons which leads into that cover which has already been released of Tom Baker’s Doctor meeting Kirk and Spock. Of all the ideas in the book that’s the one which is going to keep me reading; perhaps at some point he’s going to forget the version of his life in the Whoniverse and it’ll be substituted for a millennia of travels in the Trekverse, Roddenberryverse, whatever it’s called. In some ways, I wish we were simply getting a spin-off series version of that, with the Doctor pitching up on Romulus or Bajor.

Another quick sidebar and it's probably too early for this since it's entirely irrelevant, but I've just realised that the Q is the reflection in Star Trek of my universal Merlin theory in which a large chunk of fantastical fiction takes place in a multiverse in which magical Merlin-like figures sit at the centre reflected in different ways across them, the various Merlins in various interpretations of the Camelot myth, Doctor Strange, Prospero, Gandalf, the Doctor (who is also Merlin of course) and in the Trekverse the Q continuum.  Perhaps it'll be revealed down the line that the Time Lords and Qs really are cosmologically connected in some way and the Doctor's unconsciously tapping into that power.

Anyway back to the slating.  Where was I?  Right ... all of which isn’t to say that the many frames with the Doctor and Picard in them don’t make me tingly, especially the final scenes in which the two of them (standing on a starship) finally bump into the armada of Borg cubes and Cyberman ships even if once again the comic doesn’t have a cover which reflects the story neither of the two cyborg actually appearing within the pages. It’s almost as though they’re running a whole issue behind. The alternative covers featured inside aren’t much better. One of them teasingly features the Enterprise crew in the TARDIS. That doesn’t happen either. At least is hasn’t happened yet.

I know, pick, pick, pick. It’s just that we’re at issue two of eight and the main story hasn’t really started yet, most of what we’ve had so far lacks the epic quality the title suggests and there are few character beats which couldn’t be guessed even before the issue hit the printers. Most of this feels like a contractual obligation rather than the work of some people with a strong story they’re desperate to tell and although, and again I’ll repeat that although the moment when Deanna Troi empathically scans the Doctor has me squeeing like the professional teenager I am, I wish we hadn’t had to wade through so many pages of other stuff to get that far.

"former associate of Gus Fring"

TV Having missed out on a US tv job on Homeland, actress Laura Fraser's turning up in Breaking Bad:
"The AMC drama is introducing an “important” character in the second episode played by Scottish actress Laura Fraser, executive producer Vince Gilligan tells EW. Gilligan describes Lydia as a “former associate of Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) who’s integral to the proceedings of season 5,” as well as someone who is “nervous about her place in the world.”
Best start watching Breaking Bad, yes?  Well done you [via].

"she was absurdly, extravagantly kind"

Film Just a brief return tonight to point you towards The Guardian's predictably excellent selection of short essays and whatnot about Nora Ephron in which different writers cover different aspects of her work.

Hadley Freeman has a career overview mainly covering the quality of her writing: "Honestly, the only thing funnier than When Harry Met Sally is the fact that the writer of Dead Poets Society – Dead Poets Society! – beat her to the Oscar that year."

Catherine Shoard expresses that career in clips: "She followed it with My Blue Heaven, a swerve into broader suburban satire, a Steve Martin vehicle about a mobster who is placed in a witness protection programme and relocated to the 'burbs."

Emma Brockes on Ephron as a person: "... when I moved to New York a year later, she took me for lunch and asked if I needed any introductions. She did this for lots of people I know, all journalists, writers and film-makers, all decades younger than her and with a generosity those fields don't exactly inspire. She had a reputation for sharpness, but my experience of Ephron was that she was absurdly, extravagantly kind."

Peter Bradshaw on the films: "The great scene in When Harry Met Sally when Meg Ryan demonstrates to a gobsmacked Billy Crystal that women can fake orgasm any time is the classic, almost quintessential Nora Ephron moment. It features smart, wiseacre conversation over lunch – and the lunch scene is a signature Ephron trope. It's about sex, and yet sex is ironised, miraculously made light of, made to seem funny; yet at the same time it's weirdly intimate."

Katy Stoddard collects together a wealth of archive cuttings from the file: "In 1983 Ephron published Heartburn, an autobiographical novel based on the breakdown of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post journalist. Prue Leith, writing in the Guardian, was impressed by the recipes scattered throughout the book."

Jenny Colgan talks about her feminism: "Loads of people might insist publicly that their favourite film is Citizen Kane, but come on, what are you more likely to find yourself rewatching for the 20th time at 11 o'clock on a school night? Yes, When Harry Met Sally, over and over again ("Baby fish mouth!"). As the writer Jon Hurwitz pointed out, it's hard to believe one of the greatest romantic movies ever made starred … Billy Crystal."

Amen to that, Jenny.

"I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night."

Film The Age has the best obituary for Nora Ephron, syndicated from the Washington Post. Given that she co-wrote my favourite film of all time, or at least the film I've chosen to say is my favourite film of all time when people ask me "What's your favourite film of all time?" the news of her death when I woke up this morning didn't really set me up for the most exciting of days and so it's proved with some pottering around on the web, reading another fifty pages of one of the many books I'm struggling through and watching Tony Scott's Unstoppable, throughout which I was distracted by the news broadcasts being framed in the same aspect ratio as the rest of the film, despite everyone within watching the impending disaster on ordinary domestic screens in 16:9.

To make up for the length of that sentence, here are five Nora related memories.

(1)  This quote from When Harry Met Sally (spoiler alert -- it's from right at the end):
"I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."
I continue to aspire to meet someone I wish I could say that sort of thing to.

(2) Sleepless in Seattle was the second film I saw when I went away to university in the mid-90s. The first was The Fugitive. I saw both at The Lounge cinema in Leeds (which closed in 2005 and is now being turned into office space). Still homesick, I decided to cheer myself up with with some chips, bought beforehand from the Chinese take away opposite to take in, but it wasn't until I was sat down I realised that they hadn't put salt and vinegar on so ended up eating them without, a welcome reminder to always have salt and vinegar on chips.  Although the film helped a bit, afterwards when I returned to halls, because I didn't have any friends yet but was desperate for someone to talk, I sat crying my eyes out in a stairwell near a room where I could hear people who'd become fast friends, laughing and listening to music.  I vowed never to do that again.  I'd like to say I still haven't.

(3)  Watching Norah's The South Bank Show in which she mentioned that quote from the top of the obituary of what her Mum said to her on her deathbed:  “Take notes.  Everything is copy.”  It's one of my mantras, my iChing (in the You've Got Mail sense of the word) for writing along with James Blish's question "Who does it hurt?" and the "Time is a great dealer" postcard I have on my wall.  The episode was to promote her film Mixed Nuts, a film to this day I still haven't been able to sit all of the way through because it began Steve Martin's slow decline.

(4)  The unfolding entertainment of the trivia page on the imdb's entry for You've Got Mail which informs us:  "Meg Ryan's character, Kathleen Kelly, uses a Macintosh PowerBook G3 "Kanga", (introduced 11/97), or a Macintosh PowerBook 3400c, (introduced 2/97) in the movie. The exact model she used can't be determined from looking at the outer plastic case, as both machines used the same plastic case. "  That Michael Palin shot scenes for the film which were cut.  A reminder that the massive bookshop that's moving in destroying the little guy is called Fox Books, which now makes it look like an allegory for the entire media/cultural complex of the planet (let alone the book trade)

(5)  The poster for Cookie which Nora co-scripted was ubiquitous on the release of the film in 1989 as was the trailer which featured the instrumental version of Kylie's I Should Be So Lucky incongruously layered on top rendering most of the dialogue inaudible.  Given my worshipping at the alter of Minogue and a desperation to see anything she was even tangentially involved with I had to see this.  Unfortunately for me, the BBFC saw fit to give it a 15 certificate, and I was just slightly too young for the cinema release and still haven't seen it since by the time the video was released I'd moved on to worshipping Debbie Gibson and couldn't care less.

a decent companion piece to Grosse Point Blank

Film One of the items I purchased in That's Entertainment the other week was a copy of The Contract, a little known Bruce Beresford directed thriller starring John Cusack, Morgan Freeman, mighty Megan Dodds and Doctor Who's Van Statton, Corey Johnson. It was a Father's Day gift for my Dad who likes these kinds of chase films, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that there wasn't a bit of curiosity on my part simply because this was a Bruce Beresford directed thriller starring John Cusack, Morgan Freeman, mighty Megan Dodds and Doctor Who's Van Statton, Corey Johnson, which I didn't even know existed.

He leant it back to me tonight and against the odds, it's an entertaining neo-Western about a teacher dragging the ass of a hitman who's escaped from the authorities back to those authorities with an often hilarious script which works as a decent companion piece to Grosse Point Blank as Cusack plays the straight man faced with the moral ambiguity of Freeman's contract killer.  The script is co-written by Stephen Katz who's long career in television included spells on LA Law, Hardcastle and McCormick and The A-Team and deftly gives even small roles perfectly judged character beats.

The look of the film is especially note-worthy having been shot by Dante Spinotti one of the few cinematographers today who still has an especially distinctive style.  Like his work on Michael Mann's Heat, in the night scenes he removes almost all of the colour, the characters only just about visible in hues of purple and blue.  Unfortunately although the film was shot in a scope ratio (2.35:1 according to the imdb), it's brutally cropped to 16:9 for dvd which makes a nonsense of some of the compositions, especially a Taxi Driver-like overhead in which two characters disappear from frame completely.

One assumes if this wasn't an obscurity that wouldn't have happened.  But a quick scoot around the web reveals this was not a simple production which Beresford writes about a lot in his memoir.  Shot entirely in Bulgaria, he knew the script didn't make much sense when he started shooting, the producers closed the shoot down with him using his own money to complete the thing and at one point Steven Seagal asked for a supporting role but the director turned him down.  The film went pretty much to dvd everywhere, but if you have a spare 92 mins it's certainly worth your time.

Here's the trailer though as ever it gives away practically the whole story:



And yes trailer editor, "Driving Miss Daisy" is a film by Bruce Beresford.

Scene Unseen:
All The President's Men


Film During my post graduate film studies course, we were asked to write a short piece unpacking the mise-en-scene of a famous film shot. I'd just recently watched All The President's Men and was fascinated by the Library of Congress scene in which the two reporters are photographed from above.  Fortuitously it was also shot that many other people were fascinated with and within a few hours I was able to pull together enough research to knock something together. Here it is:


Mise-en-scene:

All The President’s Men

All The President’s Men (1976) portrays the true story of how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters from the Washington Post newspaper investigated the circumstances surrounding the burglary at the Watergate Building in Washington and how their journalism led to the eventual resignation of President Nixon. The subject of this essay is the “famous” Library of Congress reading room scene in which the reporters are attempting to ascertain, by checking every slip for items requested over a two year period, whether a White House aide has been looking for material related to Nixon’s presidential rival Ted Kennedy as part of an alleged smear campaign, The following will describe how the mise-en-scene underlines the difficulties the reporters faced and also their determination to succeed.

It is the first scene within the film without dialogue and that does not specifically give direct information pertinent to the plot, instead presenting themes on an entirely visual basis. Storytelling overall in the script is extraordinarily dense, and although screenwriter William Goldman is able to mask much of the exposition in excellent characterisation, cinematographer Gordon Willis would later admit, ‘if you went out to the restroom during the movie and came back, you would have missed something important.’ (Schaefer and Salvato, 1984: 296).


This long shot begins with a high angle close up of the hands of Woodward and Bernstein as they rhythmically sift through the requests. Relatively quickly the camera pulls backwards to reveal the journalists are heads down, deep in concentration. Surprisingly the shot does not end here; in a virtuoso move, the camera continues to pan backwards revealing the whole work table, then after a dissolve, the larger area surrounding them and after a further dissolve an extreme long shot of the entire floor of the reading room.

In a film that largely happens in close-ups and mid-shots, the audience attention is suddenly struck by a visual and technical spectacle and the effect is startling. The scene is reported to have cost $90,000 (Ehrlich, 2004: 114). As Willis describes, a crane could not be used so ‘a winch and a cable (were placed) in the top of the Library of Congress, and that winch actually pulled the camera up. It was done with an Airflex and some stabilizers to keep it from shaking […] My assistant built a radio-controlled focus system.’ (Lobrutto, 1999: 28).


The scene symbolically represents the story of the film, that of two men against an entire administration. It expresses the immensity of the task that lay ahead for the reporters, not just in searching through library cards, but in revealing the truth behind the misdeeds of the administration. Willis explains: ‘The idea was, Woodward and Bernstein were looking for “a needle in a haystack.”’(Lobrutto, 1999: 28) This was originally one slow continuous take (Lobrutto, 1999: 27) but the two dissolves and the speed of camera movement shorten the time between close up and extreme long shot emphasising the scale of the building as the protagonists becoming mere specks dwarfed by the larger space. If they do not entirely disappear from frame they become lost, ‘trapped in maze-like configurations whose spaces are perceptible only from a bird’s-eye view.’ (Cook, 2000: 366). The ’concentric circles’ (Lindamood, 1999) resemble the wheels of power they are attempting to puncture.


The lighting within the shot runs in opposition to the approach taken throughout the rest of film. The scenes within Washington Post offices are bathed in an oppressive ‘hard and unpleasant’ fluorescences, creating scenes in which absolutely everything is visible (Schaefer and Salvato, 1984: 297). Everywhere else in Washington is often ‘shrouded in darkness’ giving a ‘nourish tone’ (Ehrlich, 1984: 114), underlining the frustration that Woodward and Bernstein often express in the dialogue about their inability to see the whole picture, that patterns are there but that they cannot see them. That in this key scene, fill light is being used inside a large public building suggests that on this occasion the journalists are clear of a way forward, that they know the purpose of these particular actions and what they will prove or disprove.


There is a gentle antagonism existing between the two reporters throughout the opening of the film, but this scene is the first to demonstrate that they can work together and are presenting a united front. They appear almost symmetrically within the shot. The angle of framing is from above and they are looking downward and although their faces are not shown their stance with their jackets are off and their shirt sleeves rolled up, is one of concentration. The colour of the shirts, blue and white, is traditionally symbolic of power and authority. Their bodies are rigid in their seat, and although they make mistakes as they check the cards these are quickly remedied. This is the presentation of a single unit is an image repeated throughout the film as the pair stand together in doorways and close to each other in diners.


Director Alan J Pakula ‘needed to show that the materials Woodward and Bernstein used – typewriters, pencils, pads, and library cards – served as important weapons that could bring down some of the most powerful men in the country.’ (Toplin, 1996: 187) In this scene this focus is achieved through diagetic sound design. Even as the camera moves away from them, the synchronous sound of the flicking paper continues at full volume in the sound mix right up until the end of the shot, still audible over the music. In later scenes, a similar technique would be used in the newsroom as the only sound which can be heard are the reporter’s typewriters.

This scene generally suggests that Woodward and Bernstein are facing an impossible task as they appear lost in the immensity of the library’s reading room. But it also presents them as a united front, full of dogged determination. In the following scene it is revealed that the search through the records was in vain, with both reporters wondering if some slips had been pulled or names changed or if they’d missed a card. But in the next breath they suggest another possibility and so the investigation continues.



Bibliography

Cook, David A. 2000. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979. University of California Press Ltd., London.

Ehrlich, Matthew C. 2004. Journalism in the Movies. University of Illinois Press, Illinois.

Goldman, Willian. 1975. All The President’s Men screenplay: May 10, 1975 draft. Wildwood Enterprises, Inc.

Lindamood, Brian. 1999. Cub Reporters. In Columbus Alive. http://www.columbusalive.com/1999/19991202/film1.html (link now broken)

Lobrutto, Vincent. 1999. Principal Photography: Interviews with Feature Film Cinematographers. Praeger/Greenwood, Westport.

Schaefer, Dennis and Larry Salvato. 1984. Masters of Light: Conversations With Contemporary Cinematographers. University of California Press Ltd., London.

Toplin, Robert Brent. 1996. History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past. University of Illinois Press, Illinois.

Filmography

All The President’s Men. 1976. 133 mins. Production: Warner Brothers, Los Angeles. Directed by Alan J. Pakula.


"hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes"

Politics Earlier in the month, working together for the first time in decades. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post reflected back on Richard Millhouse Nixon's time in office and concluded that historical records demonstrate that he was far worse than they ever imagined:
"Today, much more than when we first covered this story, an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning. This record has expanded continuously over the decades with the transcription of hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes, adding detail and context to the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives; the trials and guilty pleas of about 40 Nixon aides and associates who went to jail; and the memoirs of Nixon and his deputies. Such documentation makes it possible to trace the president’s personal dominance over a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against his real or perceived opponents."
On the Post's own version of the story (which is here but shuts unregistered readers out after a few pages) there are more than five thousand comments which demonstrates how this affair above most others still captures our imagination.

"the ubiquitous observation camera"

Photography Menno Aden uses a camera mounted in area of the light socket in a room and shoots the layout from above revealing the spaces we inhabit from an unusual angle:
"The resulting images lay out space in symmetrical compositions that look like assemblages stripped off any kind of objectivity. The views into private homes and secret retreats bring up associations of the ubiquitous observation camera. The notion of surveillance is systematically played out by the artist to hint at society’s voyeuristic urge that popular culture has made mainstream."
The results also aren't unlike the final moments of Taxi Driver, albeit without the murderous implications.