Trailer
Plot summary
In 1972, men working for the White House break into the Watergate offices and are caught. A year and a half afterward, Alexander Haig, the president's chief of staff, hands Richard Nixon recordings of his own conversations in the Oval Office, and the two men go over the scandal. Nixon has the taping system switched on, and the recordings send him back through his life: a strict Quaker upbringing in California, brothers lost to tuberculosis, law school, early campaigns, and his courtship of Pat. Henry Kissinger rises from professor to National Security Adviser, and the men around Nixon argue over whether Kissinger is a leaker protecting his name in the press or a loyal subordinate.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Nixon (1995)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Warren Beatty met Stone about the part but declined, feeling that "Nixon was not treated compassionately"; while considering it he insisted on reading the script with an actress, Joan Allen was flown in from New York City, and afterwards Beatty told Stone he had found his Pat Nixon.
- John Taylor, head of the Nixon Presidential Library, leaked the script to former CIA director Richard Helms, who threatened to sue; Stone cut every scene with Helms from the theatrical print, later admitted he regretted it, and reinstated the footage on the director's cut.
- Milchan, not keen on the idea, told Stone he would give him only $35 million, expecting him to abandon Nixon; Stone instead went to Hungarian financier Andrew G. Vajna, whose company Cinergi Pictures financed the $38 million film, which angered Milchan into threatening to sue.
- Two days before the film opened, the Richard Nixon Library and birthplace in Yorba Linda, California issued a statement for the Nixon family calling parts of it "reprehensible" and designed to "defame and degrade President and Mrs. Nixon's memories in the mind of the American public".
- J.T. Walsh decided not to contact John Ehrlichman while preparing to play him, because Ehrlichman had threatened to sue after reading an early version of the script and was unhappy with how he was portrayed.
- To cut costs, Stone leased the White House sets from Rob Reiner's film The American President rather than building his own.
