Anatomy of a face-off

As Morgan's play held, both men saw in the other a way to get back into the ring. While dismissed by some in the American media as a celebrity hack stooping to checkbook journalism, Frost did get the forever-dissembling Nixon to make a startling admission. Specifically, Nixon said to Frost on doing something illicit, "When the president does it . . . that means that it is not illegal."

In a way, the debates -- and, by extension, the play -- were Nixon's trial.

Hollywood, not surprisingly, took notice of the London theatrical phenomenon, and Howard immediately traveled across the Atlantic to see what the fuss was about. As soon as he left London's Donmar Warehouse theater, Howard called producing partner Brian Grazer to say he wanted to make "Frost/Nixon" his next movie.

Before long, he was in San Clemente with his cameras.

Inspiration via location

Filmmakers are forever fabricating historical reality through money-saving cheats: building the Afghan refugee camps for "Charlie Wilson's War" not far from Los Angeles, shooting "There Will Be Blood's" California oil fields in Texas.

Howard saw things differently when he began "Frost/Nixon."

When the "Beautiful Mind" director had a chance to film at the Western White House, Howard was determined to get there, even if it meant overhauling his production budget to afford it.

The current owners of Nixon's former beachfront estate say no movie had ever filmed there. "We had to jump through many, many hoops to get in here," says "Frost/Nixon" production designer Michael Corenblith. Once Howard's team entered the gated compound, though, the verisimilitude seemed worth the trouble.

When Sheen's Frost and Langella's Nixon greeted each other during filming last year, they walked across the same Mexican tiles the real men trod upon more than 30 years earlier. And when Langella steered Sheen into Nixon's former study, it was the identical room in which the president negotiated with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev during the Cold War.

The attention to detail didn't stop in San Clemente. "Frost/Nixon" also filmed in the Monarch Bay home where the more than 20 hours of conversation between the TV interviewer and the president were actually conducted.

"That was where I first got the frisson of being in the same place," says Sheen, who along with Langella created the "Frost/Nixon" roles on a London stage, later reprising them in New York. "Playing Frost had been a part of my life for a year and a half, and I had never seen" the place where the interviews were held, he says.