They eyed each other like boxers at a weigh-in. Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) peeked through the curtains of the Western White House to size up his interviewer. David Frost (Michael Sheen) walked up to Nixon, cautiously appraising the former president before they battled in their landmark televised interviews.
Ron Howard may already have made a big fisticuffs film -- 2005's "Cinderella Man" -- but the boxing metaphors abound in Dec. 5's "Frost/Nixon," the director's adaptation of Peter Morgan's celebrated play about the 1977 conversations between the British talk show host and the exiled president.
In Howard and Morgan's telling, Nixon and Frost both have their corner men: advisors to prepare them for and coach them through the contentious interviews. Nixon says it will be a "no-holds-barred" fight and describes the showdown as a "duel." Frost agrees. "Only one of us can win," he says. The only thing missing is a ring announcer.
"There's a connection between these two. They don't hate each other. But they have to beat each other," Howard said during a break in "Frost/Nixon's" filming in September 2007, when the production enjoyed unprecedented access to Nixon's former coastal beachfront hideaway, also known as Casa Pacifica, in San Clemente. "And that's what gives it its dramatic shape."
When "Frost/Nixon" opened on the London stage in September 2006, it was lauded by critics and revered by theater patrons. Loosely adapted from Frost's memoir "Frost/Nixon: Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews," screenwriter Morgan's ("The Queen") play split its time between the actual interviews -- in which Nixon infamously declared himself above the law -- and the personal and professional wagers staked in staging them.
Both men were looking for redemption. Frost, a former satirist who had once been an esteemed journalist, saw his career floundering; where he formerly chatted up prime ministers, Frost was reduced to low-rent reality programs including "David Frost Presents the International Guinness Book of World Records."
Frost was losing his American and Australian television shows and had to come up with the money ($2 million) for the Nixon interviews and had to find his own advertisers and syndicate the talks to television stations.
Nixon, of course, had lost far more. After his post-Watergate resignation in 1974, he fled the White House by helicopter, settling in San Clemente seclusion. President Ford had pardoned him, leaving Nixon to begin the hard work of rehabilitating his ruined image.
