And Then You Destroy Yourself: Nixon at the Movies

Depending upon how many people have actually seen Secret Honor, I'm pretty sure it would win handily; Altman's much more revered, it's the more conceptually audacious film (if you believe Stone's more or less redoing JFK), it's got a better backstory, etc. I'm a bigger Altman fan myself. But I just watched Secret Honor for maybe the first time since its initial release, and I think it's somewhat overrated; Nixon I've seen five or six times now, and some obvious flaws notwithstanding, I think it's even more underrated.

Secret Honor IS overrated, and Hopkins has a couple of effective moments, but the best onscreen Nixon is still Glenda Jackson in Nasty Habits.

search: reese witherspoon in 'election'

Have only seen both when they came out, preferred Stone.

http://www.profilebrand.com/funny-pictures/category/people/736_nixons-head.gif

anybody read "nixon at the movies"?

interview with author about his viewing habits
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4254289

yeah I read it. not quite as interesting/provocative as the title suggests but worth a look for nixon obsessives and fans of pauline kael style movie criticism.

FWIW I'd recommend the recent "frost & nixon" over those bio-pics

http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=richard-nixon-1968

I love Kael, find Nixon endlessly fascinating, yet I gave up on Nixon at the Movies after 75 pages or so...I just found the guy went round and round and never really went anywhere; that was a few years ago, so maybe I should try again.

Try it again; I quite enjoyed it, esp. the Elvis chapter.

FWIW I'd recommend the recent "frost & nixon" [sic] over those bio-pics

This film was a fraudulent piece of sentimental shit.

There's a play called Nixon's Nixon, two characters, Nixon and Kissinger, on the night before Nixon resigns, and, when it's done well, it's hilarious.

http://leisureblogs.chicagotribune.com/the_theater_loop/images/2008/09/02/nixon.jpg

^saw the orig off-Broadway production, good indeed.

huge Altman fan and Nixon obsessive that I am, its weird that I've never gotten around to watching Secret Honor. Stone's movie is a hoot, but kinda minor

no "Dick" no credibility

I don't know how I forgot to mention Nixon/Frost in the original post...Unfair, probably, but I decided I didn't want to see it. Not a Ron Howard fan, and I've got the original interviews on tape; I knew there was no way in the world they could ever duplicate the amazing long zoom into Nixon as he more or less (more less than more) apologizes at the end of the first interview. I didn't really care for Dick; much prefer Election.

Both of these movies are cartoony chores

I can't even enjoy Nixon on a goofy JFK-level, aside from the Bob Hoskins cameo and some ridiculously blunt visual metaphors, maybe

ah come on, Woods as Haldemann is hilarious. The scene where the doorknob comes off the door in the oval office and they can't find their way out = classssick

maybe if they'd hadn't cast an actor with less charisma than the actual president

I mean when you finally see the guy grinning during the credits (with Stone rushing through narration over them - lol), you're like "wow, what a pleasant dude" after 3 hours of Hopkins huffing and puffing

nixon is prob one of the hardest roles to play in the world, so hats off to anyone who actually attempts it.

Rip Torn & Jason Robards (both TV) to thread

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYWQJKgbo_w

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1630

I will watch the shit out of this

Good link, J.D. Nixon's writings, by and large terrible and otiose with the strain of lying, certainly don't show an "engaged" mind though.

Surprise, surprise, I liked Our Nixon. It basically follows the standard timeline, from inauguration through to the resignation of Haldeman and Enrlichman, but it moves along casually, and it never feels like events are being ticked off a checklist. Nixon doesn't fulminate much--there are phone calls with Haldeman where he sounds bemused by events, and even one, after a Vietnam television address, where he sounds stoical. (And another, right after Haldeman's resignation, where he's almost certainly been drinking.) The one time he really gets going, on All in the Family and Greek philosophers, is something. There's a bit with the Ray Conniff Singers that moves from a funny introduction by Nixon--no lie--to a fairly stunning moment that I don't recall ever reading about. The highlight for me was a brilliant choice for the opening-credit music. It's not just a great song (not period music), it lays out the entire film in a way that makes perfect sense.

I would like to stoically amend "stoical" to "stoic."

interesting piece on that ray conniff singer protest - http://comcast.rayconniff.info/media/nixon.html

That's it--the piece even includes Nixon's joke. I'm positive I'd never come across this in any of the Nixon books I've read, including Ambrose's.

i know i came across it somewhere cuz as soon as you mentioned it i remembered the banner and that somehow they still did a tune w/ her. also remember thinking 'jesus, even the ray conniff singers did a protest???'. strange that there's so so many moments like that (mad men had paul newman's mccarthy endorsement last week) during that era and for the bush era the only comparable things i can think of are kanye and stephen colbert. maybe michael moore at the oscars i guess.

pretty sure the Ray Conniff thing was in Nixonland?

Maybe it passed my attention in print--seeing the actual clip is amazing. (Surprised Stone didn't seize on it for his movie.) I really wanted to see Nixon's reaction, but you only see what goes on up on stage. And the girl just keeps on singing like nothing happened.

Our Nixon is on CNN tomorrow night at 9:00.

For those of you that have seen it, how much knowledge about Nixon and Watergate does it assume on the part of the viewer? Considering showing it to an undergrad class, but am wondering how much context they would need.

"It" meaning Our Nixon? I don't think it requires a whole lot of background knowledge, but it's home movies plus narration (and some present-day interview footage), so it's not the first place I'd go to learn about Watergate.

Thanks - it's a found footage filmmaking class, so I wouldn't be using the film to explain Watergate.

It'd be good for that--then you can move onto Nixon & Found Audio.

Court-Ordered Audio

Another trailer...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odTZDplswDg

oh i saw this, it's interesting. more for the tapes, which i've never gotten into listening to, than the footage, really, which it uses pretty strangely. if the time hasn't past i think it would make for a pretty interesting source text for a class, because of the diversity of what's used (inc a lot of video, tv footage, &c), & the purposes it puts it all to, which were pretty often almost ambient, imo, like illustrative rather than a focus.

yes, it would be great for a found-footage class.

(saw it yesterday in a theatre)

moves from a funny introduction by Nixon--no lie--to a fairly stunning moment that I don't recall ever reading about

sampled by The KLF in America No More!

(and some present-day interview footage)

the interviews are from 1979, 1982 and 2004 iirc - continuing the bricolage nature of the film.

I'm a couple of hours into Washington Behind Closed Doors. Not what I thought, which that it would be exclusively about Watergate. It starts in '67 or '68, even before "Dick Monckton" wins the presidency. It's fun matching character to person--most are obvious, some less so (probably some composites in there). Jason Robards (wisely) makes no attempt to sound like Nixon, instead giving glimpses here and there; he snarls some vintage Nixon to end the first episode, which I won't quote here (telling you something about what was still acceptable on network TV in 1977). Has a lot of CIA-connected stuff that I didn't realize was such public knowledge so close to Nixon's presidency...It's based on one of Erlichman's books (not a whitewash; he was clearly in revenge mode), so maybe this had a hand in getting that out, or maybe the big Senate hearing on the CIA had already happened--not sure of the timeline. Cliff Robertson fairly wooden, Andy Griffith a decent (though not really remotely similar) LBJ, Stefanie Powers quite gorgeous.

yes, the Church Senate hearings happened around '75 -- I watched WBCD when it aired in '77.

I rewatched Dick this morning. The best line is still "They'll never lie to us again."

should've faded out w/ "You're So Vain" instead of Oval Office rollerdisco tho.

I played a kind of Nixon movie for my class today: a short clip from the first Nixon-Kennedy debate (Friday was the anniversary).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QazmVHAO0os

It's perfect for media studies. Play the part from 1:25-1:45, and--whatever your feelings about each guy--everything of legend is right there. Kennedy looks straight at the camera, appears confident and the picture of health (anything but, of course); shifty-eyed Nixon couldn't look more guilty. (His famous five-o'clock shadow isn't quite as bad as reputed, though--or maybe the clip is forgiving.) It's a great clip for talking about how one set of people, the radio audience, could have thought Nixon won the debate, while TV viewers reached the opposite conclusion. Everything people hate about politics in 20 seconds. Unless you believe that television is a godsend here, revealing the real Nixon in a way that radio can't.

Harry Shearer playing Dick on a YouTube series. He knows his Nixon.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/21/harry-shearer-on-being-nixon-the-simpsons-movie-sequel-and-why-obama-should-return-his-nobel.html

haha this was made just for me wasn't it

sorry, just way too "cute" for a feature film, even w/ Shannon.

http://variety.com/2014/film/news/michael-shannon-kevin-spacey-elvis-and-nixon-1201349061/

this sounds... unnecessary

this was already a movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0122474/

Elvis Presley: Well, gee, Mr. President, I kinda wish I had a tape of this meetin', so I could play it for muh wife and muh little daughter.
Richard M. Nixon: Tape-record meetings.
(suddenly intrigued)
Richard M. Nixon: Hmm...

Spacey as Nixon sure to be insufferable.

BAM here is showing the 33-minute Cockettes film Tricia's Wedding on Thursday! "The high jinks start when Eartha Kitt adds LSD to the punch bowl."

http://www.bam.org/film/2016/the-queen-and-tricias-wedding

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069407/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm

Sylvester (that one) plays Coretta Scott King.

excellent poster and tagline! anyone seen this?

http://www.tivoliwimborne.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/elvis-and-nixon-poster.jpg

I missed the names at the top of the poster and read this to mean that Alex Pettier and Johnny Knoxville were playing Elvis and Nixon, which actually might have been interesting.

*Pettyfer

pic.twitter.com/yH1FsrCecm

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) November 28, 2018

Amazing. I can't top that, but I like this picture a local rep theatre is using to promote the Roger Ailes documentary they're screening next week. That's kind of almost Nixon at the movies.

http://heardjustwhatiseen.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/ailes.jpg?w=450

I wonder if Dick got to see it and then asked Julie why she loved a movie where he is referred to as "the Asshole"

Wouldn't be surprised if Nixon just heard about the film and is making up the Julie part of that letter. She was fiercely protective of her father--it's a real stretch to believe she liked the film (not sure I even believe she saw it).

I don't know who the Clinton-like guy on the left is in that Ailes picture.

Didn't much care for the Roger Ailes documentary. Not surprisingly, more of a Trump movie than a Nixon movie. It lost me right from the start: one of the very first interviewees is Glenn Beck, who is treated throughout (they go back to him a number of times) as serious and legitimate. Besides being a total fraud and a clown, I can't think of many people who were more disgusting during Obama's two terms.

Nixon on the television...The CNN series starts tonight.

http://www.newsobserver.com/latest-news/qeucqa/picture227961029/alternates/LANDSCAPE_1140/trickydickCNN.jpg

There's so much out there already, you never know if it's going to be little more than a rehash, but the promos they've been running the past month have been really good.

oooh. would watch.

One of my favorite books AND movies ever is All the President's Men (I love them about equally) so I was over the moon to find this documentary on YouTube and found it just amazing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xo7KWzOgnf8

Also, if you were born after the fact and wanted to know how the "Saturday Night Massacre" played out on the news, this valuable upload from the Obscure Video channel is a must-watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBkUtvYlEH4

I may have seen the first, can't remember, but definitely not the second--thanks.

Good start (although they kind of wrote Whittaker Chambers out of the story--you see him, but he's only referred to as a "former Communist"). To paraphrase Hannibal Lecter, loved the blue suit.

there's a three-part BBC documentary on watergate that you can find on youtube that's really excellent.

even though i've read and watched lots of stuff about nixon (did a report on him in eighth grade and have been fascinated ever since), the exact details of the watergate scandal are so convoluted that i still somehow find myself being surprised by a lot of the story every time i see/read something about it.

It took a while, but I think I have a pretty good handle on Watergate by now; the various Trump scandals I find more impenetrable, but that's maybe a function of the world today, with the details scattered over a million internet pages, instead of one central narrative like All the President's Men. Maybe the Muller Report will end up serving the same function. Probably not.

I may have seen the first, can't remember, but definitely not the second--thanks.

You're welcome; the channel, which is actually named OBSOLETE Video (I keep getting that wrong even though I'm subscribed to it) is fantastic for watching Watergate-era news broadcasts recorded using early home TV recording technology. It's fascinating seeing news broadcasts dated from 1972 that seem very innocent and almost naïve compared to the news broadcasts from 1974. BTW, we don't see a narrative to current events because we're too busy living through them, but with the distance of time we'll be able to "have a pretty good handle on" what's going on right now with the corrupt orange bastard.

The Pentagon Papers has always been the Aleph to Watergate.

if the BBC documentary aired in the '90s and has interviews with most of the living players (including a flanneled Haldeman), then I've seen it and it's excellent.

Some elaboration on my blue-suit aside, the most interesting new thing I learned watching part 1. Everyone knows the standard story about the first Nixon-Kennedy debate: Nixon won post-debate polls among radio listeners but lost with TV viewers because he came across as shifty-eyed, had a bad case of five-o-clock shadow, and was sick with the flu besides. But Nixon (in voice-over) also suggested that his gray suit looked really terrible against the neutral backdrop, whereas Kennedy's dark suit stood out. Except his suit was gray only if you were watching in black-and-white; he had a rather youthful-looking powder-blue suit on, which actually looked kind of sporty next to Kennedy's dark-blue suit. The accompanying visual supported what seemed like a pretty astute reading, I thought.

(Yes, they also talked about the world during that debate.)

Keep in mind that in 1960 almost everyone was watching in black-and-white and didn’t see the youthful powder-blue suit; color TV had only been around for 6 years at that point

I think that's what he meant--that because virtually no one was watching in colour, that possible advantage evaporated. I've never seen any mention of the suit anywhere, and I've read a ton on Nixon, so that was really interesting to me. Having said that, there's the small possibility it would have taken more than a good-looking suit to make Nixon more photogenic than Kennedy...

I realized that right after I posted it (from a phone)

Also: Anyone who had a color TV in '60 was probably already leaning Nixon.

i watched the actual debate on youtube for the first time a couple years ago. in the context of 2016, i have to say that nixon's "bad" performance didn't register nearly as sharply as it once did. i feel like i've read countless descriptions of these debates that made them sound like the beginning of the reality-tv age, with an inexperienced candidate beating an experienced one due to his good looks and charm -- but if anything the debate seemed almost absurdly serious and issue-based compared to what we get these days. at one point i think they spend like 10 minutes talking about farm subsidies, or something like that. tbh, if i hadn't known who nixon was or the kind of president he would become, my response to the debate would probably have been to envy the voters of 1960 who got to choose between these two remarkably qualified and intelligent candidates.

The CNN thing made the valid point that Nixon had to be mindful of his reputation--Hiss, Helen Gahagan Douglas--and downplay the already entrenched perception that he was ruthless. So his supporters thought he wasn't aggressive enough and came across as almost deferential to Kennedy (which he actually was anyway).

(xpost) True--but I bet Nixon would tell you that Kennedy's "Harvard boys" owned all the colour TVs. (Sure sign I've seen Oliver Stone's film too many times: I hear "Harvard boys" in Anthony Hopkins' voice.)

Part 2 tonight. Or at least I hope it doesn't get cancelled for an extra hour of nocollusionnocollusion talk.

Which is exactly what they've done--not happy at all.

ha, I interrupted Animal Crackers to turn on CNN for the first time since December.

The CNN series finished tonight. When Nixon resigned, his approval was 29%, the Supreme Court had just ruled against him 8-0, and his party was starting to line up against him. I've read a thousand variations on this story, but the distance from there to here is still astounding.

Was it good? I've been skeptical of CNN series after their decades ones. I did watch this 2018 Watergate documentary over the weekend, and found it fairly gripping. They had actors re-enacting the transcripts, which was a bit cheesy at first but often worked for me — it drove the point home a bit more to see "Nixon" ranting about "liberal Jews" or hush money as part of regular conversation rather than a tinny recording or words on paper. Wish it had touched a bit more on the public reaction to the transcripts, though; Perlstein's Invisible Bridge has a great bit on all the moral conservatives clutching their pearls on discovering Nixon's vulgarity. (IIRC, Nixon once scolded Truman for un-presidential language by using "damn" in a public statement.)

I actually enjoy those decade shows...The Nixon series was 97% contemporaneous audio and video, which was great. I'd seen a lot of it already, but there was stuff I'd never seen or heard. Definitely caught Nixon at his worst: besides the racial epithets, you hear him saying that the opening of China was exactly the sort of thing that "the grey middle America" ate up because they were suckers. Definite allusions to Trump throughout, especially the ending.

Watched black dynamite on mubi, pretty good

When the first explanatory title of Charles Ferguson's Watergate - Or, How We Learned to Stop an Out-of-Control President had to do with re-enactments and 100% true, my heart sank--was I really sitting down to four-plus hours of re-enactments? (I read as little as possible ahead of seeing a film, and I'd read nothing on this one.) Happily, no. They appear somewhat regularly in Part 1, almost not at all in Part 2; in total, there's maybe 20 minutes' worth. They're all inside the Oval Office, most prefaced by a real audio clip from the tapes. They're kind of awful, and I'm not sure why they're there.

The rest is quite good, especially all the footage from the hearings, where you usually just get Dean, Butterfield, and maybe Mitchell; there's much more here. (Why doesn't someone release the entire hearings on DVD? I know TV networks were pretty bad at archiving stuff then, but the footage must exist somewhere.) Two biggest revelations: one, Elizabeth Holtzman, the AOC of her day every which way; two, how badly compromised Howard Baker's "What does the President know..." question was. It wasn't heroic--he was a mole for the administration, and the question was meant to get Dean to perjure himself. In all that I've read and seen on Watergate, I don't think I ever knew that.

By the way--today is the anniversary of the break-in.

Surprise, surprise, I liked Our Nixon. It basically follows the standard timeline, from inauguration through to the resignation of Haldeman and Enrlichman, but it moves along casually, and it never feels like events are being ticked off a checklist. Nixon doesn't fulminate much--there are phone calls with Haldeman where he sounds bemused by events, and even one, after a Vietnam television address, where he sounds stoical. (And another, right after Haldeman's resignation, where he's almost certainly been drinking.) The one time he really gets going, on All in the Family and Greek philosophers, is something. There's a bit with the Ray Conniff Singers that moves from a funny introduction by Nixon--no lie--to a fairly stunning moment that I don't recall ever reading about. The highlight for me was a brilliant choice for the opening-credit music. It's not just a great song (not period music), it lays out the entire film in a way that makes perfect sense.

― clemenza, Monday, May 6, 2013 9:26 AM (six years ago)

Our Nixon has been made free on Vimeo for pandemic quarantine.

So, Bob "Super Dave" Einstein once directed a Nixon/Agnew as Laurel/Hardy comedy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COdGc8Mm-gc

Hate looking at those ugly tags in the poll results...Epic new Tom Carson piece in the Voice (!) on Nixon, including a section on Nixon movies (in the J. Hoberman sense, I think--haven't read the piece yet).

https://www.villagevoice.com/the-way-we-were-a-childs-garden-of-watergate/

I remember Carson--whose Leave Home essay was my favourite in Stranded--did the Voice obit for Nixon in '94, starting with a line about how he was relieved, after two or three exhausting decades, to be free from thinking about Nixon anymore.

I can imagine a similar relief when Trump carks it

also followed by still thinking & writing about him in 30 years’ time