Happy birthday, Ronald Reagan. What making a movie about our 40th president taught me about his greatness

Editor’s note: President Ronald Reagan was born on February 6, 1911. The following essay is excerpted from 'Making Reagan.'

Shooting a movie during a pandemic is truly a surreal experience like no other. Part of the fun of making a movie is the joy of being together—of going to restaurants and local haunts and generally hanging out with cast and crew. 

When I first landed in Guthrie, Oklahoma, I went straight to our COVID Coordinator, Emily O’Banion, and asked her what the rules were for my stay there. The conversation went like this:

'Can I go to a restaurant?'

'No.'

'What about Walmart?'

'That’s absolutely the most dangerous place of all.'

'How am I supposed to eat?' I asked.

She just stared at me.

Eventually, we made a plan, and Walmart groceries were delivered to my door daily. We were living in a rental—my 92- year-old mother, my wife, my kids, a caregiver, and an assistant. While I was off at work, the kids were doing Zoom school, and we were trying hard to make normal out of chaos. 

There were plenty of signs around describing the kind of town Guthrie once was: lots of pubs, references to it being a place of refuge during Prohibition. As I walked, I came upon our assassination scene. The Washington Hilton hotel wall near the spot where Reagan almost lost his life was perfectly re-created by our design team. The next day, Dennis Quaid, who was starring at the 40th president, was in front of the wall reenacting the amazing moment and we were off to the races.

Dennis had a long day that began with that scene and then moved to a variety of pickups, including a talk with his aging mother Nelle, who was played by an old friend of mine, Jennifer O’Neill. The scene was a beautiful one that found 40-year-old Reagan telling his mom he was washed up, divorced, and feeling lost.

As Dennis and I discussed this scene, he said he wanted to change some of the lines. I asked him if he had a similar conversation with his mom and he quickly said yes, around the time he and Meg Ryan were getting a divorce. 'Let’s just riff off that,' I told him, and he did so brilliantly, telling Jennifer’s character Nelle that he hasn’t lived a perfect life in Hollywood and that maybe he can’t do the great things she told him he was going to do someday. 

After we were shut down by COVID for a second time the previous fall and we had finished our shoot and returned to L.A., I felt sometimes as though I had PTSD. But now I was looking forward to finishing strong.

We moved on to the final scene of the night and Dennis’s last of our shoot, when Reagan was in Las Vegas. This was the moment when Reagan was at the end of his rope, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer, as voices from his promising past swirled around in his head. The scene culminated with him throwing the beer bottle against a wall backstage at the show he was forced to perform to pay his mortgage. It was a scene we had crafted carefully.

I had called up his old friend Pat Boone and asked him: If Reagan was down and out in Vegas, how low could he go? Would he have reached for the bottle? Would he have thrown it in anger? 

I had posed the same question to a Reagan biographer who had assured me that Reagan would have done no such thing and that Reagan had specifically said of the Vegas show that it was difficult but still part of God’s plan for him. 

Pat would have none of it, and we went with his note. Even if Reagan later saw it as part of the Divine Plan, in the moment it would have been a huge disappointment, and yes, he might have taken a drink and lost his cool. 

So that’s how we played it. 

It was near midnight when we finished, and as Dennis walked down the stairs, we hugged one last time. We had been on a long, arduous journey, through countless peaks and valleys, and now we were nearly finished.