And Then You Destroy Yourself: Nixon at the Movies

ne takes the view that all the Plumbers shit is part of Watergate, which I think it is

hack Beltway columnists (i.e. George Will two days ago) still concern troll over what "motivated" Nixon's men to try the Watergate burglary without connecting Watergate to Ellsburg, the Huston plan, Operation GEMSTONE, and so on.

I just finished Nixon's Darkest Secrets, and the theory there is that Nixon was worried about how much Larry O'Brien knew about some of Nixon's dealings with Howard Hughes. Whatever the case, it's been pretty conclusively established that the break-in was the tip of a very long iceberg. Anyone who still wonders about motivation, or expresses a "But he had the election wrapped up..." puzzlement, hasn't looked into the matter very deeply (or, if Will's doing the same, is being very disingenuous).

Finished this tonight. It’s close to artless--there was one nice shot of Andy Griffith/LBJ and Cliff Robertson/Richard Helms outdoors as the camera drew back at a critical moment--and it lurches along from storyline to storyline, with occasionally pointless detours (the entire marital situation of Robertson). But then there’d be a really strong scene and it’d pick up for a while. Robards is as valid as any other Nixon I’ve seen. He emphasizes some things (Nixon’s persecution complex), minimizes or bypasses others (the social clumsiness), adds little flourishes the whole way through (his bizarre clowning around on Air Force One seemed especially Nixon-like). Robert Vaughn’s Haldeman is so robotically sycophantic and callous, he’s funny--his ongoing exasperation with Nicholas Pryor (most annoying character in the whole thing, not sure who exactly he was supposed to be) is great. Two people I knew from Save the Tiger: Thayer David as Hoover, also Lara Parker. Matches up well with All the President’s Men, ending at exactly the moment where the earlier film begins. Meg Foster’s eyes are weird beyond compare. She looks like a glassy-eyed Stepford wife.

Looking through my VHSs, I found a copy of The Final Days. I bought when Sam the Record Man shut down their rental store--the sticker's still on there.

Very good, very odd. It aired in '89--not sure what prompted them at that particular moment to make a TV movie of a Nixon book that had been out for over a decade. I knew virtually nobody in the cast: Richard Kiley as Nixon's lawyer, David Ogden Stiers as Haig, and that was it. Lane Smith plays Nixon. I don't know that I've ever seen him in anything.

Smith's Nixon is the least histrionic, least mannered, most normal Nixon I've ever seen. You won't like it if you can't accept that a version of Nixon like that. (Two or three times he goes full Nixon, most notably when joking about his lawyer's reluctance to take a drink.) The film is mostly the familiar scenes of getting briefed by advisers, huddling in his office, weighing options, etc., but he rarely loses his temper and doesn't start ranting and spinning off wild schemes. It's all very slow and methodical, different from everything else I've seen. The direction seemed unusually good for an '80s TV film.

Most bizarre scene is where Brezhnev accepts the gift of a car from Nixon, then promptly takes him on a Bullitt-like joyride around Camp David.

I saw it. That car scene is faithfully reproduced from the book.

Quite disappointed in Our Nixon. They played some good tapes (when RN realizes Ehrlichman might rat him out), but the rest was an unwieldy mix of the arbitrary and trivial. (schlump otm)

even better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbvq9KyOEc0

Worth it for Warren Burger musing aloud about the limits of pornography's redeeming social value: next thing you know those kids will have orgies and it'll be okay if they mention the Vietnam War!

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