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Contemporary viewers may watch the 1976 film “All the President’s Men” and ask: Could it happen today? No, not the Nixon administration’s crimes and cover-ups — not much need to question whether history will repeat there — but rather the news media’s careful and unflinching reporting of political misdeeds, followed by real repercussions instead of a never-ending spin cycle.
This overwhelming sense of present relevance provided an anxious underpinning for the dramatic pleasures that unfolded Friday night when Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke portrayed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in a star-studded live reading of “All of the President’s Men” at Hollywood’s Harmony Gold Theater, followed by a lengthy panel discussion that got to the heart of the points of connection that can unite the film world and journalism.
The reading, a benefit for the Stella Adler Academy of Acting, was at the instigation of Ruffalo, whose passions for Adler, Robert Redford and the lasting journalistic legacy of “Woodstein” came together for a singular occasion. Joining him and Hawke in a nearly 20-strong cast on stage were Don Cheadle (as Washington Post managing editor Ben Bradlee), Laurence Fishburne (as the mysterious source nicknamed Deep Throat), Spencer Garrett, Rob Morrow, Amy Brenneman, Tom Pelphrey, Kaley Cuoco and Missy Yager, among others.
Two-and-a-half hours before doors opened to a very sold-out audience, the cast gathered for its one and only rehearsal run-through, preceded by Ruffalo standing in front of the ensemble and offering a mission statement for the night.
“One thing about Stella (Adler) that we all know is her hunt for the truth,” Ruffalo told his co-stars. “We’re telling the story of the journalists finding the story. Obviously, (journalism) is under attack today. CBS has fallen. Newsrooms are being gobbled up by conglomerates. How is it affecting our business? We don’t know. But when we have ideological people who are buying up our media companies, that probably says a lot about what kind of content we’re getting. So this is a night to celebrate Stella, and the search for the truth. It’s a night to celebrate journalism, and it is a night to celebrate where journalism and our business meet. And I’m just happy you’re here.”
Arnold Turner/Eclipse Content
Taking a break to talk with a journalist in the empty house before the show began, Hawke praised Ruffalo for bringing the read-through together in short order.
“Mark’s a hustler. He’s a do-gooder,” said Hawke. (He clearly intended all this as a compliment, as Hawke also praised the character he played, Bernstein, as a “hustler” in the post-reading discussion.)
Doing “All the President’s Men” now, in January 2026, “seems appropriate,” offered Hawke (who dove into the reading amid a heavy week of accolade-laden duties for his “Blue Moon” role). “I mean, it’s amazing how the sense of shame the country used to possess over the kind of lies and deceit that don’t seem to create a scandal anymore… I grew up in a world where people wildly admired Woodward and Bernstein for what they uncovered. And now we have a president that calls journalists ‘piggies.’ It’s a different era we’re living in.”
Further assessing the shrinking ranks of journalists, Hawke added: “It’s so strange, it’s so obvious, but if there was only one publisher and all the books were published by the same person, it would defeat the role of literature. And the same companies releasing all the movies and the same companies doing all the news, then you don’t even have to put a malevolent purpose on anybody. It’s just a loss of what, in the world I grew up in, it meant to be an American.”
During the rehearsal, Ruffalo broke the fourth wall just once, after uttering a weirdly contemporary-sounding line having to do with CBS’ newsroom possibly wanting to keep its distance from the slowly developing Nixon-scandal story. “We didn’t add that!” he told his fellow cast members.
Later, I asked Ruffalo about the line in question. He looked it up on his phone. “I took a picture of it. This is the line: ‘No, let’s not worry about CBS. They’re probably afraid they’ll get their TV franchise taken away if they start fooling with this thing.’ Isn’t that crazy?” (If you don’t recall the line from “All the President’s Men,” it comes from an early draft of the script and didn’t make it into the movie; the dramaturge for the live reading combined elements from three different drafts of the screenplay credited to William Goldman, with uncredited Redford additions.)
Ruffalo was prepared for things to be either rushed or rough, but said it would be thrilling to do a live reading. He had similarly led a cast of “All the President’s Men” in East Hampton last August, as a benefit for the Center at Park West, following his first such event, a reading of Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network.” “That is also a great thing to read, especially now,” he said. “The entire audience went crazy and was screaming, ‘I’m mad as hell. I’m not gonna take it anymore!’ I’ve never really experienced anything like that in the theater.”
With a second stab at “All the President’s Men” now on the west coast, Ruffalo said, “The thing about a reading like this is, it could be very loose and magical things could happen… We’re coming from all over the country right now, and from all these different events; I just left Ethan at the AFI. It’s a lot easier to do that than it is to mount a full production, and flying by the seat of your pants for a reading is kind of the spirit of it, so it’s not the worst thing in the world.”
How last-minute was it? “I got the call on Monday,” said Laurence Fishburne, shortly before going on. When the ask came in to play Deep Throat, he admitted, “I had never seen ‘All the President’s Men.’ When the movie came out, I was making a little movie called ‘Apocalypse Now’ in the Philippines, so I never got around to it.” Needless to say, in the intervening four days, Fishburne got around to both the Goldman script and the Alan J. Pakula-directed film, which he now is able to proclaim “a perfect movie.” He joined his fellow cast members in believing “it’s clear that the story is reflective of our times and the moment that we’re in now, with it being more and more dangerous and trepidatious for journalists to tell the truth.”
When the reading got underway for real in front of an audience, the reaction of the crowd was fairly boisterous, to an almost surprising degree, considering that “President’s Men” is a screenplay famous for getting deep in the weeds of what actually transpired. Even without a surfeit of crowd-pleasing gotcha one-liners, the audience vocally relished the nearly slapstick-paced dialogue.
The panel after the reading was led by Woodward’s wife, fellow journalist Elsa Walsh, who passed along her husband’s and Bernstein’s regrets for not being able to make it. She had been at the East Hampton reading in August, and noted how the L.A. crowd’s reaction was wildly different from the east coast’s more solemn reaction to the same material.
“I saw this with Bob and Carl in the Hamptons this summer,” Walsh said, “and we knew the story, but at that time we were still riveted, our heads going back and forth, listening to it,. And hearing it anew tonight was a totally different experience. Fantastic, and also much funnier this time. One of my sisters (leaned over and) said to me, ‘It’s so funny. I didn’t realize this was comedy.’”
Responding to that, Ruffalo almost seemed a little sheepish about what a crowd-pleaser this cast had turned it into, smiling and saying, “It got away from us a little.” But how could the audience not chuckle a bit — appreciatively — when Bob Woodward calls up Deep Throat and the voice that says “hello” is one of the great deep voices of all time, Fishburne’s?
Yet, as Walsh further said, in listing all the factors why it shouldn’t go over so well: “It’s loved by journalists, it’s loved by political people, it’s loved by actors. And … it is a whodunnit, but you already know what the answer is, so the mystery is gone. You never see the villains on stage. It’s filled with names of people that most people don’t know about. It’s about a lot of methodical hard work and doors being slammed in people’s faces. Yet it’s a movie and a script that you were able to gather this incredible cast on a Friday night to come and do.”
Ruffalo responded with a treatise of sorts on why the material resonates in his profession. “Listen, all actors, I think, want to be journalists. in some part of them. Journalists are our modern heroes. You could be a soldier, you could be a paramedic, you could be a emergency room doctor or you can be a journalist — or you can be an actor playing journalists and paramedics and emergency room doctors. But one thing that I think I can speak for all the actors now is that we’re sort of on a hunt for the truth too. And when you take journalism, which is finding the story, and you take movie-making, which here is the story about finding the story, it’s just an unbeatable symbiotic relationship that’s so powerful. … As actors, this turns us on. This is as close to what we do as you can get.”
The panel included Christian Williams, who was style editor at the Washington Post while these events were taking place (and who helped guide the filmmakers when the movie was being made just a couple of years later). “It’s like ‘Casablanca’ now,” Williams said, and then explained the comparison. “We’re all 80 now, the people who did this stuff — it was a long time ago — and yet it’s all distilled into a perfectly understandable feeling now, especially tonight, with new faces and new interpretations. You know, if you want to understand the most complicated thing about World War II, the French resistance or something, there’s ‘Casablanca’; you come out of there thinking, ‘Hey, I’ve got it.’ And man, that’s one of the most complicated cultural moments… I feel the same way about this movie.”
What kind of movies might come out about what is happening in the present-day? That was a recurring theme through Friday evening, on- and off-stage. Director Ethan Silverman, in a quote moment before the show, whispered: “This is a really important time to be doing this… The clarion call of Woodward and Bernstein was so huge, so immense. What’s scary to me at this moment is that Nixon and Watergate seem so quaint.”
In a conversation earlier in the day before rehearsals began, Ruffalo got deeper into his motivation for doing the show right now.
“We had 127 journalists killed in Gaza; there’s journalists being killed all over the world. Journalism in the United States is being killed metaphorically, through buyouts. And we see what happened with (Jimmy) Kimmel and the kind of censorship that’s [floating around. So in Hollywood today, because this film had such an impact, and with the things we’re facing with the monopolization of newspapers and newsrooms all over the nation… It just felt like this would be a great thing to do here in L.A. during the award season when we’re all here together.”
With current developments in news-about-the-news, “with CBS and Bari Weiss, I mean, it’s a disaster,” said Ruffalo. “That’s the importance of this reading, I think, because where the decisions are being made about our national news right now is in Hollywood. We’re right here in the belly of the beast, talking about a film and a story that, if it wasn’t covered with independence and courage, we wouldn’t be living in a democracy today. Nixon would’ve had his way, and we don’t know what the long-lasting repercussions of that would’ve been. The only people who stopped it were this news team, Woodward and Bernstein, and the courage of the Post, Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham.
“What’s happening at CBS is a perfect example of that. We’ve got a host of a morning show who’s got the charisma and the experience of a morning talk show host, trying to handle the news of a nation that’s at a crossroads right now and needs reliable news. And we can’t even get a story from CECOT (the El Salvadoran prison holding American deportees) coming out of ‘60 Minutes.’ We are in dire straits, as I see it. We invaded Venezuela; we kidnapped the elected leader. We had an ICE agent shoot a woman in the head for no apparent reason whatsoever, other than he had a gun by his side and he could use it. And he had immunity from any kind of culpability whatsoever. I mean, why would anyone do such a thing? We have a nation that is losing its mind, looking for answers and understanding, and we have a vice president who literally goes out in front of the nation and lies about everything, And there’s no credible news source to be able to work through and weed its way through what the truth is, because we don’t have a truth that we could all agree upon, because of a failing of the media. It’s a perfect storm.
“When you look at these (Nixon-era) crimes compared to Jan. 6, compared to Russiagate, compared to the corruption of the Saudi airplane or the president’s Bitcoin… It’s rank outright corruption happening now, and the newsrooms aren’t working fast enough to cover it. Although there is incredible news still happening. The Washington Post was bought by Jeff Bezos, an their editorial board has become MAGA, but they’re still doing great journalism there.
“You know, I feel I’ve seen this movie almost every 10 years. … The whole ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was just a big lie that the New York Times basically pushed on behalf of the Bush administration because of their coziness with the presidency. So this is not new. But what is new is the monopolization of the newsroom, and the owner suddenly having some sort of editorial hand in what news is going out, what news is being held, and who’s being endorsed or not. That was a scary thing when the Washington Post and the L.A. Times pulled their endorsements for the first time in their papers’ histories, because the owners didn’t wanna see that happen. That was a blow for democracy. And it only seems to have been snowballing since then.
“So then you have the conglomerates and the monopolization of media — so where are the filmmakers gonna go to tell the next ‘All the President’s Men’? If the media owners don’t want those stories told, it’ll never make it to the screen.”
Ruffalo is a proponent of films that tell true stories in a way that cement what could be passing news stories into the cultural consciousness, and/or have immediate real-life repercussions. “The story of ‘Spotlight,’ for example, was by itself a blockbuster story, but with the film ‘Spotlight,’ we changed laws. That movie helped people. It changed the world. With ‘Dark Waters,’ only a small percentage of people were reading the story of Rob Bilott, or watching the documentaries. When you make it a film, all of a sudden everyone is seeing it as a piece of entertainment and they’re learning as well. And more laws have been changed both nationally and internationally with those two things happening than if Rob had just done the thing by himself. We use these things to organize movements around. And that’s why it’s so important and that’s why this relationship between journalism and filmmaking is so important. And that’s what we’re here celebrating today…
“This democracy is a fragile thing without the fourth estate, which is the only profession ever written into the Constitution. Isn’t that amazing? The only profession written into the Constitution,” he repeated.
As to whether “All the President’s Men” could be made the way it was today, some of Friday night’s participants said no — not so much having to do with media consolidation (yet) so much as Hollywood’s own insistence on fleshing out true stories to make them theoretically more interesting to the mass audience.
“We’re here honoring Bob, who I worked with and was friends with. I’m hearing all these stories. Elsa was telling me about how Redford, when he got the script, canned all of the personal stuff. There was all this stuff about Woodward losing his dog, and he scratched all that out and was like, ‘We just need to stick to the story. The story’s enough.’ But at that time, that wasn’t the general thinking. It was ‘We gotta pepper this thing’ (with more anecdotal character flourishes). But he was like, ‘No, we’re gonna make a movie about journalism and it’s gonna be interesting to people.’ And God damn it, here we are, 50 years later.”
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