Word: nixonization
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...Richard Nixon is telling David Frost about the day in March 1973 when he realized he had to fire his chief domestic advisor, John Ehrlichman, for abetting the Watergate cover-up - or, rather, for being fingered by the press for doing it. Tears glimmer in the ex-President's eyes, then he closes them to contain the pain as he staggers through his reciting of the conversation. "I said, 'You know, John, when I went to bed last night,' I said, 'I hoped,' I said, 'I hoped, I almost prayed I wouldn't wake up this morning.'" He grimaces...
...Frank Langella would be proud of such a performance. But this display of mood-altering confession and self-justification was the real Nixon, in his TV marathon with Frost in 1977, three years after he left the White House in disgrace. That four-part joust, still the highest-rated interview show in U.S. history, was the inspiration for Peter Morgan's London and Broadway play starring Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost. Langella and Sheen (and Morgan) repeat their roles in the Ron Howard movie version opening today. Both the movie and the interviews (now available...
...stage original was plenty entertaining, a portrait of two brilliant, conflicted men with something to prove: Nixon that he was a statesman, not a crook; Frost that he had the gravitas to bring a big man down. So how does that become a movie - one, moreover, that is essentially a making-of feature about a '70s TV show? Howard knew that to convey the particulars of what must seem like ancient history to younger viewers, he needed to move from the long-shot perspective of a play to the interviews' own visual style: alternating medium shots of Frost with blistering...
...Morgan's script has events push Frost against the ropes, the better to show how he rallied to win the fight. In a career slump after losing his Australian TV gig, he secures a contract for the Nixon interviews but must pay $200,000 out of his own pocket. The three big U.S. networks refuse to buy into his scheme, and he borrows money from friends. (He eventually creates a de facto network of independent stations to air the interviews.) Of the two reporters he hires to research Nixon, one, Bob Zelnick (large, puddingy Oliver Platt) is cynical of Frost...
...Whereas Frost's seconds are guns for hire, Nixon's cornerman, Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon), has as lifetime loyalty to his boss. Since the resignation, he has become a fretful coach and father figure to Nixon, encouraging him to be strong, insisting an interview be stopped at the first sign of Nixon's vulnerability. All these plot elements have some basis in fact. Morgan's one fanciful addition is a phone call Nixon makes to Frost, spilling out his guts, fears and resentments. In this scene above all others, Langella leeches into the president's anxieties, and summons much...