Our 2024 Reagan film received widespread acclaim from moviegoers (albeit not from ideologically motivated critics) for the roles rendered by several key actors. They included Dennis Quaid as Reagan, David Henrie as young Reagan, Penelope Ann Miller as Nancy Reagan, Jon Voight as Viktor the KGB agent, and Mark Moses as Bill Clark, just for starters. Quaid pulled off an astonishing feat that film enthusiasts and Reaganites alike thought difficult to impossible. He managed to capture the Gipper in a way that didn’t come off as a caricature, as corny, as almost a parody. Many feared that no actor would be able to do that. But Quaid did it.
Dennis Quaid was terrific as Ronald Reagan.
As someone who read every line of every script over the many years it took to get the film to the big screen (the film is based on my 2006 book on Reagan), I was also apprehensive about who would play Nancy Reagan. The much-maligned first lady would be a tall task for the best actresses. Candidly, I was not hopeful. But upon watching Penelope Ann Miller in the role, I was stunned, blown away. She was superb as Nancy Reagan. I couldn’t imagine a better performance.
Others have shared that same sentiment with me: “I gotta tell ya, the gal who played Nancy stole the show.” Everyone agreed that Miller was great.
In interviews and at screenings, I had my own scripted line about Miller’s performance. “If Penelope had played Michelle Obama rather than Nancy Reagan,” I began, “she would win an Academy Award. In fact, the damned thing would already be gift-wrapped on her front porch.”
The audience always laughed when I said that because everyone knows it’s true. If Penelope had played Michelle in a major Obama biopic in 2024, the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress would be hers, tied in a pretty pink bow. We all know that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is packed with left-wing ideologues who elevate race, gender, and sexual orientation above art. Quality is trumped by “diversity,” narrowly defined according to Academy members’ ideological preferences.
But only recently have I realized just how bad that’s the case.
It turns out that Reagan, like some 100-plus other films, was disqualified for Academy Award nominations because it didn’t meet the Academy’s bigoted “diversity” requirements. Interestingly, had Penelope Ann Miller played Michelle Obama, she would have been automatically eligible for an award. But because she played the white Nancy Reagan, well, she would need a lot of help. That is, the surrounding cast would need to check enough of the Academy’s DEI boxes, regardless of whether such characters were historically accurate.
For the record, our film was not absent of ethnic and religious diversity. I was personally quite proud of two scenes that I’ve written about and often emphasized in the life of Ronald Reagan.
One was a scene in which the young Dutch Reagan brings home to his parent’s house two black Eureka College football players who had been denied a hotel because of their skin color. Those boys were William Franklin “Burgie” Burghardt and Jim Rattan, the former of whom Reagan long called his “closest friend,” right up until Burgie’s death in August 1981.
What’s so attractive about that scene is that it was genuine. It wasn’t shoehorned into the script. Ronald Reagan talked about the episode countless times in his long life. It deeply impacted him. We wanted it in the film because it was central to Reagan’s formation.
Of course, the typical left winger, obsessed with identity politics, would learn about such an episode and force it into the film like a racial quota — to check a DEI box. Our inclusion was natural, real, and authentic. “DEI” is about coercion. Our scene was about truth.
Another touching scene comes when a Russian Jewish dissident named B.E. Kertchman speaks at young Reagan’s Dixon, Illinois church in November 1928. Kertchman talked about the persecution of religious believers in Bolshevik Russia.
That was another scene I found personally gratifying because I’m the guy who discovered Kertchman’s appearance. I uncovered it in the archives in the basement of that Dixon church in the summer of 2001. When I met the actor who played Kertchman on the movie set in Guthrie, Oklahoma — the delightful Latvian actor Elya Baskin — I pointed my finger at him and joked, “Hey, Kertchman, I found you! You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me.” He laughed.
Again, the inclusion of the Russian Jewish character was authentic. He wasn’t contrived to click a “diversity” box. Hollywood’s woke mob, however, demands contrived characters.
Apparently, we don’t have enough of them in the Reagan movie. One wonders how we could’ve corrected that. Did we need to have George Shultz don a wig and a dress and moan to Mikhail Gorbachev that he was suffering from “gender dysphoria”? Should we have made Margaret Thatcher “Latinx”? Should we have made Dick Darman and James Baker gay lovers?
What kind of madness is this?
I think of the pains we went through to make the film historically accurate, to not make up things. Apparently, that’s what the woke want.
One more thought: Our film is dominated by strong female roles. The figures most impactful in Reagan’s life were Nancy and his mother Nelle. Nelle is played beautifully in her younger years by Amanda Righetti and in her older years by the wonderful Jennifer O’Neill of Summer of ’42 fame. (The casting of O’Neill is itself a fascinating story, as captured in an exclusive interview with O’Neill by our Leonora Cravotta.) The movie also features fine performances by Lesley-Ann Downe as Margaret Thatcher, Mena Suvari as Jane Wyman, and others. Here again, these women were in the script naturally, not because we insisted on “including more women.”
One might think this strong female presence would score a few points with the Academy’s progressives. But no. These aren’t the right kind of women; today’s woke want women “of color” or women who are actually biological men. The new cultural revolutionaries have altogether new conceptions of womanhood.
Alas, shifting from the 2024 Reagan movie, pause and think about the long list of epic films that have won Academy Awards but today would be disqualified because of these discriminatory “diversity” standards.
How about Schindler’s List (1993)? Steven Spielberg’s gut-wrenching account of the Holocaust would not meet today’s Academy standards. Spielberg would have needed to invent some transgendered Nazi guards. Where do you find black Polish Jews to place in the concentration camps? And sorry, intrepid woke thug, but Krakow circa 1940 was not a place with Latinos.
How do you “diversify” the 1984 Amadeus? Do you turn Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart into a Cherokee Indian? Replace Antonio Salieri with an invented black female tormentor? Do you “gay” Gandhi (1982)? And good grief, how would you salvage The Godfather (1972) and Patton (1970)? Do you make Michael Corleone and George Patton bisexual?
Even more recently, before the Academy’s egregious DEI criteria were implemented in 2023, a film like the wonderful 2011 The Artist, a modern silent film that starred the aforementioned Penelope Ann Miller, won Best Picture without worrying about LGBTQ boxes. Ditto for the Best Picture the year before, The King’s Speech, which was about British white folks.
Click the list of the Academy’s Best Picture winners going back a century. How many would pass these heinous standards?
Yes, you get the point!
This is absurd. It’s a complete violation of common sense and decency. It is also discrimination, a form of bigotry flagrantly embraced by the Academy. Martin Luther King Jr. urged that we judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. Today’s Academy judges films by skin color, by sexual orientation, by (trans)gender. To hell with art.
I’ll finish by quoting an old-school liberal actor, Richard Dreyfuss. He notes that film “is an art form and no one should be telling me as an artist that I have to give in to the latest, most current idea of what morality is.” Dreyfuss says of the new “diversity” standards: “They make me vomit.”
We need to move on without these people. They’ve poisoned Hollywood and the very art of film they’re tasked to uphold. We must make movies without them and without their approval.
READ MORE from Paul Kengor:
Max Boot’s Reagan Is the Worst Book of the Year