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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I like that they felt compelled to show Diane Sawyer's role in the post-Watergate rehabilitation of Nixon's legacy via a book. There wasn't much to the Sawyer part. But I like that America gets to see her going into and out of every interview w/Frost and that she was acting in the role of a cheerleader for Nixon's legacy.
Liberal media my *ss.
Typical leftist history revisionism. When Bill Clinton is dead and they make a movie of his presidency, the whole Monica Lewinsky deal will turn out to have been made up by the Republicans, where they hired Monica to make up all these lies about having lurid sex in the Oval Office.
Of course, Bill had to go along because, well, because . . . . the movie will explain it. Something to do with the budget, probably.
So funny. Taking apart our Constitution, killing innocents, starting illegal wars, Republicans are cool with this. But Monica and Bill? Well, there's just no room for that sort of thing.....
NOBODY DIED WHEN CLINTON LIED
You are so way off - funny, but way off!
yeah and Bush will be a beacon of light and hope--NOT
No, the film of Bush's life will have him going to Egypt and climbing Mr. Sinai to receive instructions before invading Iraq and bringing on the Rapture. ¹
__________
¹ Rapture ['rap-chur] n. 1. Large profits made by private corporations from government no-bid, cost-plus contracts. 2. Multimillion-dollar bonuses paid to CEOs by firms propped up by an influx of taxpayer money. 3. High-paying federal jobs that falleth as manna from heaven unto incompetent party loyalists, praise the Lord!
Shakespeare didn't distort history? How about Richard III, for starters?
Thanks for this. Every time the play and now the movie is discussed, I keep thinking I must have been drunk or brain addled when the interviews were actually broadcast, because while I do not remember each moment, I vividly recall how bored and ultimately disappointed I was when they were over and thought I must have missed something. (I also read a lot of Elizabeth Drew in the New Yorker and thought she must have said something that I missed, too, until I read this piece.)
I particularly remember that after 60 Minutes was criticized for paying to interview Ehrlichman and nothing of huge interest developed from that, that this idea of paying to interview people had been discredited and that the Frost interviews of Nixon did nothing to change that view either.
As someone once said: All history is b*ll s.h.*.t.
It doesn't bother me that the movie is perfect. I feel that we only know a little of all the bad things Nixon and his crew did.
You know, like: For every rat you see, there are 10 you don't.
Excellent article. I felt similarly about the fiction film JFK by Oliver Stone. Unfortunately, it's these types of distorted entertainments that the young people accept as fact. An entire generation is misinformed. They never bother to read anything about what really happened or view an accurate documentary film. Because of this, I think film makers have a special obligation to stick to the facts. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction - and far more interesting.
Film makers have to stick to making only documentaries because the audience is too lazy to read actual history? It's just a movie, folks!
It's "just a movie" in the sense that Rush Limbaugh is "just a radio commentator". The movie influences belief and opinion in a way that deceives the audience. This is not an accident. It may be simply to make the movie more "dramatic", but there's no excuse for presenting a clearly false account.
JFK was as much about the hysteria and decades of myths, facts, theories, suppositions, unanswered questions and contrasting versions we've been given about those events as anything. I find it hilarious when people criticize that movie saying that Stone was trying to pass it all off as fact. They clearly didn't watch the same movie I did. I had zero problems differentiating the events we already knew about and the events which were dramatized or proposed as "what if it happened this way?" Thankfully, he had a fantastic cinematographer and editor to help in that process. Besides, I don't know how much clearer Stone could have made it at the end of the movie when Kevin Costner looks directly into the camera...r
Baloney! After showing all this inflamatory footage, Stone can't then at the end act like he wasn't trying to stack the deck. For example, does Stone show Oswald leaving his wedding ring behind as he set off to kill the president? If you want objectivity, read Case Closed by Gerald Posner. Now that's a responsible telling based on available evidence not hearsay.
(part 2 of my response)
Young people are smarter than you give them credit for. When I left the theater after seeing JFK (I was 20 at the time), I didn't say, wow, now I know exactly what happened on Nov 22, 1963 because Oliver Stone figured it all out. But what I DID do was my friends and I all gathered at the nearest diner and spent hours discussing and debating and asking questions, which is the main thing that film was trying to accomplish. (There are STILL very important questions raised in that film that have never been adequately answered by the official account of what we were told happened!) People who think Stone was trying to rewrite history of who exactly killed JFK totally missed the point of that movie. I still believe that Stone himself doesn't have a concrete answer. Nor does he have to. It's about taking all the information and making up our own minds. There is an emotional truth to that movie that still resonates because we were never given the whole story by the government, and when they tried to, by and large the American people were smart enough not to buy it (completely). So what we are left with are all these emotions about a tragic national event to which we are still searching for answers years later. That's the truth that comes with a movie like JFK. You want 100% facts? Go read the farmer's almanac.
"It's about taking all the information and making up our own minds."
Well... Time is (for now) a forward only moving linear concept. Whatever actually happened on 11/22/63 happened as fact. It's not a matter of you making your mind up about anything. What ever happened did so whether you believe it or not.
"You want 100% facts? Go read the farmer's almanac." The farmers Almanac, while useful in some respects is also rife with myth's and wives tales.
...and speaking of generalizing assertions of misinforma
The difference with JFK is that one could tell the official story of what happened and it would be even bigger BS.
Ms. Drew, I agree that this movie is unjust and dishonorable.
However, given that President Nixon deserved to be hauled in front of an international court for war crimes, along with his buddy (and current fugitive from war tribunals) Henry Kissinger, and never was, I suppose this film's indictment is the best we can do...
This is a good post. The fact that Nixon was never impeached or charged with the crimes associated with Watergate, et al, has cost our country dearly, for it has led the same people to continue their corrupt criminal acts through the Ford, Reagan, Bush I and now Bush II administrations and GOP majority congress under the Clinton admin. Until these people are held accountable for their criminal acts and recognize they are not above the law the crimes against our country and other countries will continue.
My worst nightmare is that the right wing neo cons are the ones writing history. I do not want blinders , but I do not want the kind of shady , political demonizing, and slander that I have seen in the past 8 years. Every damn neo con is writing a book these days and they will probably be a must buy for our schools and libraries.
"- roughly seventy percent of the population is too young to have been aware of Watergate -"
I think that's exactly the point. How do you make a gripping drama without some kind of grand revelation or admission? Having watched it when it actually happened, I recall that the drama was in the more subtle admissions by Nixon, as well as his refusal to actually fess up.
Those too young cannot possibly grasp such subtle nuances of the time over the years it took for Watergate to fully evolve and Nixon's role in it all exposed. Trying to wrap all this up in a two hour movie would be nearly impossible. I've never seen a totally accurate account of any historical event in a movie - ever.
I understand that "Good Night and Good Luck" was as close to accurate as it gets - yet I'm sure that many aspects of those individuals passed over the subtle things that were big at the time and drove those people to do what they did at the time.
Good point. I was born in 73 and I know basic things about Watergate so it would be easy to suck me into seeing this movie thinking there was some huge expose' drama behind the whole thing. In all the footage I've seen of Nixon, he appears to be very un-nuanced and charismatic. A no-frills personality. You never know how people are behind the scenes but Nixon generally does not come across as jokey or dramatic in any way. I was gonna see that movie before I read this review. I hate when supposed historical account-do
Welcome to HuffPo Ms. Drew, and thanks for the timely essay.
I'm sure I'm not alone in hoping you write something on the current administration.
i.e., Lackey Press/Bush.
Nixon, the only President to resign his office, knew he would be impeached and thrown out of office for high crimes and misdemeaners. Nixon was a crook and a nasty man, deserving of punishment he never received.
Nixon was a boyscout compared to Bush and Cheney.
That will be at least a few thousand posts now as people begin to try to correct the misinformation that will spread out from this cinematic fare. After seeing forest gump, i don't watch opie's movies anyway; they are too long and trite for me.
Ron Howard didn't direct or have anything to do with Forrest Gump. That would be Bob Zemeckis.
So much for your credibility on this subject. NEXT...
Yeah, but you gotta admit, the film to which daddysboy was referring is opie-esque. On second though, maybe he was being ironic/satirical.
So much for your credibility on this subject. NEXT...
--
Bingo!
I think this post makes good points (though I still intend to see the movie). But bringing up Shakespeare at the end only undermines its main argument. Shakespeare had no compunction with distorting history for dramatic effect (or to conform with popular sentiments). The idea that artists should be faithful to "historical truth" is a relatively modern one, and, as this post makes obvious, still a controversial one.
Basically, the only distortions that offend us are the ones that contradict out interpretation of events.
eXACTLY. I'm sure paleontologists had a hissy fit over Jurassic Park. But then we all realize THEY"RE FRICKIN MOVIES. Jeez.
not just paleontologists, also biologists, gemeticis (hell anyone who ever "planted" a potato in a glass with toothpicks supporting it in grade school) mathamticians and anyone interested in plotting or creative writing was upset by that pile of gooey stupidity.
As one of the 30% who was living at the time, let me tell you the prevailing impression. Frost was considered a "safe" celebrity/reporter for the interview. To get an idea of the contempt people had for the Frost interview, remember the interview O.J. had with that dumb informercial actor? That was the consensus most of the thinking people had of the interview. Nothing more than a shill for the Nixon crowd. How Nixon escaped punishment for a life of trickery and deception will always be his legacy.
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