Frost/Nixon: A Dishonorable Distortion of History
It's not surprising that the movie Frost/Nixon is receiving rave reviews. Like the eponymous smash play it's based on, it tells a dramatic story of a clash of two interesting figures (one of them absolutely riveting), with two richly talented actors, Frank Langella as Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost. The film is even more powerful than the play because of the effects of motion-picture techniques - size, penetrating close-ups, film clips, variegated scenery, and simply more action. But mainly size: everyone and everything is bigger - even eyeballs. Moreover, the movie is set against the backdrop of one of the most dramatic, frightening, and significant episodes in American history -- "Watergate" is inadequate shorthand for the constitutional crisis this country went through (often misinterpreted as simply a series of crimes on the part of the president and his top aides), ending in Nixon's being the first (and as yet only) president to be forced to leave office.
But it's because of the enormously historical importance of that period that the film raises serious questions of its legitimacy. The film's plot is a contrivance; its telling is so riddled with departures from what actually happened as to be fundamentally dishonest; and its climactic moment is purely and simply a lie. Literary license in the name of drama or entertainment is one thing; the issue comes down to what one is taking license with, and the degree of license being taken.
The play/film is at least based on something that actually happened: three years after Nixon left office in 1974, the British talk-show host/entertainer Frost, his career on the skids, wangles the first set of television interviews with the disgraced former president, brooding and plotting in San Clemente, California over how to restore his own reputation and, by the by, to pay his substantial legal bills. (Typically, Nixon's effort to redeem himself in the public eye was a plotted project with a title, "The Wizard" -- a telling fact that the script omits.) The highly successful screenwriter Peter Morgan, using his familiar trope, turns the interviews into a mythic battle, David-and-Goliath style (note the order of the names in the title), pitting a callow Frost against the master conniver and debater Nixon, and, after hours and hours of frustrating questioning, "nails" him. Thus, Nixon is at last brought to justice, forced to admit his knavery to the American people, and truth wins out. The problem is, this isn't what happened.
First of all, the whole arrangement between Frost and Nixon was dubious from the outset. While the script is straightforward about the fact that under their agreement Nixon was to be paid for the interviews (a then-whopping $600,000), a highly unusual arrangement, it omits the even more questionable part of the deal in which Nixon was guaranteed twenty percent of the profits from the sales of the interviews to television stations. Thus, the two purported gladiators were in business together, with a mutual interest in making the interviews interesting enough to make a nice profit. The deal also guaranteed that only one-fourth of the time would be devoted to Watergate, leaving Nixon the rest to ramble on about his foreign policy achievements - which in his mind included the invasion of Cambodia. To further disguise the degree to which the interview project was essentially a fix, the script of both the play and the movie simply leaves out the episode in which, after Nixon returned to his dressing room during a sudden break in the taping of the Watergate segment - the break misrepresented in the script as having been called for by Nixon aides worried their boss was becoming uncomfortable, whereas it was actually called for by Frost because he misread a cue card held up by the Nixon aides saying "Let him talk" - Nixon aide Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon) told Frost's frustrated aides, "He knows he has to go further. He's got more to volunteer." These lines appear in neither the play nor the movie.
Second, Frost did not in fact "nail" Nixon. The climactic moment of the movie (as in the play) has Nixon confessing to having participated in the cover-up of the famous break-in of the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee, in June, 1972 by operatives hired by White House aides. But this "confession" is produced through a blatant distortion of what Nixon actually said in the interviews. At that particular moment, Frost was pressing Nixon to admit that he had more than made "mistakes," that there had in fact been wrongdoing, that crime might have been involved (a rather mild way of putting it). Then, through a sleight of hand, the script simply changes what Nixon actually said: the script of the play has Nixon admitting that he "...was involved in a 'cover-up,' as you call it." The ellipsis is of course unknown to the audience, and is crucial: What Nixon actually said was, "You're wanting to me to say that I participated in an illegal cover-up. No!"
As he gives the faux confession in the movie, Langella's remarkably Nixon-like face (shown on a television screen in the play) is ravaged, distorted in agony, contorted in anger. On the disk of the actual interview, Nixon glowers and looks perturbed, but the scene lacks the drama of both the film and the play. Nixon, as promised, did give Frost some interesting material "I let down my country;" "I gave them a sword;" his mistakes "were mistakes of the heart rather than of the head," all very unusual things for an ex-President to say, but far short of an admission of attempts, carried out during Nixon's presidency, to undermine the inner workings of the opposition party, of his broad-scale and alarming assaults on the constitution. The Watergate break-in was small beans compared to, say, the break-in of the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers - Nixon was far more worried about the discovery of this break-in. In the movie, even the semi-admissions come across as dramatic; on the disks of the actual interviews, they seem bathetic.
There are other distortions in the movie. One of them makes a very big thing of the "discovery" by James Reston, Frost's chief researcher, of a taped conversation between Nixon and his political henchman Charles Colson, supposedly the first one about the cover-up. (Reston, is depicted as the moral conscience of the story, the one who is determined to hold Nixon to account, but he is made less of a noodge in the movie than in the play, where he became an irritating presence.) Much is made of the fact that this bit of conversation was theretofore unknown. But after I saw the play I checked with one of the Watergate prosecutors, who told me that that particular piece of tape was unknown because "we were awash in far more incriminating evidence" against Nixon, and the prosecutors didn't consider it worth using. (The play was based on an unpublished manuscript that Reston wrote about his role in the interviews; the book, The Conviction of Richard Nixon, was published after the play was a hit.)
Finally, though the main characters are acted well as they were written to be, they were not written to be what they were actually like. Langella, wreaks the magic of not just imitating Nixon but becoming him before our eyes, but this is not the true Nixon. The one we meet in the movie is too mellow, too jokey. There are only flashes of the bitterness that consumed and ultimately destroyed him. The main display of that bitterness comes in an invented scene in which Nixon phones Frost in his hotel room, and pours out his bitterness. No excessive liberty was taken in the invention of the scene as a device to display this critical aspect of Nixon's persona, but it goes further than that by also distorting the plot. In the imagined conversation, Nixon heightens the supposed collision between them ("I shall come at you with everything I got") and that only one of them can win. (But that wasn't the deal.) And this supposed conversation supposedly inspires Frost to try harder, which supposedly leads to Frost nailing Nixon, which never happened. Langella deftly shows that Nixon was a strange man, awkward with small talk, uneasy with people, but Langella's Nixon becomes an almost sympathetic figure, and also a jokey one, the one we most want to see, in order to have more laughs. But Nixon wasn't funny. And he certainly wasn't the likeable figure of Frost/Nixon. (Yes, of course, some people liked him, but not very many, and not even his dog.) He was a tragic Shakespearean figure, often out of control (and drunk), and, it seemed, more than a little mad (his aides never knew which orders were even intended, not least should be carried out), brought down by his flaws: he would have made for excellent drama, if not as much entertainment. Because Langella's figure is outsized, Sheen's remarkable talent is outshone. But Frost himself wasn't and isn't the dolt portrayed in the play/movie. Sheen has Frost's intonation down cold, and Frost certainly liked his booze and his women and his parties (he's settled down now, married to the daughter of a major Duke, and has three sons, on whom he dotes), but he's more intelligent and more serious-minded than the way he's portrayed.
Peter Morgan specializes in stories that pit two figures against each other -- David and Goliath-like -- with the good guy prevailing. The Queen, in which Sheen played Tony Blair convincing a frosty Queen Elizabeth to show her grieving subjects more empathy over the death of Princess Diana; The Last King of Scotland, in which a young Scottish doctor realizes the brutality of Idi Amin, and leaves him, the monstrous Amin desolated. So, in this story, Frost must win out over Nixon, even if it never happened. The interviews ended in a draw. Morgan himself told John Lahr of the New Yorker after the play came out, "I could just as easily written the piece -- and found substance to support it -- to substantiate it, that Frost didn't get Nixon, that Nixon threw it in, for these interviews to sell."
It doesn't matter whether the Queen actually cried and thought of Diana when she saw a beautiful stag about to be killed by hunters. We don't really know how mature, or even sane, Hamlet was. To try to ascertain to what degree the liberties taken in Frost/Nixon are in accord with dramatic tradition, and acceptable, I recently raised the subject of dramatic license with Michael Kahn, the esteemed Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Theater, in Washington. Kahn told me that "while Shakespeare took a lot of liberties to produce great drama, he based most of his stuff on historical sources; he didn't distort [ital] history." Kahn added, "There were court documents to work from, there were a lot of letters from Queen Elizabeth I; as far as I know what he never did was take any documentary dialog and change it into something else." (Kahn expressed shock when I told him about the distorted key line in Frost/Nixon.) There's also the matter of timing. Nixon remains a relatively recent figure, around whom there still swirls a lot of controversy. Shakespeare, Kahn said, never wrote about contemporary politics. If he wanted to write about Jacobean times he put it in the period of Pericles and Athens; the most recent figure he wrote about was Henry VIII, "and by the time he wrote it those figures were long dead."
It doesn't matter that Frost/Nixon moves some scenes around (though it's not always clear why), and engages in some invention. But such a gross misrepresentation of such important events -- roughly seventy percent of the population is too young to have been aware of Watergate -- about a figure over whom there is still serious debate, in the name of entertainment and profits, to my mind, crosses the line of dramatic integrity and is dishonorable.
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It was made for entertainment, not as a documentary. If all I wanted to see was the interview, I'd watch it on YouTube.
I'm old enough to have watched the original interviews and, for the most part, my recollection is that, indeed, Nixon "confessed" and probably said more than he'd intended to. I realize that may not be totally accurate, but then again, this movie does not purport to be an exact telling of history. It is the spirit and not the letter of the event. The interview actually did accomplish the same conclusions that the play and the film illustrate.
Incidentally, was The Queen crying for Diana when the stag was killed, or for herself and the death of the monarchy? Art is not about accuracy, it is about impression and point-of-view. Another writer will tell the story of Nixon differently. Frost/Nixon does not do disservice to history, it merely fictionalizes it in the same way that "All the President's Men" does. Most movies must be maddening to historians.
See Ellis Weiner's Profile
Thanks, stockdale. I suffered momentary brain collapse when I read that the stag symbolized Diana. No, the Queen was lamenting the capture or end, maybe not so much of the monarchy per se, as of its supreme authority and self-sufficiency. Its defeat was her (the Queen's) defeat.
I remember the interviews and I thought he was soft on Nixon. In the tapes there are disturbing sections where they are discussing murdering a reporter by the name of Jack Anderson by putting poison on the steering wheel of his car. The poison penetrates the skin and he becomes delusional and crashes the car. Nothing about this has ever been asked of Nixon. Again a shamefful cowardly corrupt media not doing its job.
Wonder if there is any truth to the fact that it's harder for liberals to "come down" on people by nature of their personalities. Oh, plenty can, sure. But look at how Dems forgive and excuse bad behavior on the part of fellow politicians. Didn't Clinton excuse Bush from having to face accusations regarding the Contra Affair? Then look what the Republicans did to him--vicious and cruel. Wasn't Carter the same with Repubs that were in trouble? Maybe some libs are "bleeding hearts". I am pretty convinced nothing is going to happen to Cheney, at least not by the Dems themselves. Maybe another group, but wouldn't any legal team need the help of the politicians to do it?
Yeah, Che Guevara, a real softie. Depends on whether you're talking about liberals or liberals lite.
Che Guevara was not a liberal-another rethug lie
DakotaMinnesota, Che was not a "liberal." He was a radical and revolutionary.
If a delusional film-play does the delusional Nixon an injustice, so be it. One small point: if it had been Nixon/Frost many younger viewers might have been misled to believe it was about one of the man's running mates (Nixon/Lodge; Nixon/Agnew; Nixon/Ford).
Hope they make a movie called "BUSH and CHENEY meet GANDHI" with
KIM CATTRALL as the love interest. Sounds like a plan.
Dear Ms. Drew:
Considering you have written books on both Watergate and Nixon, I'll give you your high horsed trumping of what is essentially a simple story of a power struggle for information control. But if people really wanted to learn about the reality, they would rent the Frost/Nixon tapes, or read some extensively footnoted book done with a masterful stroke of research genius. This film, I do not believe bares the ridiculous dramatic license that so many 'real life' films have engaged in, specifically Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind. But I can see where simple missteps are like nails on a chalkboard for you, but I am slightly tilted on your perception, you're mad because Frost didn't actually 'nail' Nixon, and that Nixon wasn't really a likable guy? Alright: if Frost didn't 'get Nixon' we all know for sure that Nixon was guilty of some treasonous activities, so we can trump that up to dramatic resolution, without having to include an afterword. And as for likeable? I can't defend that one, but I do know that Nixon has become an amalgam in himself, transcending reality in our own minds, he has become a symbol for corruption and evil nature in power, you're welcome to check out other protrayals, like Hopkins in Nixon, Dan Hedaya in Dick, or Billy West on Futurama, he is larger than reality. And the movies, much as they may try, are never reality, especially in awards season, just go ask John Nash.
I'm not sure in all these words that you actually make a point, but if you did, is it that because it's the movies you're free to take a historic event and misrepresent the essential point of it to people who are either too young and too incurious or both, to know the facts? The reason we have a distinction between what is a true story and what is fiction is so that the truth is not misrepresented. Dramatic license is used to enhance a true story, not to change the essence of what it's about. That's called lying, not fiction. Ron Howard does history itself a disservice by mischaracterizing the man element of one of the most important interactions between the press and a president in US history.
You're getting close to nailing it here. Taking historical events and bending them to meet dramatic objectives to the point of materially changing the essence of the event is what bothers me about so-called docu-dramas. If Nixon really didn't capitulate and admit guilt but sortof, kindof did (at least in Howard's mind) - is it then ok to have him say things that he really DIDN'T say because it would clarify the ESSENCE of all the implied incrimination? No, it isn't alright. Inventing scenes and conversations to build characterization is valid if it supports the actual reality of that character. But making such a major invention as admission of guilt come out of his mouth when it never did breaks that rule and steers a whole generation of low-information citizens to conclude that Nixon came clean with us. That is wrong.
....Cont from above. We also have a category, "Based on a true story" to cover something in between what actually happened and something made up which Ron Howard could have uses if he wanted to play fast and loose with the facts to make his story more marketable. To give it the story the Hollywood treatment and pass it off as if it is historically accurate is dishonest. I expect better from Opie Taylor/Richie Cunningham.
what we all fail to realize is that Nixon broke the law and got away with it because republicans never punish their own Ford did nt have the cojones to do the right thing. we only impeach if the president has a girl friend, now there is a terrible crime!!!!!!!! which one betrayed our constitution?
Neither.
Clinton, Nixon, Martha Stewart, Libby, and Impeached Arizona Governor Mechan were all accused of crimes against the state. These are political crimes without victims.
During the investigation of a crime, prosecutors rely on testimony to make their case. If they don't feel that the witness is cooperating, than a new crime has been committed. This is done because prosecutors usually don't have enough evidence to make the initial case stick. Now they go after the witnesses on a technicality.
Most prosecutor are dishonest. They have to be to trick witnesses. Lying to them or not cooperating with them should be a misdemeanor. Let them do their job without forcing us to give up our 5th amendment rights.
Thank you for documenting my impression (based only on the dramatic "confession" featured in the TV ads) that this script sacrificed historical truth to dramatic effect. At 50, I remember those days.
Nixon never admitted his villainy- even to himself. It's over the top to insinuate he did or that David Frost 'broke him.'
wow.....a piece of fiction takes a few liberities with the facts....that's never happened in cinema ever before.
Other history from the movies....kids waste their time making out in a car while the Titanic sinks, Americans were the only troops who landed in Normandy and all that nonsense in The Other Boleyn Girl was actually real.
It'a a work of fiction.....and if it gets people reading up on Nixon and Watergate....how is that a bad thing.
And those who don't ...well....they've probably already formed opinions that won't by moved by this article.
viewfromuphere,
It's a bad thing because as impossible as it may seem, there are people out there who would believe such a movie was real history. These people never pick up a book or seek more than the bare bones of truth from a subject. Look how many believed that Barack is a muslim and that he was the one who ordered 9/11 or that he isn't even an American born citizen. Many of these people want to believe because it substantiates and validates what they want to believe. Movies that perpetuate lies can do a lot of damage.
Those people "out there" are no doubt the same people who believe professional wrestling is real. It's entertainment, not History 101.
Reminds me of that wonderful fake film "Amadeus". Totally factual if you ignore anything you know about the great man.
Ms. Drew: Methinks thou dost protest too much. The Bard took great liberty with historical facts, particularly if they did not suit the point of view of history of the Crown or its political cronies. I would agree that Frost/Nixon does not adeptly portray the real Richard M. Nixon, but I would say that it does no worse than any movie portraying Kennedy, Johnson, or any other American president. This is not a documentary. It is a historic drama, a category like an adaptation of a controversial book, like "The Da Vinci Code" brings out the history buffs with their fact-checking clip-boards, there is going to be stuff that is just dead bang wrong, but is done to DRAMATIC purpose. I doubt Queen Elizabeth I was how she was portrayed in her films either.
Well written article, and very informative, but your conclusion was a little over the top.
after watchiing this 2 hour boxing match of a movie, I would like to add my tid bits..........the biggest punches thrown in this movie where never thrown in real life............. woot?
Unfortunately, many people not educated with history believe that these movies are true. It affects voters opinions if they aren't given a true accounting of history.
The play was based on an unpublished manuscript that Reston wrote about his role in the interviews; this manuscript, The Conviction of Richard Nixon, was published after the play was a hit. James Reston was instrumental in the production of the actual interview FOR David Frost. Not Nixon. It appears a lot of us remember how uncomfortable Nixon was during this interview; he certainly didn't convey anything but bitterness at being forced into "resigning" his Presidency, something he strived for his entire life.
It is my opinion that being caught spying on the other party is not as agregious as generations of OUR children being told that what President Clinton did was NOT having sex. As we all know, many girls these days and in the previous generation felt liberated enough to NOT have sex as often as they could, resulting in the spread of sexually transmitted diseases at an alarming rate.
Then there is George W. It boggles the mind to think that someone who slid through his military duty, slid through Yale, and bungled several businesses would have the "business" acumen to run a country!! Why did he run for President? Who are you people who voted him in, not once, but twice?
Mr. Ross, your conclusion it way under the table. Was there a disclaimer at the beginning of the film? Does Howard tall the audience that he is peppering his film with inaccuracies and the audience can play "Where's Waldo" trying to find them? You presume that audiences know that historical fiction is more fiction than history. I question that presumption. As I see audiences, they are far more inclined ot believe films and their subliminal impact than any fact checking history buff who tells them later what they watched was fiction.
But doesn't the director have an obligation to tell us that this isn't historically accurate by using the phrase, based on a true story, or give some indication that this isn't faithful to the actual events? Many people will see this movie and think it's at least true to the spirit of the interaction between Frost and Nixon and it isn't. I have no problem with dramatic license, but if you use it and you don't tell people you're using it, isn't that pretty close to lying? Without saying so, won't people assume that at least the main point of the movie is accurate? I think what's over the top is to change the essence of an historical interaction, one of the most important in US history, and not give any indication in promoting the movie that it's main point isn't true.
Here's a footnote based on some personal observation.
http://stephencrose.wordpress.com/2008/12/16/frost-nixon-film-a-tissue-of-lies/
I saw the play in London but haven't seen the movie (the play was awesome). The element of the 'Watergate' scandal that consistently shocks me is it's prosaic low-keyness. One political party broke the law trying to surveil another...? er so what. Surely a pretty minor event. At the same time cointelpro (spelling?) were allegedly assasinating domestic political advocates, infiltrating groups and trying to entrap them into terrorism. Illegally whacking black panthers surely trumps illegally watching the Dems...?
HighburyJD,
See, now you are precisely the kind of person that I would worry about being fed misinforming Movies like this. You don't really understand what the spying was really all about. It wasn't just about spying on the Dems. It was about cheating at every turn in order to hijack power. Americans have gotten so used to fudging and cheating to win that it has become commonplace and acceptable. A sure sign that a nation is descending into darkness. Do you really accept the idea of a man using lies and underhanded behavior that verges on criminality in order to coopt power. What shall we accept next then, military coups and dictatorships? Perhaps that is why the election of George Bush not once but twice through deceit was so acceptable to Republicans, the party of family and moral values.
I'm siding with HighburyJD on this one - yes, Watergate was undeniably appalling; however, the fact that Watergate took center stage and COINTELPRO was never thoroughly investigated, reported on or prosecuted is unforgivable. A nation that forgives and forgets incidents like the government-sanctioned murder of Fred Hampton; the firebombing of the Move residence on Osage Avenue in Philadelphia, which killed 11 people and destroyed 62 homes because the fire department allowed the fire to burn for hours; and the over 25-year imprisonment of Mumia Abu Jamal, cannot be relied upon to recognize political corruption when it sees it. Ergo, we have had to endure 8 years of the Bush Administration.
BTW - if anyone would like to catch up with David Frost, he is currently on Al-Jazeera English.
JD, you are entirely correct.
The egregious wholescale bloodletting that typified American policy in that time, even more so than the present, has no comparison to the small mistakes in judgment this episode of presidential history portrays, however accurately or, as Ms Drew properly asserts, inaccurately.
We are faced today in America with the concluding days of an extremely duplicitous administration which seized for its own purposes the military and treasury power of the republic.
Yet nothing apparently will be done to hold them accountable for their crimes.
Did the blood of MyLai stain Nixon's hands?
Are Cheney/Bush besmeared with the blood of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis they ordered killed?
Yes to both, and yet it is the miniscule meaningless and relatively obscure acts for which they are cited.
Insanity raised to the highest level.
If you want to see an accurate portrayal of Nixon, I would recommend Oliver Stone's Film "Nixon"
Anthony Hopkiins totally nails it.
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