Frost/Nixon
It seems to me that I’m a Peter Morgan fan. I liked The Last King of Scotland, I liked The Queen, and I enjoyed Frost/Nixon a great deal. But per Kevin Drum and Becks it’s important for people to understand that this film is terrible history. Not just in the sense that, like many historical films, it gets some facts wrong. The whole premise is wrong. Read Elizabeth Drew for a lengthy explanation, but to make a long story short the movie leaves out the fact that Nixon and Frost had a deal whereby Nixon was entitled to 20 percent of the proceeds from the interviews. They were business partners, not antagonists, and Nixon knew he had to “make news” with some kind of dramatic Watergate statement.
Meanwhile, I should say that I’m not normally a strickler for accuracy in these sorts of things. I thought it was a good movie — well-acted, and given a good, if false, story. But in my role as a political blogger I think it’s important that people learn the facts.
41 Responses to “Frost/Nixon”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
January 4th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Frank Langella looks far more like Brezhnev than he looks like Nixon.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:30 am
I agree with your take on the movie. But, if you’re interested on getting more of an idea of what actually happened, James Reston wrote a memoir about the interview that came out a year or so ago. I picked it up and read it after seeing the play, definitely worth checking out. The play was also partially based on the memoir, so it gives some idea of where the fiction of the story comes from.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Some of Drew’s criticisms seem a bit unfair as well. She mentions that the deal for the interviews “also guaranteed that only one-fourth of the time would be devoted to Watergate, leaving Nixon the rest to ramble on about his foreign policy achievements – which in his mind included the invasion of Cambodia.” Drew talks about this as if the movie didn’t acknowledge those facts, but it did–at length.
Drew also talks about how Nixon’s end of the deal also included a percentage of the profits from sales to TV stations, not just a flat fee, with the implication that the movie undersold (or even “covered up”?) Nixon’s motivation for making the interviews “interesting enough to make a nice profit.” The logic in that argument, I suppose, is that Nixon had an interest in providing some interview fireworks *even if they made him look bad*, but hadn’t he already had plenty of opportunities to cash in on his infamy already by that point? Not to defend Nixon’s integrity or anything, but I don’t see how Drew’s argument undercuts the particular point of the film she’s discussing–that Nixon really was trying to use the Frost interviews to rehabilitate his own reputation, and not necessarily just participating in a choreographed kabuki for cash.
The stuff about the drunken phone call and the subsequent “revelation” that Frost and Reston “discovered” did seem unlikely to me, as well as a bit dubious dramatically, so I’m sure there’s room for criticism there.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Meanwhile, I should say that I’m not normally a strickler for accuracy in these sorts of things.
I’m not either, except when it is presented as the truth (or more accurately, TEH TRVTH). Take Saving Private Ryan, for instance; they pimped that sucker as the most accurate D-Day movie ever made, and in the sense of setting they did pretty good, but it had all kinds of details wrong, not to mention the main story was fictional anyways.
Since Becks brought it up, I’ve been trying to think of a movie that gets it anywhere near right, and the only thing I can think of that could possibly come close, would be a movie about Hitler in his bunker. Any such movie (not neccessarily Downfall, since Alec Guinness was in The Last Ten Days) has the advantage of not involving seious historical disputes, a short time scale, and dramatic events that don’t involve much actually happening on screen. It’s the closest history comes to a stage play (See! Hitler doing Hamlet as played by Richard III!), so when filmmakers film it, it’s pretty easy to get reasonably close to the actual story.
You’d think the Nixon/Frost stuff would be similar, but then, they’re making a movie about… making a TV show, which actually just isn’t all that goddamn interesting. So I imagine they had to spice it up.
max
['The winners redact the history books.']
January 4th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Re Matthew’s comment “But in my role as a political blogger I think it’s important that people learn the facts.”
————
Why go against the well-established tradition of the blogosphere?
January 4th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Don, are you talking about the rightosphere? They love to discard facts to promote their agenda.
January 4th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
“It seems to me that I’m a Peter Morgan fan. I liked The Last King of Scotland, I liked The Queen”
The Deal is Morgan’s best work, and should be the favorite of his screenplays for any lefty political junkie.
Not to mention that it provides the entire setup to the best gag in The Queen…
January 4th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
I’ve been trying to think of a movie that gets it anywhere near right, and the only thing I can think of that could possibly come close,
Well, here you have to tackle the problem of “serious cinema” being regarded as something that lets the art take center stage, and it is considered within the filmmaking community to be a bad idea to sacrifice art for the sake of historical accuracy. Plus, lots of directors love to tell a “good man seduced by evil” story, so any number of historical events put to film end up being forced into this mold.
January 4th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
The bigger issue with the film is that the drama surrounding an interview with a former president is inherently uninteresting.
January 4th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
The Last King of Scotland was an excellent movie. I have no interest in seeing Frost/Nixon though.
January 4th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
It seems to me that you need to re-read Strunk & White.
January 4th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Maybe the premise of Frost/Nixon is inaccurate, but the complaint has a premise of its own, which is that the role of cinematic drama is to portray historical stories factually.
Where is the evidence for this idea? Hollywood has never been good at historical factuality, except of course in its surfaces, but rarely does it even try. Which is probably a good thing! Usually when it does try (as in Little Big Man, or The Mission) it goes overboard in the direction of authenticity and despair. Is that really what we want?
What Hollywood does well, on occasion, is use the tools of drama to think through larger issues — for instance, what is the meaning of the South? Was it possibly a bit hysterical and cruel and self-defeating, as well as courageous? (In Gone with the Wind.) Or, what is the meaning of the Dust Bowl? (In The Grapes of Wrath.) Or, what was the meaning of Wall Street?
To make Frost and Nixon partners in the movie would all but kill the potential drama, and to what end? The underlying dramatic question is, as usual, fairly simple: Will a disgraced former President be able to find redemption after the White House? To force a shallow British upstart to carry this historical burden makes for a great conflict; the fact that it’s only four-fifths true is of no consequence.
January 4th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
I’ve just generally concluded that film-makers and producers have long assumed that historical accuracy is just too difficult and undesired, as it gets in the way of an artistic and crowd-drawing creation, but they don’t feel the same degree of responsibility to clarify that they are fictionalizing.
I mean, as long as you get the clothing and music and cars etc., right, that’s pretty much history as far as film is concerned, no?
January 4th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I am amazed that a contributors to the NYRB would lack such basic media competency and write such a silly hit-piece. If Frost/Nixon was some sort of revisionist propaganda piece, her approach might have some value, but it certainly isn’t.
January 4th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
In a conflict between Art and History, History should take a hike. Shakespeare’s “Richard III”. Stone’s “JFK”. Both are fantastic, and get the History wrong. Probably purposefully. Who cares? What’s the point of History? Apparently it’s so historians can get jobs.
January 4th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
What I don’t understand is why there’s a conflict. It seems to me to be excuse making by a lot of people too lazy or too uncreative to make actual reality interesting.
You know, there are plenty of times I’d like to see a movie bring some bit of history to light, with the film-makers really trying to bring to life some unavailable occasion or period, but, no, I’ve got to have someone telling me it’s not worth doing and it’s not “art”; meanwhile, we can have a thousand films of ‘creative’ history or alternative history or whatever.
It’s a bit harder to compare with the written word, say, Shakespeare’s Richard III, because it’s pretty clear that it’s a fictional play, and there are, in fact, plenty of books about the actual matter.
What if historians made the same argument? “Gosh, it’s just so hard to make the actual reality interesting enough, I’m just going to take some liberties here and there to jazz it up?” Or journalists?
January 4th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
What if historians made the same argument? “Gosh, it’s just so hard to make the actual reality interesting enough, I’m just going to take some liberties here and there to jazz it up?”
No offense, but the notion that historians simply record events in an objective manner is a bit shallow and rather imprecise really. In selecting certain events while ignoring others, in focusing on one angle but not another and in putting all of the events and aspects they deem interesting in a causal order – in doing all that, historians are creating their own narratives that might be more objective than those of writers and filmmakers, but they are narratives nonetheless.
January 4th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
No offense, but the notion that historians simply record events in an objective manner is a bit shallow and rather imprecise really. In selecting certain events while ignoring others, in focusing on one angle but not another and in putting all of the events and aspects they deem interesting in a causal order – in doing all that, historians are creating their own narratives that might be more objective than those of writers and filmmakers, but they are narratives nonetheless.
I suspect that El Cid knows that and is pointing out that all this is possible without feeling as though there is some kind of obligation to fictionalize that duBois seems to think that there is in the service of “art.” Judging by many historical films and made-for-tv movies, it would seem that art requires a love interest, a token white american (regardless of setting or subject matter), and, if animated, a talking animal friend.
January 4th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
I don’t have that notion, but neither do I support the notion that the nonexistence of some mechanistic objectivity means that someone claiming to make a film based on actual historical events should not within reason actually do so.
And my criticism is not for historians or against film producers / film-makers as it is against the lazy but apparently common assumption that it’s simply impossible to make interesting films based on the best and most accurate history possible, even if some degree of fictionalization or improvisation or looseness is, as usual, required.
January 4th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Also, I prefer the chatty ghosts to the talking animal companions.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
I don’t have that notion, but neither do I support the notion that the nonexistence of some mechanistic objectivity means that someone claiming to make a film based on actual historical events should not within reason actually do so.
But that is what Morgan/Howard have done – the film is based on actual historical events that have been dramatized/fictionalized to some extent for effect.
If you want to make a feature film with a wide appeal you need to do this, because such creations work according to certain rules that have been in use since the beginning of literature. If you don’t want to do this, you can film a reenactment based solely on the historical records or do a documentary with lots of talking heads and archive footage – and that’s fine, but then you are not producing a feature film anymore, you have moved to another form.
If you want to make a feature, however, you need protagonists the viewer can relate to in one way or another, you need a dramatic structure with all the trimmings and since history rarely follows the rule of poetics you’ll very likely have to take some liberties.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
My point is that History seems to me to be a pretty useless endeavor whereas Art (when it’s good) gives us pleasure. The gag about “being doomed to repeat it” is useless: there’s enough past to offer a cornucopia of evidence for whatever action one wants. The range of utility of History is tiny. Mark Twain once said (paraphrase alert) that once a cat is burned by sitting on a hot stove, it won’t sit on a hot stove again, but it won’t sit on a cold one either. Basically, we learn how to eat, walk, and talk and then we start improvising. History just doesn’t seem to matter.
January 4th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
The Last King of Scotland is also terrible history given that the main character, Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, is entirely fabricated.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
My point is that History seems to me to be a pretty useless endeavor
duBois, maybe if you had any success in anything in life you’d be able to appreciate others who were successful in their own instead of trying to boost the prestige of your worthless efforts by denigrating those of others. Failed artists have the least regard for other fields. Successful artists generally have the most.
In any case, books have handled the case of stories based on historical events that play fast and loose with what actually happened– it’s called “historical fiction,” and it’s a very popular genre of literature. Film never seems to have caught on to the idea that this is separate from works of historical narrative… and many times historical fiction is generally expected to have the historical events that occurred happen in the right order. With film, it seems that historical narrative and historical fiction are considered one in the same.
The Last King of Scotland falls under the category of historical fiction, while The Queen and Valkyrie are recountings of historical events that appear on film. I’m not sure the filmmaking community really differentiates between these two categories. I appreciate your point, novakant, but the number of liberties that are generally taken in film (and, invariably, in film alone) go much further than would be expected from most of us who aren’t filmmakers.
January 4th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
duBois, seriously, you just need to stop. Like, a while ago.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
It’s a bit harder to compare with the written word, say, Shakespeare’s Richard III, because it’s pretty clear that it’s a fictional play, and there are, in fact, plenty of books about the actual matter.
Firstly, in what way is it pretty clear that Richard III is a fictional play? It is based fairly closely on Holinshed and Hall, who were, more or less, historians. There are obviously some liberties taken of the usual sort, and Shakespeare’s sources are certainly not themselves unbiased in their presentation of the subject, but I don’t see how it falls too far afield from the kind of works being complained about.
And there are plenty of history books about all kinds of subjects – I don’t see how that distinguishes it either.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:43 pm
Having said that, I’ll say that DuBois is a moron. In the first place, demonstrating that Santayana’s famous, but rather stupid, dictum is rather stupid hardly shows up history as a useless discipline. I study history, and I don’t think anybody in the profession takes the “doomed to repeat it” nonsense seriously.
Beyond that, the idea that history is worthless is so alien to me that I don’t even know how to address it. How can we understand the world if we don’t understand how things came to be as they are? How do we understand “Art” if we don’t understand the social context that created it?
Tyro – I take your point about how film elides the difference between historical fiction and historical narrative in a way that books do not. At the same time, though, I’d say that even relatively faithful films, like the two you cite, take liberties with history that a writer of historical narrative never would. In The Queen there’s whole parts that are invented – the stag, for instance; private conversations among members of the royal family; and so forth. In Valkyrie, there are conflations and the like. If either was written as a book, it would clearly count as a work of historical fiction.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:40 am
Just to be clear, the movie DID touch on the 20% fee Nixon took, on multiple occasions. If I remember correctly, his Chief of Staff (played by Kevin Bacon) at one point screams at the Frost character, ‘You better not screw us on the 20% Frost!’
So the premise of this person’s essay is incorrect.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
duBois, isn’t your premise, then, that all human knowledge is worthless? I suppose there’s no use arguing with you if you start from there.
January 5th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
I thought the movie was more fair to the facts than Drew’s complaint about the movie’s unfairness.
Yes, some liberties were taken. It’s called dramatic license. That’s the way it works.
Go elsewhere if you want history.
March 2nd, 2009 at 5:11 am
levitraIf you have to do it, you might as well do it right
March 11th, 2009 at 4:41 am
It is the coolest site,keep so!
March 17th, 2009 at 2:27 am
Great site. Good info
tramadol
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:15 am
tramadol
I want to say – thank you for this!
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:20 am
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
buy cheap viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 6:09 am
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right viagra