Stories behind the Frost/Nixon movie, confrontation

The stories behind the 1977 verbal confrontation between Richard Nixon and David Frost continue to fascinate. The release of the Ron Howard movie Frost/Nixon has given us some great stories from that era. We looked at the transformation of David Frost from satirist to journalist a bit in an earlier post.

National Public Radio's Fresh Air program yesterday had James Reston Jr. as a guest. Reston was one of the researchers that helped David Frost prepare for the interviews, and he told some throat-grabbing stories about the information that he was able to come up with when he interviewed presidential aide Charles Colson.

Reston was one of the people who believed Nixon had committed crimes and that this set of interviews was going to be the only trial he would ever get. He was satisfied with the outcome, and he later wrote about it in The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews. A play was based on the book, and the current movie is based on the play.

The interview is online. It's only 18 minutes long (for those of us old enough -- remember the 18-minute gap?) and well worth listening to.

Inside David Frost's transformation from satirist to journalist

With the release of the movie Frost/Nixon, Clive Irving (books on Amazon) describes the transformation of David Frost from satirist to journalist. Irving was on the inside of this story, and the view is fascinating.

In the summer of 1966, Irving was one of two people hired by David Frost as "creative consultants" for The Frost Programme. The other was Tony Jay:

Tony’s idea was that TV could and should be opened up as a forum for the people to engage with power, and it was Tony who insisted on doing something that nobody had risked before, having a live studio audience with a microphone swinging precariously on a boom above them so that David could pull people into the discourse when they were provoked. Thus a lot of politicians found themselves suddenly not only being cross-examined by Frost but by aggrieved members of the public. Amazing to think now how novel and dangerous that was then, in 1966, when it began.

Frost landed his biggest interview nine years later with Richard Nixon, who three years before had resigned as president of the United States. Both Frost and Nixon had a purpose for coming together, and thereby hangs the tale.

Here is a part of that interview. The video is provided by the Daily Beast (:33):

The photo above shows Frank Langella as Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost and is from the Frost/Nixon web site.