Richard Kind and Dan Mirvish join Movieweb to chat about their upcoming Watergate-inspired comedy 18½.
Inspired by the Watergate scandal that forced Richard Nixon to resign from office, 18½ follows Connie, a White House transcriber who receives an exclusive 18 and a half minutes of never before heard Nixon tapes. With the intent to leak them to the public, she contacts Paul, a Times reporter, and together, they seek a safe place where they can listen to them. Despite their good intentions, they run into many distractions and problems including technical ones, a hippy cult, and swingers.
Willa Fitzgerald and John Magaro star in18½. Rounding out the cast is Gina Kreiezemer, Marija Juliette Abney, Vondie Curtis-Hall, and Richard Kind. It’s directed by Dan Mirvish, co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival, who co-wrote the script with Daniel Moya.
It’s set to release on May 27, but before that, Kind and Mirvish joined Movieweb to chat about the film.
Kind is recognizable for a long list of shows and movies, from Curb Your Enthusiasm to Inside Out. He plays Jack in 18½, an employee with an eye patch at the motel which Connie and Paul decide is a safe location for listening to the Nixon tapes. “The motel was spectacular. It was great. It had this real throwback to the '70s look with neon signs, and the rooms were so unusual. It’s a beautiful location right on the water. The role… it lent itself to the weirdness that the movie is, and what really does it is the eye patch. There’s no explanation why I wear it, but it makes you want to know how I got it, what makes me want to wear it — who knows? And it’s that weirdness that I think is really good in the movie.” Said Kind.
The eye patch also helps bring out comedic elements in the script, as Jack jokes about a football game that was such a nail-biter that he had to watch with one eye closed. “I think that lends itself to the character in that I am not necessarily a hippie, but I’m a free spirit. And things don’t bother me.” Added Kind.
Kind also commented on working with Mirvish, recalling the experience to be lovely. “He’s a lovely guy. I admire his moxie in the business… I did a movie for him before that is intelligent and fun, and smart… he’s passionate… he aims for a good artistic success, of which I think 18½ does.”
Related: Exclusive: Willa Fitzgerald Talks Watergate Scandal Inspired Comedy 18½
“The whole thing started because the last day of my last film, Bernard and Huey, was during the 2016 election in November. And that next day, I was going to see Jules Feiffer… and inevitably we started talking about the election and Trump. And Feiffer has won a Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning… most notably about Nixon and the Watergate. And so that conversation inevitably went to talking about Nixon and Watergate.” Explained Mirvish.
“I then took a ferry and saw this great motel, the Silver Sands Motel,” he continued, recalling how his friend Terry had inherited it from his grandparents. “He’d been running it for about a decade, and he said, ‘We do a ton of fashion shoots, but we’ve never shot a feature film here. We’re closed in the winter, so cast and crew can stay here.’… it’s like, ‘Ah! This is my time to do a Watergate film.’”
With the location and general idea set, Mirvish then started doing more research to pin down exactly what angle he wanted to take. While this was happening, his co-writer, Moya, was doing original research as he was more fresh to the scandal itself. “We discovered that in the Nixon White House, there were several offices that had the voice-activated taping system… and that there really are tapes of Nixon listening to his own tape recorder in one of those rooms, and fumbling with the buttons and kind of pushing them around. And so once I realized that there could plausibly be a tape of a tape, of somebody listening to, and the deleting the gap, all of a sudden, that opened up the world of possibilities… It could be a transcriber in the White House, and then she could be going to the motel to leak the tapes to a reporter.”
While doing this research and writing, Mirvish noted that he visualized Kind to play Jack. “He had been in my last film, Bernard and Huey, and so we had him in mind when writing the script as the voice of Jack, not knowing for sure that we would get him… Coincidentally, his schedule worked out really nicely with ours… It fit him like a glove.”
After its initial release, 18½ will become available in July on VOD and Blu-ray.
Tim Kraft is the Editor in Chief of Movieweb. His favorite genre is a tie between horror and comedy.