A Day with Oliver Stone

A DAY WITH OLIVER STONE

NIXON Sunday, March 13, 1:30 P.M.

2008 Extended Director’s edition, 213 mins. (Originally released in 1995, 192 mins.) Digital presentation.

Directed by Oliver Stone. Written by Stone, Christopher Wilkinson, Stephen J. Rivele. Produced by Stone, Andrew G. Vajna, Clayton Townsend. Photographed by Robert Richardson. Edited by Brian Berdan and Hank Corwin. Production Design by Victor Kempster. Music by John Williams. Principal cast: Anthony Hopkins (as Richard M. Nixon), Joan Allen (Pat Nixon), Powers Boothe (Alexander Haig), Ed Harris (E. Howard Hunt), Bob Hoskins (J. Edgar Hoover), E.G. Marshall (John Mitchell), David Paymer (Ron Ziegler), David Hyde Pierce (John Dean).

Narration for video essay by Kevin B. Lee who pursued power for power’s sake, and an and Matthew Zoller Seitz from Moving Image enabler and exemplar of the military- Source, October 16, 2008 industrial complex whose presence hovers (Visit www.movingimagesource.us to see a over so much of Stone’s filmography. Yet five-part video essay on Oliver Stone): the movie is no hit job, as evidenced by the sequence that follows Nixon’s Using Ptolemy’s dictation of his memoirs strangely psychoanalytical China trip with as a framing device, the narration is a harshly editorializing account of the tinged with The opening scene of Oliver Christmas bombing of Hanoi that no early Stone’s Nixon finds the Watergate burglars ‘70s broadcast news outlet would ever have preparing for their mission while watching allowed. This newscast, like all the a training film about how to be a good newscasts in the movie—indeed, like the salesman. Though seemingly random, it whole of Nixon—isn’t supposed to be taken hints at what’s to come: an epic biography as a straight recreation of reality. This about a man of substance who was isn’t the news. It’s the naysaying chorus uncomfortable in his own skin, enslaved by Nixon hears in his head. influences and impulses that his repressive conditioning wouldn’t permit The media that intrude upon the film’s him to investigate. A sprawling amalgam of narrative are colored by Nixon’s self- Death of a Salesman, Citizen Kane, perception. When he reads a newspaper or Freudian psychoanalysis, and 50 years’ watches TV, he, and we, aren’t seeing what worth of headlines and transcripts, Nixon the world thinks of Nixon, but what Nixon feels less like a biography than an thinks the world thinks of Nixon. In the autobiography, colored by Nixon’s paranoia sequence following Nixon’s defeat in the and self-loathing. 1962 California governor’s race, we enter the room with Nixon, then feel his It was assumed that Stone, a frustration as he gives what he wrongly counterculture provocateur whose Vietnam assumes will be his last public speech. As service coincided with Nixon’s rise to the he talks, Stone cuts to newspaper presidency, would skewer the man as a reporters writing down Nixon’s emotionally panderer to red-state reactionaries, a man naked statements, and newsreel cameras seeking to frame Nixon as unflatteringly and JFK’s previously cordial relationship as possible, even zeroing in on his with Nixon. Nixon is so dumbfounded that signature upper-lip sweat. he freezes, and either remembers or flashes forward to JFK’s inauguration. Nixon’s mind is a Freudian stew of It’s as if he’s thinking, "This is the incompatible ingredients. There are moment when I lost the election—and this idealized flashbacks to his Quaker is where playing by the rules gets me." upbringing, showing how he idolized his older brother and mother, and feared his Stone theorizes that the 18 minutes that disciplinarian father. We sense that Nixon Nixon removed from his White House tapes absorbed their prejudices, aspired to confirmed Nixon’s role in the creation of their clarity—and remembered their a national security state—something he admonition to never give up, no matter endorsed for patriotic reasons, but which what. grew out of control, killing JFK and subjecting America to the trauma he felt The "reality" of Nixon’s life is often at losing his brother. The gap is Nixon’s overlayed with, or interrupted by, still own Rosebud, but Stone, to his credit, photographs, headlines, or footage from leaves its meaning as mysterious and newsreel or TV cameras. Sometimes these irreducible as that of Charles Foster elements simply reduce Nixon’s Kane’s childhood sled. It’s a pretext for accomplishments to historical footnotes, free association, for fantasy—for Nixon’s, as if Nixon is thinking, "Nobody will and Stone’s, dreams and nightmares of remember how long I worked to do this, America. only that it happened." We’re inside Nixon’s head as he tries to make a case Nixon’s taping himself, then claiming as for himself, while trying and failing to he listens to the recordings that he never suppress his fear that journalism—the said this or that, and running the tape first draft of history—has already back as if to reverse and then re-record diminished him through pop psychoanalysis, history, is a microcosm of Stone’s leftist posturing, and petty schoolyard filmmaking approach. There’s a gap between cruelty. what Nixon said and did and what he wishes he had said and did; between Nixon’s The premature death of Nixon’s older aspirations to greatness and the verdicts brother is conflated, in Nixon’s of the media, the public, and history imagination, with the killing of JFK, a itself. man whose star quality seemed a reproach to Nixon’s very existence. The film re- The essence of Stone’s approach is creates Nixon’s 1960 presidential debate telegraphed by an image in the movie’s with John F. Kennedy, whose good looks, prologue: a slow tracking shot around a charisma, and TV makeup made Nixon look movie projector, ending with the bulb like a moist little troll. There’s a shining into the viewer’s eyes. The entire moment where JFK uses information gleaned film is multiplaned projection: Nixon in a secret CIA briefing to attack the projecting his goals and fears onto Eisenhower-Nixon administration’s foreign America, and America returning the favor. policy, violating both national security Museum of the Moving Image is grateful for the generous support of numerous corporations, foundations, and individuals. The Museum is housed in a building owned by the City of New York and receives significant support from the following public agencies: the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; New York City Economic Development Corporation; New York State Council on the Arts; Institute of Museum and Library Services; National Endowment for the Humanities; National Endowment for the Arts; Natural Heritage Trust (administered by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation).