When it comes to Hollywood, The Scrapbook is grateful for small favors. And last week we got a very small favor from Hollywood, for which we are suitably grateful.
Readers may not be aware that the new meaning of “Black List” in Hollywood has nothing to do with Sen. Joseph McCarthy or membership in the Communist Party. It refers, instead, to a ranked list of popular film and television scripts, floating around town, that have yet to be produced. Sometimes scripts on the Black List find a studio or production company willing to take the plunge and turn them into movies; but usually not.
One of the most “talked-about scripts” on the Black List these days, according to Washington Post gossip columnist Helena Andrews-Dyer, is the screenplay for Reagan by Mike Rosolio, a comedy (or so the Post tells us) set in Ronald Reagan’s White House. It’s the beginning of his second term, and the comic premise is that Reagan is already showing symptoms of the Alzheimer’s disease that would ultimately kill him. To save the country, a young intern is set the task of convincing Reagan that he is, in fact, still a movie actor—and an actor merely playing the role of president!
The night before Nancy Reagan’s death this past March, a public reading of Reagan was held at the Montalban Theatre in Hollywood, featuring James Brolin, Dennis Haysbert, and other stars. Of course, The Scrapbook doesn’t mean to imply a connection between that gala performance and the 94-year-old Mrs. Reagan’s demise. But we were surprised, several weeks later, to read in Helena Andrews-Dyer’s Post column that Will Ferrell, the ex-Saturday Night Live player who once impersonated George W. Bush on Broadway, “will play GOP fan boy favorite President Reagan in a comedy about the commander-in-chief’s struggles with dementia.” And not just play the part of the GOP fan boy favorite and his comic dementia: “Ferrell . . . signed on to not only star in the movie, but also produce the project through his [production] company.”
At which point, the dam burst in loud, insistent public criticism of Reagan‘s premise and Will Ferrell’s judgment. To be sure, The Scrapbook assumes there isn’t much residual affection for Ronald Reagan in his old stomping grounds; and it need hardly be said that public figures, including “GOP fan boy favorite” Ronald Reagan, aren’t exempt from criticism or satire. But building a comic turn on the gimmick of a tragic disease—one that makes no partisan distinction about suffering—must give even left-wing Hollywood pause. Or so we think, along with Reagan’s younger daughter, actress-novelist Patti Davis, who wrote an eloquent open letter on social media to Ferrell about Alzheimer’s and her father’s struggle with the fatal brain malady: “Perhaps if you knew more,” said Davis, “you would not find the subject humorous.”
To his credit, Ferrell seems to have taken the hint, and a few days later, his authorized “representative” told the New York Post that Ferrell “is not pursuing this project”—which, by the way, is only “one of a number of scripts that had been submitted to Will Ferrell which he had considered.”
In The Scrapbook’s charitable view, Will Ferrell is entitled to distance himself from this grotesque project any way that he can. Maybe the original story was inaccurate, and he was only thinking about starring in Reagan. Maybe he saw that the story was not just drawing bad publicity, but raising questions about his humanity. Maybe. The only certainty, so far as The Scrapbook is concerned, is that Reagan ought to remain permanently on the Black List.
