Frank Langella 1, Bonehead 0

The "Frost/Nixon" actor coolly disses a guy with a video camera and not enough to do. Especially deft: He graciously stops and thanks a legitimate well-wisher without ending up engaging the bonehead. Well played!

Michael's Preferred Nixon

The Philadelphia Daily News also noted the way Michael Douglas (or Oscar's scriptwriter) snubbed Sir Anthony:

Having previous winners laud nominees in specific categories got good reviews.

We found the approach touching in the actress categories. It didn't work quite as well for the men.

Especially when Michael Douglas repeatedly praised Frank Langella's Oscar-nominated performance as Richard Nixon in "Frost/Nixon" as having rendered all others obsolete. Anthony Hopkins, who played Nixon in Oliver Stone's 1995 bio-pic, was standing practically right next to him onstage.

Anthony Who?

Peter T. Chattaway:

It's funny to hear Michael Douglas say that Frank Langella makes all other interpretations of Richard Nixon fall away ... when Anthony Hopkins, the star of Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995), is standing right there on the stage with him.

Getting Richard Right

Ann Hornady gets it wrong in the Washington Post:

In "Frost/Nixon," Frank Langella didn't really look or sound like Richard Nixon. If he had, his performance as the disgraced former president would have had little more artistic heft than an old Rich Little bit on "The Tonight Show." Instead, he developed an outsize, almost Shakespearean physical and vocal persona, giving Nixon a brooding, bearlike physicality and a growling baritone completely at odds with Nixon's actual cadences. The reason it succeeds is that it's a full characterization, grounded in Langella's own preparation for the role and defined by every single choice he makes, from where he focuses his eyes to the way he walks across a room.

Perhaps Hornady knew President Nixon and had the opportunity to watch him interact with family members, friends, and aides. I doubt it, because if she had, I believe she would have been unnerved by how effectively, and recognizably, Langella (shown studying RN's own Frost interview notes in my old Nixon Foundation office) portrayed him. My guess is that Hornady only knows the public Nixon, from his speeches and press conferences.

Those who experienced the public and private man, as I and many others did, couldn't help but discern the difference between the two which I've always attributed to his introverted temperament. The public Nixon was studied and sometimes unsure, the private Nixon avuncular, attentive, inquisitive, dryly funny, lightly self-deprecating, almost exactly like Langella's performance. As Langella himself has made clear, he recognized something of his own nature and personal history in the President, hence the synergy. Mr. Nixon's voice deepened in his seventies, so Langella even gets the baritone growl right. As for the actor's greater size, it helped him communicate the gravitas Nixon projected from five-foot-ten. When he entered a room, people noticed, because of who he was, and because he had wielded great power.

"You Made My Grandpa A Human Being"

Elizabeth Snead at the LA Times talks to "Frost/Nixon"'s Frank Langella:

“I would hope that Richard Nixon would, but doubt that he might, say that he saw something of his inner soul or that I tried to portray him with understanding for his demons and compassion.”

He added that the Nixon and Cox grandchildren saw the film. “They didn’t know him well except what history has said, that he was an evil man. But one of his granddaughters told me, 'You made my grandpa a human being.' ”

Another Historic First

Dave Karger at EW.com:

With Frank Langella's nod for Frost/Nixon, Richard Nixon is the first president more than one man has been Oscar-nominated for playing. (Anthony Hopkins scored a nod for Nixon in 1996.)

Hey, Kathy: When Did Ron Meet Richard?

Peter Morgan (left), Ron Howard, and Kathy O'Connor

Apparently, you don't have watch "The View." Someone prepares a State Department-like memcon. From today's show:

Ron Howard appeared on the show. He received an Oscar nomination for best director for Frost/Nixon. He said that it is a real thrill and it never gets old. Ron said that it is a surprising and unusual story based on the behind-the-scenes drama of the interview. Barbara loved the play and the movie. She mentioned again that she did an interview with Nixon three years later that was unpaid and asked Ron if he was going to do her film. He said that he will see how this film does first.

Ron met Nixon once briefly and doesn’t think he would have seen the movie, noting that Tony Blair never saw The Queen. He said that Frank Langella did a wonderful job capturing Richard Nixon and has gotten a lot of positive feedback. He saw both actors in the play and wanted to make a movie version with them in it, but knew it would be a tough sell with the movie studio. Ron was sent audition tapes by Academy Award winning actors who wanted to be considered.

I'll have to ask my wife and Nixon colleague Kathy O'Connor when and where the P. and Howard met. When I was the former President's aide in the 1980s in New York, I got a call from Brian Grazer, Howard's production partner, who said that the director was interested in Nixon and wanted to do something that was more friendly than we might expect from Hollywood. Nothing came of it at the time, although by my lights "Frost/Nixon" fills the bill admirably.

At least I was able to fulfill my journalist mother's wish that the suggestion somehow be lodged at Hollywood's loftiest level that Tom Hanks one day be cast as Richard Nixon. I pitched it to Howard himself in the Nixon Foundation men's room when he and "Frost/Nixon" playwright Peter Morgan visited the Library in December 2006 as they were preparing to do the movie. The idea lived for at least 15 minutes, since a colleague overheard Howard ask Morgan in the elevator, "So what do you think about Tom for Nixon?" But Frank Langella (now nominated for best actor) already owned the part.

Franked Male

Charles McGrath, going deeper with "Frost/Nixon" actor Frank Langella that most reporters, reveals the key role played by a fellow Frank at The New Nixon as he prepared to portray 37:

To prepare for the role Mr. Langella visited the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., spent hours watching tape at the Paley Center for Media, the broadcasting museum in Manhattan and interviewed Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Frank Gannon — anyone he could think of who actually knew Nixon.

Read about Langella's visit to the Nixon Library here.

"RN Seemed Very Human To Me"

A moving observation by Maarja Krusten, historian and former Nixon tapes archivist at the National Archives:

As to why it took ["Frost/Nixon"'s Frank Langella] acting largely on intuition to present a Nixon to whom people could relate, rather than having a writer capture that in a book of popular history, I'm not the best person to explain why that was. I voted for RN and sent him a letter of support to his home in San Clemente when he resigned in 1974. Two years later, I joined the Archives as a NARA employee. I spent some time working with his White House documents. But mostly, my career at NARA centered on the tapes. I spent ten years working solely with his tapes, listening to thousands of hours of his conversations. Some I found sad and even wrenching to listen to. I felt a great deal of sympathy for him, even though he bore some responsibility for some of what happened. Obviously, RN long has seemed very human to me.

"Frost/Nixon" Defrosts The Historical Nixon

The most riveting scene in "Frost/Nixon" is completely fabricated, as playwright and screenwriter Peter Morgan has candidly admitted. A tipsy former President (Frank Langella) calls David Frost (Michael Sheen) and describes them as a pair of overachievers out to show the world that they were good enough. He says that by "our success" in their televised interviews, they'll prove their critics wrong.

Frost gulps and agrees with RN's analysis. You get the feeling that he'd never voiced his own fears and motivations or even admitted them to himself. Imagine that: A fun-loving child of the 1960s bowing to the superior introspection of the most introverted and outwardly stoic of Depression-bred public figures. He then warns Nixon, "Only one of us can win."

About that, the fictional Frost is wrong. Thanks to the original Frost-Nixon interviews, the British TV personality won the fame and riches he craved. Thanks in part to Ron Howard's "Frost/Nixon," the historical Nixon is beginning to win the measure of redemption he never dared hope for in life.

As my New Nixon colleague Frank Gannon has noted, Langella's gripping Nixon, like the statesman's milieu he occupied and the world he changed for the better, is large and consequential. He dominates almost every scene in which he appears. (One exception is his awkward, imaginary appearance before something called the Orthodontists Society of Houston, the kind of speaker's circuit event that he never did.) When Nixon passes through a room in the movie, the factotums and crew members part like the Red Sea. It's obvious why alarmed Nixon critic Elizabeth Drew called Howard "dishonorable." His Nixon shatters the confines of marginalization, one-dimensionality, and caricature thrust upon the historical Nixon as the result of Vietnam-era passions. It's the first film Nixon worthy of the real thing, the first that will help younger audiences begin to understand him and his tumultuous era.

Not surprisingly, the film doesn't convey much Watergate understanding. Its main conflict, between TV lightweight and political heavyweight, depends on fudges. Morgan and Howard misconstrued RN's famous "if the President does it, that's means it's not illegal" as being about Watergate rather than a plan to increase surveillance of domestic militants during wartime. As for Watergate itself, the movie Frost accuses Nixon of having claimed he didn't know about the break-in until June 23, which is obviously untrue. He read about it in the paper on June 18, along with the rest of the world.

All in all, "Frost/Nixon" is conventional in its failure to communicate that Watergate and Vietnam were inextricable. Whether Mr. Nixon ever intended a criminal cover-up of the June 17 burglary is doubtful. The preponderance of the White House tapes from 1972 show that he believed that anyone involved in the burglary itself (as opposed to previous national security matters) should own up. Russ Baker's intriguing if highly speculative new book, Family of Secrets, asserts that President Nixon correctly assumed from the beginning that the botched burglary was a CIA setup, but that's a blog for another day.

At the film's climax, Langella's Nixon owns up by saying he let the American people down, a moment that occurs after adjutant Jack Brennan (portrayed by the less-entertaining-than-the-real-McBrennan Kevin Bacon) panics and interrupts the final taping. Afterward, James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell), the most anti-Nixon of Frost's team members, exults at seeing the former President's face "ravaged by self-loathing and defeat."

It's a deceptive denouement, since it was actually Frost who interrupted the taping after misunderstanding a sign the real Brennan was holding up that said "let him talk." Mr. Nixon had chosen to make a statement of accountability. Neither Frost nor Reston maneuvered him into it.

Besides, self-loathing wasn't in Mr. Nixon's nature. By his death in 1994, he was at peace with what he had achieved in the nearly 20 years since his resignation, both personally and publicly. What mattered most, besides his family, was having the ears of his successors, and at that he succeeded, advising each one from Ford to Clinton and even playing a decisive role in U.S. relations with Russia and China.

Contrary to most conventional wisdom, he never expected broader rehabilitation during his lifetime. He said it would take at least 30 years before he began to get a fair shake. Yet again, he called it about right.

"Frost/Nixon" Praised By Close Nixon Colleague

Over at The New Nixon, the discerning and thoughtful Frank Gannon -- who sat at Richard Nixon's bedside taking notes when the former President thought he was dying in 1974 and, a few years later, helped him write his memoirs -- gives "Frost/Nixon" TNN's highest (and indeed first) movie rating of "five Checkers":

Frank Langella gives a serious and stirring account of RN. He wisely eschews imitation, much less impersonation. Aside from some of the obviously applied physical characteristics, and the adoption of a recognizably husky vocal timbre, Mr. Langella’s Nixon is convincing not because it is derivative, but because it is complete. In fact, quite unlike RN whose locution was formal and whose diction was precise, this Nixon speaks casually and colloquially and often even drops his “gs.” Mr. Langella uses his brain (and undoubtedly his heart) to embody the balanced elements of confidence, formality, toughness, shyness, insecurity, and vulnerability, and then renders them into a character that must move and compel even the people who knew RN, and have that high standard of comparison. Of course, that’s what acting at this exalted level is all about.

And Ron Howard, much of whose work has been open and optimistic and straightforward, has turned out to be the ideal director for this complex, essentially cerebral, and decidedly dark two finger exercise. He is above all a story teller, and he keeps his eye on Frost/Nixon’s clear, compelling, and chronological story line. And while he knows how to keep the story moving forward, he also shows a willingness —and the confidence— to slow things down and take the time it takes to let the story also sink in. This is brilliant directing — authoritative and unobtrusive.

A Humanized Nixon? Bah, Humbug!

If you can't count on your home town newspaper, whom can you count on? But for its Christmas Day review of "Frost/Nixon," the Orange County Register used copy purchased via a news service from the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Colin Covert, who was appalled at director Ron Howard's worthy attempt to be fair to the 37th President:

[Actor Frank Langella gives] Nixon sympathetic, humanizing dimensions the man never possessed in real life....Ron Howard is too nice a guy to comprehend the cruelty that coexisted with Nixon's formidable intellect, so he becomes a co-conspirator in romantic revisionism.

Cheney Ends Up As The New Nixon, Anyway

The VP was evidently so grateful to Chris Wallace of Fox News for defending the Bush Administration against comparisons to Richard Nixon that he agreed to give Wallace an “exit interview” — ironic, since Mr. Cheney’s interview with Wallace has itself drawn a comparison by Matt Corley to RN’s famous assertion to David Frost about the President’s latitude during a national security crisis.

As TNN’s Robert Nedelkoff has noted, when Frank Langella, portraying RN, says that when the President does something, “it’s not illegal,” the script makes it appear as though he’s talking about the Watergate break-in and cover-up. In real life, Frost and the former President had been talking about the Huston Plan for wartime intelligence-gathering about domestic radicals. The plan was approved and later rescinded by the President.

It’s hard to defend illegal activity by the government under any circumstances. But it would be interesting to know how much latitude the American people would give it in the event of an imminent threat. At his appearance at the Nixon Library on Friday, Bill O’Reilly said that arguments against extreme measures would lose much if not all of their salience if the U.S. is hit again as on Sept. 11.

That doesn’t justify such actions, either. But journalists should not assume that Americans are of one mind on the subject. That’s why, at the start of the new administration, debate and dialogue would be better than the legal scapegoating of Bush Administration officials which is so intensely craved by the President’s and VP’s political opponents.

As for “Frost/Nixon” director Ron Howard and playwright-scriptwriter Peter Morgan, it would be interesting to know why they chose to misconstrue RN’s quote. Without knowing their motives, its likely that most theatergoers are more appalled by the “not illegal” formulation when it’s applied to political shenanigans as opposed to wartime national security policies.

Special, For My Four Followers Only!

Actor Frank Langella, portraying Richard Nixon, flanked by two of RN's real-life post-Presidential chiefs of staff: Kathy O'Connor and her husband, your host. Photo by my cousin, and the production's still photographer, Ralph Nelson, in the Nixon Library's White House East Room, September 2007

Nixon Critic Calls Ron Howard "Dishonorable"

Elizabeth Drew, so appalled by Richard Nixon that she couldn't bring herself to give a speech about him in Yorba Linda (our federal colleagues arranged for her to appear at the LA public library instead), calls Ron Howard's "Frost/Nixon" "dishonorable." Drew says Nixon was not funny, not likeable, not redeemable, and not worthy of the prodigious talents of Frank Langella (we're beginning to detect a theme that could silence Oscar buzz). She is still waxing sarcastic about the invasion of Cambodia. Hey, Ron: Welcome to our world!

Read my New Nixon colleague Robert Nedelkoff's thoughts here.

Bad Buzz

Christopher Orr says Frank Langella's just too good for Richard Nixon:

Though ["Frost/Nixon"] chronicles the moment when (in theory) the 37th president of the United States was cut down to size, the movie's presentation of him is utterly larger than life.

How Do You Talk About RN? Carefully

As the "Frost/Nixon" promos come fast and furious, one's inner Columbo issueth forth.

On the CBS morning show, director Ron Howard said:

There is no part of Frank Langella's personality [that] has anything to do with Richard Nixon whatsoever. He is not only making us believe and understand and relate to somebody we think we kind of know, but it has nothing to do with his personality.

Whereas the actor has repeatedly stressed a sense of commonality with his subject.

This week, Howard said his 1972 vote for RN was a gesture of thanks for his enfranchisement:

That was my first opportunity to vote. He had been the president that sort of made it possible for people under 21 to vote and I went back and forth. And, ultimately, decided to vote for the incumbent...

Whereas last month, Howard (though sounding less sure about whom he voted for) said is was all about Vietnam:

I did turn 18 that year. Richard Dreyfuss, when we were doing “American Graffiti,” was pumping me to vote for McGovern. But I think I wound up going for Nixon. I thought he could get us out of the Vietnam War quickly. Ha.

That version, told to the New York Times, didn't quite wash, since the Paris Peace Accords were signed around the time the President was sworn in for his second term, which would seem to have been quickly enough for anyone.

In short, this most admirable of movie business figures gives the impression of being able to calibrate his comments about RN to suit the expectations of his audience. Perhaps he too is called to public service.

RN's Buried In Yorba Linda, FL In The Part

When actor Frank Langella visited Yorba Linda two years ago while preparing to portray RN on stage, he talked as much about his working-class, Garden State roots as his days of fashionable Nixon-hating on Long Island. As every interview he does comes over my e-transom (with journalists paraded through a suite at the Ritz Carlton in New York, just like with Julia Roberts at the Savoy in "Notting Hill"), it feels more and more as if whenever he's talking about Mr. Nixon, he's also talking about himself. And now this, from an interview by Stephen Schaefer:

“When you talk to really successful people they were the runts of the litter, the middle kid or the funniest one. I was one of those kids, a four-eyed kid who was very shy and backward. I had to fight. Whenever I wanted to go out with a girl she wanted to go out with the football captain, not a skinny kid who wanted to be an actor. The characters I often play are fighting.”

Frank Langella vs. Frank Nixon

Actor Frank Langella buys into a psycho-biographical portrait of Richard Nixon as an abused child for which there is no evidence:

Langella said some of his most important research was visiting Nixon's birthplace at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif., and sitting for an hour in the closet-sized room the boy once shared with three brothers. He says a part of Nixon probably never left that space...."

What you walk around with are the first two to five years of your life," he says. "What Nixon had was a horrible kind of existence and a lack of belief in himself, with a father who whacked him on the back of the head all the time and told him he wasn't as good-looking as his brother, wouldn't get girls and would never amount to anything."

Wouldn't get girls? May we have a footnote on that? Great actor, but not much of an historian.

From Henry XIII To Henry K

In a profile, the Newark Star-Ledger's Stephen Whitty gets Frank Langella to compare playing RN in "Frost/Nixon" to playing Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons:

"Thomas More was a man fighting for his life," the actor says, sitting in a Manhattan hotel room just a few hours before curtain time. "And, to a certain degree, Richard Nixon was a man fighting for his life, for respect. What's important in each case is to bring across a sense of what motivated them to persevere."