Speaking of ‘White House Plumbers,’ have you seen this Jewish Watergate werewolf movie?
‘Werewolf of Washington’ imagined the Nixon administration beset by a lycanthrope
By PJ Grisar May 4, 2023
It’s fitting that one of the greatest and earliest sendups of White House Plumbers features a bowl’s eye view from a toilet. Also a werewolf.
In 1973, in the thick of the Watergate scandal, Milton Moses Ginsberg, a Bronx-born editor and independent filmmaker, released a lycanthropic satire of the Nixon presidency, The Werewolf of Washington. The conceit is all there in the title, but the horror comedy is eerie in the extreme for its prescience.
The offbeat, and often hilarious, creature feature follows Dean Stockwell’s Jack Whittier (his last name a reference to the 37th president’s hometown in California), the assistant press secretary to jockish and never-named commander in chief (Biff McGuire). Jack, who dated the president’s daughter, returns to the capital after a stint in Hungary, where a werewolf nipped him and he disposed of an amulet that might keep his transformation in a toilet (as in nearly every werewolf film, bathrooms feature big).
McGuire’s administration has two things on its mind: advancing a Supreme Court nomination and waging a war against the media, both the “networks” and the local paper, represented by a clear Katharine Graham analogue credited only as “Publisher.”
But in a twist, Whittier becomes a major source of bad press, mauling the many women in the executive branch’s orbit in very literal Saturday Night Massacres. The crusade against leaks to the networks, naturally, takes priority over solving the full moon murders.
Ginsberg, who died in 2021, wrote Werewolf in 10 days at his Fire Island summer share and shot it for around 100 grand around Glen Cove, Long Island. Its idiosyncratic edits are the result of limited camera movements; the inventive, if not quite Rick Baker-level transformations, are the work of Bob O’Bradovich. The film’s politics come straight from Ginsberg, who described his Bronx Jewish upbringing as worshiping “the Trinity — Roosevelt, Truman and the Holy Democratic Party.”
Werewolf, unlike a certain HBO series about G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, was mostly ripped from headlines of the Pentagon Papers drama as it was unfolding and so doesn’t explicitly touch on a certain hotel break-in. Still, there are eerie hints of what’s to come with Watergate — and we even see its signage at one point.
Ginsberg said that Stockwell’s character anticipates White House Counsel John Dean, who helped blow the whistle on Watergate. Somehow, Ginsberg knew there would be skeletons in the closet and tape on the door latch.
“Werewolf came out a few months after the true horrors of Watergate surfaced,” Ginsberg wrote in a piece for Metrograph’s Journal. “The reality was unbearably worse than I had even imagined.”
Well, it wasn’t like a werewolf was really eviscerating women on the Mall, but the ethos of paranoia and journalistic suppression is hard to overlook.
As the credits roll, we hear remarks even more chilling — and canine-forward — than Nixon’s Checkers Speech.
“I know I can count on your support as I lash out against the enemies of America, both in the press as well as the Senate,” the president says in an address to the American people, getting more and more excitable as he goes along, and, finally, unleashing a great howl.
It’s one thing for a movie to predict the presidential behavior of its time, but watching it in a post-Trump world is downright scary.
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