Movie night at the White House: a century of screenings, decoded

By Matthew Sweet

Bill Clinton once told a journalist what he regarded as the biggest perk of being president. (No, not that.) “It’s the wonderful movie theatre I get here,” enthused the commander-in-chief.

The White House Family Theatre is a small wonder, converted in 1942 from an East Wing cloakroom, known as the Hat Box, by a pair of movie nuts called Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Space has always been limited to 42 – with front-row armchairs and foot rests for the First Family – but over the years it has become more like a proper picture palace and less like the breakfast room of a frosty DC hotel. In the George W. Bush years, the movie industry paid for red velvet and raked seating.

Not all the Roosevelts’ successors have been Cahiers du Cinema subscribers. Lyndon B. Johnson used the space to screen documentaries about himself, or he slept. (He stayed awake during “Thunderball” in 1966, possibly because, like James Bond, he was also dealing with a crisis involving nuclear bombs lost at sea.) JFK may not have had movie appreciation on his mind when he ran the Cliff Richard musical “Expresso Bongo” for a single unrecorded visitor on August 16th 1961 – while the First Lady was out of town.

A peanut-farming Southern Baptist was the first president to run an X-rated picture at the White House

Donald Trump betrays little evidence of a presidential movie habit, though several commentators have noticed that the imagery he deploys when evoking horrors of the US-Mexico border – trafficked women with taped mouths, prayer rugs abandoned in the dust – seems to have been borrowed from “Sicario 2: Day of the Soldado”, an action film that came out in 2018.

For precise data on White House screenings we must thank Paul Fischer, presidential projectionist from Eisenhower to Reagan, who wrote careful notes on everything he wound and loaded. Subsequent records were kept by others, and have been squeezed from the executive by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Why so cagey? Our movie choices say more about us than we might care to admit, and most presidents are smart enough to know it. Days after his victory in the 1976 election, Jimmy Carter and his media adviser Gerald Rafshoon took their first tour of the White House. “Do you know I can get any movie I want?” said Carter. “What should we watch?” Rafshoon suggested “Rocky”, which was days away from release. “What’s it about?” asked Carter. “It’s about you, Mr President,” replied Rafshoon.

Birth of a Nation Woodrow Wilson 1915
Here’s a challenge for the modern American spin-doctor. On February 18th 1915, the first film was screened inside the White House: D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”, in which the Klan are the heroes and the rapist villain is played by a white actor in blackface. The reason? Woodrow Wilson’s wife was too recently dead for mourning rules to permit the president seeing it in the plush surrounds of a public cinema.

Two projectionists in evening dress cast the film onto the white-panelled walls of the East Room. Wilson’s reaction to the movie – “It is like writing history with lightning!” – may be an early example of a fake critical quote. In the 1970s, the last living eyewitness from that night said he shuffled off at the end without saying a word.

High Noon Dwight Eisenhower 1950s
John Wayne, one of the most popular film stars of his era, reckoned that “High Noon” was “the most un-American thing I’ve seen in my whole life”. This anti-McCarthyism western stars Gary Cooper as a marshal who discovers that the inhabitants of his town are too self-interested to help him repel a gang of hoodlums. The first president for whom Wayne campaigned loved the film so much that he ran it three times in the White House cinema and shouted advice at the screen. “Run!” urged Dwight Eisenhower, as Cooper’s lone hero was cornered in a burning barn.

Ike had simple tastes. Musicals (“Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”), comedies (“Angels in the Outfield”) and any western, as long as that doe-eyed dope-smoker Robert Mitchum wasn’t in the cast. Perhaps he didn’t notice the politics of “High Noon”, or know that the screenwriter, Carl Foreman, had fled to Britain to escape the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

But the old soldier was more clear-sighted about the film than his cowboy-actor friend. Wayne said he took deep exception to a shot of Gary Cooper “putting the United States marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it”. No such image appears.

Roman Holiday John F. Kennedy 1962
Two weeks into his presidency, John F. Kennedy requested a 35mm print of Stanley Kubrick’s anti-slavery epic “Spartacus”, a film that was fast becoming a touchstone of the civil-rights movement. Universal said no. In a piece of slightly mixed messaging, JFK crossed an American Legion picket line to catch it at a cinema in Washington, DC – and ensured that his five-star rave was overheard by journalists.

Sure enough, the studios soon assigned the Motion Picture Association of America to supply the president with any new release he desired. The log records that he saw Tony Richardson’s “Tom Jones” before his fateful trip to Dallas in 1963. But it was Lee Harvey Oswald who turned that routine choice into a last request.

When Kennedy – and everyone else in the world – faced the possibility of nuclear oblivion during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, he picked “Roman Holiday”, William Wyler’s 1953 rom-com about a European princess (Audrey Hepburn) who goes AWOL for a night with a charming American ex-pat (Gregory Peck). It’s only at a press conference the next morning that she realises that he’s a reporter who is now in possession of the scoop of his life. At this moment, there is no music on the soundtrack. Even the hacks and flunkeys fall silent. Hepburn looks at Peck, Peck looks at Hepburn. The tension is incredible. But Peck does nothing. And in that moment, we know that catastrophe has been avoided.

Yankee Doodle Dandy Richard Nixon 1972
What do Nixon’s cinematic choices suggest about his moral character? Here’s the case for generosity. He adored “Hello, Dolly!”, and yet Barbra Streisand (the movie Dolly) and Carol Channing (the Broadway Dolly) were both on his official list of enemies. They also expose his “Dr Strangelove” side. Nixon screened “Patton” – Franklin J. Schaffner’s thrilling portrait of the American general’s war years – as he made the decision to send ground troops into Cambodia. The president’s admiration for the film was so well known that Zhou Enlai viewed it to prepare for their historic meeting in 1972.

Another of his favourites, “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, is harder to explain. Michael Curtiz’s 1942 picture is not the martial Viagra implied by the title, but a biopic of George M. Cohan, a Broadway legend. The title number is sung not on the battlefield but on the racetrack, as a recreation of a moment from Cohan’s “Little Johnny Jones”, a 1904 stage show about a jockey who enters the English Derby. Despite appearances, this isn’t a hotline to Nixon’s hawkishness – it’s evidence of his love for musical comedy.

Midnight Cowboy Jimmy Carter 1977
In January 1977 Jimmy Carter summoned the White House projectionist to tell him that only family-friendly films would be screened during his period of office. The motive was understandable – an over-frank Playboy interview had nearly cost Carter the election.

The policy was a failure. The following Christmas, presidential guests were treated to John Schlesinger’s “Midnight Cowboy”, in which Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight play a con man and a prostitute wrecking their bodies and souls on the streets of New York. Up on the screen, Voight’s character gave head in a cinema and endured sexual assault in a Texan parking lot. All of which made a peanut-farming Southern Baptist the first president to run an X-rated picture at the White House.

Voight wasn’t present to acknowledge the honour. Four decades later though, after turning hard right and endorsing Donald Trump, he came to Pennsylvania Avenue to accept a National Medal for Arts. The “Midnight Cowboy” theme wailed around the East Room, Voight performed a peculiar little jig, and even Trump seemed lost for words.

Top Gun Ronald Reagan 1986
Thanks to an affectionate memoir by a former White House aide, Mark Weinberg, we don’t just know which movies the Reagans watched (363, from the Jack Lemmon vehicle “Tribute” to Ronnie’s own “Cattle Queen of Montana”), but when and where (8pm on Fridays and Saturdays, usually at Camp David) and how (closely, carefully, professionally). We know about the food, too. The president shovelled two bowls of popcorn at every screening (“Gandhi” was a three-bowl movie), until these were later replaced with soft-centred chocolates.

Hollywood in the 1980s was attuned to Reagan’s sensibilities. Tony Scott’s “Top Gun” might have been constructed as an extension of Republican policy: its hero is an individualist maverick (called Maverick) who outmanoeuvres and outguns the Russians. Reagan was dazzled by the film, but his one criticism is revealing. He found the love scenes between Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis embarrassingly “hot and heavy”.

The Carter White House ran Blake Edward’s “10”, in which Bo Derek arouses Dudley Moore by describing how she lost her virginity to her stepbrother. Nixon screened “What the Peeper Saw”, in which a 12-year-old Mark Lester gets into bed with Britt Ekland. But the Reagans’ cinematic diet was extravagantly wholesome. Policymakingly so. What inspired Nancy to launch her “Just Say No” campaign? On Valentine’s Day 1981, she and her husband watched Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Lili Tomlin in “9 to 5” having “an old-fashioned ladies’ pot party”, and wondered why they couldn’t just get drunk like decent people.

Titanic Bill Clinton 1998
Thanks to a FOIA request by Matt Novak, the pre-eminent scholar of presidential nights in, the movie schedule of the Clinton years was yielded up in 2016, complete with the names of those in attendance. The files reveal Clinton as the most present-focused and middlebrow cinephile to occupy the Oval Office – there’s little that predates his time in power, and nothing that could be described as edgy (though “American Beauty” looks more that way with every passing year).

The omissions may be more interesting than the list. As Novak points out, the documents ask us to believe that the White House ran only three movies in 1996 and seven in 1997 –which coincides roughly with the period that Monica Lewinsky was on the premises. When the record starts again in 1998, James Cameron’s “Titanic” is one of the first to appear. The Clintons saw it on January 23rd, just a few days after the Lewinsky scandal broke on the Drudge Report website. A vulgar joke of the period asked: what is the difference between Clinton and the Titanic? We know how many women went down on the Titanic.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery George W. Bush 2005
Like his presidency, the moviegoing of George W. Bush is a work in two acts. In those carefree early years, he delighted in the larks of Austin Powers, the defrosted 1960s Carnaby Street secret agent embodied by Mike Myers and a set of strikingly British teeth. Witnesses report that Bush often hooked his pinky at the corner of his mouth in imitation of the diabolical mastermind Dr Evil.

There may be something cartoonishly Manichean in a phrase like “the axis of evil”, but after 9/11, Bush’s goofball humour drained away. In the White House screening room, the president frowned over “We Were Soldiers”, a Mel Gibson picture about the war in Vietnam, and frowned even deeper at “Black Hawk Down”, Ridley Scott’s grunt’s-eye-view account of a helicopter crash during a 1993 military mission to Mogadishu, in which the survivors are left to fend for themselves. Bush said: “I would never do that.”

The movie became part of his argument for intervention in Iraq. According to Donald Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein also saw the film and learned the same lesson. One way, then, of reading the second Gulf war – a bloody struggle between two parties, one trying to stick to a Ridley Scott plot, the other trying to change the ending.

High School Musical 3 Barack Obama 2009
In the Clinton years the White House movie theatre was used less as a place of private amusement and more as a velvet-curtained schmoozing space. The Obamas pushed that project further, blurring the distinction between the business of politics and the business of Hollywood, often seeming more groomed and charming than the stars who walked through their doors.

Details of all the Obamas’ private screenings have yet to be released, but the first took place on inauguration night in 2009: “High School Musical 3” projected for their children, Sasha and Malia, followed by a scavenger hunt and the surprise discovery of the Jonas Brothers in the East Room, where Woodrow Wilson had once watched hooded Klansmen ride to the rescue of white virtue.

Finding Dory Donald Trump 2017
The presidency has done little to enrich Donald Trump’s cultural life – his diet of cable news and internet memes seems to be broken only for occasional national anthems and one instance of a French military band performing Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”. He almost certainly hasn’t seen Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite”, at which he blew a raspberry when it won the Best Picture Oscar.

His pre-presidential film habits, however, fit his profile. He admired “The Dark Knight Rises” for its shots of Trump Tower. He considered Jean Claude Van Damme’s “Bloodsport” a “fantastic movie” – and liked to fast-forward the VHS through the exposition to the action scenes. He professed to understand Citizen Kane’s contention that the accumulation of property brings its problems.

A handful of films have been screened at his White House. One has caused controversy. Not “Joker” – a movie about a crazed clown who leads an army of incels in a Gotham City riot – but “Finding Dory”, a cute Pixar animation about a sweet little tropical fish who is cut off from her parents. It was shown days after Trump signed an executive order that prevented refugees, visa holders and their children from seven Muslim-majority nations from entering America.

The irony wasn’t lost on the film’s cast, but it may have been lost on the president. Though he welcomed the audience of White House staffers and their children to the screening, according to Sean Spicer, then press secretary, he left the room before the lights went out. This president is his own blockbuster: a second term is the only sequel that interests him.■

IMAGES: GETTY, SHUTTERSTOCK, CAPITAL PICTURES, ALLSTAR