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Dean once," said Leonard, 42. "My dad was the head of a speaking series [at Miami University in Ohio], . . . and he invited John Dean to speak after the whole thing." Peterson, 40, didn't have too much familiarity with the scandal, either. "I was not a fan of history," he said. "As a kid, we had terrible history teachers, so I knew very little about the actual mechanics of it all." As a native of the Washington, DC, area, Connelly, 38, was around the corridors of power for a good chunk of her life. "My dad worked in the government," she said. "I know he and my mother greatly followed Watergate." Even so, she was born too late to have any recollections of the whole sorry episode. "I knew about a lot of political things growing up," she said. "But I don't have any personal memories of Watergate." Yet for the picture editors, coming into the material cold turned out to be an advan- tage. After all, no viewers under 50 would have had any firsthand familiarity with Watergate, either. "It definitely helped me identify where things were confusing," Connelly said. "I didn't really do a ton of pre-research or anything like that." Consequently, if a scene didn't make sense to her, she knew it might not make sense to modern audiences, ei- ther. "If I'm reading a scene and something is confusing, or there is terminology being used that I wasn't familiar with, that actu- ally was helpful in knowing what we needed to explain," she said. In fact, "Gaslit" centers on what Leonard calls "the unwritten stories of Watergate" — the experiences of what might seem to be peripheral players. None was more important than Martha Mitchell, whose unvarnished, press-friendly nature — she had turned up on the sketch comedy show "Laugh-In" and was a celebrity of sorts in her time — led Nixon officials to plot against her; she was kidnapped and drugged for fear she would divulge details about the scandal. "Upon reading Episode 3, where she is assaulted and drugged, there is something, as a woman myself, about being gaslit and ... you're saying the truth and [being told] it's not true, that really struck a chord with me," Connelly said. "She is, in history, a very flawed individual, but Julia's perfor- mance of her is incredible. To see such a strong woman stick to her guns, and insist on telling the truth no matter what the men around her are doing to her physically or saying about her — I loved that." Martha Mitchell is "the heart" of the series, Peterson said. "In each episode, even if we don't always have Martha having the largest roles in all of them, we come back to her, and we keep coming back to that trajec- tory of her relationship with [her husband] John, her relationship with her daughter, and where she sees herself and where her dreams sort of went." Although "Gaslit" is focused on what might be called the Watergate scandal's B-team, the picture editors stressed that each character, no matter how complicated, imperfect, or even villainous, needed to come across in full: not as caricatures, but as human beings. "As editors, and as filmmakers and as actors, we're approaching it from a place of pretty extreme empathy, or trying to," Leonard said. "If we spend enough time doing it, then of course you will start to understand and fill out these characters." Added Peterson: "We're dealing with people whose whole lives are being upend- ed. . . . It's someone who has a home life, and they have things they're thinking about, and the prospect of going to jail or turning on their friends and all of that is stuff that I think we all really personally responded to." Retaining some basic sympathy for several key characters was essential, as Connelly found while cutting Episode 3. "There used to be a scene where [John Dean] actually broke up with" his wife Mau- reen Dean, played by Betty Gilpin, Connelly said. "And there was no coming back for this character once he did that. It was pretty bad for anyone liking him. Essentially, what we ended up doing was restructuring that en- tire episode to make it a fight and not have him break up with her, which changed the trajectory of people liking him for, I think, the rest of the series. That's something the three of us talked about a lot in terms of CHARACTER PORTRAIT: Martha Mitchell, right, with Julie Nixon Eisenhower in July 1969. P H O T O : A L A M Y 36 C I N E M O N T A G E C O V E R S T O R Y