Superhero journalists here and in 'Watchmen'

The coming of the "Watchmen" film and the visit of Bob Woodward to the Post-Gazette newsroom coincided nicely today.

Alan Moore's book and Zack Snyder's adaptation each reference Woodward and Bernstein being "silenced" by the Comedian, a mercilous mercenary in the employ of Richard Nixon, who goes on to his fifth term as president as the United States inches closer and closer to a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union.

Of course, that's the parallel 1980s America of Moore's imagination -- in the real world, the intrepid Washington Post reporters were instrumental in exposing the scandal that went straight to the White House -- but it made me nostalgic for a time when journalists and their editors breaking a big story could be viewed as heroes for their efforts.

Thirty-seven years after the Watergate break-in, Woodward, who has written four books on the Bush administration and is pondering his next book project, is still knocking on doors and asking important questions, face to face. That makes him a hero in any book.

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"Watchmen" has the box office to itself here in Pittsburgh and many other markets, where other movie openings this weekend are scarce.

The film is a hard R, live-action movie that makes the mostly implied violence of "The Dark Knight" seem tame. But that's not stopping fans from gobbling up tickets to see what Zack Snyder has wrought. The AMC Loews at the Waterfront has added midnight shows to accommodate impatient movie-goers.

Fandango has the pre-ticket sales off the charts, and MovieTickets.com shows "Watchmen" at 55 percent of the box office, with the Jonas Brothers' 3-D movie a distant second at 12 percent.

Apparently a lot of people will be watching the Watchmen this weekend.

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At Comic-Con International in San Diego (the gift that keeps on giving as movies and TV shows debuted there make their way to the public's eye), Patrick Wilson, who plays Nite Owl II/Dan Dreiberg (above with Stephen McHattie as Hollis Mason/Nite Owl I), was his usual handsome, fit self.

It was there that I first heard him talk about putting on the pounds for the role, to give Dreiberg the hang-dog, paunchy look of someone gone to seed. He also dyed his hair a mousy brown and wore big glasses, the better to seem out of touch with his former role as a gung-ho masked crime-fighter.

The sometime song-and-dance man ("Oklahoma!" on stage, "Phantom of the Opera" in the movies) from Carnegie Mellon was among those on the "Watchmen" panel who said they saw the original book as a bible for their characters.

Adding the 20 or so pounds was just another way to connect with his character, and it was easy to do. “Well, I could just kick back, have a carton of Haagen-Daas, pop open a beer and . . . I’m done.”

“Everyone pulls for Dan," he added. "You feel for him, you just do. He wants it so bad, the relationship he has with Hollis [the aging former Nite Owl], you just pull for the guy the entire film. Every day that I got in that suit, man, was a gift.”

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Six degrees of Patrick Wilson:

He co-starred with Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach) in "Little Children" and with Gerard Butler, star of Zack Snyder's hit "300," in the 2004 musical film adapation of "Phantom of the Opera," as Raoul to Butler's masked man.