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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You realize your rant is giving the film publicity and will likely cause many more people to go see it. But it's good you raise awareness that these things are not absolutely factual.
Perhaps this "rant" is an expression of dismay with another distortion of history? We see such distortions much too often and those dedicated to factual accuracy may only wish to protect the truth. So that many who are new to those events won't believe a distortion to have actually happened. And fiction won't become fact.
We are departing eight years of Bush. He is busy, as of today, with rewriting history to make himself look good. He may even believe some of his lies. After eight years of dwelling in Fantasyland a voice, here and there, rising up for sanity should not be startling. For there will always be surges of that nature.
What's more, you contradict yourself in your second sentence.
You're overreacting. Any Hollywood depiction of history is going to be flawed and dramatized. I doubt any thinking person takes every action of the characters as a depiction of actual historical fact. It's a suggestion of what might have happened and how it might have been interpreted, in this case by the filmmakers. That's all you can ever hope such a film to be.
Movie goers are not so stupid as to believe every little thing and every statement uttered was exactly as it happened. I hardly think this is a gross distortion of fact. You whine about trivialities. Such things are certainly little more than dramatizations. As I recall, the real Nixon was a total bore. You can't expect a filmmaker to make a boring movie.
That remark about whining was completely gratuitous. The point the writer is making is that Nixon never admitted to participating in the coverup, let alone on TV. It's a valid point.
Moviegoers may not believe every detail which appears in a movie. They may be able to spot the Hollywood twist which enlivens the moviegoing experience somewhat. But they leave with an impression.
And if that overall impression is wrong, what then? Can true life and history be exploited in order to create an exciting fiction? A fiction based upon an actual life? That life being the impetus which drives the drama? What if all that is wrong?
Then the viewer leaves the theater with a misrepresentation. And that is a disservice.
Ron Howard directed this movie. He took similar liberties with A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man, in which the hero battles with the evil Max Baer. Baer was made out to be a horrible man. He was nothing of the sort. In fact, he was beloved. I like Ron Howard and his movies, but I think his truthiness comes from his lack of nuance. If Baer is evil, then the audience will hate him and so side with the hero. It would be more difficult to make a nuanced film.
Howard's a good movie maker, but I think this article points out that we really ought to remember that his movies are not true stories; they are based on true stories.
Point well-taken.
I think Howard is a capable filmmaker too, if a bit weak in the subtlety department. He grew-up in a milieu of artifice (Opie wasn't exactly a realistic Southern rural 1960s kid), where exaggeration was the norm. Few deputy sheriffs or gas station attendants are as goofy, for example, as Barney Fife and Gomer Pyle. They were caricatures, and so Howard's films are often populated with caricatures. It's probably what he considers "normal" film-making, and it mostly works for him.
Ms. Drew,
Yes, films take liberties, but I don't think these are inappropriate. The film is a valuable fiction, just as your historic corrections are valuable non-fiction.
Woven into Frost/Nixon is a hearty and gratifying nod to our human need for justice. While we may not feel 100% satisfied with actual events (Nixon never literally confessed and spent not one day in jail), we can find that in "Frost/Nixon."
For what it's worth, we DID get a confession in the form of Nixon's resignation. He resigned because he knew that 1) impeachment was imminent and 2) the House had the goods on him. He was, in fact, guilty and knew it.
For what it's worth, we DID get punishment. Nixon was forced to retreat to San Clemente where he spent years brooding. He was stuck living in the unseemly yet inescapable company of Richard Milhous Nixon. The rest of us could freely enjoy with each other the rest of the 1970s in (relative) innocence. Not so Nixon. He had no choice but to see the world through the cold, narrow, shifty eyes of Tricky Dick. We were rid of Nixon, but he could not be rid of himself -- which is perhaps as harsh a punishment as anybody could've given him.
Very astute observations! While many disagree to this day, Ford's pardon of Nixon was the right thing to do at the time. Unless you lived through the last two years of the Nixon Presidency, you cannot possibly understand what it had done to this country. The impeachment hearings dragged on for months and this country came to a standstill economically. Our Congress wasn't doing anything. Nixon's aids were being indicted and those were huge stories as well. Our allies were as confused as we were! Ford saw all Nixon had wrought and said "Enough!" Nixon went back to CA and never again saw the light of public adulation. As you said, he couldn't be rid of himself and that was the greatest punishment of all.
Here you have done your own historical re-write. Congress was doing nothing? What? The Watergate hearings were nothing? I have never seen Congress so unified in purpose and in agreement. Your basis for the claim that Ford did the right thing is nonsense. With Nixon out of office anyway the country would have moved forward anyway. Nixon's criminal prosecution would have become a sideshow. Letting him off the hook proved that once again the top dogs usually get off easier than the underlings who in this case spent years in prison. Thus, Nixon proved he was, as he thought, above the law. He was able to live out his days in luxory and achieved some measure of rehibilitation when he was called on to assist Buill Clinton. It would have been better if he had been forgiven after properly repaying his debt to society like any other criminial.
I lived through those days, and I followed the Watergate episode from the first story about it in the national press. Ford's pardon was not the right thing to do. If Nixon had been punished, Reagan and Bush would have been much less dismissive of the laws and the Constitution. Ford's pardon was just another one of those things Republicans do in lieu of admitting they were wrong. In other words, a big, black, festering lie.
If Ford's pardon was the right thing to do, then a lot of people need to be pardoned for crimes that were of much less moment to our society, starting with the bogus drug convictions for possession of persons who are still serving mandatory life sentences. Your conviction proves why white collar crime committed by the wealthy is treated disproportionately and why it is easier to steal billions than a few hundred. Nixon was a cheap punk of a crook who didn't have the balls to be a stick up man. He was just another flim-flam artist on the GOP dole.
The current president deserves jail for his assault on our Constitution along with Cheney.
Ahhh, I knew it wouldn't take long for a post like this to appear. Another bitter lib, still seething over the fact that VP Gore was not elected to the presidency in 2000, trying to blame President Bush and VP Cheney for everything that has gone wrong in this world.
What will you people do beginning Jan. 20 when you no longer can blame everything on your President????
Whereas YOU people will stop blaming Clinton and seamlessly start blaming Obama.
Worrying about the constitution isn't really a "lib" thing.
Bush's destruction of the constitution is something that we all need to work to correct. I wouldn't want a Democrat to have the level of executive powers that Bush has claimed, either.
I would recommend checking out Naomi Wolf's movie the "End of America" or her book "A Letter to a young Patriot".
It's scary stuff.
I did not see the movie and will not do so.
I do take exception to your "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."
Shakespeare often distorted history as is seen in his play on Julius Caesar. Unfortunately his distorted view is now common today with the uneducated or those unwilling to do any research. Shakespeare wrote for the audience, which in most cases, is still used today by movie and television producers.
There is something intriging about the Nixon defense that relates to President Bush and that is ' If the president does something that may be construde as being illegal in the context that he is protecting the United States of America than did he commit a crime, in other words If the president does it than that means its not illegal.? These are things that need to be concidered before a investigation can accure. Bush may come out of the investigation smelling like a rose.
I never watch these silly fictional "histories". Either you're writing fiction or history...make up your mind.
I don't want to encourage them, because people have confidence that they are historical and accurate with no political agenda in mind. They have a hard enough time sorting through the rhetoric on a daily basis without adding to the misleading messages. Shame, shame.......
It's not possible to write true history. Anything written is filtered by the writer's point of view.
How times have changed. Nixon found out about the break-in after the fact and tried to cover it up. He was railroaded out of town. The people who participated still believe that this misdemeanor burglary was a major government clandestine operation worthy of falling on their swords.
Today, a President is allowed to participate in the fabrication of intelligence and involvement of the country in an illegal war, killing millions of innocent people and transferring much of the population's wealth to the military complex, and stay in office. A governor who attempts to sell a Senate seat is let out on $4500 bail. Congress takes campaign donations from the banks to pass the bank bailout bill. In fact, all but a handful of them take donations to pass bills or not pass bills in the case of the auto bailout.
Our Republic certainly has progressed beyond the petty lies that Nixon told.
http://ewebsmith.com/gov/bellsoffreedom.html
Nixon did not leave Washington in disgrace because of petty lies, my friend. His many offenses include, per Wikipedia:
"campaign fraud, political espionage and sabotage, illegal break-ins, improper tax audits, illegal wiretapping on a massive scale, and a secret slush fund laundered in Mexico to pay those who conducted these operations. This secret fund was also used as hush money to buy silence of the seven men who were indicted for the June 17 break-in."
If you'd like further insight, read John Dean's (Nixon's White House counsel) "Blind Ambition."
And, of course, Wikipedia is such a trusted source of information . . . . . .
I'm not defending Nixon. I lived through it and know how stupid his actions were. But let's don't use Wikipedia as the source for facts when discussing history.
well george bush is the only guy who could look worse than nixon
but make no mistake, working for nixon were guys like cheney and rove
nixon referred to the jfk assassination as "the bay of pigs thing," according to his right hand man, hr haldeman. and nixon instructed his aids to tell watergate investigators to go easy on some areas, as it could "open that whole bay of pigs thing again."
i leave it to you to connect the dots.
Can you please tell me what the definition of "an illegal war" is? And then tell me the definition of a "legal war."
Oh, that's right. An illegal war is one led by a Republican President. Silly me. I should have known.
In the U.S., a legal war, like it or not, would be a war declared with the approval of congress.
An immoral war would be a war in which the leaders of the country lied to the citizenry of the country in order to secure the support of the citizenry. For example, the war the U.S. has been waging in Iraq.
That would be true whether the President of the U.S. was George W. Bush, or anybody else. As it happens, the President who lied us into war in Iraq was George W. Bush.
A war started for ideological reasons against an enemy which has not attacked you or your allies is obviously illegal. "Silly" doesn't adequately describe your level of turpitude.
I suppose Nixon was railroaded, in a manner of speaking. The real reason he was impeached was that he promised to end the Vietnam war as a condition of being re-elected, and then didn't. That was a much graver offense than trying to cover-up the Watergate break-in.
I did not see the film. I lived through Nixon. That was enough. Between this felon and the one leaving office in January, who needs drama? If people think that being forced from office was enough punishment for Nixon I cannot disagree more. He belonged in jail for crimes against the U.S. Constitution and I suggest this could be applied to more recent politicians as well. When is the movie called "Interviews with Junior" coming out. It would be very short with some nonsense from one side and probing questions from the other...in the background will be shadowy figures with the occasional Blackwater or Halliburton logo appearing on tunics, the occasional muffled cries of anguish as part of a soundtrack mixed with intonations about WMDs and so forth. In and of itself, both of these creatures are representative of a right wing power elite that tries to run the US and occasionally of late have succeeded in being in power and in so doing have single handedly tried and nearly succeeded to destroy the integrity of American democracy and its sense of right and dignity and its place of respect so clear after World War II. The new Presidential administration has many things to do in the next years and I hope that one of them is to bury forever the possibility that such criminals or the influence of these power hungry but nearly invisible manipulators ever set foot in the Oval Office again.
Isn't it a given, by now, that Hollywood by its nature takes "poetic license" when presenting historical reality? After all by very definition, I believe it was Aristotle's actually, theater is the willing suspension of disbelief. That does not by any means that any or even all of it is untrue.
Blue Zoo's comment sums it up eloquently. Richard M. Nixon, even before Watergate, did not engender maternal instincts in even the most loving. He appeared a man without compassion, who needed none.
And his outrageous and cavalier approach to whether or not the President of the United States was held to the same standards and tenets that all who reside in this nation are was intended to set perhaps one of the most dangerous precedents ever attempted by anyone holding that Office.
Good for you! I was waiting for something to come out on this - will truth prevail? Someone tell PBS, and their talking-heads, please! Charlie Rose needs to watch where his wing's feathers are flying, with all due respect, he is slipping lately (ie: interview with his friend, Paulson).
Keep it up. We must have transparency, and continue on this path to bring America back.
If Drew wants a history lesson, take a night course. This is drama and even heinous characters need some sympathy. ( I never thought Helen Mirren in "The Queen" was thinking of DIana at all when that stag was killed. I just believed she was more concerned with the death of a stag than the death of her ex-daughter-in-law, and I didn't believe for a moment the attempt to make Elizabeth sympathic at the end. That's ok though.) What's important in historical drama, as it is in historical novels, is not so much what really happened but that the audience or reader gets a sense of what really happened and that comes though loud and clear in Frost/Nixon.
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 history."
That is absolute baloney and I'm surprised to hear it from a so-called Shakespearean scholar. Shakespeare used historical sources but altered the stories to suit his own dramatic, cultural and political needs. The primary example is Richard III - a villain in Shakespeare's play but not considered quite so evil in the historical record. Shakespeare had to make him a villain in order to appease his political masters. His histories are dotted with many such examples. Shakespeare was a revisionist plain and simple. He was also the world's greatest dramatist.
People should not equate Frost/Nixon as an accurate retelling of history. It is simply entertainment. It's a shame that most people don't have the capacity to recognize that anymore.
Shakespeare did the same thing with Cleopatra. No one knows how she died, and I mean no one, including the Roman historians who wrote about her some 100-years after the fall of her dynasty. As for her son, Caesarian, he escaped to Ethiopia, where he died some years later at the age of 19. Who knows? Maybe mommy Cleo was there with him in the end. I mean, let's be real. If you knew the Romans, of all people, were coming after you and you had a few days or weeks before they reached Alexandria, would you sit around and wait? Or would you loot the treasury and hot-foot it south or east? I'm betting as soon as Mark Anthony killed himself, Cleopatra breathed a big sigh and uttered her final words "Feets, don't fell me now!"
I don't recall the public perceiving Frost as an "airhead."
Monty Python and SNL may have satirized him, but it was his up-beat attitude that was his trademark.
Many people at the time thought Frost was shallow and unable to identify the crucial issues in is interviews. But the majority opinion was that he was a wise and august personality.
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