I would normally have Thursday night’s All The President’s Men 30th anniversary screening at the Academy (which will include a chat between producer-star Robert Redford and Newsweek critic David Ansen) at the top of my list, but there’s a big-deal Children of Men screening in Westwood with an after-party that Alfonso Cuaron and Clive Owen are attending… so that’s that.

I’m not all that heartbroken because I felt I’d connected with the All The President’s Men mystique and present-tense relevancy factors after watching two brilliant mini-documentaries last Fenruary that were part of Warner Home Video’s All The President’s Men double-disc special edition DVD. (Which I briefly mentioned at the time.) Both were made by Los Angeles-based documentarian Gary Leva .
The docs — an 18-minute piece called Woodward and Bernstein: Lighting the Fire and another called Out of the Shadows: The Man Who Was Deep Throat — are especially valuable and noteworthy because they’re serious looks at the state of U.S. journalism today rather than typical celebrate-the-movie puff pieces. They’re basically about how journalism has gone downhill since the days of Watergate and, by implication, how attempts to muscle journalists under the Bush administration are just as bad if not worse today than they were under the Nixon administration in the early ’70s.
The Academy people should make video-audio recordings of tomorrow night’s event and put them up on their site.