Biopic About Reagan ‘Struck a Nerve,’ Producer Says

The biopic “Reagan,” starring Dennis Quaid as the nation’s 40th president, is set for release Tuesday on DVD and Blu-ray. Rob Bluey, president and executive editor of The Daily Signal, interviewed “Reagan” producer Mark Joseph over email to mark the occasion.

Rob Bluey: “Reagan” exceeded box office expectations, earning over $30 million after its Aug. 30 opening. What do you think resonated so strongly with moviegoers?

Mark Joseph: It’s very similar to political polling. Our core audience is difficult to poll because they’re not typical moviegoers. So we doubled official predictions by industry experts for that first weekend. We’re gratified that the film seems to have struck a nerve.

We received many reports of tears and standing ovations in theaters. I think people yearn for a time when our leaders could fight fiercely in the ring, but then be friends outside of the ring. And that’s one of the things people reacted to—the relationship between [House Speaker] Tip O’Neill and Reagan. 

Q: The movie spans Reagan’s entire life. How did you capture such a long and eventful life in a feature film?

A: We broke a major Hollywood rule that a biopic is supposed to center on a small window of time in someone’s life. I firmly disagree with this “rule,” and I think the audience does as well. 

To understand Ronald Reagan without understanding where he came from and the influences in his early years of his parents and his community is simply impossible. We knew the rule we were breaking by covering an 80-year span and we did it for a good reason. And we’ll probably do it again. [“Reagan” was directed by Sean McNamara and written by Howard Klausner.]

Q: Dennis Quaid, who plays Reagan, spoke about how this film helped him understand Reagan’s complete story rather than just “bits and pieces.” What were your goals for the movie?

A: Our goal was to tell his story from beginning to end, and we had a great storyteller in Jon Voight as the KGB agent who knew everything about Reagan. I joked with Jon that this was going to be the greatest acting stretch of his career—for Jon Voight to play a communist. But he was the perfect storyteller to connect all of those bits and pieces.

Fundamentally, when I realized that Reagan’s pastor when he was a young boy was something of an anti-communist activist who invited Soviet dissidents to speak at the church, everything about Ronald Reagan and what he did in Hollywood and on the global stage made sense. 

Q: What were some lesser-known aspects of Reagan’s life that you felt were important to include?

A: I spent time with 50 of his colleagues and associates, who sometimes let things slip that were lost to history or that didn’t make their biographies so we put those things in here and there and we also had some fun. The scene with Pat Boone, for instance, is one that has been ignored by most historians. But we had Pat, who told us the story exactly as it happened.

The scene with Judge [William] Clark was something that Clark gave me word for word, and George Shultz and Ed Meese were great resources. And I couldn’t resist having some fun with Shultz’s having a tattoo on his rear end, so we had the Russian negotiator bring that up. Reagan’s preacher and the doctor who operated on him also helped us to get those scenes post-assassination attempt just right. 

Q: The film’s DVD release follows the presidential election and is on the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Was this intentional?

A: None of our timing—including releasing in an election year in the middle of a campaign—was intentional. This movie had a mind of its own when it came to timing; we were just along for the ride. 

Q: What parallels do you see between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump?

A: They’re very different men for very different times. But what they have in common is a keen understanding of the hopes, dreams, and fears of the average American.

Reagan got it from growing up in the heartland and from spending time on the GE [General Electric] lecture circuit, interacting with workers at GE plants across America. Trump learned it from spending time with workers on construction sites. Both of them got significant numbers of traditionally Democratic voters to vote for them as Republicans. 

Q: What can “Reagan” the movie teach us about contemporary politics?

A: “Reagan” reminds us that our leaders can be both tough and gracious and that friendship and relationships should be able to cross party lines. Nobody was tougher against his enemies than Reagan, but he was also gracious and allowed them to maintain their dignity even as he crushed them.

And he deployed humor against them as well. I put a line in the film where Gorbachev tells Reagan: “They say about you that he picks your pocket and makes you feel good about it.” Bobby Kennedy [Jr.] told me he urged his Uncle Ted to be tougher on Reagan, but Ted demurred and said even though he disagreed with Reagan, he loved his country.

Reagan ended political careers and empires, and yet those he defeated liked and respected him. We can all learn from that. He also taught us the importance of fessing up when you’re caught. I don’t think this modern ethos of deny, deny, deny works in the long run, because people can’t trust that and trust is the currency of politics. 

Q: What made you choose Paul Kengor’s book “The Crusader” as your source material?

A: I grew up reading all of Reagan’s biographers, even as a teenager. But I think they all only partially captured Reagan, and his official biographer Edmund Morris famously gave up and called him “inscrutable.”

Kengor is one of the few who grasped how important religion was to Reagan’s formation. And the fact that he went back to the church Reagan grew up in and asked to see the sermons he would have heard as a kid—only to be told by the current pastor that they were in the basement, but nobody had ever asked to see them before—tells you what a huge oversight had happened in Reagan scholarship.

Religion writer Terry Mattingly says that religion is often the “ghost” in people’s stories, in the sense that often we have to understand those impulses that propel people in order to understand them and what they did.

Kengor grasped both the sacred and the secular when it came to Reagan’s story—the importance of his mother and his preacher as well as the realpolitik involved in bringing down the Soviet Union, blowing up pipelines, deploying Bill Casey, etc. We had to have both to tell his story. 

Q: How did you decide on the cast, particularly the roles of Dennis Quaid and Jon Voight?

A: Dennis was always my first choice because he required almost no hair and makeup touchups to get him camera-ready. He’s a natural, and he has that great Reaganesque smile and persona. He’s a busy guy, so it took some time to nail him down, but he was always the one for me.

Before we had the character of the KGB spy Viktor as narrator, I had asked Jon [Voight] to play James Baker. But once we developed Viktor, we moved Jon over to that role. Jon had spent time in the Soviet Union before and after the fall of communism and he had some great insights into how Russians were before and after. And he brought those insights to the role. He said their eyes came alive after they were freed.  

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