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

[gojo]

Is this the kind of thing Hollywood has come to be? Has Ron Howard become the new Oliver Stone?
Making movies under the guise of "historic" and then filling in the unknown parts with fantasy in order to try and put your own spin on history? If you don't have enough information about the historical facts, then please don't just make them up in order to "fill in" the movie. It's dishonest and benefits no one.

[whatfreshhellisthis]

I don't think that this is a new thing in Hollywood. The mere fact that there was once a movie called "Jesse James' Daughter Meets Frankenstein" would indicate that Hollywood has always felt free to embroider on historic events and people.

[Carrie-On]

AMEN, gojo! My sentiments, exactly. That movie was a grievous assault on those who were 'there,' and do remember. Frankly, when things are ground in Hollywood we have to consider the source, but things out there can't be too good--they're hawking their wares on every TV show in the nation. It's so boring (and how many Americans can afford "the movies" now, anyway"). We have far better things to do right now.

Entertainment is important, but not to the point where we are saturated with "stars" 24/7, everywhere we turn. And, we must also consider the source when we expect to see something historic. For years we've been led around by nose to prove America has won all of it's wars. . . NOT.

[BlueZoo]

While I will give Ms. Drew that some of the movie contains an overuse of poetic license, she leaves out the most damning of all words straight from Nixon's mouth during the actual interview w/Frost. Once Nixon said "When the President does it, it isn't illegal!" that was the confession we had all wanted and it forever condemmed the man. It is absurd to label Nixon, even in the form of Langella, as a "sympathetic character." I doubt if you could find one person who knew the man who would have ever referred to him as "sympathetc." I lived through Nixon and Watergate and this man and his cohorts were criminals who truly believed they could not be prosecuted for their crimes ~ much like the Bush adminstration! If nothing else, I hope this film receives a huge viewing audience so people will realize to what extent Presidential (and gubernatorial) hubris can be elevated.

[bwalsh1]

Unfortunately, these historical dramas do shape peoples opinions, and some will take it as historically accurate. If you are going to quote someone, especially a quote that important, it should be accurate.

It would be different if this were touted as "based" on real events, but it plays itself off as a re-enactment more than anything else. The filmmakers are not unaware of this, and they are being irresponsible in distorting such an important event so completely. Artistic license is one thing, but when creating historical drama you do have a responsibility to tell the truth.

[gc2332]

>Unfortunately, these historical dramas do shape peoples
>opinions, and some will take it as historically accurate.
>If you are going to quote someone, especially a quote that
>important, it should be accurate.

You're absolutely right. In the actual interview, Nixon said the following...
"Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."

And in the movie, Nixon says...
"I'm saying that when the president does it, that means it's not illegal."

How dare they twist and distort his words around and...........oh wait. Nevermind.

[hangdogit]

"When the President does it, it isn't illegal!"

Incredibly, this claim is still current today -- called "unitary executive" by Bush'es neo-con cronies.

[Querent]

How about Bebe Rebozo?

[alanrsnipes]

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I have not yet seen the movie, but I have watched the Fost/Nixon DVD and found it compelling. I did not come away from the actual interviews in any way feeling sorry for Nixon. I was origionally skeptical about David Frost because of his lack of a jounalistic background (journalistic background being something different then as to what it is today). However, he obviously did his research and a good job with the actual interviews.

[dobner]

I believe that relying on Hollywood to relay the truth is to confuse the entertainment industry with the information industry. A move is art. A documentary may better suit your taste. I do not think it is the job of a filmmaker to tell the truth but to inspire imagination, creativity and thoughts of things that might have been in history.

[Cowboylove]

At 55, I have lived through a lot of recent history, and what I can say confidently is that what is written as history is largely fiction - regardless of the topic. One of the first fiction I experienced was the revisionist history of John F Kennedy. Kennedy was not beloved by the nation prior to his assassination, nor was he on his way to becoming a great President. His assassination greatly improved his legacy. He certainly had a great vision, but his execution was severely flawed. Jackie Kennedy set out to accomplish this with the Camelot myth. Johnson accomplished much of the Kennedy legacy, while destroying his own with the lies about the Vietnam War. It's all very perverse.

Later, during the Vietnam years, there is the impression that all teenagers were anti-war hippies slightly distracted by free love and drugs. Most more closely resembled Ricky and David Nelson for most of the 1960s. The real anti-war sentiment came when college deferments disappeared and everyone was being drafted - which was years into the Vietnam War. Hippies were never the majority of young people, regardless of what history now says.

The truth about Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H W Bush, Clinton and even the current Bush are constantly being rewritten, legacies revised, history recast. It is unlikely we really know anything about history except that those who are in power rewrite it to suit the current agenda,or to romanticize their past.

[brizzle]

Absolutely brilliant. This is exactly the sort of cautious attitude we should all take when considering history. It is important to remember that history is written by the winners...and until now, those winners are mostly rich, white, men.

[CJWausau]

You are right on, Cowboylove. It is all in the eye of the beholder. I am 64, and I have not yet seen a history book that was not without bias unless it was totally devoid of details.
We are feed what they want us to think, often slanted far from the real truth.

Some of us still alive actually remember the Nixon experiment with communism. Yes! I did say communism because I see no other way to describe the effects that his "price-wage freeze" had on the economy and especially on the working person. What is happening in todays economy started back then. The "great depression of the late 1920's and early 1930's demonstrated that business, and especially banking, needed regulation, yet beginning with Nixon, the regulations were relaxed and eliminated until again we have a demonstration that business and especially banking needs to be regulated. How many among us know that in August of 2008, representatives of the automakers informed Congress that the banks were refusing to extend credit to the automakers unless they would pay 20 (TWENTY) percent interest rates.

Botom line: We live in a land of deception. The news information is colored by a few for their own personal gain, and the media goes along for the ride.

[edayres]

God, I am so sick of people confusing movies with real life. Movies are entertainment, therefore, dramatic license will taken to make it a better movie. If you want facts, nothing but the facts, then watch a documentary, or read about the subject. JFK, the movie by Oliver Stone, received the same kind of criticism. Are we such a juvenile population that we can no longer distinguish between movies and real life? Movies are movies, nothing more, nothing less.

[Carrie-On]

Right you are, but then it behooves the myriad of interviewers, and TV hosts who promote these things to realize everyone is not as discriminating, and be sensible about promoting the movies--it would help if "Hollywood" didn't cover every show on our TV screens. That' s just an ethical stance, I realize, but until we realize that some messages are taken literally, (re-playing Walter Winchell's shout outs for example), "confusion" will exist. Frankly, in this case, there was a heap of "actual history" being put forth. Give us a break, eh!

[brizzle]

And I'm sick of people thinking that books are better than movies...always and forever. Like all movies are lies and all books are true. Yeah, because that's reality. What are you, retarded?

What makes a documentary not a movie?

Or wait...I want facts. Should I read a book? Is the Bible factual? What about OJ Simpson's book, "If I Did It."

I believe you are confusing many issues here. First, your assumption that if you want facts, you should read, is just silly. Is "Harry Potter" factual? I want facts, nothing but the facts...so I'm going to read about the subject of young magicians. Hrm, see where it all goes awry?

Not all movies are untrue.
Not all books are true.

Are you so confused about my juvenile-ness that you can no longer distinguish between movies and books?

Lies come in all shapes and sizes; you cannot avoid lies by reading books and skipping movies. In truth, everything you hear, at all times, is prone to lies. You cannot learn truth by sticking only to books. You must forget the medium and simply learn to think critically about what you experience, whether it be words, images, music or rumors.

Otherwise, you post crap and nonsense like this online, for everyone to see...and clearly your argument just confuses the issue.

[motoGpifupleez]

The easiest way to get the facts is to watch the actual interview. Movies take dramatic license, that's a given. You don't think the Titanic hit that iceberg because the lookouts were watching "Jack" and "Rose" instead of the path before them, do you?

[jaundicedview]

Invention? Distortion? Welcome to the movies in America. AS far as Shakespeare not distorting history, still laughing about that one. Will was pandering to his patrons just as the filmmakers of Frost Nixon are pandering to their audience. After all, was Richard III portrayed as an athletic and adept horseman?

[luckyoldson]

The play and the film are not represented as "documentaries."

The license to bend or inflate is not dishonest in any way, shape or form.

This article makes me wonder what she thinks when she reads "novels" based on true stories or accounts of actual events.

[jashbowie]

I'm not sure why my clean comment was deleted, but I'll try it again...

1) This movie is a fictional drama, not a documentary. While perhaps more accurate, a script based on an anti-climatic stalemate in a rigged interview would never have been made into a play or movie.

2) Using phrases like "gross misrepresentation" is pure hyperbole in this case. A truly "dishonorable" story, by comparison, would have tried to justify or exonerate Nixon. In this case, the story isn't so much about rewriting history as it is a cathartic attempt to experience the confession that the country deserved but was denied.

3) With all due respect, Ms. Drew's screed isn't really about a movie that oversteps any accepted line of integrity, but is grounded in her own disappointment in how this particular story was presented. I suspect that she wasn't this upset over Howard's Oscar-winning "A Beautiful Mind" which took far more license in terms of historical and medical accuracy.

4) It's fine to give us an essay outlining an accurate view of history, but to attack this film as if it was somehow detrimental to society is unjustified and unreasonable. Anyone who takes their history from Hollywood deserves the ignorance that is their due. I want to be entertained and moved by movies, and I'm sure Front/Nixon will not disappoint.

[Chuckwheat]

For a chilling presentation of Nixon, watch "Secret Honor," a monologue by Philip Baker Hall, directed by Robert Altman in 1984.

[daveny]

Amen. Best Nixon ever.

[KayWrites]

Too bad we couldn't have had this dialog as a nation about the conduct and limits of power of a president before Bush shredded the Constitution. Where was all this discussion then? Why was there no outrage then? OH, that's right. There was. Here on HUffPost, just not in the MSM.

[Overd0g]

FDR shredded the constitution in ways never even remotely approached since.

[coolfish]

Yes, FDR did shred the constitution. I'd argue that Bush has gone above and beyond what FDR did, though. (Think internment camps, but all over the world, for example).

Great book on this is The American Way of War by Eugene Jarecki.

[boing007]

He was a republican who promised change from a failed democratic administration that had involved us in a war that cost over 50,000 american lives. He promised change and an end to a decade long involvement by the US. He promised and delivered an improved diplomatic climate. And, he was faced with an energy crisis.

50,000 American troops were not already dead by 1968. It was just the beginning of the increasing death toll.

[Moka11]

An absolutely wonderful critique from E. Drew. Like so many people, I was compelled to watch the original broadcast of the Frost interview.
I saw the film last night and Ms. Drew critiques perfectly.
The only thing I have a disagreement with is her praise of Langella and Sheen. I thought Langella was lame although the common take on his performance is "Oscar worthy".
Richard Nixon was a scowling dark man and Langella just doesn't do it for me and just distracted me throughout the film. And Sheen has nowhere near the presence of David Frost.
The film was so contrived to me and not anywhere near what I was expecting or hoping for.

[BlackJAC]

Back in college, I attended an event where astronaut Ken Mattingly (the guy that Gary Sinese played in APOLLO 13) talked about how the movie differed from what really happened. It was due to Ron Howard wanting to tell a story rather than simply retell what had happened verbatim. Differences include:
* It was Swigert (Kevin Bacon) who said "Houston, we have a problem," not Lovell (Tom Hanks)
* It happened right at shift change at Mission Control, and Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) and the on-duty crew simply went into the back room to work the problem, letting the replacements sit down at the consoles
* Mattingly didn't attend the launch, didn't own a gold Corvette, spent his time at a drafting table rather than in the simulator, and didn't have that much hair

[boing007]

I'll watch the movie. It might give me some ideas on how to construct a film script that I'm working on.