All the President’s Men turns 50 today.
This famous “six‑minute shot” is a masterclass in phone acting and pure technical nerve.
Director Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis pull off a single, unbroken slow zoom: from a wide, humming newsroom to a tight close-up on Redford. No cuts. No safety net. Tension builds in real time.
Redford carries it with typical quiet confidence. Six minutes of note-taking and talking into a phone, no flashy “Oscar clip.” He even flubs a name (“McGregor” for “Dahlberg”), corrects himself naturally, and Pakula keeps it because it feels authentic.
The background is part of the story. As Woodward hones in on his phone call, everyone behind him huddles around a TV watching Senator Tom Eagleton resign. The contrast is deliberate: they chase the “obvious” headline, while the camera drifts past them to Woodward, and the real story.
To hold Redford and the busy background in focus early on, they used a split‑diopter lens, then had to ease it out as the camera moves in. A technical tightrope. The timing of both actor and cinematographer is spot on.
As Woodward closes in on the truth, the world literally falls away: the newsroom blurs, the noise fades, and we lock into his obsession. It’s one of cinema’s great moments: Redford doing almost nothing—and somehow everything at the same time.
What makes this shot brilliant is the contrast it carves between Redford and the newsroom around him. The visual language does the talking: he’s locked in, disciplined, driven, all focus and fire. He stands apart because the work matters more than anything else.
There’s a cool feature in Latin, the gerundive, which is a verbal adjective implying that something should/must happen. A few of them survive into English words:
If someone should be revered, they are “reverend”.
If something must be cut away, it is a “dividend”.
My favorite: if a story is so good that it simply must be read by everyone, it is “legend”!
Latin reverendus/a, dividendum, and legenda. Pretty cool that what is sometimes a difficult concept for Latin learners is actually present in English, albeit rarely. Do let me know if there are any good ones I’ve missed.
The Library of Congress, to their eternal glory, has provided nearly 2,000 recordings of poets and writers dating back to 1943.
We're talking T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, Sandburg, Robert Frost, and more.
Check it out here!
https://t.co/0JSjv0Vpkk
🐎✨ Happy National Arabian Horse Day! ✨🐎
Today we celebrate the beauty and legacy of the Arabian horse, a tradition central to CPP’s history. We’re sharing a 1927 photo of Antez at the LA County Fair from the W.K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library archives.
Stay tuned… 👀
Ferg analyzes bird remains from the University Indian Ruin, offering insights into the role of birds and environmental changes during the Classic Period in relation to other sites. https://t.co/ZhRCB4v3TR
#Archaeology#Arizona
Happy 100th birthday to a legend! A few years ago a friend told me he had a friend who knows Dick Van Dyke, and that he is a fan of Charles Dickens. So I signed this book for him, never thinking it would really get to him. A few weeks later I received this lovely photo.