Great Scene: “All the President’s Men”

Woodward meets Deep Throat for the first time. Deep Throat’s advice? “Follow the money.”

The IMDb plot summary for the 1976 movie All the President’s Men makes it sound like a pure drama: “The Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncover the details of the Watergate scandal that leads to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.” It’s certainly that. It’s also a thriller.

This scene is a great example. Woodward meets with someone whose code name is Deep Throat. What’s not included in the video clip is the espionage run-up to their meeting. I’ve included that here in the script pages.

Here is the movie version of the scene:

A few things:

• Notice how scene description is included as dialogue in the very last side. We see this sometimes, particularly in older scripts before PDFs became so readily available. Presumably, someone typed a copy of the script using a screenwriting software and simply neglected to tag the scene description as such when finishing up the last side of dialogue.
• In the movie, it ends with an added line from Deep Throat explaining why he won’t just fork over all the information. I have a feeling this was inserted at the insistence of the studio to make sure the audience understood this point.
• I also suspect they shifted the “follow the money” line to the end of the scene for a similar reason. I happen to like the way Goldman ended the scene with the Liddy anecdote.

There’s been some speculation about how much revision there was on the original screenplay and who did the revising. You may check out the backstory on this issue in an article I wrote in 2011.

It’s clear that Goldman, who won an Oscar for the screenplay, wrote a script which the movie pretty much followed, but the screenwriter did have some mixed feelings about the movie. If there was much going on in terms of script revisions, it’s likely Goldman took some degree of umbrage at that.

You may read the screenplay here.

For more articles in the Great Scene series, go here.