My Curated Cinema series of Movies to Remember When Mainstream Journalists Weren’t Afraid to Hold the Powerful to Account By remains in the 1970s — after 1976’s near-contemporaneous All the President’s Men and 2017’s The Post, set in 1971 — with 2008’s Frost/Nixon.
It’s Watergate again here, because that loomed over political journalism at the time, even into the latter part of the decade. The year is 1977, Richard Nixon (Frank Langella) is now retired in California, and British journalist and talk-show host David Frost (Michael Sheen) is pursuing the ex-president for a series of in-depth interviews, an attempt to give Nixon the trial before the American public that he never had and richly deserved.
As with Ron Howard’s earlier docudrama Apollo 13, the director mines massive suspense out of forgone historical reality — Frost does land the interviews, of course, and does get Nixon to make some astonishing admissions on camera. And ironies abound: The fact that it was not someone like Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley but Frost who nailed Nixon hints that political journalism was already veering more toward the entertainment end of the spectrum… and yet it’s absolutely inconceivable today that American television would air six hours across four nights of sit-down with even someone as infamous as Nixon. On the other hand, Frost was stonewalled by every TV network he approached with the project and ended up basically inventing the concept of self-syndicated television in order to produce the interviews and get them aired, using money out of his own pocket.
Media paradigms were shifting, and Frost was in the vanguard of the new reality, arguably helped shaped it. At least he did crush Nixon. We could use his like again.
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