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.

Comments

[frenchie25]

Frost/Nixon isn't the only current falsification of historical events raking in millions at the box office.

To music lovers and historians, excluding Bo Diddley from "Cadillac Records" demotes the film to nothing more than rubbish. The "artistic lisence" Executive Producer Beyonce Knowles took in this film is tantamount to the re-exploitation of an uneducated African American musician born Ellas McDaniel who rocked the world with a new genre of music, but who is cheated once again and deprived of the only thing he could leave his family: his legacy and place in the proverbial sun.

Ah, what some folks will do for that extra buck.

[LaurieR]

I know far too many people whose opinions of historical figures and events are based entirely on how they were portrayed in movies. For a lot of people, seeing the movie means they know the story, and they go through life judging the participants and events by the film version. Which is why I agree with many posters here who say that if a movie is based on a true story, liberties should not be taken with the facts. There's no reason *not* to tell the story as it happened. There's plenty of room for fiction in films, and it should be reserved for fictional subjects. I don't agree that deliberately making something inaccurate somehow makes it more "entertaining." All it does is create a culture of misinformed people.

[skidee27]

Laurie R: You are a refreshing voice of common sense in this sea of arrogance and hate. WHEN oh WHEN will news return to be NEWS and historic films be HISTORIC? If you want to argue that Historic "fiction" is also FICTION...then write about fictitious people in an historic era. Do NOT fictionalize REAL people to suit your own political agenda. Ron Howard should be ashamed of himself. I am aghast at the propagation of FICTION in our Universities and in major publications. Oh yeah....I forgot....there is no such thing as fiction anymore. Our intelligentsia have "informed" us that there is no truth....ergo....there is no fiction. Gee.....if there is no truth....then how can we condemn Richard Nixon??????

[Wickowitz]

I scored Frost/Nixon's circumstantial reality depiction as 150% of natural in my WikPik review http://www.wikpik.com/movie_reviews/1565-frostnixonn). I've since included a link to Elizabeth Drew's article, noting that "I’m guessing she’d rate it a full 2x of circumstantial reality."

[Tulka2]

Thank you for your penetrating critique. It is important, as you say, that Nixon in the film is warmer, funnier, much less scary than in reality. Why would the playwrite do that? Why would Oliver Stone follow? What's the motive? Nixon would have been as interesting as Richard III and much closer to reality.

It's true what you say about Nixon's dog not liking him. Poor creature. An Irish Setter is not a lap dog suitable for ladies who want a lap dog and Nixon didn't even like dogs. Dogs are not good judges of character because they will like anyone who likes them. Dogs loved Hitler, just for instance, because Hitler loved dogs. Dogs know who likes them and Nixon did not like dogs. So, yeah, not a lot of warmth in that relationship. Poor dog.

Nixon wrote once... i don't remember where i read this..... Nixon was maybe ten-years-old and friends and family waited in the front yard while Nixon's older brother, who was maybe twenty, died of the Spanish flu in the house with their mother at his side. When Mrs. Nixon walked out, "She looked right through me and I knew she would rather it had been me who died". True story. That story humanized Nixon for me. He was a sick paranoid from an early age.

[Tulka2]

Sorry... brain hiccup. I know Ron Howard directed.

[Mrjonz]

Personally, I'm waiting for "Nixon/Presley"

[Halminbar]

I could imagine the scene where Elvis begins to sing "Jail House Rock" and Nixon responds, "They'll never take me."

[drjuluka]

I watched the original. I wouldn't waste my time on a docu-glamorized second version. It wasn't that interesting or memorable the first time. Nixon is gone, none too soon. Frost has morphed into Hannity, Conan, and Tina Fey all rolled into a breakfast burrito. Now is where life is. There is nothing to learn from Nixon or Frost, except as examples of how not to live.

[smoothdogie]

One thing I would disagree with is that Nixon was uncomfortable with small talk. Not true. Nixon was a master at small talk with one, two or three people. He was witty and charming with that small group. He was uncomfortable working a room...say like Ronald Reagan could. Reagan could enter a room and work it. But get him in a one on one or a small group and he had very little to say. He was an actor after all and used to playing the crowd. Nixon on the other hand would charm your socks off in a small group but just look at him in front of a group or a camera. They were almost opposite in their talents.

[jojo326]

This movie was directed by Ron Howard. Can somebody tell me what he has contributed to
cinema? It seems he is always aping a Spielberg or Lucas, somebody. Is it Stone, now. He is
a complete no talent. And if you listen closely, say Charlie Rose interview the Nixon actor.....its
some kind of wierd schmoozing where they talk these touchy feely cliches you know you've heard
about the so called directing experience...a thousand freaking times.....geez he seemed like
he was channeling Nixon.
Howard's not into portraying Nixon as he was.....or however close you can get.....He wants the
blockbuster, the endless laurel, the oscar, etc.....booooooorinnnnnnnnnnng.

[Dogmanger]

Anyone who takes a Hollywood movie, directed by Ron Howard, as historical fact to be relied upon exclusively to inform them of this important historic event, deserves the delusion they find themselves with. This is a movie. A movie is intrinsically incapable of portraying historical events with accuracy. Furthermore the object of a movie, especially a Hollywood movie is to make money by providing a form of entertainment that (a lot of) people are willing to pay money to see. The aim of informing doesn't even appear on the radar, regardless of what Ron Howard may say in his interviews. This is simply the latest in a long, long line of movies that tell lies in order to make money. Even the well respected ones, like Ghandhi fall into this category. If, as Ms Drew seems to imply, the moviegoing public will be fooled into treating this film as gospel, then the "dishonour" lies in the society that created such intellectually lazy individuals and not in any movie.

[zoomerain]

I'd have to agree with you dogmanger. In fact, one of my favorite all-time films, the 1992 film Tombstone, which was a telling of the story of the gunfight at the OK Corral, was filled with historical inaccuracies. Of course, the gunfight at the OK Corral doesn't have the same gravity as Watergate, but I agree with your point that all too often, Hollywood's quest for marketability over truth and substance leads uninformed audiences believing a false version of the truth. You'd mentioned Ghandhi -- how about Pearl Harbor, the Ben Affleck flop from a few years ago.....filled with historical inaccuracies. The list goes on.

[dvdoff]

It's a movie. Show me a single film in history that has gotten the facts of history 100%. There aren't any. That's why we have documentaries. I liked it and I knew it was far from accurate, so lighten up. Hey, it could have been "Path to 9/11" bad.

[bellepepper02]

It's a movie that claims to be based on historical events. The audience goes to the historical genre movie expecting base-level truth in the presentation of facts. Interpretation is another matter, and licence is allowed there, especially in guessing what happened behind the scenes. But whether Frost made Nixon confess is a question of public fact, not interpretation. Either it happened or it didn't. To twist that around and to make it the fulcrum of the movie is deliberately and wilfully misleading the public.

"Queen Elizabeth" took licence with interpretation in giving us speculations of behind-the-scenes action and dialogue (which the audience recognizes as 'fiction' since such material has not been publicly documented), but it was based on true action, that Princess Di died and that Blair was able to turn around Queen E's initial response to downplay the funeral.

Thank you, Ms Drew, for a well-researched article. I was beginning to doubt my own memory because I couldn't remember Frost bringing Nixon down. I've always thought Frost was way over-rated as a journalist, anyway.

[zoomerain]

....yes, or even "Fahrenheit 911" bad.

[sunnyjane]

I believe that "All The President's Men" was as historically and factually accurate as they get. No one involved in the Watergate mess has disputed the facts. The great thing about this movie is that it just told the story. There was no attempt to manufacture drama -- the facts WERE the drama.

I lived in Washington during that time, and it was a moment in history that I'll never forget. Thanks to Bob Schieffer's excellent book, "This Just In", I finally was able to forgive Ford for pardoning Nixon.

[SFfromSF]

The following quotation from the article above has left me absolutely speechless:"

"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.) "

Shakespeare took a great deal of his "history" from Holinshed. Any historian who knows ANYTHING about early Scottish history will tell you that "Macbeth" is a complete and utter LIE -- written purely to pander to the anti-Scottish sentiments of the day.

I was reading this article with great interest and taking on board all that the estimable Ms. Drew had to say about the film -- until I read this comment which suddenly casts everything she says in a highly dubious light...

[salamanca1]

I agree, and I also assert: If it's not Scottish, it's crap! By the way Liz, it's "The Last King of Scotland," not "The King of Scotland. "

[DLSteinhardt]

Yes, the interviews were a disappointment, but I think it's fair to say our expectations have changed in the intervening years. Even by 1998, when I first viewed again some of the Nixon interviews, on David Frost's "Interviews I'll Never Forget" program, seeing Nixon ask Frost what words he think the American people need to hear (Frost says he must apologize), then seeing the former president say he let the American people down, I felt that we had overlooked what a "conviction" we'd gotten, via Frost, in the Nixon interviews.

I haven't seen Frost/Nixon, so I cannot comment on Ms. Drew's complaint.

[Witkacy]

"a gross misrepresentation of such important events" - I felt exactly the same way about Morgan's 'The Queen"--I was shocked on watching it to think that so many people lauded this film as psychologically acute. And I despised "The Last King Of Scotland." Morgan's got a middlebrow Freudian quality to his work which reminds me of e.g. Peter Shaffer, or of some American theater of the '50s (the sort of things Eric Bentley slammed in his reviews of the time).--So it's no wonder people have taken his fact-adulteration and easy character arcs to heart.

[billw8017]

Hollywood rewrites history. Knowledgeable critics set it straight. Viewer can enjoy the drama while knowing where it is false. It is good to revisit Nixon. It is better to have the more realistic view.

He was a funny man. When Kennedy was pictured playing touch football on the beach, Nixon took a walk on the beach wearing his suit and tie, black shoes, and black socks. Our heart goes out to him since he was clueless. When he became a lame duck but presumed to be king of America, he showed himself sadly friendless.

[LaFilleEnRose]

You know when all the hoopla came about re this movie I scratched my head (alas I'm old enough to have seen the Frost/Nixon interviews in question) wondering what drama could come from such disappointing stuff. My memory -- thanks to you -- has been proven not so faulty after all. The interviews were a tempest in a teapot and revealed little. Someone needed to set the record straight. So glad yo did.

[kevinmcd]

Thank you. I recalled vaguely that it was a non-event and was shocked when i saw the previews. I wondered for a moment whether my mental state from the late 70's caused me to misinterpret or forget this allegedley great breakthough moment. I love history and there is nothing I hate as much as these distortions which rewrite it. It should be condemned. Thanks to E Drew it has been.

[rvrleo]

Another "thank you" to Elizabeth Drew (and LaFilleEnRose) for saying what those of us who were around then remember, however vaguely. As I recall, my reaction to the interview at the time was "same old Nixon" -- in denial. I was both disappointed and annoyed with Nixon but not surprised.