Penny Lane Shows Us Another Nixon

Published by Interrobang Staff at September 4, 2013

Director Penny Lane has been making award-winning documentaries and essay films since 2002. Now she has made her feature documentary film debut with “Our Nixon”, a re-examination of the former President, using archival material that has never been looked at in this way before. Penny stopped by the SiriusXM studios in New York City to talk with Ron Bennington about the film, and the man. Excerpts from the interview appear below. The interview can be heard in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.

* * *

Penny Lane Talks About Seeing The Watergate Conspirators As Sympathetic Characters

Ron Bennington: You’ve done something here that’s never happened in my life, made me feel for these guys that I’ve always…

Penny Lane: Yeah, sorry (laughs)

Ron Bennington: Yeah, it’s weird because not long after I saw your film, The Watergate movie was on, the one that they did in 1976, and of course you demonize them, and I think a lot of it has to do with the Super 8, the home movies. But for the first time in your life you look back and see these guys as guys, as just people.

Penny Lane: Yeah, I think you need some distance to do that though, right? Because in the moment they were doing really dastardly things that were, I’m sure if you were of that persuasion, filling you with justifiable kind of rage and anger. So in the moment, I don’t think your interest was, “Oh, lets humanize these people,” in the moment it was, “Let’s get these fuckers out of office.”

* * *

Penny Lane Talks About The Nixon Aides

Ron Bennington: When you get into Haldeman, Chapin, and Ehrlichman, they just seem like the Enron-type guys. They seem like the guys who golf together and take vacations together and maybe don’t realize how far they’ve crossed the line.

Penny Lane: Yeah, I think there is probably some truth to that and I think that Ehrlichman specifically spoke pretty genuinely, in one of the interviews that we used, about how you go in there as a young man with some amount of idealism and you hope that you are going to change things, but at least in his experience, he viscerally felt that he had become part of the problem and not part of the solution, after awhile. That the kind of trappings of power, the glitter of this life that you get to lead and the insularity of riding everywhere in a limousine with Secret Service agents all around you and not dealing with regular people anymore, it makes you part of the same system that you said you were going to come in to and change. So, to the extent that I think these guys were idealists, and at least to some extent, I think it’s fair to say that they were, they become part of the system – so in some ways it’s a very classic young guy goes to Washington story. So, it’s not the way I normally thought of those men. When they enter the historical narrative, they are already villains, no one really had ever heard of these guys. Some people had heard of Haldeman, I guess during that time, because he was the Chief of Staff, but he didn’t really give interviews, so no one really knew him. That Barbara Walters interview that we use is the only interview he ever gave when he worked at the White House. So, by the time they enter the historical consciousness they’ve already been cast in this very specific role, which was a villainous role, and I was very interested in how they went from that kind of Super 8, what looks like naïvety, to that kind of villainous historical role.

Ron Bennington: And it’s just day-by-day, it’s just like what happens with a bad cop. Where you feel like what you’re doing – and you’re surrounded by people who agree with you.

Penny Lane: They always said, and this is pretty consistent across all of the Watergate guys, all thirty-eight guys who went to prison, they all said, “Hey look, this is all stuff that everyone did in politics.” They really truly believed – well, ok, I don’t know if they believed it, but they consistently said this, up until their death beds, in some cases. That this was what everyone did, and we got caught. Now, I don’t know if this was true, that could be a defensive sort of lie that maybe they even convinced themselves of, I just don’t know, I don’t think we’ll ever know because we’ll never have four thousand hours of secret tapes to find out what other Presidents were doing when they didn’t think we were listening.

* * *

Penny Lane Talks About How Watergate Began To Unravel

Ron Bennington: In your film, as we’re going along from kind of a happy time to slowly hearing the stress of Nixon’s voice, you almost start to feel for the guy. Like you would for any kind of trapped animal. It’s got to be the worst thing in the world to know that this is imploding on you and it’s history coming down on your shoulders.

Penny Lane: Yeah, and that was a gradual realization for them. You can listen to those tapes and one of the funny or sad pieces of dramatic irony that is consistent in those tapes is Nixon saying things like, “I’m never going to discuss this, son-of-a-bitching Watergate thing again,” you know and that was 1973, it it’s like well, actually you are going to talk about this for the rest of your life.

Ron Bennington: Yeah, when you watch this you’re so much smarter than them, throughout the whole thing because you understand…

Penny Lane: Yeah, because you know the future and they don’t. (laughing)

Ron Bennington: They are in this day-to-day thing and then when he just starts to sell them off one at a time… you’re gone, then he’s gone… and finally I think, was it Ziegler who was the one who went to Haldeman…because Nixon himself didn’t even do it.

Penny Lane: No, Nixon was never able to fire anybody. He had other people fire for him. But, also, Haldeman wasn’t able to fire Chapin and had John Dean fire Chapin, too. So they all had this way…

Ron Bennington: What do you think that was about? Just not wanting the unpleasantness, or…

Penny Lane: I think it was extremely painful. These are men who really cared about each other and worked very closely together and I think that nobody wanted to fire anybody in that context. There was no joy in laying off Chapin, this young thirty-year-old guy who has given his entire adult life, since the age of eighteen to Richard Nixon, to be like, “You’ve got to go, because of this scandal that we think is crap, but we can see is not going away.” So, I think it had to do with just trying to insulate themselves from the pain of it.

Ron Bennington: There is a thing that hit me so hard in this, where Nixon is setting up those singers…

Penny Lane: The Ray Conniff Singers.

Ron Bennington: And saying, “If they are square, it’s because I like square, that’s the way I like it.” And it just seems like… Then this woman starts to speak and breaks rank and starts to tell him that he’s bombing innocent people and that if Jesus Christ were there he wouldn’t act this way. It is so fucking powerful, it is so strong, and it’s true probably of every President. They all go in as Christians, but you know they do things against even their own beliefs.

Penny Lane: Looking at what is happening right now, this second, about whether we are going to start dropping bombs on Syria, and I cannot imagine what it would be to be the person who ultimately makes decisions like that and I think that, if anything, this project has given me some measure of empathy, which is kind of weird, for people in power. And a feeling of wow – it’s so easy to sit over here, with no power, and criticize and say, “this is what I think people should do,” but without really understanding what’s going into it. Now, a lot of what goes into it is cynical, and it’s politics, and it’s crap and we should be appalled by it – and we are – like ‘how am I going to get reelected’ stuff, not the ‘what’s good for the world’ stuff. Then there is also ‘what’s good for he world’ stuff and the kind of foreign policy things that Nixon was dealing with were very complicated, and I don’t even want to go down the road of talking about defending his policies in Vietnam, or something. But, yes, I did develop a sense of that pressure and what that would do to a human being and I think I understood, for the first time, why Nixon and his men were shocked by what happened with Watergate because from where they were sitting it really did look like peanuts. We got real things to deal with here: we’re trying to end the war in Vietnam, we’re dealing with this, we’re dealing with that, we’ve got desegregation, we have riots in the streets – we have a lot going on that seems more important than this dinky, as Ziegler said, “this two-bit burglary” or whatever he called it. So, I finally understood why it really could be considered a surprise from their perspective. They knew what they did, but, the idea that it was going to take the President down was nowhere near their consciousness for a very long time.

* * *

Penny Lane Talks About Nixon’s Decision To Resign

Ron Bennington: The difference today is, when you look back at “All the President’s Men”, they never even got close to any of those guys. They never interviewed them, they never got close – so they must have felt so far away from that and it was just one string that just started to pull itself. But, I also wonder, what if he had just bit the bullet and rode it out the way Clinton did, where Clinton just said, “yeah, ok, I got impeached.”

Penny Lane: But you heard his voice, at the end of our film, and that wasn’t even that late into the horror of the two years that Watergate went on, that was early and his voice was not – he was a mess.

Ron Bennington: He was lost.

Penny Lane: Totally. And so when you hear the descriptions of what life inside the White House was like, once the President was defeated – he was defeated. He couldn’t lead, he had to go because he couldn’t do it anymore. His credibility was gone, but also, I think on a personal level, he couldn’t do it.

* * *

Penny Lane Talks About Nixon’s Human Inadequacies

Ron Bennington: There was other parts, too, where he was just wanting – You’re the most powerful man in the world and then he keeps wanting feedback from each speech. Like, “Hey, I never heard from… Do you think it was a good speech, I never heard back from… ” And he just wants to get these things of, “Oh you’re doing great.” It’s so incredibly strange. Or the fact that he ends the Vietnam war as almost a fuck you to the media, like, “I’d love to see Dan Rather’s face…”

Penny Lane: “Can’t wait to see Dan Rather’s face, when he hears that speech.”

Ron Bennington: It’s amazing shit, it’s amazing. It’s so petty.

Penny Lane: It makes you realize that he’s a person and you’re like, this is uncomfortable. There is kind of like a celebrities go shopping, too, aspect to this film that I think – I know it sounds dumb – but there is a certain kind of humor and weirdness, the word ‘weird’ does come up a lot with this film, I think the weirdness and the humor, a lot of it is things like that, oh the President also gets insecure, the President also can be petty, the President swears, you know whatever… the President can be stupid, the President can be drunk – those kinds of things really make us laugh, but also frighten us very deeply, I think.

* * *

Penny Lane Talks About Having To Decide What She Included In “Our Nixon”

Ron Bennington: Did it ever feel like there is too much information to shove into a movie.

Penny Lane: Yeah, because we did want to follow all of the different rabbit trails because you start to think about things like Nixon’s domestic policies. When I’m making a film I kind of follow my own interests. So, if I say, “oh that’s interesting and surprising,” I assume that it would be to at least to some other people, so there was a kind of whole bunch of other pools of information that were also new and interesting to me that I thought people would be interested in. But, yeah, like Nixon’s environmentalist record and women’s rights legislation and all this stuff that you just don’t associate with Nixon, but it just kind of had to go to the side. Because, (a) the point was not to resurrect Nixon’s image, that doesn’t drive me, it’s ok if someone watches this film and that’s part of the effect it has for them, that’s fine. But, that’s not the point. And (b) this film had to be about those three men holding those cameras or else we would lose our way and try to make a kind of more generalist film and what would be the point of that be? We weren’t going to make the definitive Nixon movie. We were inspired by this very small and narrow slice of life represented by those home movies and we wanted to make sure the film honored what that story was about those three guys. So, we had to lose a lot of great stuff about Kissinger, we had to lose a lot of great stuff about a lot of things that just didn’t help us tell the story of these three men and their betrayal by their boss.

* * *

Penny Lane Talks About Realizing Political Leaders Make Human Mistakes

Ron Bennington: I think the finest thing about the film, and I brought it up in the beginning, is that there are so many times that you just see it as human beings and that’s almost scarier than the thing we make up in our heads about shadow governments and all.

our nixon Penny Lane: Right, or supermen. Yeah, I agree, and it happens to us all throughout our lives. First, we figure out that our parents aren’t superhuman, and then later we find out that our teachers aren’t super human, and then we find out that our politicians aren’t superhuman. It’s a kind of gradual unveiling of something that is really scary. That we’re all just bumbling through life and we have the potential for great evil, even though we are just humans, right?

Ron Bennington: And a lot of the evil comes from just not being good enough to do good.

Penny Lane: Right, and then you think, who goes in to politics? I’m sorry, politicians who are listening – but, it’s not a life that is appealing to that many people. You have no privacy, between now and the time you die, the end – so give that up. I’m not sure, already you’ve lost most people. People that are intelligent want some kind of private life, it’s an important thing. Then you have to be totally aware of the fact that you are doing things that are not for the greater good, but are good for your career, but then convince yourself that that is for the greater good. I mean, that’s not… that sounds horrible, to me. Any intelligent thinking person would find that incredibly difficult to deal with.

Ron Bennington: And, the same thing, it kind of reminds you of like the Hollywood lifestyle. It’s almost like they picked the same thing that Jessica Simpson or Lindsay Lohan, of like, “I’ve got to keep this machine going twenty-four hours a day, keep my name out there, make sure that I’m wearing the right things, no matter what happens,” and at the end how can anything good ever come out of that?

Penny Lane: I don’t know. (laughing) It’s surprising that anything good does come out of it, but it occasionally does happen.

Ron Bennington: The film is amazing, it’s called, Our Nixon, opens today in New York at the IFC Center and a national rollout is going to follow. Thank you so much for coming in Penny.

Penny Lane: Thank you for having me, it was a joy to talk to you.

Ron Bennington: I’ll see you next time coming through.

. . .