COMMENTARY | The story in Politico, which reveals a little about the approach that Hollywood is going to take to a film about the Reykjavik arms control summit October 1986, should be all too familiar to how conservatives heroes are treated in the movies.
Essentially the filmmakers reject the notion that President Ronald Reagan, to be played by Michael Douglas in the movie, won the Cold War by standing up to the Soviets and by devising and carrying out a multifaceted strategy to defeat them. The Reykjavik summit was a crucial event in the final years of the Cold War. Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz provides a detailed account at what happened at the summit.
In essence, then-Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev offered to eliminate all nuclear weapons. All Reagan had to do in return was to give up his Strategic Defense Initiative, a plan to defend against nuclear missiles using space-based weapons. Reagan, rightly as history shows, viewed SDI as a crucial weapon for forcing the Soviets to make concessions that they otherwise would not have made. Gorbachev was made to realize that Reagan was one American president who would not make an arms control deal for its own sake.
Three years later, Reagan’s strategy bore fruit with the fall of the Berlin Wall and then three years after that, the fall of the Soviet Union.
However, those who want to make “Reykjavik” the movie want to take a more nuanced, which is to say false view of what happened.
“It wasn’t quite that simple. It’s got to be balanced, and it can’t be told through an American lens,” executive producer Jere Sullivan said. “It’s a film that will get international distribution. The Europeans see the Cold War a little differently. The Russians see the Cold War a little differently.
Of course the Nazis and the Japanese likely view World War II a little differently than to Americans and British. Oddly their tender feelings have rarely if ever been taken into account when movies about that conflict are made.
Hollywood rarely if ever gets history right. The difference is that there are a lot of people who were alive when Reykjavik occurred and even participated in the summit. Therefore the filmmakers are just asking for trouble by bending the facts to fit a political or a — heavens — marketing agenda.
