Jay Roach is going to be making an attempt to go straight with a film about Mark Felt, a man best known to a generation of sniggering school children as Deep Throat.
Felt is one of the great American heroes, the man who helped Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein break the Watergate scandal, which ended up forcing Nixon to resign. We need more men like him today, helping to hold out of control politicians accountable.
Deep Throat’s identity was kept secret for decades until Felt stepped forward in a Vanity Fair piece last year. America had a, “Oh, no kidding,” response, which was kind of a bummer, but understandable on some levels. Who the hell knew who Mark Felt was, anyway? Some of the favorite guesses for the identity of Deep Throat had been bigger names, like international war criminal Henry Kissinger.
Roach made one sort of serious film, the very excellent Mystery, Alaska, so it isn’t like the guy only knows how to make dick-joke level comedies like Austin Powers and Meet The Fockers. Here’s hoping he has the chops to make Felt’s story as interesting as it needs to be to inspire more people.