The newly minted Rawhide Pictures will be mounting a biopic of President Ronald Reagan, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
With a $30 million budget, Mark Joseph, Ralph Winter and Jonas McCord will produce the film based on the best-selling biographies by Paul Kengor: The Crusader and God and Ronald Reagan.
Joseph has no feature film experience, while Winter and McCord, who wrote the script, have worked as a producer on four X-Men movies, and as a development executive on The Passion of the Christ respectively.
The producers have detailed their execution of the narrative, saying the film will begin in 1981, the night John Hinckley, Jr. attempted to assassinate the president, and then tell Reagan’s story through a series of flashbacks, detailing his troubled childhood, rise to movie stardom, and move to the White House.
McCord has shown a special interest in revealing Reagan’s upbringing, calling it “a surreal Norman Rockwell painting with his alcoholic Catholic father, devout Christian mother, Catholic brother and ever-changing boarders the family took in.”
Joseph shares McCord’s enthusiasm for the narrative, expounding, “This is a great story. I’m just glad no one else in Hollywood thinks so, or they’d have made this film by now.”
This is not in fact the first attempt to bring Reagan’s life to screen. There was the controversial 2003 miniseries starring James Brolin, The Reagans. The miniseries was initially slated to air on CBS, but was relegated to Showtime after a public outcry over accused “left-wing bias.”
When asked about The Reagans, Joseph extolled, “Only in Hollywood could you make an insulting, condescending movie about a much-loved historical figure, hire an actor who loathes the man, watch it flop and then somehow conclude that Americans don’t want to see a movie about him…I watched Americans line up and wait for 10 hours for the simple privilege of passing by his closed casket. They love this man.”
Rawhide’s Reagan will undoubtedly be different than the one portrayed in The Reagans. However, the producers have not yet signed a director or any actors to the project, and are still in the fund-raising stage. Despite this, the Hollywood Reporter has some casting suggestions for the role of young Reagan: Andrew Garfield, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zac Efron, Chris Pine and James Franco. Readers can vote for their favorite in their poll.
At the time of posting, Zac Efron was in the lead.
Do you want to see Rawhide’s Reagan? Which actor gets your vote to play Reagan?