5 Movies Depicting The Watergate Scandal

Alan J. Pakula’s iconic political thriller, adapted by William Goldman from Woodward and Bernstein’s nonfiction book, picked up eight nominations at the 1977 Academy Awards and won four, including one for Goldman. Forty years later, it’s still as fresh and exciting as it was upon its release — which came just four years after the break-in at Watergate.

Andrew Fleming’s teen comedy came out before Mark Felt was identified as Deep Throat, and ‘Dick’ imagines two airheaded teenage girls, played by Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, to be the mysterious informant. After Dunst and Williams’ characters accidentally stumble upon the Watergate break-in, Nixon hires the girls as his dog-walkers to keep them quiet. Over the course of their regular visits to the White House to walk Checkers, they discover the cover-up in a series of hilarious mishaps.

Ron Howard’s historical drama, which was nominated for five Oscars, isn’t concerned with showing the events of Watergate so much as the aftermath: Following Nixon’s resignation from the presidency in 1974, British journalist David Frost seeks him out for an interview. Nixon agrees to do it to rehabilitate his reputation, thinking Frost will be an easy interview; Frost seeks to hold the former president accountable, and to get some kind of confession out of him.

Oliver Stone’s Nixon biopic, released the year after the death of its subject, stars Anthony Hopkins as the fallen president. While the film portrays his life all the way from his childhood to his resignation, the Watergate legacy hangs heavily on his story, as scenes from that period of Nixon’s presidency are used to frame the narrative, punctuating everything throughout. The three-hour-plus political epic collected four Oscar nominations, including one for Hopkins.

Robert Zemeckis’ decades-spanning film only addresses the scandal — as it does so many major events of the 20th century — briefly and tangentially. When Forrest (Tom Hanks, in an Oscar-winning performance) stays at the Watergate, he notices a commotion in an office window in the middle of the night and calls the front desk of the hotel to send a maintenance man. Because when people are rummaging around a dark room with flashlights, they must be looking for the fuse box, right?