Watergate-Era Cinema Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Three Days of the Condor (1975) was conceived before Watergate, written through Watergate, and released after Watergate. The script's CIA-rogue-operation premise was not modeled on Watergate, but the audience that bought tickets in September 1975 had spent the previous two years watching senior officials lie under oath on television, and the film landed in a culture whose default position toward institutional authority had moved permanently.
The political timeline ran ahead of production
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| June 17, 1972 | Watergate burglary |
| June 13, 1971 | Pentagon Papers begin publication |
| Summer 1973 | Senate Watergate hearings televised |
| October 1973 | Saturday Night Massacre |
| August 8, 1974 | Nixon resigns |
| September 1974 | Ford pardons Nixon |
| December 1974 | Seymour Hersh publishes CIA domestic-spying revelations |
| January 1975 | Church Committee formed |
| Spring 1975 | Condor in production |
| September 25, 1975 | Condor released |
| October–November 1975 | Church Committee public hearings on assassinations |
| April 1976 | Church Committee final report |
| April 1976 | All the President's Men released |
"We thought we were really going out on a limb talking about destabilizing foreign regimes... then all this crap comes out, while we were shooting the movie!" — Sydney Pollack, Cinephilia & Beyond
"We cooked all that stuff up that's in the movie in a hotel room one night, and we're thinking 'Man, maybe this is just too far out.'" — Sydney Pollack, Cinephilia & Beyond
The Church Committee's revelations during 1975 — CIA assassination plots against Castro, Lumumba, Trujillo, Diem, and Schneider; CIA mail-opening programs against American citizens; CIA experiments with LSD on unwitting subjects — meant that the film's invented rogue oil operation read in theaters less as fiction than as the kind of thing that probably also existed.
Watergate-era cinema shared a worldview, not a genre
The films that emerged from the period span genre. They share an assumption — institutions lie, and the lies are not aberrations — that no longer needed to be argued.
| Year | Film | Genre | Institutional target |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1973 | Serpico | Cop drama | NYPD |
| 1974 | The Conversation | Thriller | Surveillance industry |
| 1974 | The Parallax View | Thriller | Political-assassination industry |
| 1974 | Chinatown | Detective | Civic government |
| 1975 | Dog Day Afternoon | Crime drama | Police, media |
| 1975 | Nashville | Ensemble | Politics, music industry |
| 1975 | Three Days of the Condor | Thriller | CIA |
| 1976 | All the President's Men | Procedural | White House |
| 1976 | Network | Satire | Television |
| 1976 | Taxi Driver | Drama | Urban politics, media |
"After Watergate, you didn't need exposition to establish that the government was lying. You could start the movie at minute zero with the lie already on the screen and the audience already understanding." — Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) (book, not available online)
Pollack saw the film as a barometer rather than a polemic
Pollack repeatedly framed Condor as an attempt to register the moment rather than to instruct it.
"I wanted to deal with trust and suspicion, paranoia, which I think is happening in this country." — Sydney Pollack, Jump Cut
"It was a speculative film. We were just speculating, saying what if, what if, what if." — Sydney Pollack, Jump Cut
The speculation was, by 1975 standards, conservative. The actual CIA had run worse operations than the one in the film.
The era's distrust did not stay in the movies
The institutional distrust that animated 1970s cinema did not dissolve when Reagan was elected. It migrated. By the late 1970s the distrust had become bipartisan and trans-ideological — left distrust of the security state, right distrust of regulatory bureaucracy, a shared distrust of media gatekeepers — and that distrust has structured American political culture continuously from the Church Committee to the present. Condor's freeze frame on Turner's face — the question of whether the press will print the story — has only become more pointed.
"The state of journalism is a lot worse. The media has been lazy and irresponsible." — Robert Redford, The Dissenter (2005)