John Waters And His Nixon Connection

February 5, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Energy, Entertainment, Environmental issues, Movies, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Library events, Pat Nixon, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

This week the Australian newspapers the Melbourne Age features an interview with director, writer and raconteur John Waters, who will be traveling to Down Under in March to present his one-man show in several of that nation’s cities. In the article, Waters mentions that he was interested to see one of his childhood favorites, Patty McCormack of The Bad Seed fame, playing Patricia Nixon in Ron Howard’s film Frost/Nixon, which leads to the surprising fact that:

Waters has a Nixon connection himself. His uncle, John C. Whitaker, was undersecretary of the interior during the Nixon years. It got a bit awkward, Waters says, “during the ’60s when I was at riots and things outside the White House but now we get along great”. Whitaker, he adds, “was never part of anything like Watergate and his son, when he was 15, worked as a craft services kid on Hairspray and went on to become a big producer with Imagine Films, producing things like Eminem’s film 8 Mile.”

As previously mentioned at TNN, Mr. Whitaker, who appeared at the Nixon Library last month, was a major figure, during the early 1970s, in the shaping of the most far-ranging and farsighted environmental policies of any Presidency since Theodore Roosevelt’s, and in the initiatives in energy policy that have become especially relevant in recent years.

It’s also worth noting that his son Jim Whitaker, who Waters mentions, was a producer of another Ron Howard film, Cinderella Man. And it was Waters’s grandmother Stella Whitaker who gave him, for his sixteenth birthday, the camera which he used to shoot his earliest films. Over forty years later, he’s at work on his next feature, Fruitcake, although, as he points out to the Age’s reporter, it’s now rather difficult for even the creator of Hairspray to get backing for any feature with a budget above $1 million and below $100 million.

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.

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.

The Most Unpopular Man at RAND

September 25, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Movies, U.S. History, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

Daniel Ellsberg, the man who, with the aid of a photocopier and some willing journalists (plus former Sen. Mike Gravel), unloaded the Pentagon Papers into the public eye, is now the subject of a feature documentary which opened in Los Angeles this week, with the somewhat unwieldy title The Most Dangerous Man In America: Daniel Ellsberg And The Pentagon Papers. (And, from reading the New York Times, you would have thought that “most dangerous man” had been retired by Glenn Beck.) The Associated Press site has an article about this event.

It reveals that, nearly forty years after Ellsberg walked out of the offices of the RAND Corporation (or “Rand,” as the article spells it) with the last of several suitcases stuffed with the Papers, he still dreams constantly of walking through the hallways of decades ago, still a respected expert at that eminent think-tank. When he wakes up, however, the reality is just a teeny bit different:

The movie had its West Coast premiere only a few blocks from Rand. Ellsberg, ever the agitator, sent college students with flyers to headquarters to urge his former colleagues to attend the screening and try to understand why he did what he did.

None came. Ellsberg acknowledges that some wounds never heal. At a Rand reunion several years back, no one would shake his hand. When he tried to visit Rand, a nonprofit think tank providing analysis of public issues for government agencies, he was escorted out by security guards.

It’s hard to know if this film will be received with the chorus of hosannas that it undoubtedly would have received from liberal reviewers and bloggers if a Republican were now in the Oval Office. Since President Obama entered the White House Ellsberg has been slightly less prone in interviews to suggest that what the country needs is someone in the corridors of power to follow his example and unveil classified documents concerning the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts, but he hasn’t quite stopped urging such action, perhaps to the dismay of more than a few Democrats.

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.)

Rules For Witnesses

August 7, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Cold War, Congress, Domestic issues, Economic issues, Faith, Healthcare, History, Movies, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Public Opinion, Religion, U.S. History | 15 Comments 

There is a scene early on in the movie Patton, where the feisty general watches the forces under his command do battle with those led by the legendary German Panzer leader, Erwin Rommel. To prepare for this particular skirmish, “Old Blood and Guts” studied the writings of his adversary, prompting the memorable line uttered in a gravely voice by actor George C. Scott: “Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”

Later, the general found out that Rommel himself had not actually been present for the confrontation, but he is comforted by an aid: “If you defeat Rommel’s plan, then you defeat Rommel.”

It is a fascinating thing when an adversary ironically uses a methodology that was previously owned by an opponent – especially when he does so with surprising effectiveness. When a football team known for its excellent running game throws the bomb on the first play from scrimmage, when a home run hitter bunts, and when a political adversary takes a page from the book of the other guy, well – you gotta love it.

Under any credible definition of the phrase “dazed and confused” there now appears the look on Nancy Pelosi’s face. Yes, that one. That, “we are the good guys, why are people giving us a hard time, they must be Nazis, or just nuts” look. Surely you’ve seen it. I have had a persistent “where-have-I-seen-that-look-before?” feeling when seeing the speaker’s visage on the screen, but it took me a while to make the connection.

The date is December 21, 1989 – the place Bucharest, Romania. Nicolae Ceauşescu, the man who had ruled his country with an iron first for a couple of decades, was on his balcony trying to address an increasingly unruly crowd. It was a moment of truth for the dictator. The look on his face – one of complete incomprehension – was one of the Kodak moments capturing the scene at the end of the Cold War.

That look might be described by my grandkids as: “clueless.” Others might simply say that it is a facial expression that begs the question, “what the?” But it is a look that is botoxed in place for Ms. Pelosi. And that same expression has recently been found on the faces of many members of the House and Senate as they have gone home to meet with constituents.

Sadly, the time has come in America where recess is no longer any fun.

What Nancy Pelosi is seeing is her side being on the receiving end of some of the kind of methodological medicine the left has been forcing down the country’s throat for quite a long time. I recently got around to reading Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals. Yes, I know I should have done so long ago, but I thought I had a good enough grasp on what the man said back in 1971 via the thorough treatment his musings have received from the conservative punditry.

I was wrong. My bad. Every American should read it. It’s chilling.

I believe what we are now witnessing is a case of people being, as the saying goes (and as is actually used in Alinsky’s book) “hoisted with their own petard.” Fire is being fought with fire. The reflexive dismissal of angry citizens showing up at town hall meetings these days to give Washington insiders a piece of their mind as somehow orchestrated, notwithstanding.

This is not a top-down campaign with a few sinister puppeteers pulling the strings. The opposition to liberal health care machinations and other stuff is very real. What they see as orchestration is actually mobilization. And it is only the beginning. We are, I think, on the verge of seeing one of the great collapses of political popularity and good will in American history. The nation is on the verge of a Network moment, where “Yes, we can” is being drowned out with cries of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

George Washington died because of misguided notions about how getting the bad blood out via leeches would cure his ailment. It was a case of a cure that killed. Sure, his cold was gone, but so was he. In a sense, the draconian measures some would use to remake our nation’s fabric, from health care, to national security, to the economy itself, are somewhat akin to bleeding the nation en route to restoration. All this will do is make us weaker. Or dead.

I shared a sermon last Sunday at my church based on a haunting passage from the writings of the prophet Jeremiah called, A Dying Nation At A Crossroads. The prophet was a patriot, but he knew that sometimes patriotism involves even more than waving a flag – a stand must be taken. His message was:

“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.” Jeremiah 6:16 (New International Version)

Jeremiah was speaking to a nation at a pivotal moment – a time that called for clear thinking and action. They had been on a slippery slope for a long time and the clock was running out. Nothing short of a return to what made them strong – even great – in the first place would correct the problem.

The week Winston Churchill traveled to diminutive Fulton, Missouri to deliver his most famous speech – the one that talked about a sinister iron curtain born of Soviet expansionism – Time Magazine published a review of two recently publish books. One was a work by Frederick L. Schuman, the Woodrow Wilson professor of government at Williams College, called Soviet Politics. It was basically a defense of the Soviet system. The other was by Saul Alinsky, who had written Reveille For Radicals, the spiritual ancestor of his 1971 work. The title of the review was: Problem Of The Century.

The reviewer suggested that, “the dominant problem of the 20th century is the reconciliation of economic liberty with political liberty.” He saw this issue resolved in Schuman’s book by simply “liquidating political liberty.” He saw Alinsky’s ideas in a little more favorable light, suggesting that it was written with a “burning honesty” and that the author had “glimpsed a vision which is greater than his ability to put it in practical terms.”

In other words, the review for Time saw something constructive in what Alinsky was saying in those days immediately following World War II and as the Cold War was just barely being noised about. But he indicated that only time would really tell.

In fact, that reviewer did not live long enough to see the fruit of Saul Alinsky’s attempt to put his vision into those “practical terms” in Rules For Radicals. He died 10 years before that. His name was Whitaker Chambers.

He never got to write a review of that book, but he did write one of his own and it became a classic called simply, Witness. It was his treatise as a man who had once been a communist, even an agent. Then he had seen the light and spent the rest of his days fighting, at a great personal price, his former faith. Along the way, he exposed a traitor or two, gaining him the wrath of the liberal elite in America, though he has long since been vindicated as a truth-teller by many infallible proofs.

He began his book with a letter to his children, letting them know the nature of the struggle and the craftiness of the enemy:

Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world.

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man’s destiny and reorganizing man’s life and the world.

The Communist vision has a mighty agitator and a mighty propagandist. They are the crisis. The agitator needs no soapbox. It speaks insistently to the human mind at the point where desperation lurks. The propagandist writes no Communist gibberish. It speaks insistently to the human mind at the point where man’s hope and man’s energy fuse to fierceness. The vision inspires. The crisis impels.

Too bad Mr. Chambers didn’t live to see the demise of such thinking. But then again…

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.

Ink-Stained Saviors

April 25, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Movies, News media | Leave a Comment 

Reporters and bloggers together will save democracy. Yeah, right.

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.)

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.

C/L? L/C? Will Bill Want Top Billing This Time?

March 24, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, History, Movies | Leave a Comment 

Frost/Nixon playwright Peter Morgan has turned his attention to another POTUS.  This summer he will be making his directorial debut with his own screenplay Special Relationship, telling the story of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

British playwright Peter Morgan has written a third script —in this case a screenplay— to complete his “Tony Blair trilogy” that began with the TV movie The Deal.  The second installment was the Oscar-winner  The Queen.  And now there is —drumroll please— Special Relationship, which tells the story of William Jefferson Clinton and Monica Samille Lewinsky.  

Apparently Mr. Morgan thought better of Clinton/Lewinsky or Lewinsky/Clinton as titles.

Casting is moving apace (Dennis Quaid as WJC and Julianne Moore as HRC) and filming begins this summer.

Julianne Moore has been cast as Hillary Clinton in new film “Special Relationship”.

The actress will star opposite Dennis Quaid — who will play Hillary’s husband, ex-U.S. President Bill Clinton — in the movie which will show how Bill’s ‘inappropriate relationship’ with White House intern Monica Lewinsky nearly ended his time in power.

A source said: “This is a big role for both of them. Playing Hillary, a wife who stands by her unfaithful husband, will be something she can get her teeth stuck into.”

Dennis reportedly beat four other leading actors – Russell Crowe, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin and Tim Robbins – to win the role of Bill.

The film will also feature Michael Sheen as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who will be seen growing frustrated with Bill as his attentions move from politics to his own personal crisis.

“Special Relationship” starts filming in the UK and US in July.

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.

Wherein Nixon, The Neocons’ Dove, Goes To War

March 11, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Culture, Movies, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

“Watchmen” author Alan Moore, though alarmed by Ronald Reagan’s hawkishness, made Richard Nixon the first-strike madman in his story, now a majorly long motion picture. I wonder why?

Everyone Knows RN Served Until 1989!

March 9, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Culture, Movies, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

One review after another of “Watchmen,” including this one in England’s prestigious Guardian, says that the movie’s fictional Richard Nixon was serving a third term as President. Evidently reviewers are being thrown off by the opening titles, which show RN reelected in 1976 after a constitutional amendment permits him to seek a third term. But by 1985, when the action of the story occurs, he’s on his fifth.

RN’s luck’s about to run out, though, because at the very end of the graphic novel (I’m not sure about the movie, which I haven’t seen yet), a newspaper headline says that “RR” is considering running in 1988. Presumably the reader is expected to think Ronald Reagan. If so, the authors are teasing us. As we learn on “Watchmen”’s very last page, the candidate’s actually another famous cowboy: Robert Redford.

“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.

Half An Alternative

March 5, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Cold War, Movies, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Richard Nixon and the movies these days — whoa! There’re now almost as many references to “Watchmen” as there were last month to “Frost/Nixon.” From Canada’s Globe and Mail:

Watchmen is set in an alternative 1985, in which the Cold War is still raging and Richard Nixon is still president.

Actually, the Cold War really was still raging in 1985.

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