Check out this glance into the films that recent U.S. presidents have selected to view in the White House’s theater.
There are many good historical tidbits — for example, Ike refused to watch any film featuring Robert Mitchum because of the actor’s conviction for marijuana possession, and JFK watched the second James Bond film, “From Russia With Love,” the night before his assassination in 1963.
What do film choices say about a president’s politics? Not much, because there are few conservative alternatives to Hollywood’s offerings:
Presidential movie watching can tell us something about Presidents’ interests. But there are limits to what we can learn because the choices are somewhat limited. Presidents tend to select films from recent studio releases, of which there are a few hundred a year.
By comparison, some 275,000 new books are published annually in the United States, and the number available is in the millions. It’s more common for a President to select an old book than an old movie, though unconventional reading can cause trouble. When President George W. Bush read Camus’s bleak novel The Stranger, in which the protagonist kills an Arab, he was pilloried in the press.
And there are other political considerations. Presidents Clinton and Obama favor mainly liberal authors, while W. read more of a mix of liberals and conservatives. When it comes to films, there’s no “counter-establishment” of conservative studios. There’s only Hollywood, and the town’s politics are well known.