RN Shares The Spotlight With Elvis

August 10, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Entertainment, In Memoriam, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

Over at the KNBC Channel 4 Los Angeles website, they are celebrating the life of Elvis Presley this week. He died on August 16, 1977, 32 years ago this coming Sunday. Interestingly enough, at the head of the page is the most requested photo from the National Archives, taken from Elvis’s 1970 Oval Office Visit. Former White House staffer Bud Krogh recounts the event here, you can buy his book about it here.

KNBC was also nice enough to plug the Nixon Foundation gift shop:

While “The President and The King,” a Richard Nixon Library exhibit detailing that iconic photo of the president meeting Elvis Presley in the Oval Office circa 1970, closed awhile back, the library still sells Elvis-Nixon memorabilia in the gift shop. The library is located in Yorba Linda

You can buy the gift shop memorabilia here.

The Case Of The Amiable Applicant

July 18, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon in the News, Senate, Supreme Court | 1 Comment 

This week marked the more or less official beginning of the Al Franken Slightly-Less-Than-Three-Fifths-of-a-Decade (Saturday Night Live fans, at least those of 1979-era vintage, will recognize the reference) and it started in a suitably bizarre way.

At the Senate hearings to consider the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the junior Senator from Minnesota bided his time, then sprang a surprise question. Judge Sotomayor had earlier said that she was in part inspired to become a prosecutor by watching the Perry Mason TV series.

It might have been a good time for Sen. Franken to ask how it was that seeing William Talman (in his role as District Attorney Hamilton Burger) losing the prosecution’s case week after week, season after season, could inspire her to follow in his footsteps.

Instead, Franken asked Judge Sotomayor to name the one case that Perry Mason lost on the show. She couldn’t do it. Another senator asked the former Stuart Smalley if he knew the name of the episode. Franken said he didn’t know.

This exchange, naturally, sent reporters to consulting the Wikipedia entry for the series and the several sites devoted to the show. There, they learned that Franken’s question was more confusing that it at first appeared.

There are three episodes in which Perry Mason loses a case. (At this point, TNN readers in Orange County can skip a few paragraphs, since I presume nearly all of them have seen these shows at least a thousand times apiece on KDOC during the last 27 years.)

“The Case Of The Witless Witness,” from 1963, which opens with Mason (played, of course, by the late Raymond Burr) losing an appeal (after his client, evidently, is convicted at trial). However, the plot of the episode does not focus on Mason’s defeat; rather, it sets up a situation where the judge who rules against Mason in appellate court is accused of murder and Perry gallantly takes his case and prevails in the courtroom.

During the show’s first season, “The Case Of The Terrified Typist” featured Mason losing a case, and discovering, on further examination, that his client is indeed guilty. However, it turns out that the name the client is using has been stolen from someone else, in a style somewhat anticipating today’s wave of identity thefts; that, and some other circumstances, enable the attorney to obtain a mistrial ruling, and at the show’s conclusion the implication is that the dishonest defendant will be tried again, with some other lawyer handling him.

The third episode, from 1963, seems to be the one that Judge Sotomayor had in mind, from what she said to Franken, but could not name. This is “The Case Of The Deadly Verdict.” In it, Mason’s defendant is convicted and it looks like Burger finally has the chance to find out what the thrill of victory is all about. But Perry, with Della and Paul’s help, looks into the matter further and finds out that his client has been withholding some facts from him. This leads him to discover the identity of the real murderer.

And at this point we come upon a conundrum truly worthy of the late Erle Stanley Gardner: why Al Franken would not be able to remember the title of “Deadly Verdict” when the actor playing the villain in it was his own second cousin, Stephen Franken. (Yes, the same Stephen Franken who attained pop-culture immortality as Chatsworth Osborne, the quintessential rich kid from Dobie Gillis – not to mention his role as Levinson the waiter in the 1968 film The Party, in which he displays prodigies of timing and comic skill that are to Al’s efforts what the arias of Kirsten Flagstad are to those of Florence Foster Jenkins.)

But I’ll leave it to wiser minds to puzzle that out. Right now it’s time to explain the title of this post. The Washington Post’s article about Franken’s exchange with the judge moved one of its readers to send a letter which the paper published today.

The letter’s writer, Beth Kravetz, said the colloquy of lawmaker and lawgiver put her in mind of a time in the early 1980s when she visited the offices of the National Association of Truck Stop Operators to talk to that organization’s president, former Nixon White House press secretary Ron Ziegler, about a job.

“With little in the way of general niceties” (as Ms. Kravetz tells it), Ziegler asked her to name the nine members of the Supreme Court. “I was surprised by the question,” Ms. Kravetz informs us, “and answered that I could more easily name the Seven Dwarfs, which I proceeded to do. The interview ended shortly thereafter.”

Now, it is most likely true that most Americans, at any given time since Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs was released in 1937, could more easily name Dopey, Doc and the rest of the gang than the nine justices. But I wonder if even the enormous investigative and logical capacities of Perry Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake would be up to explaining why Ms. Kravetz was surprised that Ron Ziegler was asking her to identify the members of the Court when she, a 1974 graduate of Georgetown University’s law school who presumably had studied cases bearing the names of most of the justices, was applying to work as general counsel of his organization.

I have the feeling that we will be seeing even greater wonders as the Franken era continues.

Liddy, Hunt, And The Power Of Song

June 27, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Music, Nixon Administration figures, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

What are the citizens of Vermont doing, now that the United States is being remade along the lines most of them seem to favor, and they no longer have to plot to secede from the Union to join Canada?

Well, tonight, and next Tuesday, some of them will be going to see a new musical at the Paramount Theater in Rutland. The show is called Room 16, by the youthful team of Stephen Sislen (composer and co-lyricist) and Ben H. Winters (book writer and co-lyricist), and its subject is nothing less than the Watergate break-in. From what I could gather in these articles from the Rutland Herald and Vermont Public Radio’s site, the show focuses on the relationship of the break-in’s two main planners, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy.

The brief description of the musical at ASCAP’s site gives an indication of the plot: “though initially wary of each other, the two soon become successful co-conspirators…and pals.” Not much different from The Producers, in other words, and we all know what a massive success that show proved to be.

Last year Room 16 was featured in an ASCAP/Disney workshop in New York, and Youtube has clips of three songs from it: “Room 16,” “After November,” and “Under Control.” Watching these clips, it’s quite apparent that Sislen has a superior gift for melody in the grand Broadway tradition and that he and Winters can produce lyrics on the same high level. (Indeed, their songwriting style somewhat brings to mind Liddy’s favorites, John Kander and Fred Ebb of Cabaret fame.) It’s hard to say to what degree the show’s book would follow the historical record, but then again, The King And I and The Sound Of Music are not exactly models of fidelity to the facts.

No word yet on when or if the show will reach Broadway, but considering that John Adams’s Nixon In China is probably the most produced opera from the second half of the twentieth century, Room 16’s chances of further success may be quite good.

A Different Kind Of Inauguration

June 26, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Entertainment, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Michael Jackson was always a keen reader of comic books, and in the 1980s he was often referred to in them. Comicbook.com takes a look at some aspects of his association with the comics world. It’s been widely reported that in his last weeks the Gloved One enlisted the help of TV’s Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferrigno, to help get in shape for the marathon series of London concerts he planned to undertake next month before tragedy struck.

But did you know that Jackson reportedly once met with Stan Lee to discuss buying Marvel Comics – the whole shebang? With Spidey and the Fantastic Four in the hands of MJ, the whole course of history might have been changed.

And speaking of Marvel, back in the early ’70s it had a short-lived title called Spoof, somewhat in the tradition of the 1950s Mad. The cover of issue #3 (for January 1973) featured the first appearance of Jackson on the front of a comic book. He was depicted with his brothers, Bob Dylan, the former Beatles, Elvis, the Stones, and the Osmonds in the grandstand of that year’s Presidential inauguration in Washington, watching as John Lennon swore in David Cassidy as Chief Executive. The foreground of the cover showed Spiro Agnew casting a baleful glance at Richard Nixon and saying, “You had to lower the voting age to 18.” (The scene was clearly inspired by that wacky old movie Wild In The Streets.)

Ed, Farrah, and Michael

June 25, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, In Memoriam | 1 Comment 

Within a forty-eight-hour period the world lost three figures in the world of entertainment. Farrah Fawcett, in the days when she had Majors appended to her name, was the nation’s most popular sex symbol a year or so after Richard Nixon left the White House. Ed McMahon’s work with the late Johnny Carson spanned eight presidencies (if one includes their late 1950s game show Who Do You Trust?) but for many viewers their true heyday came in the early 1970s, when no weekday in the Nixon era was complete without at least a few minutes watching Ed holler “Heyyy-yo!” or hearing him intone the magic words, “I hold in my hand the last envelope.”

But both of these deaths were inevitably overshadowed by the unexpected passing of Michael Jackson. It would take thousands of words to come close to describing the triumph, tawdriness, and tragedy of his 40-year career but it is worth mentioning that it all started in the Nixon years, with “I Want You Back” in the fall of 1969. Indeed, his first big solo recordings, like “Ben” (which was nominated for an Oscar), happened during the thirty-seventh President’s first term.

May their families be comforted in their time of sorrow.

Raising The Curtain For Nixon’s Granddaughter

June 13, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Nixon family, Pat Nixon, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

Jennie Eisenhower, the actress who is the great-granddaughter of the 34th President and granddaughter of the 37th (and the daughter of David and Julie Eisehower), is the subject of an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer by that paper’s theater critic Howard Shapiro. Ms. Eisenhower is currently featured in the show Forbidden Broadway’s Greatest Hits at the Walnut Theatre in Philadelphia, a production in which she portrays such legends as Carol Channing, Ethel Merman, and Liza Minnelli. This versatility has been a hallmark of Ms. Eisehower’s career; she plays several other characters in the show, recently performed in the title role in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and also just directed productions of Our Town and Kiss Me Kate at her alma mater, Conestoga High School.

The article describes how Ms. Eisenhower, after graduating from Northwestern with a dual major in theater and communications, settled in New York, where she went through the customary round of endless auditions and getting roles that, as often as not, took her far outside the city. After a period of working at Bloomingdale’s as a personal shopper, she moved back to Philadelphia and has made it her base for performances in that area and further afield. (Several years ago she appeared at the Olney Theater near Washington, in the title role of Shaw’s St. Joan, and also had a small role in the Julia Roberts film Mona Lisa Smile.)

The actress also mentions the support she received from her parents and grandparents as she chose and worked on her career, and points out that RN’s very last public appearance (unless one counts the wedding of a family friend, the weekend before his death) was in the audience at her high school production of Stephen Sondheim’s Into The Woods. (So the next time you find yourself at a Sondheim trivia contest – and whenever two fans of the man who gave us Sweeney Todd and A Little Night Music are in the same room, there always is one – that’s your chance to deliver the stumper: “Which Sondheim musical did Richard Nixon see just before he passed away?” My bet is that the first guess would be either West Side Story or Gypsy.)

Comedy Isn’t Pretty — And Often Not Even Funny

June 12, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Comedy, Entertainment, Sarah Palin | 6 Comments 

After five years of working for and with David Letterman at Late Night, my respect and affection for him are pretty darn close to unbounded.

But, of course, that doesn’t mean that I think everything he does is OK — much less that every joke he tells is funny.

A recent unfortunate —and uncharacteristic— case in point is the small run —in the opening monologue and the Top Ten List— of marginally tasteless and arguably unfunny of material about Sarah Palin on Monday night’s show.

The hook was the Governor’s highly-publicized whirlwind trip to New York that had received saturation news coverage over the preceding weekend.

On Sunday’s itinerary was a family outing to the new Yankee Stadium with Rudy and Judith Giuliani.  And that’s where the trouble started.

Then, as you look at it, insult was added to injury a couple of minutes later with Number Two on the Top Ten List from the Home Office in Wahoo, Nebraska.

TOP TEN HIGHLIGHTS OF SARAH PALIN’S TRIP TO NEW YORK

10. Visited New York landmarks she normally only sees from Alaska.

9. Laughed at all the crazy-looking foreigners entering the U.N.

8. Made moose jerky on Rachael Ray

7. Keyed Tina Fey’s car

6.  After a wink and a nod, ended up with a kilo of crack

5.  Made coat out of New York City rat pelts

4.  Sat in for Kelly Ripa. Regis couldn’t tell the difference.

3. Finally met one of those Jewish people Mel Gibson’s always talking about.

2. Bought makeup at Blomingdale’s to update her “slutty flight attendant” look

1. Especially enjoyed not appearing on Letterman

I know at first hand and from considerable personal experience and observation that Dave is —despite his ostensibly prickly personality and self-proclaimed dumb guy persona— a highly intelligent, thoughtful, considerate, and sensitive fellow.

None of the jokes in question are very funny —with the exception of Numbers Ten and Six it has to be one of the lamest Top Ten lists in a long while— but that’s the law of averages, not the law of unintended consequences.  And I can assure you that the notion that he intentionally set out to insult or demean a pre-teen is, simply, off the table.  (The technicality is that the Palin daughter present at the ball game turned out to be 14 year old Willow rather than 18 year old single mom Bristol.)

To the extent that there may have been any operating principle behind what happened, I suspect it’s hiding in plain sight in the Number One Highlight of Sarah Palin’s Trip to New York: “Especially enjoyed not appearing on Letterman.”

There has been bad blood —entirely and gratuitously McCain (and by indirection McCain-Palin) generated— between the 2008 GOP presidential ticket and The Late Show with David Letterman.  Even after Senator McCain admitted screwing up and tried to set things right, he failed to deliver on a promised joint appearance  with his running mate.

To most people these events might seem like tempests in teapots.  But having been there and done that I know how seriously Dave takes his show and treats his audience.  Besides, he comes from a time and a place where, if you make a promise, you’re expected to keep it.

What would otherwise have been a minor blip noted only by those with highly sensitive blip monitors, has been turned into a brouhaha bordering on a cause celebre by the Palins — who have effectively charged Dave with pedophilia.  Whether this was done in a misguided attempt to make a point or in order to further an agenda will be the subject of debate for some time.

I think they made a mistake in not accepting Dave’s apology and moving on.  Partly because I think it would have been the right thing to do; and partly for the reasons put forward by Margaret Carlson on today’s Daily Beast:

…picking a fight with a trained comedian, refusing to accept his apology and continuing to battle after the white flag is shown reveals a complete lack of political sophistication.

Letterman apologized at unprecedented length for a comment about Palin’s recent trip to New York. There was, he said, “One awkward moment for Sarah Palin at the Yankee, during the seventh inning stretch, her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.” To which the Palins shot back: “Laughter incited by sexually perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is… disgusting.”

Who said anything about a 14-year-old girl? Not Letterman. That would be… the Palins. It turns out it was Willow, not Bristol, who went to the baseball game. But who knew that until the Palins brought this “disgusting” comment so painful to their younger daughter to the attention of the 300 million people not tuned into David Letterman?

Letterman’s joke was indeed tasteless—he even owed A-Rod an apology. But I doubt there was another soul in the world who didn’t understand the joke to be about the older Palin daughter, who lapped Jamie Lynn Spears as the most famous pregnant teen in the world once she was trotted out at the Republican National Convention in August. Not that Bristol should have been left at home in the dark, but if you want a “zone of privacy” around your daughter, do you have her appear on stage with her then-fiancée hinting at prospects of a White House wedding waving to the crowd like Charles and Diana of the Klondike?

Woebegone: Garrison Keillor’s Memorial Day Song

May 30, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Entertainment, Music | Leave a Comment 

Last week’s edition of The Prairie Home Companion was broadcast from Wolftrap Farm, just over the Potomac from the nation’s capital.

During the show, Garrison Keillor did a good thing and a bad thing.

This is is praise and his comeuppance.

The good thing: He invited the audience to stand and join him and the cast and musicians in singing the National Anthem. It was a stirring and fitting moment.  So kudos to Mr. Keillor for that.

The bad thing: He closed the segment that preceded singing the “Star Spangled Banner” by mangling one of the most powerful anti-war songs ever written in order to bend it to an inappropriate and tendentious purpose. And in doing so he managed to desecrate the day that honors the memory of the fallen and to dishonor the sacrifice of the many wounded in battle by appropriating them for his own bathetic use.

The song is  Eric Bogle’s 1971 “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.”

It is impossible to listen unmoved —or unshaken— to this chilly and chilling masterpiece. Not the least of its power lies in its site-specificity. It was written about the ill-conceived and mismanaged Dardanelles expedition and the Gallipoli Campaign of April 1915, when Australian and New Zealand troops were thown against superior Turkish positions and succinctly massacred. It refers to the thinning ranks and equivocal emotions of the survivors of that brutal and bloody disaster as they celebrate Anzac Day each April.

Bogle brilliantly uses “Waltzing Matilda” —a song that is deeply engraved on each strand of Anzac DNA— as an ironic leitmotif, until, at the very end, it finally manages to break free in time for a mordant and melancholy finale.  After listening to “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” you will never hear “Waltzing Matilda” again in the same way.

Here is Eric Bogle’s song performed by Liam Clancy, You can read the lyrics here.

Mr. Keillor full well understands the power of music.  Indeed, he understands the power of Eric Bogle’s song — which he has sung on his program in its original form on Anzac Day.

But last Saturday he hijacked it on Memorial Day for his own purposes.  In his ersatz version, the band plays the “Star Spangled Banner” (now incongruously to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda”), and Mr. Keillor equates the Anzac bitterness over the Gallipoli debacle with the American mobilization after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

He introduces the segment by describing his visit to the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery near the Anzio battlefield, where the invasion of Italy began in December 1943.  He describes walking around the marble memorial to the 6,000 men killed, the 18,000 wounded, and the 6,000 taken prisoner or missing.  Then he observes that “People are still arguing about the allied campaign in Italy.  If it should ever have been done…the decisions that were made.  They’ll never resolve that.  But there they all lie.”

And then he sings his misappropriation of “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”  — the apparent point of which has now become the futility of  having fought World War Two.

You can hear it here (at 58:50).

This is dishonest historically, musically, and emotionally.  Prairie Home listeners deserve better on Memorial Day.

Frost/Nixon: The Supporting Players Speak

May 15, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Movies, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Over the last six months we’ve heard quite a bit from the major players in the Frost/Nixon film – director Ron Howard, writer Peter Morgan, and stars Frank Langella and Michael Sheen – but it’s been somewhat difficult to find interviews with the supporting cast members.

So I was happy to come across an interview that Oliver Platt (who plays Bob Zelnick in the film) did with Film Monthly last December. In it, he’s asked whether it’s true that Langella insisted on being addressed as “Mr. President” on the set. (Here, I should mention that in the commentary to the Frost/Nixon DVD, Ron Howard tells an amusing story about the moment when Langella finally dropped character and gave everyone permission to call him Frank again, just before the last scene was shot.)

Platt confirms this, but observes that:

[I]t really didn’t end up having a lot of bearing on us, because Ron kept the two camps very much apart on the set. He really didn’t want us to mingle. I mean, I’m surprised he didn’t have, like, separate craft services and makeup trailers for us, But he really encouraged—he said, “I really don’t want you guys to hang out together.” The people on the Frost team and on the Nixon team. And so we rarely—we actually rarely saw them.

This article is titled “Oliver Platt vs. Richard Nixon,” but this month, in another interview done to promote the DVD, Platt reveals, when asked if his opinion of the 37th President was changed by his work on the film:

Absolutely, and that is one of the things that is so beautiful about the movie I think. We have been handily villainising Nixon for almost four decades now and my view is that there are very few real heroes or real villains, there are people who do heroic things and there are people that make mistakes and I would put Nixon in the latter category.

Matthew Macfadyen, who plays producer John Birt in the film, is asked in the same article whether the scene depicting Birt joyously stripping off his clothes and jumping into the Pacific was based on fact. Macfadyen replies:

He might have done [that]. It would have been something that he could have done. I asked [Birt] about that. He was sort of hazy but he said it was something he could imagine himself having done. It was a wild, spur of the moment kind of thing. But actually he would have had to get into the car and drive down to the beach and then dramatically, spontaneously run into the sea.

To which Platt ripostes, “in real life it was Zelnick who did it but he has a much nicer bottom.” That witticism aside, it sounds like the romp in the surf might well have been another scene meriting an admission by Howard on the DVD commentary that it departed from the historical record.

The After-WHCA Scene In A Nutshell

May 15, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Entertainment, Media, Social Networking | Leave a Comment 

Chris Lehmann, once the Washington correspondent for the New York Observer, now contributes to theawl.com, founded by some former staffers of the gossip site Gawker. This week at the site he described a party he attended after the White House Correspondents Association dinner. One paragraph, especially, caught my eye, since it illustrates how wonkery and showbiz are sometimes inextricably linked in Beltway society:

The most engaging conversation of my night, for instance, was with a learned and witty UK economist—“for my sins, I try to teach this discipline to the young,” he explained. We lamented the lack of any systemic approach to health care reform in America, the decline of the 19th century “political economy”—to the detriment of latter-day economics and politics alike—and compared the limitations of the two-party system in America and Britain. It was only when he was fetched away by his brooding-hunk son that my wife informed me that he was the father of Ed Westwick, of “Gossip Girl” fame.

Ron Howard’s Missed Chance

May 1, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Movies, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

TNN reader Tom van Oosterom recently emailed our master of ceremonies Jonathan Movroydis after he and his wife saw the Frost/Nixon DVD, and observed that (comments in brackets are mine):

[W]atching the DVD extras…one historical fact seems to have passed [up] by Ron Howard. Interestingly enough, Nixon’s “Final Press Conference” [of "you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" fame] was given at the very same Beverly Hilton Hotel where David Frost stayed while preparing and conducting the Nixon interviews. In fact some of the routes that the character of David Frost walked in the movie were caught on film when Nixon left the “final” press conference, walked through the hotel, shook hands with a worker at the front desk, proceeded outside ([from] the back of the hotel) and hopped in a car that then drove away. [Mr. van Oosterom saw this footage in PBS's American Experience special about RN.]

It would have been fun if Ron Howard had picked up on this historic parallel, compared footage, etc.

Frost/Nixon On DVD

April 27, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Movies, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 2 Comments 

Over the weekend I picked up the new DVD of Ron Howard’s film Frost/Nixon. As noted last week, this has a number of interesting extras.

One of these is a seven-minute short about the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, featuring former Library Executive Director Rev. John H. Taylor (though his ecclesiastical status is omitted from the subtitle identifying him) and Acting Executive Director Kathy O’Connor. Despite its brevity, this extra is sure to bring many a new vistor to the Library; it features such major highlights as the replica of the White House East Room (though I didn’t spot the room with the life-size statues of the leaders RN knew).

Another extra compares footage of Michael Sheen (as David Frost) interviewing Frank Langella (as President Nixon) with the actual Frost-Nixon interviews from 1977. It’s especially interesting to see the way in which Langella, while varying considerably from RN’s phrasing, somehow remains faithful to the spirit of what was being said.

The making-of featurette, lasting 25 minutes, includes a lot of useful and informative material. If you watch it with the subtitles on, you’ll spot an amusing moment about halfway through: Matthew Macfadyen, in a voiceover, begins talking about his performance as Frost’s producer John Birt. But the subtitles identify the speaker as John Taylor. This extra also has the one typo I spotted in the subtitles: a reference to the “Houston Plan” (though the correct spelling appears in the subtitles to Frost/Nixon itself).

This brings us to the feature. It includes a full commentary by director Howard that’s full of fascinating detail. He emphasizes, time and again, that the film was shot on a limited budget and on a very tight schedule. He observes that he made the most of existing places to shoot, rather than trying to put together expensive sets: for instance, it was a fortuitous happenstance that the Beverly Hilton Hotel, at the time the film was made, had been redecorated in a sort of retro-1970s style in keeping with the period depicted in the film (when the hotel was used as the Frost team’s headquarters).

It turns out that the scene in which Sheen (as Frost) pitches the interviews to executives at the three networks was not in the original script and that the decision to film it was made nearly on the spur of the moment, when shooting was almost over. Howard says the set representing the networks’s offices (the same room in each shot, with posters of TV shows on the wall changed to represent CBS, ABC and NBC in turn) was put together in a matter of hours and that Sheen improvised his dialogue,as he did with the scene where he pitches his series to Weed Eater honchos.  (The director praises Sheen’s performance, incidentally, for reasons akin to those I cited in my previous posts about the movie.)

Howard goes to some trouble to explain his use of dramatic license in four scenes. Regarding the controversial sequence in which RN drunkenly phones Frost, Howard insists that since RN was reported to have made such calls from time to time in the wee hours of the morning during his Presidency, and since the scene had been an effective one with the audiences who saw Peter Morgan’s play, both he and Morgan felt it should be included, despite the fact that no such call ever happened when the interviews were being put together.

Howard also acknowledges that the line “when the President does it, it is not illegal” was lifted out of the context in which it was spoken in the original interviews (a discussion of the Huston Plan in 1970) and inserted by Morgan into RN’s reply to a question from Frost about the Watergate events two years later. Again, the director argues that the dramatic effectiveness of the scene justifies this license, though Howard’s tone suggests he doesn’t completely feel on sure ground in this claim.

The third example of license Howard mentions is the scene in which Frost shows RN footage from the Vietnam War. Although such footage was inserted by Frost and his producers into the original broadcast of his interviews, the President did not see this material on monitors, in the way depicted in the film. Howard, again, argues that the dramatic point made by having Langella see the footage justifies this departure from the historical record.

After these weighty examples, it’s a bit startling when, in the concluding scenes set at La Casa Pacifica overlooking the ocean, Howard mentions that dramatic license has been taken again, but in a way that would not be that easy to spot: because the “Western White House” was not available for these scenes by the end of shooting, he found a nearby house which had a similar view of the Pacific and shot there.

This sets the stage for Howard to mention that there were several endings shot for the film, focusing on Frost’s gift of the Italian shoes to RN. In the version shown to early audiences, the President puts the shoes on and walks around in them. This elicited a very favorable response at the previews, but Howard was wary of this reaction (because he thought that it depicted RN abruptly shedding his introvert’s persona and so wasn’t true to character) and finally concluded that the way to go was to conclude the scene as it now appears, with RN simply taking the shoes out and looking at them. Because the shoes were absent from the long shot Howard wanted to use to close his feature and there was no time or money to do retakes, the footwear was inserted into the image through computer-generated imagery.

There are a lot of other interesting details in the commentary. I’ve seen the film three times so far but, until Howard mentioned it, didn’t realize that most of the figures in the background of the audience shots when RN is speaking to the audience in Houston were actually plastic dummies (a trick the director says he picked up when filming the Madison Square Garden scenes in Cinderella Man).

And people who immediately recognized the name of Patty McCormack, who plays Pat Nixon in the film, as that of the actress who won an Oscar nomination at the age of eleven for her unforgettable performance in The Bad Seed, will be interested to know that no such bell rang with Howard; it was not until an assistant mentioned this to him after McCormack finished her audition that he recalled that role. “Of course, I’d be the last person to hold being a child star against her,” quoth Opie. There’s a lot more in the commentary, which is nearly worth the price of the DVD in itself.

There are also about 25 minutes of deleted scenes, primarily featuring Langella delivering longer excerpts from RN’s resignation speech and his August 9 East Room remarks than appear in the finished film. The actor’s expressions just before he begins his resignation address, and as he concludes the East Room speech, are just as superb and moving as his acting in the interview sequences, and it’s unfortunate they couldn’t be included intact in the feature. All in all, this is a superb package, and it’s a relief – especially since this DVD is sure to be seen by high school and college students interested in the events it depicts – to hear Ron Howard identify and acknowledge the departures he made from the historical record.

Don’t Forget The Cheeseburgers

April 24, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Movies, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

The lineup for next season’s Brinker International Forum series at the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts has been announced. Most of it is not especially out of the ordinary: Condoleeza Rice, Hillary Swank, Lisa Ling (formerly of The View). But the final event, on March 16, 2010, raises the old eyebrows a bit: “Frank Langella and Sir David Frost: A Conversation.” If that meeting is filmed or taped, footage from it will make a nifty extra for the 2013 commemorative re-release of the Frost/Nixon DVD.

Which reminds me that the first-run (so to speak) DVD of that film is now in the stores. It features a number of extras, plus a commentary track from director Ron Howard. Among the notable revelations in the disc’s  making-of mini-documentary: the scenes in which Michael Sheen (as Sir David) pitches the Nixon interviews to Weed Eater, and in which Oliver Platt does his RN impression, were improvised on the set. Another 6-minute extra is devoted to the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. There are also 22 minutes of deleted scenes; I wonder if these include one of Swifty Lazar grabbing the check (a highlight of Peter Morgan’s play which was omitted from the film).

Richard Nixon Helps The First “Millionaire”

April 22, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under Entertainment | 2 Comments 

Who wants to be a millionaire (First $1,000,000 winner)

Sinking His Teeth Into A New Role

April 13, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Movies | Leave a Comment 

This November, Michael Sheen, whose performance as David Frost in Frost/Nixon impressed critics and audiences both onstage and on film, will undertake a somewhat different part – the leader of the Volturi vampire clan in New Moon, the sequel to the massive box-office hit Twilight. No telling if this choice of a part represents Mr. Sheen’s effort to compete with his co-star Frank Langella, whose best-known role, prior to playing the 37th President, was perhaps that of Count Dracula in a legendary Broadway tour de force later captured on film in the 1970s. But this is not the British actor’s first venture into playing otherworldly characters – he was a werewolf in the film Underworld and its sequel. (Indeed, there was something just a tad vulpine about his initial encounter with Caroline Cushing on a jet in Frost/Nixon.)

Presidents Of The Twenty-First Century

April 4, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Entertainment, George W. Bush, Movies, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Today in io9.com, the science-fiction blog which is part of the Gawker.com online group, Alasdair Wilkins takes a look at comic books, movies, science-fiction novels, and TV shows over the last half-century which have speculated on who might be sitting in the White House from 2001 until century’s end.

He begins with Lex Luthor. The real world had the saga of Bush vs. Gore, but in the sometimes tidier universe of DC Comics, the chrome-domed entrepeneur had little difficulty winning the Presidency in 2000. However, once in office, his popularity somewhat diminished with the public. Like his real-life counterpart, Luthor’s Administration faced many challenges and crises, but old Lex was inclined to let most of these sit on the back burner while he focused his energies on annihilating Superman. (Of course, many liberals would suggest that President Bush had a similar preoccupation with Saddam Hussein in his first term.)

After a couple of minor figures from the DC universe fill out Luthor’s term once Superman straightens things out, the next President in Wilkins’s chronology is the one figure who, so far, is actually the Chief Executive in real life: Barack Obama (who has been a character in a multitude of comics lately, joining forces with a host of superheroes from Spiderman on down to defeat various villains).

After Obama comes Arnold Schwarzegger, who, as Wilkins notes, showed up as President in The Simpsons Movie. (This raises the question, still unanswered in the two years since the film’s release: why did the film’s makers posit the Gubernator as President instead of his doppelganger from the TV show, Rainer Wolfcastle?)

Wilkins follows that with a list of Presidents that includes both fictional and real names. He points out that the short-lived CBS series Century City, set circa 2030, presented a United States over which Oprah Winfrey presided. (And, though he doesn’t mention it, an episode of The Boondocks, set in the present day, concluded with Oprah announcing her candidacy.) The three Zenon: Girl Of The 21st Century movies on the Disney Channel, set in 2049, portrayed an America run by Chelsea Clinton. (Hillary doesn’t show up in Wilkins’s chronology.)

During the 2080s the President is another African-American: Jim Briskin, from the late Fullerton resident Philip K. Dick’s 1966 novel The Crack In Space. (Dick, as his two biographies attest, was very interested in the Presidency, and especially in the 37th President: RN figures as “Ferris Fremont” in his Radio Free Albemuth.)

The chronology winds up in 2099 with Steve Rogers aka Captain America in charge, But never fear; as all regular viewers of Comedy Central know, just over 900 years afterwards, RN (or rather his head in a jar) will be Earth President, getting the planet through crises of varying magnitude. The Presidency of 2100 through 2999 awaits its chronicler.

More Sleepless Nights For Elizabeth Drew

March 30, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cold War, Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

Last night Stacy Keach completed his run as RN in Frost/Nixon at LA’s Ahmanson Theatre, triumphantly fighting back, in the best Nixonian tradition, to retake the stage after being hospitalized for a week by a mild stroke. Tomorrow through Sunday, he appears with the production at Arizona State University in Tempe. (As was the case with the final weekend at the Ahmanson, understudy Bob Ari will take over as RN for the Saturday and Sunday matinees.)

Yesterday Kerry Lengel of the Arizona Republic interviewed Keach. As he has done in nearly every press interview on this tour, the veteran actor emphasized his belief that Richard Nixon, in the decades since he left the White House, has emerged as a figure as compelling as any in Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories, and just as worthy of portrayal by an actor seeking to reach the heights of his profession. (Or maybe I should add “her” – could it be that one day we might see, say, Meryl Streep or Glenn Close in a Frost/Nixon revival, much as Dame Judith Anderson or Sarah Bernhardt once played Hamlet?)

“Nixon has become an iconic figure, a tragic American figure,” Keach says. “Just as there are many great Hamlets and many great Lears, there are many great Nixons. Anthony Hopkins was a great Nixon. Rip Torn was a great Nixon. So I am adding a notch in my belt in the Nixonian tradition.”

And what does he add to the Nixonian tradition [asks Lengel]?

“I think my contribution is the humor,” [Keach] says. “He’s very engaging, and humor is one of the means of humanizing the character, which is one of Peter Morgan’s objectives.

“This play has done more to rehabilitate Nixon’s image in the world than the original interviews ever could have.”

Indeed, Keach’s temporary departure from the production and his replacement by Ari for a week emphasized, perhaps better than anything else, that playing Nixon is starting to become one of the litmus tests for an actor’s range and capability. The understudy’s performance in the role was examined by Mike Boehm at the Los Angeles Times’s site (“Ari, who was also Frank Langella’s understudy on Broadway, revealed a markedly different take on Nixon than Keach’s: gruffer, deeper-voiced, more raw and less able to disguise the insecurities and disappointments that nag at him”) and at considerable length by Evan Henerson at Examiner.com. That is to say, Ari’s handling of the part received almost the kind of attention at those sites that New York newspapers would have given to the performance of Richard Burton’s understudy in Hamlet in the 1960s had that eminent thespian been laid up for a week.

And, at Canada’s National Post, in the course of a review of Susan Jacoby’s new book on the Alger Hiss case, Philip Marchand suggests a new area of RN’s career for any playwright with the skill and ambition to take it on:

It is strange that Hollywood, which has aimed to make high drama out of such relatively insignificant political events as CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s televised attack on Senator Joe McCarthy (Good Night, and Good Luck) and David Frost’s interviews with Richard Nixon (Frost/Nixon), has neglected the story of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. The 1948 confrontation between the two men — Hiss, the cool, handsome, high-ranking government official, versus Chambers, the talented, scruffy, emotionally erratic, repressed homosexual writer and editor — truly was dramatic.

There was a PBS miniseries back in the 1980s in which Edward Herrmann played Alger Hiss, but it was a rather undistinguished affair. And the story is rather too complex for a 100-minute movie. A carefully constructed 3 1/2 hour play, however, might well be as spellbinding from beginning to end as The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial or Inherit The Wind. Any takers?

Stacy Keach Returns As RN

March 24, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

The Los Angeles Times reports today that actor Stacy Keach, having recovered from a mild stroke that disrupted his run in Frost/Nixon at LA’s Ahmanson Theatre, will resume his role as President Nixon on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights to conclude this engagement and move on to the four other cities on the tour. Bob Ari, his understudy, will play the role at the weekend matinees.

Mixologist-In-Chief

March 23, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Humor, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

The Daily Princetonian published an article today about the imminent departure of Jim Kelly (a member of Princeton’s Class of ‘76) as Time’s managing editor. In the course of reminiscing about his long career with the magazine, Kelly recounts this story:

On one especially memorable occasion, he even dined with former president Richard Nixon.

“[Nixon] asked if anyone wanted a drink, and we all said white wine. And he said ‘Well, I’ll have a martini, and if anyone else wants a martini, I’ll mix one for you,’ ” Kelly said, laughing. “Suddenly, everyone wanted a martini.”

In other news, word came from Los Angeles this evening that actor Stacy Keach, whose work as RN in the touring production of Peter Morgan’s play Frost/Nixon was interrupted when he suffered a mild stroke last week, has been released from the hospital. Still no word when or if he will return to the production, though the Ahmanson Theater, where he was performing before falling ill, is offering refunds to ticketholders uninterested in seeing understudy Bob Ari take on the part.

Bowling For Atonement

March 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Barack Obama, Entertainment, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Sports | 1 Comment 

The one truly embarrassing moment in President Obama’s sit-down with Jay Leno on The Tonight Show came when Jay asked the Chief Executive if he had followed through on his promise, often articulated on the campaign trail, to replace the bowling lane installed at President Nixon’s request in 1969 with a basketball court. (The comedian was apparently unaware that Obama had announced back in December, after a chorus of dissent from the nation’s bowlers, that he’d decided to keep the lane.)

Obama replied that he’d been practicing his bowling but was still scoring so low that his game was “like the Special Olympics or something.” This lapse in taste quickly resulted in the President apologizing to Tim Shriver, the head of the Special Olympics. And, yesterday, at least one Special Olympian offered to take Obama on at the White House lane, and though the President has counterproposed a basketball game, it appears a sure thing that bowling will be staying in the Executive Mansion.

Last December, the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher half-whimsically suggested that RN’s lane be changed to accomodate duckpin bowling, the century-old variation on the game which originated in either Baltimore or Lowell, Massachusetts, and which is played mainly in areas fifty or sixty miles east or west of I-95 in Maryland and here and there in New England, as well as some parts of southern Quebec. Duckpin uses a much smaller ball than regular bowling, cupped in the hand rather than held, and it could be that the President would find it easier to excel in this sport than in standard bowling.

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