you don't have to put on the red light

Tavis Smiley interviewing Frank Langella and Ron Howard on Frost/Nixon:

Langella: Well, I would think the thing I learned the most that I will now never, ever forget is that you see that little red light that's on me now? The minute it goes on, something in me changes. Some imperceptible thing in me changes, because I know I'm being recorded. I'm not exactly 100 percent myself. I am a personality, a character, a sense of self that I choose to put in front of a camera.

And what I learned on working on Nixon and watching him and slow-moing him for hours and hours and hours, is never to 100 percent totally believe the person the politician is when the red light goes on, because he wants to communicate something to us. He wants to communicate power or sensitivity or vulnerability or in Nixon's case, toughness.

Every single politician must stand in the dark a second before the light goes on, and something unconscious changes. So I've learned to watch like a hawk everybody - Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama, it doesn't matter - and all of us, too. We all know we do some things slightly different.

But when you are leading countries, when you are a politician and the red light goes on, you create a character. You have to. You couldn't possibly be yourself. And I think it's second nature. I don't think it's something - after a while, when a politician becomes skilled at it - President Kennedy knew he had charm, Nixon did whatever he thought would look strong, Lyndon Baines Johnson had a wonderful kind of shaggy Texas demeanor, Mr. McCain had a way of behaving.

That's the thing I took away from it the most, was that...

Interesting observations from someone who knows the camera and character. Audio and transcript available at Tavis Smiley's PBS site. (h/t Kos)

presidential literature

Really interesting blog post on bookblog the Millions - genre review of Nixon literature, others on presidential fiction. Postulates that this current administration will offer no literary possibilities -- they have to know in some small corner that what they are doing is wrong. And they don't seem to.
Closes with a great observation is that this administration has been most effective and most dangerous because they have been able to destroy sources of resistance to its desires. More than any specific goal, what they have done is permanently, or at least significantly, weaken social sources of power that can be used to check any executive. Can see this institutionally within the government, media, scientific community, etc.

As the Millions put it better:

A mark of the current administration's moral failure, and perhaps of its artistic triumph, is that it has sterilized many of the avenues for protest against itself.