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

[Rmitchell]

I think some of Miss Drew's points are valid, but to refer to the film as a 'Dishonorable Distortion of History' is absurd. Her points against the film are all minor, and the dramatization of the film is completely in the spirit of what actually happened. What would have been 'dishonorable' would have been if the movie portrayed Nixon as being wrongly maligned by history or if the film had vindicated his actions. Instead, Miss Drew is getting upset because the movie is a tad more dramatic than what actually happened. This is dishonorable? Give me a break. It's a movie. It certainly an interesting enterprise to point out the differences between what actually happened and what is portrayed in a film, but when I read your article and I say 'Um, that's it?', it makes me think that Miss Drew should spend her pent up anger and considerable writing talents complaining about something that isn't completely frivolous.

[BlueZoo]

Thank you! During my reading of the blog, all I could think was this woman is a Republican apologist.

[LeftCoastLefthandedLefty]

I agree. What Miss Drew is overlooking is the amount of boiling down that needs to happen to get a movie script under 2 hours. In order to tell a story several statements need to be combined into a single statement that effectively relays the same information.

I have heard Ron Howard interviewed about the movie, and his desire was to be as historically accurate to the spirit of the interviews. I guess you can't please everyone though

[PetePixxx]

Bathetic is now my favorite word. Well done!

[gc2332]

The Wizard of Oz was bull%@#*.
Monkeys can't fly!

[howard16]

It is incorrect to say that Shakespeare did not deal with contemporary issues. Shakespeare is obsessed with the issue of legitimacy. In Henry IV, Henry V, Richard II and King Lear, the issue of succession is a pattern that is at the center of the plays. Also consider King John. What Shakespeare's purpose might have been in giving pre-eminence in a history play to a character whose existence lay only in his imagination is puzzling. It is clear that Shakespeare's plays are "not disinterested objective plays but serve as mirrors that reflect Elizabethan policy". They are written to the Crown about rulers who have “reaped the whirlwind” and his goals are purposeful and political – to teach the sovereign that the absence of royal authority leads to doom.

[gnorrfa]

excellent critique by ms. drew. history is always distorted by hollywood. never worry. the picture doesn't include impossible scenes of the hero fighting off hundreds of very determined villains with the accompanying explosions, screams, etc., ad absurdum. only a few will bother to see it. most won't even remember what it was about.

[sconehead]

Shakespeare *did* write about contemporary politics, if you consider that Henry VIII was the father of the reigning monarch of his time. Or that Richard III lost to Henry Tudor (VII), founder of that dynasty. So both Shakespeare and the "historical documents" of his time were biased towards Tudors/Lancasters, English, Protestants, etc.

But those were different days (centuries) - history was little more than propaganda. Today with our modern standards and documentation we expect more. Especially as the Frost/Nixon standoff is something few of us who were not around then were aware of. Like the Rumble in the Jungle, we may know the characters but not the drama. Not the facts. So Elizabeth Drew is right to raise these concerns, and how eloquently.

[Tremonius]

Yes, we learn from the Bard that Joan of Arc was a strumpet. Why? Because his audience was on the other side of the controversy. We know, especially from Shakespeare, that Richard III was a conniving low-down rotten scoundrel, and a crook-backed cripple to boot, and why do we know this? Because the Bard was writing under the reign of the Tudors, which family forebear usurped the Plantangenet throne.

And we had at the turn into the seventeenth century the old warhorse Richard II, about a weak king best deposed by the heroic Henry. Why was this play brought back? Because the lover and friend of a patron of Shakespeare's saw himself as another hero to depose another inept monarch. "I am Richard II, know ye not that?" the queen is reported to have stated, shortly before she separated the head of Essex from the corpse.

I watched part of the Frost interview series originally. I remember the tory Frost was selected because in all the world he was considered the broadcaster most sympathetic to Richard the None. I thought the parts I saw were never as dramatic as represented in the movie trailers I've seen, and Nixon was extremely odd. He delivered his "If the president does it, then it isn't a crime" line in a dull monotone.

[ratcityreprobate]

Once was enough. I won't be going to see Frost/Nixon, much as I won't be watching any reenactment of the George W. Bush presidency. I have a fairly high tolerance for pain, but do not subscribe to the theory that pain builds character. The election of Obama was as if the burden of a thousand years has been lifted from my shoulders, why would I, or anyone, want to relive either of these two American nightmares.

[Fabini]

I am in the 30% that remembers–lived through–Watergate. I am also a person who loves good cinema. I shall not see Frost/Nixon. Today, the genera of Historical Fiction, in cinema and television relies to heavily on the recent past. It's an easy hook. A cheap device.

It also sets itself up for failure, since the actual documentary is available to see and hear. The Manhattan Project, the building of the first atomic bomb, secret when it happened, was well documented and the availability of that footage gives us an engaging insight into the people who made the bomb happen. The military head of the project was General Leslie Groves. In 1989, Hollywood made a completely forgettable movie about this time called, Fat Man and Little Boy. It starred Paul Newman as the general. I thought then that the movie was a complete embarrassment. Why fictionalize a well documented event? It provides no insight and is of questionable entertainment value.

Fictionalize history when the original event has slipped into cultural legend, not when it has slipped out of the 24-hour news cycle.

[Social Construct]

Quite the critique. If this review of Mr. Howard's film causes one to look deeper into this period of US history to gain an informed and more accurate perception then all the better. Likewise, if the film causes one to question Nixon's or Frost's role during this period and to research the actual events then, too, all the better.
In my experience, people will make up their minds about such issues depending on the insight of personal bias than anything else. But if the few naturally curious and critically thinking among us are inspired to investigate further because of either the film or this review then all the better.

[Fabini]

Your "if" is a large one that rarely happens in reality. And what of the one-million who never look deeper? Does the one who does make up for that?

[TommyMcCarthy]

How pleased I was to see one of my journalistic heroes:...­.Elizabeth Drew.... posting here at our beloved Huffpo.

One commentor suggests that only 30% of us were even ALIVE at the time of Wategate!
Well, there's lies,......Damn lies....and then there's statistics.

At any rate, I was.....and unlike young people since ( until VERY recently) we were all PLENTY "engaged" in what were then referred to as "current affairs".
I guess the prospect of being drafted and blown to bits does focus the mind a bit.

The Frost/Nixon interviews were a big deal.......and then a big let-down.... at the time......and Ms. Drew has effectively warned me that this movie is too.

Neither should come as a great surprise..­......sinc­e, ...."David Frost"...and "Journalis­t".....whi­le not mutually exclusive,..... are only tenuously linked in my estimation.

An Irish friend of mine once said.....
"Frost???.­....Ahhh..­. (dismissive wave of hand) O' course yanks love him, he's the one pimped out Nixon!"

And that pretty well describes the nature of the Faustian bargain struck between Frost and Nixon.....both were trying to rehabilitate thier careers....and both were less-than-­forthright with the public about certain aspects of their arrangement.


Some of the BEST contemporaneous analysis from those dark days of the Nixon reich would be Elizabeth Drew's own from Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker.

And some of the better commentary TODAY on current affairs continues to come from Ms. Drew on public television
tm

[hlawyer]

There is more to this than the movie gives us, obviously. I think, however, that this article is equally guilty of distorting the interview. Here is a transcript of the pivotal part of the interview in question.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2007/sep/07/greatinterviews1

Nixon says this, which is closer to he line in the movie than Ms. Drew admits,
"And under the circumstances I would have to say that a reasonable person could call that a cover-up. I didn't think of it as a cover-up. I didn't intend it to cover-up."

Also,
"And so I can only say that in answer to your question that while technically I did not commit a crime, an impeachable offence - these are legalisms. As far as the handling of this matter is concerned, it was so botched up, I made so many bad judgments. The worst ones mistakes of the heart rather than mistakes of the head, as I pointed out, but let me say a man in that top judge job, he's got to have a heart, but his head must always rule his heart."

[bloity]

Thank you for this post! I was a teenager when watergate unfolded, and I remember being home for summer holidays and angry that every afternoon my tv shows were preempted because of the hearings. But I also remember watching the frost/nixon interview and remember that there was no slam dunk of confessions from nixon. Thank you for clearing up this confusion I've been having with my memory and confirming I don't in fact have the onslaught of alzheimers.

[gvc]

Typical Ron Howard. He takes an already dramatic story and fictionalizes it for "dramatic impact." Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Frost/Nixon. In contrast, Oliver Stone seems to have departed from this genre in W.

[LadyWesley]

I despised Nixon and loved "wallowing in Watergate." I am puzzled, therefore, that I have no memory of the Nixon/Frost interviews other than the $600,000 payment. Did I even watch? Probably not, because I still despised Nixon and didn't expect him to say anything new. And he pretty much didn't.

I'll go see the movie, but I'll also remind my younger friends when we discuss it that Nixon didn't really confess to anything. Thanks Ms. Drew for reminding me and educating us all.