During the Watergate investigation, the FBI confiscated more than 3700 hours of Nixon's secret tape recordings. But the FBI also confiscated 204 reels of Super-8 film. The confiscated films were home movies made by Chief of Staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, Chief Domestic Advisor John Ehrlichman, Special Assistant to the President Dwight Chapin, and Deputy Assistant Larry Higby. Everyone knows about the secret tapes because they forced Nixon to resign. But the home movies were filed away and forgotten... until now.

For the first time, OUR NIXON presents those home movies to the public – to tell a familiar story from an unfamiliar perspective. You might be surprised by how much the story changes in the telling.

Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Chapin, and Higby were nuts about home movies. They filmed big events: White House performances by Bob Hope, Dionne Warwick, Johnny Cash and Raquel Welch; hordes of anti-war protestors on the National Mall; legions of adoring fans on the campaign trail; visits from heads of state like Haile Selassie, Nicolae Ceausescu and Indira Gandhi; their historic trip to China; and Tricia Nixon’s Rose Garden wedding.

But they also filmed each other: Chapin goofing around with his camera; Ehrlichman clowning with Kissinger on the beach; and Haldeman filming Higby filming Haldeman at the Great Wall of China. Ehrlichman filmed birds. He was especially fond of hummingbirds. The home movies record every aspect of their experience of the Nixon White House, from the prosaic to the profound. These four men carefully documented their time with Nixon because they believed that Nixon would transform America. And in a way, they were right.

Today, when we think of Nixon, we think first of Watergate. But OUR NIXON isn’t a film about Watergate. It’s a film about four of Nixon's men and the story they thought they were a part of – before Watergate changed everything.


OUR NIXON is currently in production with an expected release date of early 2012.