18 1/2

Year 17, Day 310 - 11/6/25 - Movie #5,183

BEFORE: Jon Magaro carries over from "September 5" and I'm sending a big Birthday SHOUT-out to Sullivan Jones, who played Muhammad Ali in "Big George Foreman", which I watched just a couple months ago. I'm not scheduling by actor birthdays any more, but I still check each day to see if one popped up. With the new late-fall schedule of just watching a film every two or three days, I have some flexibility in scheduling each one, I can push a film one day in either direction if I want things to line up. 

I tried to find some Nixon-era tie-in also, but nothing really popped up. However, it's election time so there's a bit of a political tie-in there. Today in history, 11/6/1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected for the first time, and it's also the 125th Anniversary of William McKinley getting re-elected, with Theodore Roosevelt, former Governor of New York, as his V.P. That led to Roosevelt becoming President in 1901 - sorry, that's the best I can do, but it's something. 

THE PLOT: In 1974, a White House transcriber is thrust into the Watergate scanddal when she obtains the only copy of the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in Nixon's tapes. 

AFTER: This is a bit of a weird one, if you're looking for actual historical information about Nixon and/or Watergate, you've come to the wrong place. Sort of. This is meant as a comedy (umm, I think) based on the scandal, specifically one audio tape out of Nixon's library that was missing, or there was 18 1/2 minutes that had been erased or edited out or something, and for some people that was a focal point of the investigation, like what information was missing, and why? So much information about Nixon's dirty dealings had already come to light, so it made people intensely curious about what could be SO BAD that it needed to be removed or destroyed. It's a weird phenomenon about active history, in a world where nearly everything is recorded or archived for posterity, something missing kind of gets our attention. 

Like those few seconds that got cut out of the Zapruder film - or the current furor over the Epstein files, and those 2 minutes of security cam footage from the prison where Mr. Epstein supposedly took his own life, what more could we learn about the case of the dead pedophile if there wasn't that mysterious glitch? I know what people THINK they might see, but that's not really the same thing as seeing it, is it?  Anyway, with all the crap that Trump has pulled over now (almost) five years in the White House, he's really done his part for Nixon's legacy, like Nixon wouldn't have thought of so many different ways to defraud the American people and separate them from their money. Imagine Nixon selling trading cards or his own brand of steaks, vodka or bottled water - that would be ridiculous, and at that time it would have been insanely illegal for the POTUS to have a side-hustle, but this is where we find ourselves.  

The premise for this film is that a woman who works as a transcriber contacts a Washington reporter, who meets her at a hotel because she's got a copy of the missing audio tape, technically it's a recording of the meeting where Nixon and his aides erased the original tape, but in the process of listening to it and discussing it before erasing it, supposedly Nixon was unaware that he was being recorded, meaning that he was also creating a copy of a copy. Umm, sure, that's not really how dubbing works, but OK, let's roll with it. 

Connie and Paul meet up at a Maryland motel, she brings the tape and he brings the reel-to-reel player, and their cover story is that they're a newlywed couple, they're on a honeymoon road trip and they only need the room for one night. There's a wild cross-section of 1970's people staying at this motel, and the motel manager is quite a character, too, so it's really trippy. And when their tape recorder appears to be broken, they have to go on a quest to find another reel-to-reel machine in the motel or perhaps the surrounding neighborhood. 

I think maybe even in 1972 reel-to-reel players were a bit archaic. The "hippies" in this film talk about how they've switched to stereo 8-tracks, which of course were more convenient because the tape stayed in the plastic cartridge (most of the time, anyway) and you didn't find yourself picking up audio tape from the floor and trying to wind it all back on a reel. And then of course in the early 1980's everyone had switched over to smaller cassettes, which was the second time everyone needed to re-buy all their Beatles albums in a new format - the third time was when CDs came out and the fourth time was digital files, so, umm, are we done with that yet? 

Connie and Paul find out that the older couple who invited them over for dinner are listening to bossa nova music, which means they probably have a reel-to-reel player - which means they must have brought one from home, such things were not standard equipment in motels, unlike, say, color televisions. But to borrow the tape player, they have to accept that dinner invite and then stick around for drinks afterwards, and then, you know, what if those people are swingers? Well, it was the 1970's, anything is possible, but how far would Connie and Paul take their newlywed act in order to borrow that tape player?  And at what point does pretending to be a couple put them close enough to each other where there might be a bit of real romance in the mix?  

It kind of felt for a while that this storyline was going nowhere fast - actually that's not accurate, it felt like it was going nowhere very, very slowly - I can assure you that it does go somewhere, but that somewhere might not be very realistic or even believable. Well, at least there's a narrative arc to it all, however it's still about five minutes of story stretched out to fill a 90-minute space. I'm not going to really trash this film because I know the director, Dan Mirvish, he's one of the founders of the Slamdance Film Festival, which means I had dealings with him back in 2004 when I produced a film that screened at Slamdance. 

What's presented here as the "information" contained on the missing 18 1/2 minutes, is, of course, completely fictional. In reality, nobody knows who created the gap in the audio tape and what it might have contained. Production on this film began in March 2020, 11 days before the COVID shutdown, so the shoot was on hold for six months, and during that time the filmmakers changed their schedule to work on the recording sessions with the actors playing Nixon, Al Haig and H.R. Haldeman, which all took place over Zoom. Filming resumed in September 2020 after COVID protocols had been put in place for live-action shoots. 

Directed by Dan Mirvish

Also starring Willa Fitzgerald (last seen in "Strange Darling"), Vondie Curtis-Hall (last seen in "Eve's Bayou"), Catherine Curtin (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Richard Kind (last seen in "Beau Is Afraid"), Sullivan Jones (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Alanna Saunders, Claire Saunders (last seen in "The Intern"), Lloyd Kaufman (last seen in "Superman" (2025)), Marija Abney (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Gina Kreiezmar, Alexander Woodbury, Elle Schneider, Joshua A. Friedman,

and the voices of Bruce Campbell (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Jon Cryer (last seen in "Brats"), Dan Mirvish (last seen in "Animation Outlaws"), Ted Raimi, Samantha Michele Buchanan, Chris Quintos Cathcart, Modesto "La Voz" Moya, Donald Ray Schwartz, Marv Wellins, 

RATING: 5 out of 10 reasons to not eat Wonder Bread (it is true that Wonder was made by Continental Baking, which at one time was owned by ITT. My father also worked for Continental Baking for a while, but he was allergic to the flour that they used, so he had to stop - but for me, that's reason #11 to not buy the brand)