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Last month’s nationwide premiere of “Reagan” thrust the State of Louisiana into the national spotlight.
“It’s about his upbringing as a child, his Christian faith, what drove him to be a crusader against communism, and of course his love affair with Nancy Reagan,” says Dave Roberts, owner of Baton Rouge-based Alluwee Productions, one of the executive producers of the film.
Dennis Quaid portrayed President Ronald Reagan, while Penelope Ann Miller played Nancy Reagan.
Roberts says he set out to tell the story about President Reagan without making it overly political.
“It’s a story about patriotism, love of country, a man who worked really hard to make a difference, and he had a calling from God to do it,” says Roberts.
Roberts says he wanted to make the movie family friendly in order to introduce a new audience to the life and times of the 40th President of the United States.
“It’s hard to find a movie that you can sit down and watch with adolescent kids that doesn’t have some type of sex or violence or curse words and things like that.”
Roberts says he went to great lengths, including working with the Reagan family and the Reagan Presidential Library, to make sure that everything in the movie was factual. He says they had a lot of great material – too much, in fact.
“We worked with the Reagan Library and the Reagan family to fact-check every detail. So everything in that movie is spot-on 100% factual.”
“Reagan” was shot on a budget of $25 million, and a good amount of the film ended up on the cutting room floor.
“Our first cut was four hours long,” Roberts noted. “And we knew that that wouldn’t work in theaters. We had to get it down to two or two and a half hours. So we cut out a lot of fantastic material.”
Since its opening on August 30, “Reagan” has grossed more than $18.5 million through this past weekend.
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