I’m working on a video about All the President’s Men (the film), which turned 50 this year. While I haven’t quite sorted out the full arc of my argument, I’m focused on the tension between how the film is remembered — as a story that romanticized investigative reporting and mythologized Woodward and Bernstein — and what it actually shows — an often unrewarding slog conducted by two guys who were sometimes kind of assholes. More specifically, the video is about the odd, seemingly unintentional conflict between the film’s aesthetic design and the actual things we see on screen.

Not sure when it’s going to be done, but I have an almost complete draft of the script. So hopefully before the end of the month.

That said, I wanted to share an interesting fact that’s probably not going to make it into the video: Namely, that Robert Redford — who played Woodward and was hugely responsible for getting the film made at all — actually had creative influence over the source material. Woodward and Bernstein were already planning to write a book based on their Watergate coverage. But, as they tell it, their original idea was to write a straightforward work of reportage, which would’ve been closer in style to their eventual follow-up book, The Final Days, which chronicled Nixon’s resignation.

Here’s a bit from a retrospective documentary about the making of All the President’s Men:

Redford: I was focused on the work that these two guys did that nobody else seemed to be doing. I called Woodward in Washington. I said, “Look, I’d like to talk to you, I have an idea.”

Woodward: He was interested in the personal story of trying to figure out what happened and our quest.

Narrator: At the time, the book envisioned by Woodward and Bernstein did not include themselves as characters at all.

Bernstein: When we sat down to write a book, the book that we started to write was not about us, it was about Watergate.

Woodward: Carl Bernstein and I were going to do a standard narrative about Watergate and what happened from the perspective of the Nixon campaign and the Nixon White House.

Narrator: Robert Redford had another idea.

Redford: My interest is a little different. I said, “My interest is you guys and the personal, about how you guys worked.”

Bernstein: Woodward came up to me one day and said he’d gotten a call from Redford. And I said, “What the hell about?” And he said, “Well, he thinks the story is really us.” And at the time, we were still reporting the story and we sure didn’t think the story was really us.

Narrator: But when Woodward and Bernstein finally did write the book, they abandoned their original concept and embraced Redford’s idea. All the President’s Men became the story of two young journalists fighting to uncover the truth.

Woodward: It was helpful to me to hear him say that and in the end we wound up writing All the President’s Men as a reporting story. He laid the seed for that in that first phone call.

This is partly interesting historical trivia, but it’s also fascinating because it upends how we normally think about the process of adaptation. The typical story of a book-to-film adaptation goes something like: We have this source text that was written as a novel or a non-fiction narrative, and we have to make creative decisions about how to translate it for a screen. Because storytelling techniques that work in one medium don’t necessarily work in another.

Done right, you get something like 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Done poorly, you get — ugh — Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.”

But Redford’s influence on his film’s source material means the adaptation of All the President’s Men isn’t quite so straightforward. The story here is less about translation from page to screen than a conversation between mediums; whether they intended to or not, Woodward and Bernstein wrote a book that was, in a sense, more cinematic. They weren’t screenwriters, so they weren’t drafting a script. But Redford certainly influenced how they told the story which, in turn, opened up the possibilities for the kind of narrative the film itself could construct, and ultimately created the conditions for how Woodward and Bernstein are remembered today — as heroes of the Watergate story, rather than simply chroniclers of it.