The historical past of film screenings within the White Home didn’t start auspiciously.
On February 18, 1915, D.W. Griffith unspooled his three-hour “The Delivery of a Nation” within the East Room of the White Home to a rhapsodic response. The then-president, Woodrow Wilson, was a defender of the Confederacy and peddled “Misplaced Trigger” propaganda, and he was actually quoted 3 times within the movie itself, together with a comment through which he praised the Ku Klux Klan.
It’s typically accepted that after that screening Wilson mentioned of Griffith’s movie, instantly controversial upon launch because it has been ever since, that it was “like writing historical past with lightning.” If this alternative as the primary film ever projected contained in the White Home is lamentable, take coronary heart in figuring out that there was a earlier screening outdoors on the garden of the 1914 Italian silent masterpiece “Cabiria” that was the very first film proven on the grounds full-stop.
These screenings kicked off a historical past of moviegoing on the White Home that has continued ever since, culminating with the conversion of an East Wing cloakroom into the White Home Household Theater, an on-site cinema, in 1942.
Nicely, it was a historical past that lasted till October 2025. The movie show was razed this week as a part of the Trump administration’s demolition of your entire East Wing to make manner for a proposed $300 million ballroom. Numerous historical past was misplaced this week, however the movie show was a part of it — and it shouldn’t be forgotten.
Able to seating 42, the White Home Household Theater took place at a second when the Franklin Roosevelt administration acknowledged the distinctive energy films held over the general public. This was a time when the common moviegoer went to the cinema twice per week. And as America lurched ever nearer to coming into World Warfare II, regardless of nationwide polls displaying the American public was extraordinarily isolationist and that Charles Lindbergh’s “America First” rhetoric had taken root, Roosevelt acknowledged that nearer ties with the American film business is likely to be within the authorities’s greatest curiosity. When the U.S. lastly entered the struggle, Roosevelt mentioned, “Leisure is at all times a nationwide asset. Invaluable in time of peace, it’s indispensable in wartime.”
Making a Bureau of Movement Footage, Roosevelt additionally reworked a part of the White Home’s East Wing with the intention to display movies as a manner of gauging the nationwide temper. Because the White Home Historic Affiliation places it, “In 1942, Roosevelt ordered an East Terrace cloakroom known as the ‘Hat Field’ transformed right into a movie show. Right here the president loved watching newsreels and took particular curiosity within the battles fought in Europe and Asia.”
Since then, movies screened within the White Home Household Theater have been a matter of public document. The Washington D.C. uncommon books retailer Second Story Books has a handwritten log of most of the films screened through the FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower administrations, and it’s an eclectic checklist. FDR watched Paul Robeson in “The Emperor Jones” together with many Marie Dressler comedies. Many Disney movies had been screened for youthful members of the Roosevelt household. And he even took films on the street, together with the 1943 model of “The Phantom of the Opera” to that 12 months’s Cairo Summit, and Howard Hawks’ masterpiece “To Have and Have Not” to Yalta. The ultimate movie FDR watched earlier than his dying was the Charles Laughton noir “The Suspect,” screened in March 1945 and with Crown Princess Juliana of Holland in attendance.
Many years earlier than President Obama made the reveal of his favourite films every year an annual occasion, a sort of White Home to Oscars pipeline took maintain, beginning with a White Home screening of 1948’s eventual greatest image winner “Hamlet.” Eisenhower’s screening of “Excessive Midday,” which he later declared a private favourite, established that film as a go-to reply for presidents or aspiring presidents when requested their favourite film.
The D.C.-Hollywood connection was then endlessly set through the Kennedy Administration. On November 20, 1963, two days earlier than his assassination, JFK watched the final film he’d ever see, the second James Bond entry, “From Russia with Love” — he had declared Fleming’s unique novel considered one of his prime 10 favourite books.
Subsequent administrations would go as far as to maintain official screening information of all the films watched on the White Home Household Theater of their respective presidential libraries (although the College of Chicago Press compiled all of Nixon’s screenings, which featured some modern titles however veered extra towards Previous Hollywood throwbacks). There are publicly accessible archives on-line by way of these libraries the place you’ll be able to see what precisely was screened for POTUS through the Reagan administration, Invoice Clinton’s, and George W. Bush’s.
Jimmy Carter noticed about 480 films on the White Home throughout his four-years in workplace, together with a pre-Cannes screening of “Apocalypse Now” in Could 1979 with Francis Ford Coppola in attendance. One screening of Ingmar Bergman’s “Autuma Sonata” apparently drew 48 White Home staffers, past the Household Theater’s capability. Carter’s moviegoing even prolonged to Camp David, the place he organized a screening for Egyptian chief Anwar Sadat of “Star Wars” that they watched collectively within the leadup to the historic summit that led to peace between Egypt and Israel. Paul Schrader’s “Hardcore”? Screened on the White Home.
Moviegoing on the White Home Household Theater arguably hit an all-time excessive through the Reagan years, not stunning provided that the White Home’s occupant was a former Hollywood film star himself. However Reagan went a step additional than his predecessors by leaving mini opinions of the films he screened, as recalled within the memoir of his press secretary Mark Weinberg, titled “Film Nights with the Reagans.” Reagan’s style may very well be fairly wide-ranging, and for as a lot as he was a staunch anti-communist Reagan advised Warren Beatty he wished his film “Reds” had a contented ending.
Afterward, Gwyneth Paltrow says that Invoice Clinton dozed off and snored loudly throughout a screening of “Emma,” whereas Roland Emmerich recalled to THR how Invoice Clinton watched the White Home get blown up for a screening of “Independence Day.” George W. Bush took the White Home Household Theater so severely that he really had the entire thing redecorated in movie show purple to seem like an previous film palace. Barack Obama screened “La La Land,” and Donald Trump‘s first film he watched there was “Discovering Dory.”
Now, the White Home Household Theater isn’t any extra.
