Leah Katznelson (‘White House Plumbers’ costume designer) on balancing authenticity and ‘artistic license’ to depict Watergate [Exclusive Video Interview]
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“My father’s a historian, so I grew up with politics and history very much at our dinner table,” shares Leah Katznelson about how she became familiar with the Watergate scandal and why the HBO limited series “White House Plumbers” appealed to her. But even with that background the costume designer says, “I definitely was not familiar with Liddy or Hunt on a micro-level at all. I wasn’t familiar with the detail of their stories or their families,” referring to the series’ two main characters, E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson) and G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux). Watch our exclusive video interview above.
“White House Plumbers” centers on the two bumbling masterminds behind the infamous Watergate break-in during the 1972 election cycle. It begins with the duo pairing up to track down the leaker of the Pentagon Papers and follows them through the burglary of the Democratic National Committee and its aftermath. For Katznelson, part of the joy of working on a limited series like “Plumbers” is “the research component that comes with designing a period piece” and “immersing” herself in the world and the “historical evidence.”
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Since the series begins years before either the trials of Hunt, Liddy, and their co-conspirators or the legendary Watergate hearings, Katznelson had the opportunity to take creative liberties with the costuming for these figures before they came under public scrutiny. She explains, “Most of the photographic evidence of Hunt and Liddy and the Cubans and those involved, aside from Nixon, were heavily documented after the fact… My job was to get those images from afterwards and look backwards… and piece together what their worlds look like.”
For Hunt, Katznelson leaned into his “blue-blood, New England” and “upper-echelon upbringing,” using finer materials like “wools, silks, cottons.” But since Hunt’s career had seen better days by the time the call to work on the Pentagon Papers leak came, “Everything was lovely but a little tired… His silhouette stayed very 60s.” Liddy, by contrast, was “solidly middle class” and would have shopped from “the Sears catalog,” so the costume designer “leaned more heavily into the synthetics and wider lapels and the 70s Modern Man.” For a man obsessed with order and hierarchies, she “built in a lot of geometry and architecture in his clothes.”
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“White House Plumbers” moves beyond the sphere of politics and into the personal lives and households of Hunt and Liddy, too. Katznelson focuses the Hunts’ dynamic in particular because while Howard and Dorothy (Lena Headey) are “both somewhat conservative,” some of their children are representative of the “counterculture,” wearing “denim and flares and band t-shirts and anti-Nixon slogans.” In a future episode, Dorothy has a montage sequence that required numerous quick-changes for Headey. The costume designer calls the actress “extraordinary” to work with and shared how these quick-cuts were “a great opportunity to play with what her version of disguise would look like… coats, scarves, glasses… accessories.”
By the limited series’ end, we do get to see glimpses of the trial and congressional hearings, from which there is no shortage of footage and photographs. Katznelson did “replicate the exact ties that the guys wore” for these occasions, “fully recreated the dress” that John Dean’s (Domhnall Gleeson) wife wore to his bombshell testimony, and tried to be “as true and authentic as possible.” But since the series had “already established who these people were,” the costume designer was able to “take some liberties.” She shares that since “White House Plumbers” “wasn’t a documentary,” she could “have some artistic license.”
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