Search results for ""Author Nicholas Evan Sarantakes""

Some presidents throw out baseball’s first pitch of the season. Some post picks for college basketball’s March Madness. One might tweet about a football player kneeling. President Richard M. Nixon phoned Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula to suggest plays for the Super Bowl. He hosted players in the 1969 Major League All-Star game for a party deemed the strangest since the mob scene during Andrew Jackson’s inauguration. He attended a Washington Redskins practice to boost moral; altered the NFL’s policy for televising home games; introduced the practice of calling teams after Super Bowl or World Series wins. The list goes on, but the point is clear: Richard Nixon was the nation’s first sports super fan to occupy the Oval Office. And this, Nicholas Evan Sarantakes suggests, may explain why Nixon, so despised for all his faults and failings, was nonetheless also widely loved by the American public.In Fan in Chief Sarantakes Sets out to show how Richard Nixon’s passion for sports, more than policy positions or partisan politics, engaged the American people—and how Nixon used this passion to his political advantage. Fan in Chief takes place in the realm of political theater, a theater in which the president’s role was perfectly genuine. A true fan, Nixon exposed core elements of his personality, character, and values in the world of sports; through sport he could connect and communicate with the character and values of his fellow Americans. Fan in Chief is thus a story of both personality and politics; but more than that, it is an in-depth exploration of what Richard Nixon’s love of sport can tell us about the man and his times.

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Forever known for its blazing cinematic image of General George S. Patton (portrayed by George C. Scott) addressing his troops in front of a mammoth American flag, Patton won seven Oscars in 1971, including those for Best Picture and Best Actor. In doing so, it beat out a much-ballyhooed M*A*S*H, irreverent darling of the critics, and grossed $60 million despite an intense anti-war climate. But, as Nicholas Evan Sarantakes reveals, it was a film that almost didn’t get made. Sarantakes offers an engaging and richly detailed production history of what became a critically acclaimed box office hit. He takes readers behind the scenes, even long before any scenes were ever conceived, to recount the trials and tribulations that attended the epic efforts of producer Frank McCarthy—like Patton a U.S. Army general—and Twentieth Century Fox to finally bring Patton to the screen after eighteen years of planning. Sarantakes recounts how filmmakers had to overcome the reluctance of Patton’s family, copyright issues with biographers, competing efforts for a biopic, and Department of Defence red tape. He chronicles the long search for a leading man—including discussions with Burt Lancaster, John Wayne, and even Ronald Reagan—before settling on Scott, a brilliant actor who brought to the part both enthusiasm for the project and identification with Patton’s passionate persona. He also tracks the struggles to shoot the movie with a large multinational cast, huge outlays for military equipment, and filming in six countries over a mere six months. And he provides revealing insider stories concerning, for example, Scott’s legendary drinking bouts and the origins of and debate over his famous opening monologue. Drawing on extensive research in the papers of Frank McCarthy and director Franklin Schaffner, studio archives, records of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, contemporary journalism, and oral histories, Sarantakes ultimately shows us that Patton is more than just one of the best war films ever made. Culturally, it also spoke to national ideals while exposing complex truths about power in the mid-twentieth century.

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