Tag: Jaws

‘Make My Day’: J. Hoberman on Reagan, Rambo and ’80s Movies

(Link): ‘Make My Day’: J. Hoberman on Reagan, Rambo and ’80s Movies

Excerpts:

July 2019

The film critic and author of a new book on 1980s cinema talks Spielberg, the Gipper and getting flak for writing about politics and pop culture

by David Fear

He was a former radio announcer who broke into movies in the late 1930s and served time as an actor in Warner Brothers’ B-movie unit and a TV host (and corporate pitchman) for General Electric Theater.

Then, after flirting with the growing post-Goldwater conservative side of the G.O.P., Ronald Reagan successfully ran for the governorship of California in 1966.

That was when Jim Hoberman, a Queens, New York, native who’d wound up in Berkeley right as things were coming to a sociopolitical boil in the Bay Area, first encountered the Gipper as something other than a stock player on the screen.

By the time Reagan began his second Presidential campaign — the one that would get him elected commander-in-chief in 1980 — Hoberman had been a second-string film critic at the Village Voice for a few years. But he’d been closely following the man’s career for a while.

And he was both fascinated and a little horrified by how the man who shared scenes with a chimp in Bedtime for Bonzo was using his “movie stardom” — and the movies themselves — to sell some seriously reactionary policies with a smile.

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