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December 17, 2008, 4:29pm
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Specifically, in Milk, the narration comes from the tape he made prior to his death. Are all the words he spoke in the movie from that tape? Or, did the screenwriters take some license with it? Likewise, the dialog that is spoken in the tv segments in Frost/Nixon - were they verbatim from the broadcasts, or did those screenwriters also modify? xo, C.
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December 17, 2008, 9:23pm
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bump Wait - no one in this forum knows the answer? Do I have to go to GQ? wow
CC:
Specifically, in Milk, the narration comes from the tape he made prior to his death. Are all the words he spoke in the movie from that tape? Or, did the screenwriters take some license with it?
I didn’t see the movie, but here’s the tape:
And here’s an interview with the writer, whre he says the following:
http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=entertainment&sc=movies&sc3=&id=83782&pf=1
EDGE: But Harvey also seemed to possess an incredible amount of self-awareness as well as a sense of his own impending death. He even begins the tape recording by assuming he’ll be assassinated. How much of the actual tape transcripts did you use?
DLB: There is a dramatic framing device with the assassination because I wanted to indicate right away that this was someone very important who something very bad happened to. That starts the clock ticking, which was in Harvey’s head as well. In his recorded will, he voices his strong suspicion that he would be killed. Separately, to his friends, he had said, “I don’t think I’ll make it to 50.”
I would say fifty percent of the recording in the film is directly out of the will. The beginning, all the famous lines, and the ending, which is so beautiful, is all taken from the actual will. Some of it is created, but based on speeches and recordings. I tried as much as possible to stay true to his voice because it was the first thing I heard, him talking by himself.
The original recording is so intimate and lovely. You fall in love with him, and I thought this is what we need to do right at the beginning of the film; introduce this man that I met through this recording.
The writer of Frost/Nixon said in an interview I heard on NPR that one key scene, where Nixon calls Frost on the phone, was entirely dramatic.
F/N obviously could not JUST be scenes from the interview or there would be no need to make the film.
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December 17, 2008, 9:49pm
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Yes, this I understand, of course. But there are no doubt scenes in the movie of the interviews. Are those verbatim?
From a longer article detailing the historical inaccuracies of F/N :
Second, Frost did not in fact “nail” Nixon. The climactic moment of the movie (as in the play) has Nixon confessing to having participated in the cover-up of the famous break-in of the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee, in June, 1972 by operatives hired by White House aides. But this “confession” is produced through a blatant distortion of what Nixon actually said in the interviews. At that particular moment, Frost was pressing Nixon to admit that he had more than made “mistakes,” that there had in fact been wrongdoing, that crime might have been involved (a rather mild way of putting it). Then, through a sleight of hand, the script simply changes what Nixon actually said: the script of the play has Nixon admitting that he “…was involved in a ‘cover-up,’ as you call it.” The ellipsis is of course unknown to the audience, and is crucial: What Nixon actually said was, “You’re wanting to me to say that I participated in an illegal cover-up. No!”
As he gives the faux confession in the movie, Langella’s remarkably Nixon-like face (shown on a television screen in the play) is ravaged, distorted in agony, contorted in anger. On the disk of the actual interview, Nixon glowers and looks perturbed, but the scene lacks the drama of both the film and the play. Nixon, as promised, did give Frost some interesting material “I let down my country;” “I gave them a sword;” his mistakes “were mistakes of the heart rather than of the head,” all very unusual things for an ex-President to say, but far short of an admission of attempts, carried out during Nixon’s presidency, to undermine the inner workings of the opposition party, of his broad-scale and alarming assaults on the constitution. The Watergate break-in was small beans compared to, say, the break-in of the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers - Nixon was far more worried about the discovery of this break-in. In the movie, even the semi-admissions come across as dramatic; on the disks of the actual interviews, they seem bathetic.
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December 17, 2008, 10:53pm
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Very nice find. Thank you.