While he didn’t have a Watergate, major war or get assassinated to hook people in, it’s almost suprising nobody’s made a movie about Ronald Reagan before, as he’s certainly got an interesting story. Actually, perhaps it’s not that surprising, as he’s a god to the hard right in the US, and they protest loudly if a bad (or even neutral) word is said about him, something that heavily effected the two-part mini-series, The Reagans, a few years ago, which saw it bumped from the CBS network and end up on the Showtime cable channel, because of perceived left-wing bias.
However that’s not going to stop producers Mark Joseph and Ralph Winter, who’ve hired Jonas McCord to turn two biographies of Reagan, The Crusader and God and Ronald Reagan (both by Paul Kengor), into a screenplay. The plan is to use the 1981 assassination attempt on the President as a hook, then tell Ron’s stories through flashbacks and flashforwards. And there’s certainly a lot of ground to cover, with McCord describing Reagan’s childhood as “a surreal Norman Rockwell painting with his alcoholic Catholic father, devout Christian mother, Catholic brother and ever-changing boarders the family took in.”
Then he went on to become an actor, who many people thought was rubbish, most famously starring alonside a chimp in Bedtime For Bonzo, but actually made most of his money in the 50s as a spokesperson for General Electric. Indeed it was this training as a TV corporate figurehead that probably helped more than anything else with his ascendancy to the highest office in the US. It also sounds like the movie will take a less condescending tone than the mini-series, which should keep conservatives happy.
THR reports that the film is currently finalising funding, and no actors or director has yet been hired, but the hope is to start production next year.