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Clint Eastwood shared his secret to success with me on the set of Space Cowboys in 1999. It was my first studio film, and he was gracious enough to let me sit by and watch him produce the script I’d co-written for him. For a budding Hollywood screenwriter, it was a life-changing experience. Every chance I got, I asked the master filmmaker these questions:
“It’s simple,” he shrugs in classic Eastwood fashion. “You just find the best people, give them the assignment and get out of the way so they can do their job.”
His advice was hauntingly familiar: Ronald Reagan famously espoused a similar mantra.
“Reagan” beats box office expectations during opening weekend
“If you don’t care who gets the credit, there is no limit to what people can do or where they can go.”
Clint Eastwood in “In the Line of Fire.” The actor and President Ronald Reagan had similar ideas about getting things done.
Twenty-five years later, as I watch Dennis Quaid bring to life the 40th president on the big screen — in “Reagan,” a film I had the honor of writing — I look back on these two iconic figures, one with whom I worked and one whom I never met, and how their words and work have inspired, influenced and impacted my own, and my life itself.
I was a tough sell to Reagan. I’m the son of a Kennedy Democrat. As a teenager, I worked on Jimmy Carter’s 1976 and 1980 election campaigns. And like many in the (not so) US at the time, I dismissed the Republican as an “affable idiot” and a well-publicised “B-movie actor” outdated. I never listened to what he had to say, nor did I try to fact-check these claims.
They were dead wrong. He was, in fact, a critically acclaimed A-list movie star in his prime, a successful governor of California, a highly intelligent man who beautifully camouflaged his intelligence with a humble, self-deprecating wit, and, after 14 years of studying his speeches, essays, and books, I found him to be a better writer than I am.
I didn’t know or care at the time, he was on “the other side.”
Then on March 30, 1981, six weeks after taking office, he was shot. And all of the above no longer mattered. The world stood still while our new president lay dying, a bullet a centimeter from his heart. That was what mattered.
As he was wheeled into the operating room, he whispered to the doctors, “I hope you’re Republicans.”
“Mr. President, we are all Republicans today,” the chief surgeon responded.
That midnight, Reagan opened his eyes to see his political rival, Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, watching over him. Now there were no allies, just two friends. The two men prayed together and read the 23rd Psalm.
Dennis Quaid and Ronald Reagan (Getty Images)
Six weeks later, audiences on both sides of the aisle rose to their feet as the House moderator shouted, “Mr. Speaker, Mr. President of the United States!” And as the Speaker stood with them again, they cheered and laughed and cried for ten minutes.
A thousand miles away in my college dorm room, I cheered, laughed, and cried like other Americans. For just a brief, glorious moment, the cynicism, partisanship, and hostility that had defined our generation faded away. We were a family again.
And Ronald Reagan made me fall in love at first sight.
On the set of “Reagan,” there was always a joke whenever something went wrong — which happens almost every day in filmmaking — and it was always, “Hey, guys! We’ve got to save the country!” and it always got a laugh.
It’s funny. I don’t think it’s a joke anymore.
Of course, no movie can save a country, and ours isn’t going to do that, but I think it’s fair to say that there’s a growing feeling on all sides that a little healing isn’t a bad thing for our family.
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From day one, our greatest hope as filmmakers has been that this story of real human lives, full of our shared faults and failures, might at least help to dilute the boundaries that divide us, to transport us back to that place we were that night in 1981, and perhaps even contribute to some long-awaited healing.
I never had a chance to ask Reagan what the secret of his success was, but having spent the last 14 years living, thinking, and writing about my hero, I think I know what his answer was: It wasn’t charisma, or policies, or smarts, or luck. He had all of those things.
Dennis Quaid and Penelope Ann Miller star as Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan. (Rob Batzdorf/Rawhide Pictures)
I believe love is the reason we remember and honor this man and his era.
Ronald Reagan loved people, even those he disagreed with. He loved his family, he loved Nancy, he loved God, and he loved his country.
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That’s what we all felt that night. Love.
And I hope that this American family can feel that again when they watch this film.
