Marvin Minoff, RIP

November 14, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Movies | Leave a Comment 

Ron Howard’s acclaimed film Frost/Nixon, based on Peter Morgan’s play which was a hit in London’s West End and on Broadway, depicts two men as the architects of the famous set of TV interviews with President Nixon: the future Sir David Frost and the future Baron John Birt, the host and producer, respectively, of the broadcasts which mesmerized the nation in 1978. However, the play, and movie, leave out the contributions of a third man: Marvin Minoff, a veteran agent and the president of Frost’s Paradine production company, who was co-executive producer of the interviews.

It’s hard to say why Minoff’s role remained undepicted in the play and movie; it may be that Morgan, and later Howard, thought that the late Irving “Swifty” Lazar was such a colorful representative of showbiz mores in Frost/Nixon that adding another agent, while truer to history, would diminish the effect. In any event, Howard does not mention Minoff’s absence in his DVD commentary to the film, though the director gets around to discussing many of its other departures from the historical record.

Minoff died this week in Los Angeles at age 78. After the Frost-Nixon interviews, he went on to marry Bonnie Franklin, One Day At A Time’s Ann Romano, who survives him. He also joined forces with Mike Farrell of M*A*S*H* fame to produce a series of TV movies and two features: the little-remembered Dominick and Eugene with Tom Hulce and Ray Liotta, and Patch Adams, which elevated Robin Williams’s tendency to bathos to such a staggering level that the star has ever since downplayed sentimental roles in favor of “edgy” and “dark” dramatic parts. But with the Frost-Nixon series, Minoff made his mark on American history as well as American entertainment.

Audition For “Frost/Nixon” In Memphis

November 6, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Frost/Nixon | Leave a Comment 

There’s good news for everyone who, after an evening spent watching Dan Aykroyd or David Frye in the 1970s, would turn to their friends and say, “OK, wanna see a real Nixon impression?” The Playhouse on the Square in Memphis is taking on Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon as its next production, and, to that end, is holding an audition on November 14 for all the roles.

So if you, gentle reader, are up for getting on a plane and heading to the land of Elvis, Big Star and B.B. King – or if you already live in Memphis – this is your chance. Or, if you prefer, you could try out for the roles of David Frost, Caroline Cushing, John Birt, Manolo Sanchez, Irving Lazar, Col Jack Brennan, James Reston, Jr (a part much more substantial in the play than in Ron Howard’s film), or even Evonne Goolagong. So order a copy of the play from Amazon, and make your showbiz dreams come true.

Peter Morgan’s Follow-Up To Frost/Nixon

October 10, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Frost/Nixon, Movies | 2 Comments 

About nine months ago Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, with its acclaimed screenplay by Peter Morgan that later received an Oscar nomination, opened in theaters nationwide. This weekend sees the coast-to-coast release of Morgan’s next project – The Damned United, a drama about Brian Clough, the soccer (or, as the Brits put it, football) coach who led Leeds United to some hard-won triumphs. Michael Sheen, who so skilfully brought depth and insight to his portrayal of David Frost in the previous film, plays Clough in this movie. Like him, the rest of the cast are British, and, apart from Colm Meaney, not especially well-known on these shores. The director is Tom Hooper, another Brit who made a considerable impact here with his John Adams miniseries for HBO.

The reviewers have given The Damned United thumbs-ups almost all around, especially for Sheen’s performance; this Associated Press review is representative. But, despite the exponential growth of soccer’s popularity in America since the 1970s, it’s one thing for high schoolers and college students to play it and see it, and another to get them to watch it on the big screen (outside a sports bar, that is). But in any event, it’s proven to be a better advertisement for the game than that long-ago, rather peculiar collaboration between Sly Stallone, John Huston and Pele, Victory.

Frost/Nixon Is Forever

September 12, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Movies | 2 Comments 

Now that Frost/Nixon is comfortably settled in the racks of your local Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, and the touring production with Stacy Keach has run its course, Peter Morgan’s play has started to be produced in repertory theater, with the Austin Playhouse’s production in Texas apparently the first out of the gate. In another year or two, TNN’s readers might be seeing Frost/Nixon at their local community college, with the leads undertaken by student actors who were toddlers in the days when RN was still living and David Frost was not yet a knight. And who knows? Perhaps for the Nixon centennial in 2013, there will be a revival on Broadway with Dan Aykroyd finally getting to play his old Saturday Night Live role in a serious way – as, reportedly, he wanted to do in Ron Howard’s film.

Meanwhile, Michael Sheen, who played Sir David in the film, continues to line up surprising roles; the most recent is the voice of the White Rabbit in Tim Burton’s upcoming movie of Alice In Wonderland. And after reports circulated that he might play Ernst Stavro Blofeld in what is provisionally titled Bond 23 (to be scripted by Peter Morgan), Sheen issued a statement that this would not be the case. (Note to Elizabeth Drew: Donald Pleasance, Telly Savalas, and Charles Gray have previously portrayed Blofeld, the arch-villain with the white cat. None of them ever played Nixon.)

More Coverage Of The Resignation’s 35th

August 9, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Frost/Nixon, John Dean At The Nixon Library, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Library, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, TV News, U.S. History, Watergate | 2 Comments 

Today marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation, and since I wrote about coverage of this last night, some more articles and op-eds of note have appeared. Apart from the memorable discussion of RN’s achievements on this morning’s Chris Matthews Show, discussed in Jonathan Movroydis’s post below, I have not seen or read about any mention of the anniversary on TV. 

Right now MSNBC, for example, is finishing yet another hour of programming about the Manson murders, since today is also the fortieth anniversary of the murder of Sharon Tate and four others, while other networks have already started running shows about Woodstock’s 40th.

(It may be that a lot of younger viewers nowadays wonder how the coverage of Charles Manson affected the coverage of Woodstock in August 1969. It didn’t, since no one, apart from the killers themselves and a few who had crossed their paths, had any idea at the time who had committed the murders. It was not until December 1 of that year that arrest warrants were issued in the Tate case, which brought Manson’s evil to light, and less than a week later the disastrous free festival at Altamont, immortalized in the documentary Gimme Shelter, continued the ominous note on which the decade finished.)

But the Nixon Administration did come up in today’s New York Times online roundtable about Woodstock’s 40th.  The participants include such notables as Nixonland author Rick Perlstein, novelist Ishmael Reed, social critic Morris Dickstein, and historian Joan Hoff, author of Nixon Reconsidered.  Perlstein makes no mention of RN in his contribution, but Ms. Hoff discusses at some length why she thinks that ”Woodstock had little or nothing to do with the radical-conservative change in politics” that began during the Nixon years; she thinks that the big political story of the period was the rise of neoconservatism and the role it played in the emergence of Ronald Reagan on the national scene.

At NPR’s website, Daniel Schorr, who will turn 93 at the end of this month, speaks of the resignation and how it changed American perceptions of the presidency. He concludes:

After 35 years, Nixon is enjoying a revival of interest because of Frost/Nixon, first a stage play, then a movie based on Nixon’s 1977 television interviews with David Frost, for which Nixon was paid $600,000 — triple his annual salary as president.

For that, Frost got the closest thing to an apology that Nixon ever uttered for having put America through the wringer.

“I let the American people down,” he said, “and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.”

He did let the people down. And we are still carrying the burden.

And at Truthdig.com, historian Stanley I. Kutler, author of The Wars Of Watergate, offers some thoughts about the resignation, in a gentler tone than has sometimes been the case when he’s written about the Nixon White House.

Speaking of Kutler naturally brings John W. Dean to mind, since both have frequently criticized what they claim are “revisionist” examinations of the events surrounding Watergate. For the last several months, since his appearance at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Dean has shown up from time to time in scenic Southern California locales such as Mission Viejo to promote his apparently self-published reissue of his book Blind Ambition, and last night he spoke to an audience at the Hotel Zoso in Palm Springs.

(Yes, Zoso as in the alternate title of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, the one with “Stairway To Heaven.”  For Watergate students familiar to that passage in Blind Ambition in which Dean describes H.R. Haldeman informing him that the President thought he was dressing like a “hippie” because his tie was wider than usual at the White House, this has to produce a chuckle.)

The Desert Sun, Palm Springs’s newspaper, has an account of this event. It’s worth mentioning that the caption to one of the photos that accompanies the Sun’s article refers to the current edition of Blind Ambition as being a “sequel” to the original 1976 edition of the book. The truth is that, apart from a new afterword of about 100 pages, it is the same book as that published over 30 years ago.  The real sequel to Blind Ambition was Dean’s 1982 book Lost Honor, which is mostly forgotten except for the chapter in which Dean argues at length that Gen. Alexander Haig was Deep Throat, a theory he later abandoned.

The Real F/N To Air On PBS

July 28, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Frost/Nixon | 2 Comments 

It appears Ron Howard’s film has sparked interest among PBS viewers:

If you admired Ron Howard’s "Frost/Nixon," you can see the real thing on PBS.

Public television will offer the 1977 interview between former President Richard Nixon and David Frost.

PBS stations will start presenting a two-hour retrospective next week. WMFE-Channel 24 will air it at 10 p.m. Friday, Aug. 7. Frost introduces the program and discusses his memories.

Aug. 9 will be the 35th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation as president. In the Frost interview, Nixon spoke most frankly about the Watergate scandal, which brought down his presidency.

Nixon said, “I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.”

Bob Zelnick And Vietnam

July 22, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Frost/Nixon, Nixon in the News, Vietnam | 3 Comments 

In an interview with Boston University’s Today, journalist and research assistant for David Frost (of Frost/Nixon fame), Robert Zelnick (played by Oliver Platt in Ron Howard’s film), says that he has come to agree with RN’s Vietnam policy:

As time went by and I studied more about Vietnam, I came a little bit closer to Nixon’s position. I do believe that he or some president might have made the peace agreement stick if there hadn’t been the War Powers Act that was passed by Congress or the bombing cut off or the great diminution in aid to our South Vietnamese ally that was passed by Congress. I think there was some merit in Nixon’s argument, though it came as a great surprise to me at the time.

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.

Cue “Victory At Sea”

May 12, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Cold War, Frost/Nixon, Movies, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

There’s been a lot of comment in the last 48 hours about former Vice President Dick Cheney’s appearance on Face The Nation, and it was probably a matter of time before he was dubbed “the new Nixon” by someone.

That someone turned out to be Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle, famed around the world as the former husband of Sharon Stone. A representative quote from his post yesterday on the Chronicle’s site:

This Cheney role comes just in time for those of us who were reminded by “Frost/Nixon” just how much we missed the original. As knotty as the man was himself, he could somehow make everything else seem clearer. Life without him appeared colorless, less darkly symphonic. While he was around, kicked after a defeat or voted in by a landslide, he provided psychological hand-holds in a post-1950s world where there was always mysterious and dangerous trouble lurking somewhere. He gave a face to your fears, whether you feared him or worried about the things he feared.

Later in the column, Bronstein speaks of the “philharmonic complexity” of the President’s character, which led me to refer to RN’s favorite late-night music in the title of my post. The comments to his post are also worth reading; a surprising number (since this is a Bay Area newspaper) are favorable toward RN, including one that gives him credit for ending the Cold War.

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).

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.)

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.

Natasha Richardson RIP And Stacy Keach Update

March 18, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Culture, Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, In Memoriam, Movies, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

A few minutes ago word reached the major news media outlets that actress Natasha Richardson had died at the age of 45, a few days after suffering head injuries in a skiing accident. Though her movie appearances were generally in out-of-the-way, little-seen films – The Parent Trap and Maid In Manhattan being the major exceptions – she enjoyed considerable success on the stages of the West End and Broadway, most notably as Sally Bowles in the 1998 revival of Cabaret, and won the sort of acclaim that proved her a worthy member of the Redgraves, the most respected acting clan in the English-speaking world. She will be missed.

The tragedy of Ms. Richardson’s last days has rather overshadowed the illness suffered by another prominent actor. Yesterday morning, Stacy Keach, less than a week into an 18-day stint playing the 37th president in the touring production of Frost/Nixon at LA’s Ahmanson Theatre, was hospitalized for undisclosed reasons. This evening it was announced that he has suffered a mild stroke which does not affect his movement or speech, and is making a steady recovery. It is not clear, however, whether Keach can return to the Ahmanson’s boards to complete his run or when or if he will rejoin the production for its remaining dates in Tempe, Arizona, San Antonio, Sacramento, and Dallas.

In the meantime, Keach’s understudy, Bob Ari, is taking over the role of RN. Ari has previous experience with the part; he was Frank Langella’s understudy in the original Broadway production of Frost/Nixon and, in the role of Bob Zelnick in the touring production, does a rather broad Nixon impression at one point in the play.

Having seen Keach portray RN at the Kennedy Center last year, I can assure TNN’s readers in the aforementioned four cities that I hope for his quick recovery, not least so that they have the chance to see his incisive and memorable portrayal in this role.

Ought To Have Done Vs. Ought Not To Have Done

March 17, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Frost/Nixon, Vietnam, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

Though he praises Frank Langella’s subtle, powerful portrayal, Carl Bernstein doesn’t like “Frost/Nixon” because it makes Richard Nixon look too good.

That, at least, was journalist and Nixon biographer Elizabeth Drew’s assessment, which Bernstein embraced during a restaurant chat with buddies. Drew actually called director Ron Howard “dishonorable.” Specifically, Bernstein wishes filmmakers had included RN’s denial of an illegal coverup of the Watergate burglary.

If that’s a sin (and we may discuss it if you wish), then it’s a sin of omission. Neither Bernstein nor anyone else (besides The New Nixon’s Robert Nedelkoff and us other true believers) acts offended about another transgression, namely the film’s contention that RN’s famous “it’s not illegal” comment was made about Watergate rather than a controversial plan for cracking down on dissenters during wartime. The demerits of the never-implemented Huston Plan notwithstanding, Howard and playwright-screenwriter Peter Morgan may have worried that, in the age of terrorism, some moviegoers would nod their heads at a President saying that extra steps to combat violent groups such as the Weather Underground were justified.

So what’s worse, Carl: Leaving something out, or rearranging the narrative to avoid burdening the audience with ambiguity?

“I’ve Really Come To Understand Him”

March 7, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Environmental issues, Frost/Nixon, Movies, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 1 Comment 

On March 12, the touring production of Peter Morgan’s play Frost/Nixon with Alan Cox and Stacy Keach in the title roles opens at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, and this weekend Keach talked about the experience of portraying RN with the Orange County Register’s Paul Hodgins. The acclaimed actor acknowledges that “I’ve always been biased against Nixon – ever since the ’70s and Watergate,” but points out that since signing on to the production, “I’ve really come to understand him a little better [...] I find myself having a lot more sympathy for him than when I first took this role.”

Keach also reveals that he has avoided seeing Ron Howard’s film of Frost/Nixon, and says of the play:

“It’s designed to work in the theater. It’s so much about how the media affects our lives and how image is such an important part of being on TV [...] When you see it in the theater you get the live image and the projected image simultaneously as if you’re at a concert or a sporting event. I think it makes the experience much more dynamic.”

And, having seen both play and film, I can confirm that the use of a giant TV screen onstage to display Keach’s close-ups, as he works his way through the drama’s cathartic confrontation over Watergate, has a power that is missing from the film, where the juxtaposition of TV monitors with Frank Langella sitting in the living-room set somewhat detracts from the effectiveness of his performance.

Keach also expresses a fondness for the wholly invented scene in which an inebriated RN phones David Frost at his hotel. This is rather understandable, since the scene, as much as it varies from what President Nixon would have said or done, gives Keach a chance to do a virtuoso turn on the boards.

A Look At The Magazines

March 3, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Culture, Entertainment, Frost/Nixon, Media, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

The new issue of The American Spectator has a column by Jonathan Aitken (former British cabinet minister and author of the one biography of President Nixon published in the post-presidential years that enjoyed RN’s full cooperation) discussing Frost/Nixon. It turns out that Aitken’s wife Elizabeth is an old friend of Frank Langella and that the actor, when preparing for Frost/Nixon’s initial incarnation as a play on London’s West End, conferred with the biographer in order to give his portrayal of the president additional accuracy and depth.  Aitken, whose high regard for Langella’s performance was previously noted in TNN, offers further very illuminating insights into it in  this column, which, at the moment, is only in the print version of TAS.

This week’s issue of The New Yorker is also of interest.  It includes a review by the late John Updike of Blake Bailey’s long-awaited biography of John Cheever, whose byline appeared alongside Updike’s for nearly three decades in the magazine’s pages.  It is as good as nearly any essay the author of the Rabbit tetralogy ever published; nothing in it gives the slightest indication that it would prove to be among his last writings.

The magazine also features an excerpt from the late David Foster Wallace’s last, unfinished novel, which is all about IRS agents in the Midwest – I kid you not, though somehow, coming from this writer, it makes sense.  Be warned: though the long essay about Wallace’s tragic but heroic career by D.T. Max that accompanies it says that Wallace was seeking a more straightforward approach in this book, the excerpt is, in some passages, nearly as complex as much of his masterwork Infinite Jest. But it’s still worth examining.

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