What if they hate it?
Double that dread when you’ve lived that nightmare. Which I have.
And so it was, the night REAGAN premiered on Hollywood Boulevard at the historic Chinese Theater, where the shoe and handprints of the movies’ Greatest of All Time wait silently for your offering. I wrote the screenplay for this movie, which doubles down again on that dread, because all screenwriters know, if a movie with the likes of Dennis Quaid, Jon Voight and Penelope Ann Miller doesn’t work… it’s probably on you.
Lights dim. Movie rolls. Two hours later, the fear and loathing give way to joyful tears as our hero rides away into the sunset as a hero should, and the audience rises to their feet, applauding through their own tears.
And it happens again, in another premiere event in another city.
And yet again, in a third city. This time with an impromptu receiving line at the back of the theater, with people thanking me and director Sean McNamara, and again, tears of joy flowing. As the movie opened nationwide, my phone and those of my Band of Brothers who spent nearly two decades of our lives creating and producing it were blowing up with messages from all over the country, reporting the same response.
It was as wonderful as it sounds.
And then I opened up my first newspaper review.
And then a second one. And a third.
Apparently, I, and lots of Standing-O, tearful people around the country are just plain wrong.
“The worst movie ever made,” is how one of the more prominent critics put it. And more than eighty percent of his critic brethren tracked by Rotten Tomatoes agreed with him.
While at the same time, going into our fourth weekend holding in the top ten, the same rating service was reporting an astounding 98% positive viewer rating, pretty much their highest ever.
So. Critics: 18%. Viewers 98. As my kids would say, What’s up with THAT?
Now on the surface, this shouldn’t surprise anyone. And it didn’t surprise us. The Hero of this film, Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States represents the gold standard of American conservatism. It’s not news to anyone, the mainstream press and certainly Hollywood stand staunchly on the other end of that spectrum. So it’s easy to shrug off the vitriol and just plain meanness as more of the same of our cultural divide, on ideological lines. 82% of them hating it is a tad extreme, but not all that unexpected.
But I think there’s something deeper going on here, and should give us all— liberals and conservatives— pause, as we look at what this movie has apparently laid bare in America’s cultural divide:
A tiny minority of people speaking from gigantic and very powerful platforms either don’t believe in heroes, or can’t look past their own biases to know one when they see one.
I don’t write movies for critics, but I do learn from them. Even the mean and petty ones. Now an artist should never defend or explain his work, it should speak for itself to any viewer. And believe me. There are a dozen things I wish I’d written better in this one.
Still, I smiled at one of the nastier reviews when the writer used the word, Hagiography in his evisceration of REAGAN. The first time I’d ever heard this term was from an Academy Award winning actor who was considering signing onto the movie a few years back, as he dressed down my script for an hour, in one of the more painful “Thank you sir, may I have another” experiences of my career. He’s one of my favorite actors and a brilliant man, and he was right about pretty much everything…
But he wasn’t right about that. And neither was the critic.
And with respect, I feel it is my duty to this critic and that Academy Award Winner to explain the difference, between a Hagiography and a Heroic Story.
Hagiography is a literary form. It’s been around about 2000 years, it refers to the biography of a saint. With all the saint’s flaws, failures and weaknesses whitewashed away into semi-divinity, as he or she walks the planet among us mere mortals.
The Heroic Story has been around as long as human beings have been telling stories. Its central theme is the flesh and blood man or woman rising above the flaws, weaknesses, mistakes and failures common to us all, to fight a battle bigger than himself, even at the cost of laying down his life for his friends, family or country.
It is, at its core, the true meaning and beauty of art: depicting the finest of human virtues, and until about 60 years ago, the most common storytelling form in all media. But tastes have apparently changed in this post-modern Third Millennium.
Or, have they?
If we really want to understand something like a 98-18 Rotten Tomatoes score between movie critics and “real” people (sorry, couldn’t resist), we need to first understand the context. And that requires a little history.
Most everyone agrees that the culture revolution of the 1960s changed everything in America. Much of it, like the civil rights movement, speaking out against a terrible war, landing on the Moon, and rock and roll, was very, very good.
But some of it?… not so much.
Among this latter category, was the rise of the Anti-Hero in literature, music and film. And the Anti-Hero was the embodiment of the Sixties Youth Movement— the Baby Boomers as they came of age, questioning, protesting and rejecting the core values of the country; like marriage and family, the Generation Gap (“Don’t trust anyone over thirty!”), Republican Democracy, Judeo-Christianity in the public square, school and airwaves, and even God Himself.
And a new wave of movies reflected this, celebrating the Anti-Hero, and/or deconstructing American traditions and values. Films like Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde, A Clockwork Orange and The Wild Bunch took the baton from Rebel Without a Cause and On The Waterfront from the decade before, and the form really took off in the 1970s.
To be clear, this is not a critique of these individual films, they are all very good, as are many just like it. Some made by the greatest filmmakers of all time.
But here’s the point. Underlying this form is a cynical, nihilistic and pessimistic view that permeates all of those once-cherished values listed above. And this became the prevailing view among the academic, artistic and literary set, especially on the American campus. It was cool. While a positive worldview of heroes, family, Judeo-Christian values and America itself was largely looked down upon as corny, dated, square… the definition of uncool.
I went to a major American university film school in the 1980s, and with the exception of one professor I can recall, this viewpoint was represented by every one of my instructors. Especially the ones teaching film criticism.
And I might as well just say it. They were all from the Left, and they hated Reagan. (They also hated most of my student films, but having re-watched a few of them recently, they were absolutely right on that).
And today’s film critics studied under them.
So of course REAGAN’s 18% score among them was not surprising. What was surprising was the 98% Viewer Score. Included in that set were plenty of folks with a D on their Voter Registration card, many of whom texted me with the kindest words I’ve received in my entire career.
Because they got it. This is not a Republican movie. It’s an American movie. A Hero’s Journey, not a Hagiography. It’s far from saintly or perfect, it’s got plenty of flaws, weaknesses, and even a failure or two.
Just like its Hero. But just like him, it showed up, and did the best it could with what it had, cool or uncool. Because that’s what heroes do.
And those people standing and applauding in the theater, with genuine tears? They believe in Heroes. They know one when they see one. They remember a time when they were very rightly revered, regardless of their politics, and they long for that time again.
That’s who I write movies for. That’s who we made this one for.
And we’ll do it again. Soon.
Writer, Producer and Director, Howie Klausner is founder and president of I-40 Studios, a Film and Television production and development company. Author of 60 screenplays and three books, most recent credits include REAGAN, starring Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller and Jon Voigt, releasing worldwide in 2024.
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer.
