httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OtMq2s0TyM
Before it even went into production, a planned satire of Ronald Reagan to be produced by and starring Will Ferrell inspired an outpouring of criticism from conservatives and members of the former president’s family.
The film, if it goes forward without Ferrell, will almost surely stoke controversy because its plot purportedly portrays Reagan as suffering from dementia while he was still in office.
“The REAGAN script is one of a number of scripts that had been submitted to Will Ferrell which he had considered. While it is by no means a ‘Alzheimer’s comedy’ as has been suggested, Mr. Ferrell is not pursuing this project,” a spokesperson for the actor told the Post on Friday.
Reagan went public with his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 1994, and while t has long been speculation about his state of mind during his second term in office, t has never been any hard evidence that he suffered from Alzheimer’s while president.
“Across the political spectrum, historians, biographers, and former Reagan aides have condemned the movie’s outrageous caricature of Ronald Reagan as historically inaccurate and personally unfair, many noting that the president didn’t have a racist bone in his body and was actually remarkable in his sensitivities and warmness to blacks and other minorities,” wrote Mark Joseph and Paul Kengor in a column for Forbes at the time.
In 2013, the news that Hollywood icon Michael Douglas would eventually be playing Reagan in a big screen interpretation of the former president’s historic 1986 nuclear summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik was also greeted with a collective groan from many on the right, due to the “Wall Street” star’s perceived lefty leanings.
Bunch has been making a concerted effort to bring the Reagan image back down to earth ever since he published his book “Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy” in 2010.