Exploring the Complex Legacy of Ronald Reagan in Film

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Hello, everybody.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen podcast podcast show, and I'm by myself today.

Sammy and Jack are off, and I'm interviewing Mark Joseph, the director of the film The Big Hit Last Year and continues to be, Reagan and his simultaneously released book, I think it was in December, of Making Reagan.

And welcome to the show, Mark.

Thanks for having me.

Great to be here.

Yeah, one of the things I was curious about the book and some of the press coverage was all the difficulty years after years

that you had.

Was that with the production people, the finance side of it, or was it the culture of Hollywood?

Can you just tell us what was so difficult about it?

Or was it everything difficult?

Yes, the answer is yes to all that.

You know, in the best of circumstances, movies are difficult to make.

And so I didn't want to be crying in my soup too much.

There's just a lot of factors that have to come together for a movie to get made, not the least least of which is your talent and schedules and, of course, the distribution and all that stuff.

But certainly, I mean, it was a blessing and a curse that it was Ronald Reagan and this is Hollywood because

there have been attempts to make movies about him over the years, and they would inevitably run into problems.

Not the least of which is his fans are very, very devoted.

And once they get a whiff of somebody trying to besmirch their man, those movies would often be sacked.

And so I think one of the things we had to do was really establish the trust,

not that we were out to make him look like Mr.

Perfect, but that we weren't out to destroy him.

That wasn't part of our agenda.

We just wanted to tell the story fairly.

And so, but certainly there were over the years, the one that I think most notably was Will Farrell had attempted to make one.

And within 48 hours of the announcement,

they canceled the whole thing because it was going to be a movie about Reagan having Alzheimer's as president and apparently you had to convince him that he was acting in a movie in order to get him to function.

That didn't go over very well.

That was sort of the theme of Margaret Thatcher's movie too.

I thought so too, Dr.

Hansen.

I thought that that movie was really about her.

It wasn't a frontal attack, but it was kind of a backdoor

running around her apartment, not being

what was going on.

So, you know,

we had the,

I wanted my viewers to be able to feel like this was a portrayal that was not beholden to anybody.

So even though we appreciated the Reagan Library and Museum and they let us be on Air Force One, they never had any kind of script approval.

We never had to really get anybody's approval, even a studio.

And I just wanted the viewer to know that we weren't going into beholden to anybody.

Did you have ⁇

so you had to convince people who were sympathetic to Reagan, but did you have any people indirectly or insidiously that were not, I mean, that were critics of Reagan and didn't like the idea of making a movie?

And if so, do they have power to obstruct things?

Not really.

You know, the key thing is when we were

we made the movie and then we partnered with some great partners.

And so if you do it that way, you don't have those issues come up usually.

So Universal came aboard for the rest of the world.

Lionsgate handled all the domestic and then a terrific new company called Showbiz Direct handled all the domestic theaters.

So between those three entities,

yeah, they're not necessarily in the content business.

They're more of a great partnership.

So yeah, we just wanted to be able to make it and

have the viewer know that there was nobody looking over our shoulder saying change this or change that.

I spent time with probably 50, 55 of the people that knew Reagan and, you know, got their stories and got the good, the bad, the ugly, everything.

And so we put it in there.

Did you have any people that were reluctant to talk?

It seems like the kids are divided, aren't they?

Michael's on one side and then Ron Jr.

Yeah, you know, Michael gave me some good advice early on.

He just sort of said, you probably should steer clear of us, you know, all three of us, because you don't want to get caught up in our issues.

And so we did.

And they have their own books and movies and documentaries, so I didn't really want to interfere with what they were doing as well.

But certainly, you know, I would say, yeah, we had people.

I had one fellow named Peter Hannaford who passed away.

He said, I'm going to tell you a story, but you cannot put this in the movie.

He promised me.

So

things like that that were just really helped more fleshing out the character.

And in particular, he was the one that, you know, you and I both hear these stories of Ronald Reagan, Mr.

Perfect all the time.

And to be honest with you, there's not much of a movie for a perfect person.

And so I remember asking Peter, like, you've got to give me something to hang my hat on here because what is it that, and I asked him, like, would he get angry?

Did he have a temper?

And he says, yeah, he did.

He said, it passed very quickly.

I said, well, give me an example.

And he said, well, one day we walked and we handed him his schedule.

And he looked at it and he said, fellas, I cannot do all this in one day.

And he threw his glasses down the table, the long conference table.

But it passed quickly.

And I said, okay, that's good.

That's helpful because he's human like the rest of us.

I remember when he was doing the primary and he

They cut his mic off and he said, I'm paying for this, that element.

And you

I think there are two

public moments like that where you get a little bit of the flash of that quick temper.

And that was I paid for this microphone, Mr.

Breen.

And the other one was the last day of the 80 campaign.

He's in San Diego, and there was a heckler.

And, you know, he'd probably kept his cool the entire campaign.

This is the last day.

And so he just turned to the heckler and said, ah, shut up.

And one of those great unscripted moments.

I was a student, and I think in high school, my brother was at UC campus, and I remember Reagan got very angry, and he said, we're going to have a bloodbath, let's get it over with.

he did he said that and people got very very angry were you um

were you surprised that some uh of the people i i know that at the hoover institution it is you know we all george schultz was iconic but then we also had peter robinson yes who's a good friend of mine and a wonderful interviewer and

it was very it was sometimes touchy because when they wanted to talk about or relate how the uh tear down this wall came it was peters as a young speechwriter, but I think at the initial iteration, George Schultz tabled it.

Yes.

This is

too provocative.

Yeah, I spent time with both of them.

I spent probably a little bit more time with Schultz than Peter, but visited the campus, and then Schultz and I communicated

several times, and he passed away actually before

our last meeting we had scheduled.

But yeah, part of that angst, or not the tension we have in the film, is between the Peter Robinson crowd and the the schultz crowd and of course

the regan crowd that's right yeah and of course uh peter robinson and you know dana rohrebacher's character is also in the in the scenes with peter and you know dana is this obviously you know over-the-top character who's coming in in shorts and uh and uh so peter's in there as well but yeah that's a i think we we showed a lot of different tensions there's obviously the u.s soviet tension But there's also the Reaganite moderate crowd tension.

And so there is a scene in the film where George Schultz comes into the office and he learns Reagan is going to say, tear down this wall, and he says, please, you cannot do this.

And

yeah, George, we talked about that directly.

I was a good friend of Peter Daly, who was one of his early handlers and was an ambassador to the Vatican.

And then there was a guy who was...

I knew him in his 80s.

Jack Parker was vice president of GE, and he was the one that had the initial contract for the GE TV show with Reagan.

He would say that Nancy Reagan really didn't want him to do that.

And

the biggest shock I had, I don't know if you had the experience when you first went up to the Reagan ranch at Santa Barbara, I had been in college when everybody said he had this kitchen cabinet of all these wealthy people, Justin Dart, and

they were just lavishing him with his gifts.

And he has this 600-acre Hearst Castle-like enclave that he didn't earn.

And then I went up there and I saw Romex on the walls.

It was the more sparsely

barren place.

And then you look at the movies that they have there.

He did everything that he said he did.

He worked out with a chainsaw and it was amazing.

Yeah, I think there's a lot to learn from that ranch.

I think there's some truth to the fact that we buy houses that kind of reflect our character.

And in the case of that house, It's very Reagan-esque.

It takes a long time to get to it.

So you really have to make the effort.

It's really like Reagan's personality.

He really hid himself from people in a way.

And you really had to work to get to know him.

In fact, you know, interesting you bring up the house because Ed Meese had given Reagan a gift and Ed Meese had never visited that wrench, one of his closest friends and allies.

And when I told him that the painting you gave Reagan is on his wall, it was the first time that he had heard about that.

Wow.

And so, and I asked Ed, I said, I mean, you're the closest thing to a brother.

And he said, well, but there was only a certain place that I could get to.

I couldn't get beyond a certain place.

Now, he said, we would discuss our kids and things like that, but not a lot of personal stuff.

And Reagan was very guarded in a way.

Who do you think after doing all of this research, who do you think of all the major, was it people like Justice Clark or who was closest to him, do you think?

Yeah, Judge Clark

is probably the closest.

They were very spiritually, even though Clark was Catholic and Reagan Protestant, they were very spiritually aligned.

And And they would often have shorthand conversations with each other.

They would talk about the D P, the divine plan.

And when something would go wrong, or they would remind each other, oh, you know, don't forget the D P is at work, so it's going to be okay, that kind of a thing.

I'd say one of his guys back in Hollywood, sort of the Bill Holden types, he was close to some of those guys.

Bill Holden, uh, I was always remarkable that

that you always got the impression that that Bill Hol Holden was such a sophisticated part of the Hollywood scene, and yet he had a genuine admiration and friendship with Reagan.

He did, he did.

And others, so I would say there was one or two really close.

The rest of them were all friendly but peripheral.

I remember Justice Kennedy, I visited with him in the Supreme Court, and he told some wonderful stories of being Reagan's lawyer in Sacramento when he was governor.

And then he said Reagan called him up for the Supreme Court nomination and he said, Mr.

President, Marion, I don't know anybody in Washington, D.C.

We'd rather not.

And he said, Reagan paused and said, Well, you know me.

And Justice Kennedy, future Justice Kennedy said, okay, fine, we'll come.

What was the biggest surprise that you discovered about Reagan as you got into the research for the film and the book?

Oh, boy, that's a tough one.

I think the biggest realization, so I begin the book with being pulled over in Dixon, Illinois for speeding.

I was there with my wife and four children in a minivan, not knowing I was traveling through Ronald Reagan's hometown.

And they had a wonderful speed trap there.

I had to stay overnight there and go before the judge the next day because I was this horrible speed demon in a minivan.

But I think visiting that town

really

gave me the clear realization that our leaders come from ordinary places and they're often from ordinary families.

I'm foreign-born myself.

I grew up in Japan.

In Japan, the prime minister is often the grandson, the great-grandson of a former prime minister.

And it's true around the world.

And it's true a little bit in the States with with Rose of the FDR and Bush, but really mostly not.

And you think about Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

And these are all people that come from places like Dixon, Illinois.

And when I visited, there just was not a lot there.

I mean, I saw a hotel and a pizza hut and a courthouse, and that was about it.

And you just realize that our heartland gives birth to people like these.

who do extraordinary things.

That was probably my greatest.

I wouldn't say it was a surprise, but it was a greatest

realization.

Were Were you surprised that you,

given that you were not on the normal Hollywood track of distribution production,

how the movie sort of grew and grew and grew and did so well?

Well, we were so pleased.

You know, I would often sometimes read in the press, they were saying this movie has been on the shelf for four years or whatever, and it wasn't true at all.

We were, as we were tweaking, I was screening the film for 3,000 people in 11 states, first of all, just to really tweak it and get it right.

But we were also carefully monitoring COVID.

And in fact, we did polling ourselves to see, are people willing to come back to theaters yet?

And so that was part of our calculation, was waiting for that right moment.

And initially, the numbers were very high.

They didn't want to come back to a theater, something like 50, 60%.

And once the number got to single digits, we got down to about 8% were not comfortable yet coming to theaters.

So that was a key thing, a barometer we were waiting for.

So it was really a combination of those those two things.

But yeah, I mean, we were pleasantly surprised.

The LA Times called it a sleeper hit, and so that was great.

Also, I don't know if you, at the time the movie came out last fall, summer fall, there were just movies bombing all around us.

I mean, it was just shocking.

Megalopolis, this incredible movie, you know, I think he lost like $120 million on it.

So we were kind of, I felt like I was in a war zone watching, you know, bombs go off to my right and my left and kept kind of tiptoeing through there.

So we were thankful to be just

come out alive.

When you think of the past presidential candidates,

of course, the two Trump administrations, the candidacy of Romney, McCain,

the two terms of Bush, W, and then H.W., and then Reagan,

it seems the only president who really wanted to stage a counterrevolution and change the very nature of Washington, and in Reagan's case, both to change the economy and open it up, but also to win the Cold War.

Trump has sort of the same,

I'm not saying they're all at all similar in character or behavior or manner, but they have the same grandiose idea that they're going to not just address individual issues, but change the system

and try to revert back to kind of a nostalgia before

the Progressive Project was so dominant

well you know i think it's i would just also parenthetically add to that that i was uh

you're i'm a little bit younger than you are but not probably not by too much but i was about teenager at the time when regan became president i remember at that time we had had four basically failed presidencies in a row we had johnson couldn't couldn't even run he was in such a poor shape nixon is impeached ford is thrown out and carter is basically thrown out so i remember at the time there was serious talk among smart people that maybe the presidency is too much for one person.

We had very smart people saying that.

You recall that.

Yeah, I remember when

in the convention that Jerry Ford was offering himself as a co-president almost.

Right, right.

And I remember after

I was farming at the time, I had just finished a Ph.D., and all the people who had voted for Reagan were really angry because he went with Paul Volcker.

to break inflation.

And a lot of people were caught in that bad nexus where they had high commodity prices and they had bought land and they were leveraged.

And in early 83,

it looked like, as I remember, there was a poll

run that Mondale was a, excuse me, yeah, Mondale was ahead of Reagan, just for a brief.

And then the economy, I think, grew 7% in the last part of 83, and he just blew them away.

But same thing about...

I don't know if that poll was right in 1980 where I think, and you can remember better than I, the last week, maybe,

maybe 10 days before the October, the November 1980 election, Reagan was in one poll, I think Gallop down by three points to Carter.

It was neck and neck.

Yeah,

it was never easy for him.

Yeah, and people have forgotten, you know, Reagan has the image today of everybody's favorite grandfather.

But I was there.

He was not everybody's favorite grandfather.

There was about 40% of the population that was constantly against him, and very strongly,

burning him in effigy in the streets.

I remember Joan Baez on the

Woodstock.

She just tore into him at Woodstock, long raygan.

And she started, everybody, I was at UC Santa Cruz.

It just opened.

Oh, really?

Yes, that's where I went to school as an undergraduate in 1971.

And then I was a graduate student at Stanford from 75, and I left in 80 the year of the election.

And I guess

kind of a conservative Democratic Party, kind of a a JFK, Pat Brown.

But in 1980, I said to my mom, I can't vote for Jimmy Carter.

And she was very struck by that.

Is that right?

Yeah.

It was very funny about the attractions.

Everybody thought Nancy was plastic.

My mom was

one of the first appellate court judges that was a female in California in the second appellate court,

Fresno County Superior Court, very strong Democrat.

but she had a, she would always remark about the taste of Nancy Reagan.

Everybody felt Nancy, she she liked Nancy Reagan, and my dad liked Reagan as a person.

So

would you consider your parents Reagan Democrats?

I think my father was.

I think my mother had been appointed.

She was a Pat Brown delegate

in the 62 convention, 60 convention.

She was a Hubert Humphrey delegate.

And

yeah, she was appointed by Jerry Brown, but she was appointed because she was a mom with three kids, and she'd gone for, my grandfather had mortgaged his little tiny farm, and he sent all three of his girls,

two sisters, to Stanford in the 30s and 40s.

She'd got a BA at University of Pacific, a BA at Stanford, a JD at Stanford, and then she went home, as everybody did, and raised kids.

And she went back to work as a lawyer at 40.

40.

And when Jerry Brown was getting a lot of criticism for Rosebird and his left-wing appointments, he was looking for women that in this conservative that would be, you know, get through.

People forget that this used to be a Republican state, you know.

And

she had all the credentials.

She'd gone to Stanford.

She was on a, she was grew up on a farm.

She had three kids, and she knew everybody in Fresno County, and they thought that was a safe appointment.

But

it was one of Jerry Brown's, and he reminded every

couple of times I've been critical of him, and he's called me to remind me that I owe him

for a point or.

Yeah.

Well,

just going back to that point,

again, that we don't, even people who dislike Trump or Biden, we don't really talk in terms of is the presidency too much for one person anymore.

I think that Reagan got that monkey off our back, that you don't have to have a foreign policy president, a domestic president, one person can handle it, which is not an insignificant thing.

I mean, if you think of it, after 200 years, we lost confidence in the very idea of the presidency itself.

So I think in a bipartisan way, I would look at that as that he restored the confidence of the nation in the presidency.

Did you think that from what your research and talking to people and the actual filming and writing the book, because we're now obsessed with the health of Joe Biden and things that were...

Did that assassination attempt,

did you think think that markedly slowed him down or did he make a full recovery?

It did slow him.

Yeah, it did slow him down.

It did.

It did.

It did.

Yeah, and certainly I was looking for any sign of Alzheimer's, as people, his critics like to say he had it in the end of his term, but there's no sign of that.

But I would say there's two things.

The shooting slowed him down.

There's no doubt about it.

He just didn't quite have the vigor.

And, you know, one of the guys that I spoke to was his pastor.

His name is Don Mumaw.

And

he said he visited Reagan, and he said, Reagan essentially, he didn't give me the exact wording but he basically said that Reagan considered it almost like a brushback pitch from the Almighty like he'd been a little fool of himself he'd just won this big election and it was a reminder to be humble don't think you're all that I can take your life you know in an instant and and he felt the weight of that that it was it was a reminder

I'm doing this from memory but didn't he make a quip something to the effect he hoped the surgeon was Republican or he made a joke about it yeah we put that in the movie because that's what I remember you did yeah I hope you're all Republicans And the person he said, the main surgeon was actually a Democrat, so it was perfect because then he replied, well, today, sir, we're all Republicans just for the day, basically.

The other person that was really helpful was the surgeon who was there that day.

And he's still alive, believe it or not.

He is.

He's got to be 91 now, and he lives out in Colorado and San Diego.

And so he came, and I spent a good bit of time with him.

And he really felt it was his destiny to be there that day.

Like, almost, that was almost like the purpose for his life.

Is it the consensus now, isn't it, that it was more serious than people thought at the time?

He came closer to dying than we thought from the bullet.

Well, listen, I think that Trump holds the record for the greatest, closest call in presidential history, right?

Literally the turning of the head.

But Reagan was not too far behind.

He was about a quarter of an inch.

If the bullet had moved a quarter of an inch, it came in, it flattened like a dime off the limousine, cut into his suit, and then bounced off of a rib and landed about a third of an inch from the heart.

If it had hit the heart, I think that would have been game over.

And so it was literally right there.

And but yeah,

his name escapes me right now, but the surgeon was there and he basically reached in and moved Reagan's organs around during the procedure, moving the heart, whatever else is there to try to find the bullet, and they located it.

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Mark, you've been involved in columns, books, films, television.

After the success of Reagan, do you envision like an something similar or similar project, film project?

Well, you know, I love biopics, so it's not relegated to presidents.

But

the next project for me will probably be, I'm looking at a couple of rock stars who have great stories of redemption.

But

my interests are very scattered.

I grew up watching Japanese baseball, and there's a great Japanese baseball player, Sadaharuo, who has a great story.

So I'm always looking for stories about extraordinary men who do really interesting things.

And, you know, I noticed that you probably noticed there was some criticism of Reagan of the film.

But I always thought it was interesting that I've never heard the word hagiography used about Jackie Robinson or about

Freddie Mercury.

It's only when it's a politician that leans Reagan's way that suddenly that word gets dusted off.

But I don't think it was the same movie that I made because in our movie we have so many challenges that Reagan faces.

You know, he's dumped by his teenage girlfriend who finds a more interesting man overseas when she's traveling to Europe.

He's dumped by his first wife.

That was very, he took that very hard.

I mean, that was kind of,

she was really pretty blunt with him.

She just didn't want anything to do with politics.

Well, I have to tell you a funny story.

So Mike Reagan came to the premiere, and I listen, I had no idea, Dr.

Anzon, what he was going to say.

He could have been offended by the portrayal of his mother.

I just sort of waited for his comments.

And he came out and he said, you nailed my mom exactly, exactly as she was.

He says, that's the way it was.

In fact, he said, I called my mom after Reagan gave a speech when he was president, and I said, Mom, wasn't that a a great speech?

And he said, he said, my mom said, honey, I didn't like them when he was 40 years ago, and I don't like them now.

So she did not change her opinion.

But, you know, looking at her from a more charitable lens, it's almost like both those women who dumped him couldn't take him to where he needed to go.

I think if he'd married the first teenage girlfriend, he would have ended up as the salesman at the sporting goods outlet in Dixon, Illinois.

And if he had stayed married to Jane, he would have been an actor and not done what he did.

So it was almost like they saw the limitations that they couldn't take him where he needed to go.

If you're going to do a bioepic, you know who was

one of the great American heroes, and there's almost nothing about him.

There's no major biography, is Matthew Ridgway.

He was the savior of Korea, the Korean War.

Of course.

He had a very tragic relationship with MacArthur.

After MacArthur was relieved, of course,

we had the longest retreat in military history of the United States.

And they took Seoul, and then they said,

Who's going to go over there?

And Matthew Ridgway was never been anywhere in Asia.

He was a Latin American specialist.

He had a great record in World War II as a two-star general, airborne.

And so they just sent him over there.

He knew nothing about it.

And

he got to MacArthur, and MacArthur said, it's all yours, Matt.

And then he went back as proconsul.

And then

he went out and pranced all through the front lines.

They called him old iron tits because he had a hand grenade and a mess kit on each breast.

He got hot food.

He made sure the F-86 was coming.

He reassured everybody we could win.

He took Seoul.

He went all the way back to the 38th parallel.

And he inflicted enormous damage.

on the Chinese.

In fact, a lot of people said the Chinese had not intervened in Vietnam because they had suffered over a million casualties in Korea.

It was just brutal.

He had the B-29s and the artillery that just destroyed the Chinese expeditionary army.

And then when they, he was all,

they asked him if he was going to go into the north like MacArthur and get the entire peninsula.

And he said, no.

He said the American people would not support it, and they might support it if he was.

completely victorious in a lightning raid, but they had done that with MacArthur.

And then when you get too far to the north, it gets cold, it gets expansive, you're too close to China and Russia, it's a bad idea.

They called him in during Vietnam and they said, what do you think about going into Vietnam?

Kennedy and Johnson, because he was probably the most distinguished five star.

I think he was a much better general even than Omar Bradley.

And they asked him, and he said, it's a bad idea.

Just what most people had said.

Omar Bradley had said that wrong place, wrong time.

And then when we went in, Johnson called him up, wanted to get out after Tet and said, so don't you think we should pull out?

And he said, nope.

He said,

the only thing worse than a bad war is losing a bad war.

It was so true.

Yeah, it was so true.

And he lived

96.

He had a very tragic life.

He was married three times, and his only son was killed in a freak accident.

But I didn't realize that Reagan had lost a child.

Was that a premature birth?

She died the day she was born.

Yeah.

Christine.

And that was probably the final

nail in the coffin of their marriage.

They were divorced right after that, weren't they?

Shortly after that.

Right.

And did she remarry Jane Wyman, but

did she never had children after that with her next?

No, she never had children.

Of course, she went on to be on Falcon Crest and had a great career after winning two Oscars.

And, you know, it's funny because Dennis Quaid,

when I chose Dennis, I didn't realize all the parallels between him and Reagan.

But they both had wives who sort of outshone them for a while.

And Dennis talked about how he used to go down to New York City and down the street, people would be screaming her name instead of his.

And

they both had fathers who were alcoholic and mothers who were very religious.

So it was really interesting.

Now, Dennis had a bit of a bout with drugs at one point, so there's a little bit of a

darker side there than Reagan did.

Reagan never got into that.

But otherwise, a lot of parallels, and actually, I was gratified to hear Dennis told me later that he and his dad heard the 64 speech that Reagan gave in real time.

We were driving down the highway and his dad was pounding the

car saying, isn't the rod, go get him, Ronnie, that kind of a thing.

And so Dennis had a real visceral connection and his mother passed away just before we began shooting, but she was so happy that he was going to take the role.

And he said, you know, I learned a lot from Dennis about courage.

He said,

when you first called me, he said, I had a

tinge of fear go up my spine, but I've learned in life, when I have that, I need to do the thing that I'm afraid of.

Was there a reaction to his role from his former?

Had he been kind of a liberal, apolitical or on the left side?

They all are on the left side, but he had made his peace with Hollywood.

Is that true?

Yeah, when you get to his age, I think you care less and less about people's opinions.

And he's moved from L.A.

to Nashville primarily.

But he didn't really have

great fear about it.

And, you know, I don't know if you noticed, but sort of against my wishes, he came out in the middle of the campaign and endorsed Trump,

which was fine.

But, you know, from my perspective, I already had John Voight who was playing that role, right?

So I didn't need a second person.

But, you know, the last time I tried to tell 70-year-old people what to do, it didn't go very well.

But he felt strongly about it, and I respected that decision.

He went on Pierce Morgan's show and said Trump is, I think he said, they call him an a-hole, but he's my a-hole.

And so I think I'm going to vote for him.

John Voigt is a very good guy.

I know know him a little bit.

I always liked him.

Yeah, John and I,

we talked about this role for probably 10 years.

We were waiting for our cars after an event, and we talked about it way back when.

And so I was thinking about possibly another role for him, but then I realized that this Victor role, the Soviet agent, was really perfect.

And when John and I went to lunch and talked about it some more, and I realized he had been to the Soviet Union pre and after

the fall of the wall.

And he just had great observations.

He said that during communism, he said the people's eyes were dead.

There was just no life in their beings.

And afterwards, they came alive again.

And so

he's such a, when I was, I used to teach a lot at Pepperdine as a guest graduate professor.

And he would call me, we would go to dinner in Malibu.

And I had a daughter.

who's passed away at 26 from leukemia.

But

yeah, she was a graduate student there.

And one time there was a Pepperdine, there was an event I had to speak at, and he was there.

And of course, it was at a private home of maybe 60 people.

And I came in with my daughter, because she was at Pepperdine when I was teaching.

And as soon as he, we were there, and as soon as he walked in, everybody just rushed him.

And my daughter felt that she needed, so she went into the anteroom by herself.

And she could still hear my talk.

And John looked at me and said, is that your daughter?

And I said, yes.

Yes.

And then when I started speaking, he got up from his chair, walked over and sat next to her the whole time,

had a conversation.

I've always liked him.

Yeah, he's just a remarkable actor.

I keep reminding myself of his versatility.

Right.

I told him I had seen the champ when I was 11 years old or something.

And so we had a lot of fun.

But

he took the role very, very seriously.

He practiced his Russian endlessly with Russian linguists, with our other actor.

And then when we arrived on set, we had a COVID outbreak, and so he had to stay for 10 days.

And I said, John, do you want to go back to Los Angeles?

He said, no, I'm just going to stay here and rehearse.

So he spent the 10 days leading up to his beginning.

And he really thought about being in a wheelchair for the movie, but then he decided he was going to walk in a very stooped way instead.

And so he really put a lot of time and effort and energy into it.

John is what, 88 now or something like that?

I think he's 85, I believe.

85.

He's had a remarkable career after 70.

It's just really inspiring.

He really is.

Yeah, I'm 71.

I thought, wow, some of the best things that John Boyd has done is after he was 70.

And he's in great shape.

You know, in the movie, he appears to be stooped over, but he's not.

In real life, of course.

I noticed that.

I was thinking that was pretty, that was part of the acting.

What's Mark, what's on the immediate agenda right now for you in the next year?

Yeah, well, we've got the, I'm sort of still supervising all the international release of the film, so Universal has been a great partner.

Of course, people can watch it at Amazon and

iTunes and all that.

And believe it or not, people are still buying DVDs.

We had one group, if you know

the evangelist Greg Lurie, his group bought 20,000 copies of that DVD Blu-ray.

And so people still buy those.

You know, it's funny because people that don't sort of trust the powers that be think that someday when everything is digital, they're going to be edited and messed with.

So they want to have their own copy.

I joke that we should probably have VHSs made, too.

But people like to have their own copy at home.

Is there areas in the world where you think there's more interest, like Eastern Europe, for example?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Poland,

you know,

the countries that were freed

under Reagan's rule.

And our office here is actually about three miles from Reagan's parents' grave, ironically.

And so

his parents are just up the street here.

And, you know, I often think about her.

And she was a really remarkable person.

And she was really the architect of a lot of, if you watch the movie, you'll see that the church that he grew up in, the pastor was a very strong anti-communist.

And Reagan's mother was very interested in foreign missions.

And so really, it's almost like his mother, Nellie, sort of ruled the world during that period when he was president because it was really, she was the architect, I would say, of who he became.

Nixon's mother was the same way.

That's right,

Hannah Nixon.

She was a strong Quaker, wasn't she?

Yeah, I would say that Nixon got away from her brand of faith in college.

And in fact, his senior thesis, he wrote about how his mother had warned him that when you go to college, the professors are going to try to strip you of your faith and you must resist.

And Nixon says that he instead chose to take a different route of believing that Jesus wasn't the Son of God, but his soul mingled with the...

soul of the Almighty or something like that.

So he ended up kind of fulfilling her prediction that she was hoping wouldn't happen.

Was it true that, oh, excuse me.

Yeah.

Was it true that Reagan was magnanimous toward Nixon because he was sort of still in the post-water gate, and yet he was advising people and writing

simply about foreign policy?

He was very interested in the Cold War.

And, of course,

he and Kissinger hadn't taken a different approach of accommodation.

Right.

Did Reagan talk to him regularly?

And if he did,

was he sympathetic to Nixon?

There was a lot of controversy at the moment that Kissinger was going to try to dominate Reagan's foreign policy.

So I think there was a lot of pressure on Reagan to sort of stay away from the Kissinger crowd.

And, of course, the conservatives who didn't like that wing tried to keep away from them as well.

So there wasn't a lot of connection.

However, Nixon did not, I would say there was a part of Nixon that really didn't respect Reagan.

He thought he was a bit of a shallow actor, Hollywood actor.

And so I think that was, I I think he came to respect him more as the presidency went on, but certainly in the early parts and when he was governor, there wasn't a lot of respect on Nixon's part toward Reagan.

Did you get the, I remember when George H.W.

Bush took over and he said

a kinder, gentler nation, and Nancy said kinder than

what.

Right.

That relation was a little bit more, was tenser, wasn't it?

Yeah, there are some aspects of, you know, whether it's LBJ and JFK or even Obama and Biden, there's a certain clinical aspect.

These are not best pals.

I would say Reagan in his heart of hearts, remember in 76 he picked Schweiker

from Pennsylvania.

He was a liberal too, wasn't he?

Well, he was a liberal, but he was pro-life.

So that was really important.

And, you know, one of the guys that I spoke to, James Baker, this was really a surprise to me because James Baker is obviously more of a moderate figure.

But he said when Reagan called down to offer the presidency to the vice president of the Bush, he had one condition.

And, you know, you're thinking as a historian, of course, you're thinking, well, what could that be?

Is it

Soviet Union, whatever?

And he said it was abortion.

And he wanted to know if Bush could change his position to Reagan's on abortion.

And Bush said yes.

And that was the transaction that day.

And that really surprised me.

It also surprised me coming from Bush.

Right.

That

was the piece that Bush made.

And of course, then subsequently, the Bush,

it's generally thought that the Bush boys are pro-life and the the Bush ladies are pro-choice.

So that was kind of forced on them by Ronald Reagan.

But it was an important issue to him.

I think he really felt like he had been burned when he was governor of California and they passed the Therapeutic Abortion Act.

And he really felt responsible for that.

And so that was a different thing.

That was the most liberal bill at the time that he signed.

I got a lot of criticism for that.

Well, you know, they promised him that there would be an exception for the health of the mother.

Yeah.

But health of the mother came to mean all sorts of things.

And I think think there was also a veto-proof majority in place at that point.

So he realized he really had no choice but to sign it and hope for the best.

But he really felt burned by that.

And, you know, there are times in Reagan's career, if you've noticed in the film,

there's a moment on the airplane where Nancy Reagan kind of yells at him in a Nancy Reagan way.

And by the way, you'll see our actress, Penelope Emilly, she turns around to see if anybody else is there.

And that was exactly how it was.

I was told by their aides that she would talk very tough with them, but only if nobody else was there.

She would never do it among other people.

But there's a moment in the plane where she says, you've got to fight.

You cannot go through and just wander through this Iran country.

They're going to get you.

And I think from the perspective of the growth of a character, that's the moment where he goes from being Nelly, the optimistic Nellie's son, to being the more measured Nancy Reagan's husband.

where

she is always looking out for who is out to get him and who has his interests at heart.

Because he did sign some deals in his life that he probably would have regretted later, the Therapeutic Abortion Act.

He probably regretted the immigration thing that he signed because they had promised him that in exchange for 3 million legalizations, the border would be closed.

Of course, we know that never happened.

And so he wasn't immune to making deals that he could get

snookered by his opponents.

Yeah, I had a polite debate once with Al Simpson, the Simpson Mazzoliak.

Oh, in 86.

Yeah, I think it was a mistake because they did their,

as you said,

they were willing to consider amnesties,

but the other side never really agreed to control the border as they had promised.

What he did get was the love of a lot of Mexican Americans.

I still run into Mexican Americans who say our family is here because of that 86 act, and they credit Ronald Reagan.

I think also the vaccine bill that he signed,

I'm just guessing, but I feel like he would have later regretted that because you're taking away the market forces at work, and that doesn't sound very Reagan-esque to me.

Everybody should be responsible and to exempt certain companies from any consequences of their behavior.

It doesn't sound very Reagan-esque to me.

I've noticed that too about Reagan.

I live in an area that's about 90% Mexican-American, and I have Mexican-American members of my family, in-laws, et cetera, I've had.

And they had the same idea that Reagan was a strong leader as Trump.

They had the same,

I was remarking to my wife,

in the last year, if I've gone in town and say I've been accosted to talk to people, maybe 200, I have not seen one Mexican-American male over the age of 50 that wasn't wildly enthusiastic about Trump.

And I remember a lot of our friends voted for Reagan as well, because they felt that he was a strong anti-communist leader and he was pretty conservative on social issues.

I was going to ask you one final kiss.

We have all of this criticism that we always consider, I guess, ahistorically is unprecedented, that Trump is Hitler.

I can remember when John Glenn said about George W.

Bush,

that he was Hitler-like of all people.

But

how would you calibrate the animosity toward Reagan, his tax cuts, the Cold War?

I remember when they made the, didn't...

Hollywood make a movie the day after when he was trying the Persian-Mischel deal and everybody thought that he was going to blow up there was a lot.

Do you think it was in any way comparable to the hatred of Trump we see from the left in those days or not?

It's comparable.

I would say that

Reagan was

fairly genteel.

Yes, but he wasn't as crude or as coarse as he was.

Right.

So in some ways, Trump has earned more of this.

But, you know, it's also important to remember that in addition to the presidency itself, we talked about that earlier being under questioning.

You know, Reagan had no infrastructure.

There was no talk radio.

There was no Fox News.

It was literally him against the world.

And when you think of it in those terms, you think about all the things that have happened in conservative media.

I would say that conservative media saved George W.

Bush's candidacy.

Remember when they were doing that thing about

his military record and 60 Minutes did something?

And then conservative media came and corrected it.

Yeah.

And there was no.

Absolutely.

Power Lines showed the Microsoft on the fake but accurate Dan Rather memos and things.

That was conservative media really helped him.

Yeah, so there really was all Reagan could do was to go on the radio and say, call your congressman.

And, you know, that was the only tool in his toolkit.

I mean, imagine if he had had that infrastructure, if he'd had the Fox and the Rush and all that stuff.

So when you think of it that way, it was remarkable.

But yeah, he definitely, again, I wanted to make sure, if you noticed in the film, I have almost an entire minute of all the protesters that would have coalesced against Reagan.

I wanted people to understand this is not your favorite grandpa.

This was people that really hated him with a passion.

And I got permission from the group Genesis to let us use their song Land of Confusion in that scene

because that's the prototypical anti-Reagan song.

And the video actually has sort of Muppets, Reagan and Nancy character Muppets or puppets that are there.

And so it's really important.

We kind of gave, I wanted to give voice to all the criticism, whether it was on AIDS, military.

Everybody had their reason for disliking Reagan.

But

Reagan and Trump are very different creatures.

One is from New York and has fought his way.

Think of what Trump had to deal with.

To build a building, he's probably fighting the mob and

politicians and city officials and unions and unions.

Absolutely.

All that stuff.

And so he's learned a punch.

And Reagan,

he's from the middle of Illinois.

He comes from genteel, polite people.

He fought, but he fights in a very, very different way.

I think Reagan had the skill of defeating his opponent.

I have a line in the film where Gorbachev says to Reagan, they say about you, you pick my pocket and make me feel good about it.

I think there's something to that.

The fact that Reagan and Bush didn't issue statements, Reagan didn't issue a statement the day the Soviet Union collapsed, that's something.

You know, there's something about letting your opponent quietly and with dignity lose in a spectacular fashion, but not the dance on their grave.

And again, Trump is a counterpuncher.

Reagan would absorb punches.

And there was a Dana Rohrbacher told me one time they were landing in a Central American country, and they had just learned that upon landing, the leader of that country was going to attack Reagan.

And Rohrebacher, being the sort of St.

Peter type figure, said, Well, let me write a speech attacking him right back, sir.

And Reagan said, Dana, we're going to do just the opposite.

I'm going to, when I land, I'm going to praise him.

He'll be so ashamed he won't give the speech he was planning to give attacking me.

And he said, that's what happened.

And so it's a different kind of toughness.

They're both tough.

I would say that I think Trump is accomplishing things that Reagan only dreamed of accomplishing.

Yes.

Because I'll give you an example.

Reagan wanted to recognize Taiwan when he ran the campaign in 79 and 80.

And once he was elected, you know, the Washington minds came around and said, sir, you just can't do that.

I mean, it's a nice thought, but we can't upend the entire international structure by recognizing Taiwan.

And so he backed off on that one.

Those are the kinds of compromises that Reagan made.

Certainly in Trump's second term, he doesn't have those voices around around him saying, sir, we can't do A, B, or C.

He's just sort of doing it.

He's got force multipliers this time around, all of the cabinet people.

What's different to me about them is that

they're both counter-revolutionaries, and Reagan tried to upend the orthodox approach to the Soviet Union under detente and the idea that we always had to have a 70% tax rate with deductions and all that.

Yeah, and Trump, I'm sorry, go ahead.

He liberated the economy.

But what Trump is doing, I've never seen before because he has a policy, you know, close the border and

doge and beef up the military, but he's actually addressing the sources of liberal institutional power.

And I think it's kind of sort of like all the issues he ran on, Harris, Biden were on the wrong side.

They were 70, 30 or 60, 40 issues, the border, transgender, all of them.

But they had still been able to institutionalize that progressive agenda because they control the universities, they control the media, they control the foundations, they controlled the bureaucracy, the administrative state.

And when you look at what he's doing, he's going after the blue chip law firms that were pretty partisan.

He's going after the universities that kind of like a rock you turn over, nobody can believe what they've been doing.

And

he's going after the foundations.

He's going to start taxing foundation income, I think, over $5 billion.

So it's almost a systematic

appraisal of how the left got so much power when their agenda was not so popular.

And he's trying to address all of that.

And that's, I think, the outrage that they have.

They understand that now.

There's also a critical difference between the two, and that is on trade.

You know, Trump took out a full page out, I think it was in the New York Times in 87 or so, and he was not a fan of Reagan's trade policies.

And you're seeing him implement today the kind of trade policies that he wanted.

And

from Trump's perspective, Reagan was taken advantage of by all these countries who allowed for these and allowed for them to have unfair numbers.

And so that is a big difference.

And Trump hasn't changed.

I would say this is Trump's driving passion over the last 40 years.

You watch these interviews with Oprah or on various talk shows in the 80s, and it's the same thing.

It's literally a Johnny OneNote.

on tariffs.

And this is, he has lived to implement his passion.

And that's,

from his perspective, it's a correction of Reagan being too lax and too willing to take advantage of.

It's very funny because, you know, I work at the Hoover Institution where we're kind of the libertarian par excellence on everybody that's an economist is very critical.

But

Trump has, I don't know where he developed it.

Maybe it was the reliance on union workers and the building trades, but he has a genuine empathy or connection with working people.

And he's really altered the Republican Party into a middle-class workers' party.

It's what Romney was missing in the 12 campaigns.

He was, absolutely.

Right.

You think of Romney, and by the way, Reagan got that skill, I would say, probably from the GE lecture circuit,

spending time with workers on the floor of the GE plants around the country.

That was invaluable for him.

Not that he wasn't in touch, but, you know, he was a Hollywood guy for many years, and it's easy to lose touch with average people.

But don't you think Reagan also had

not that he ate Big Macs like Trump, but he had simple tastes compared to the Bushes or Romney or others.

Yeah, you go to that ranch that we were talking about earlier, and you literally have two single beds zip-tied together.

I know.

And you're thinking, can't you just go down to the store and get a mattress for you and your wife and you?

I thought I saw a wire in the closet didn't have door.

It was just kind of open with a wire hanging clothes or something.

It was.

Nancy must have hated it, didn't she?

Well, you know, yeah, you must must really love your man to be willing for Nancy to live up there with all nature.

And she wants to be in Beverly Hills having lunch with her friends, the kitchen cabinet wives, right?

The fact that she allowed

was up there with him, it's huge.

But there's also, you know, there's also something there about

it's an odd thing because it's a very, very small place, as you know, from having been there.

It's not the place like where Bush would invite his 35 grandchildren or whatever it is to.

And so there is something about that place that says, this is for Nancy and I.

You can come and visit us, you know, to the family, but hey, you know, you got to go home at 7 o'clock.

There's room for the maid quarters, and that's it.

So, after he died, did she ever go back up there at all?

No.

Then, you know, the question was what to do with it.

There was some talk of developers coming in, and the Young Americas Foundation purchased it for, I think, $4 million.

So, they've kept it exactly the way it was.

And for us to shoot there, for Dennis and Penelope to do those scenes in the kitchen where they're deciding whether to run or not, in literally the place it happened that hasn't changed in 45 years, it was really kind of eerie.

I think also I took Dennis up there when we were first talking about the role, and that really convinced him to do it.

He really just kind of felt Reagan's presence and his spirit there as he walked around the ranch.

Well, Mark, it's been fascinating.

Where, if people want to purchase the

download the movie or read your new book, Making Reagan, or do you have a website that we're going to go to?

Yeah, it's all

it's

Reagan.movie or ReaganFilm.com is our landing page.

And then, of course, at Amazon is a great place to purchase it.

In fact, I purchased my own movie at Amazon.

You know, I wanted to test this out, Dr.

Hansen, because people aren't going to the theaters as much.

And so I paid $19.99 back then and downloaded my own film.

And I get it.

I can watch this film a thousand times now.

I can rewind and pause and go get popcorn

versus one time in a theater.

So I understand why people are doing it.

And then the book is

making Reagan.

It's also at Amazon.

And is it out on cable TV now, isn't it?

Not yet.

So it goes in cycles.

So the first window is at Star, the Stars channel.

And then once that ends, it'll go to others, and then eventually it'll be on, as you said, cable.

But we're releasing in Japan and we've released in Poland and across the world.

So that's kind of our next step is monitoring all that.

I did a screening for the members of the Japanese parliament a couple of weeks back and

that was a lot of fun.

So it's interesting.

I have to tell you one last thing.

I watched it,

I can read some Japanese, so I watched it with Japanese subtitles, and for the first time, you know, there was a line where Reagan says, we're the greatest country in the world.

And I thought, what must it be like for other countries to constantly hear Americans saying we're the greatest country in the world?

And so I saw it through their Japanese eyes.

So I asked one of my Japanese friends, how does that make you guys feel?

And they said, oh, we're used to it.

It happens all the time, and we're used to it by now.

Well, the only person president I think that didn't say that was Obama.

Remember, he said, we're only exceptional to the degree that Greece and

Greece and the United Kingdom think they're exceptional.

He got the same thing.

Every country thinks they're the greatest, basically.

Yeah.

No, the rest of the world hears it from us all the time.

But the Japanese are used to it, so that's a good thing, I guess.

Well, thank you very much, Mark, and everybody.

The movie, as you know, is Reagan, and the book is Making Reagan.

And we've been talking with Mark Joseph.

And thank you for spending some time with him.

Thanks so much for having me.