Is anyone watching this Youtube series by actor/writer/musician/broadcaster etc. Harry Shearer? I know some of it aired on Sky in the UK. Shearer has long had a fascination with Richard Nixon, and has collaborated with historian Stanely Kutler to bring some of the infamous Nixon tapes to life on video. Actors performing actual tape dialogue are shot in hidden-camera style, as if there were surveillance cameras in the Oval Office as well as audio mics.
Though the tapes about Watergate are understandably the most well-known, the show seems most interested in the seemingly ordinary conversations of the president, staff and guests. And the results, I thought, were very funny. Not in a laugh-out-loud joke way, but in a bizarre, "you could never make that stuff up" way. As is often the case, real life is better satire than satire. And there will never again be such an amazing record of a president's day-to-day life.
The production values are quite good, eased no doubt by having a single set. Shearer has gone with heavy prosthetic makeup to play Nixon, which I didn't care for. It didn't really look more like Nixon, it just looked like a weird mask. But that's always been kind of Shearer's thing, going back to SNL. His voice acting, though, is great, and the surveillance-cam angles make it fairly easy to ignore the makeup. Henry Goodman as Henry Kissinger was terrific. He didn't make his voice as croaky as Kissinger's, but nonetheless, completely convincing. The should have given the guy playing Bob Haldeman a flattop, though.
I don't want to say much about the "script," but even though I had read about a lot of the material presented, some of it was still fairly shocking to hear.
Anyway, I find I'm looking forward to new episodes. If you're interested in presidential history, political satire or that kind of thing, you might want to check it out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9HtoWea72A
Though the tapes about Watergate are understandably the most well-known, the show seems most interested in the seemingly ordinary conversations of the president, staff and guests. And the results, I thought, were very funny. Not in a laugh-out-loud joke way, but in a bizarre, "you could never make that stuff up" way. As is often the case, real life is better satire than satire. And there will never again be such an amazing record of a president's day-to-day life.
The production values are quite good, eased no doubt by having a single set. Shearer has gone with heavy prosthetic makeup to play Nixon, which I didn't care for. It didn't really look more like Nixon, it just looked like a weird mask. But that's always been kind of Shearer's thing, going back to SNL. His voice acting, though, is great, and the surveillance-cam angles make it fairly easy to ignore the makeup. Henry Goodman as Henry Kissinger was terrific. He didn't make his voice as croaky as Kissinger's, but nonetheless, completely convincing. The should have given the guy playing Bob Haldeman a flattop, though.
I don't want to say much about the "script," but even though I had read about a lot of the material presented, some of it was still fairly shocking to hear.
Anyway, I find I'm looking forward to new episodes. If you're interested in presidential history, political satire or that kind of thing, you might want to check it out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9HtoWea72A
