Looks promising, although I doubt if it will do justice to the greatest president of my life time. We shall see. Dennis Quad in the title role however is a good sign. A fine actor and a religious conservative. Jon Voigt, now the grandfather of the conservative movement in Hollywood, is also in the picture and I have never seen him give a bad performance. The film is based on Paul Kengor’s The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.
It looks pretty good. I hope they include the time he was giving a speech and a balloon popped. He looked up and said, “Missed me.”
When he was being wheeled into the operating room after his attempted assassination he looked at the doctors and quipped, “I hope you are Republicans!”.
My favorite Reagan story was told by one of his aids for a biography around the time of his funeral. It was from his first meeting with Gorbachev in 1985. He stayed in some individual’s home (a very nice home I assume). It was the bedroom of one of the children. The child asked him to remember to feed his fish in the bowl. Priorities being what they were, Reagan must have forgotten, only to find the fish dead. In a panic, he sent his aids to get another fish that looked exactly the same. He went to another conference that day. When he got home that evening, his aid said the first thing Reagan asked had nothing to do with domestic issues, the current conference, international affairs or any such things. His first question was ‘did you find a fish?’ I always thought that was the most Reagan of all Reagan stories.
Jon Voight did a stellar job portraying Howard Cosell in the movie Ali where Will Smith played Muhammad Ali (and did a very good job himself) and gave a great performance playing Pope John Paul II. That’s a very diverse skill set for an actor.
It would be agreeable if a proper full dress biography of Reagan were written. Mrs. Reagan recruited Edmund Morris to write one and he turned in a piece of historical fiction because he said he couldn’t make sense of Reagan except as a performer with an audience. (Lyn Nofziger also noted that there’s a surprising amount of text in the book devoted to Jane Wyman even though she wouldn’t talk to Morris or anyone else about RR, which makes sense if Morris’ object was to use the book to irritate Nancy Reagan).
Morris was chosen because he had written a well received multi-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt. The biography of Reagan was spell blindingly bad. The scholarship on Reagan is weak and probably will remain so until the academy recovers its collective sanity.
Reagan is a complicated figure, as most converts are, and his biography requires a mastery of many subjects ranging from Hollywood to the Cold War and encompassing a disparate cast of many thousands. I wish Cecil B. DeMille were still alive to direct the forthcoming movie. A huge subject worthy of his mastery of the film making craft.