It feels as much like a celebration as a wake: There's a scene toward the end of "Frost/Nixon," as Richard Nixon's landmark interviews with talk show host David Frost draw to a close, when the disgraced president sits down at the piano.
As performed by Frank Langella and directed by Ron Howard, Nixon is both hopeful and doomed -- he knows his televised clash with Frost isn't yet over, that "victory isn't necessarily at hand," as Howard puts it. It's a dramatic encapsulation of everything that unfolds in Peter Morgan's hit stage play, from which the movie is adapted.
But the scene never happens in the play.
Howard invented it for his film, even getting permission from the Nixon estate so that Langella could play a song the 37th president wrote himself.
Directors adapting theater for the big screen inevitably "open up" their stories, adding more characters, locations and cinematic sequences. Howard did all of those things in bringing "Frost/Nixon" to the screen, but he also searched for something else: new moments, almost theatrical little scenes, that might make the movie more personal.
At its heart, "Frost/Nixon" is a gladiator story, two solitary men thrown into the very public ring of television, each trying to vanquish his rival. "They really are lone wolves, and it's ultimately all about them," Howard says. "They are pretty comfortable carrying the world on their shoulders."
But the story's combatants are as much focused on victory as what that success will bring: deliverance. Both want to use the 1977 broadcasts to restore their image. Nixon is a commander in chief chased from the White House, Frost a once-credible interviewer turned into entertainment hack.
So as Howard and Morgan worked to turn the play into a screenplay, the director focused on small, telling scenes that illuminated not only how much Frost and Nixon had at stake, but the lengths to which they prepared for possible redemption.
Morgan's 2006 play (which, like the movie, starred Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost) referenced the talk show host's struggles to find backers for his interviews, but it did not focus on the mechanics. Howard did. He chose to show Frost's meeting with executives from Weed Eater in search of underwriting and his beseeching of (and rejection by) network executives for distribution.
"The engine had to be what Frost had at stake -- the audacity of the enterprise," Howard says.
