Free Student Film Screening: 18 1/2
18½
Directed by Dan Mirvish
87 minutes
This engaging 1970s-era dark-comedy thriller about the Watergate conspiracy poses an intriguing question: What if a copy of those infamous missing 18½ minutes of recording, allegedly erased by secretary Rosemary Woods, wound up in the hands of a well-meaning transcriptionist? The road to good intentions takes Connie (Willa Fitzgerald, “Little Women”) on a surreptitious journey to a rundown roadside inn with Paul (John Magaro, “First Cow”), a journalist who wants to help her. A small cast of zany characters — played by actors such as Richard Kind (“A Serious Man”), Vondie Curtis Hall (“Harriet”), and Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman — punctuate this clever cloak-and-dagger take on an odd footnote to the Nixon White House, and a number of surprise guest voices are heard on the “actual” tapes. “18½” is directed by Dan Mirvish, a frequent SLIFF guest whose films “Omaha,” “Between Us,” and “Bernard and Huey” all screened at the fest. Co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival, Mirvish is a Washington U. grad and received SLIFF’s Charles Guggenheim Cinema St. Louis Award in 2017.
Award-winning filmmaker and author Dan Mirvish was a history and political science double major at WU before becoming a senate speechwriter, going to film school and cofounding the Slamdance Film Festival. His newest feature film, 18½, a 70s Watergate thriller/dark comedy starring Bruce Campbell as Nixon, is definitely historical fiction. But Mirvish will discuss how it raises pressing historical questions about what really happened at Watergate, and what are the implications for our own time. He'll also answer the age-old question, is there life after a history or poli sci major?