Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1492834
39 S P R I N G Q 1 I S S U E F E A T U R E Justin Theroux, left, Judy Greer, Lena Headey, and Woody Harrelson in "White House Plumbers." P H OT O : H B O Plumbers" — remembers his own mother being absorbed in the real-life drama un- folding in the nation's capital. "I'm at the age where, when I was grow- ing up, I would come home from school and my mom — my parents were very staunch Democrats — was glued to the Watergate hearings," Cooper said. "She watched it gavel to gavel. She could be on the phone with her friends and screaming at the TV: 'I can't believe they did this.' I very much knew about Watergate from growing up." Cooper and his colleagues — picture editors Erick Fefferman, Roger Nygard, ACE, and Steve Rasch, ACE, who split the episodes or worked in various combina- tions — came to know much more about Watergate while working on "White House Plumbers." The five-episode series, which will premiere in March, shines a spotlight — or should we say the interrogation lamp? — on the two men most responsible for stage-managing the Watergate break-in: former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and Committee for the Re-Elec- tion of the President official G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux). Co-starring in the series are Lena Headey as Hunt's wife Dor- othy; Domhnall Gleeson as John Dean; and Ike Barinholtz as Jeb Stuart Magruder. (Assistant editor Jon Mechen co-edited several episodes.) More than five decades after Watergate, Hunt and Liddy's plotting, planning, and law-breaking can come across as darkly humorous, but director David Mandel emphasized the unique mix of comedy and drama that came to define the show. " ' W h i t e H o u s e P l u m b e r s ' h a s a very unique tone," said Mandel, also an executive producer and showrunner of "Veep." "It's not a comedy per se, but at the same time, the Watergate break-in and these characters like Gordon Liddy are very funny. I knew the show would have to find its own unique tone and that there would be a lot experimentation in the edit room to figure out where that line was." The picture editors describe the process of defining — and then finding — the tone as a continual challenge. "David was experimenting with every Picture editor Erick Fefferman. P H OT O : C A R O L I N E F O G A R T Y