Peter Landesman

It’s not an exact science, making movies. Plenty of projects get stuck in the suspended animation of development, and even those that move forward do so at a gradual pace. But sometimes, everything works out just perfectly: two years ago, I reported on a picture called Felt, a biopic of Watergate informant Mark ‘Deep Throat’ Felt starring Liam Neeson in the title role. I forgot about the item soon afterward, but production has been chugging along for the past couple of years, and director Peter Landesman is preparing to unveil this new film at the most perfect time imaginable. You can plan for a lot, but it takes a stroke of divine generosity for a full-scale Presidential treason investigation to break out around the time you release your Watergate movie.

The Watergate scandal has been permanently imprinted in America’s historical memory, making for an instant low point of American politics upon the revelation that President Richard Nixon had authorized illegal information-gathering strategies against the Democratic Party. And yet that chapter only came to a close fairly recently; reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered Nixon’s conspiracy to spy on his political opponents, the President resigned, America moved on, but it was in 2005 that Woodward and Bernstein’s key source, the mysterious and gravel-voiced informant codenamed Deep Throat, made his identity known. With Nixon long gone and his own health starting to fail him, a former FBI spook named Mark Felt ‘fessed up to cooperating under the Deep Throat moniker.