'Reagan' Director Pans CBS Editing

The director of "The Reagans" complained Monday that CBS butchered his made-for-TV movie, ultimately making it too incoherent for the network to air.

"We were, in a sense, banished" from the editing process before CBS ditched it, director Robert Ackerman said.

CBS decided last month to cancel its movie on the former president, shunting it off to Showtime on cable. Showtime will air the filmmakers' version Sunday.

Producers and the stars of the movie commented extensively about it for the first time in a conference call Monday.

CBS' decision not to air "The Reagans" came after weeks of complaints by fans of the former president that it would distort his legacy.

CBS President Leslie Moonves said Monday that the movie was politically pointed, and that he would have made the same decision to cancel it even if there had been no public outcry.

"I was told it was going to be a love story, that the politics would be in the background," Moonves said. "I didn't feel that was the case, and I didn't think it was balanced."

Neil Meron, one of the film's producers, said the filmmakers' only point of view was to humanize Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Moonves said CBS had different standards for movies with political content than cable networks and would not air, for example, a film like Oliver Stone's "JFK."

Robert Greenblatt, Showtime's entertainment president, disagreed, saying that Moonves' "JFK" example was "ludicrous and specious."

Greenblatt noted that Moonves had paid for the movie, and had full access to the script and film as it was being made.

"If he didn't know what movie he was getting, it was not the fault of the producers, the director or anybody else associated with this film," Greenblatt said.

CBS expressed no problems until after a "rough cut" was hurriedly delivered in October, Ackerman said. At that point, CBS ordered changes to the dialogue that were "nonnegotiable," he said.

"What they were doing with the structure of the film, I thought, was making it incoherent," Ackerman said.

The film Showtime is airing Sunday is exactly as the filmmakers intended — with the major exception of excising the one line that caused the most hubbub.

In a part of the script that was published in The New York Times, Reagan was depicted as judgmental toward people with AIDS as his wife begged him to help people with the disease. "They that live in sin shall die in sin," Reagan's character said.

Reagan supporters said there was no evidence that the former president ever said any such thing.

Film producers on Monday, however, cited a line attributed to Reagan in Edmund Morris' book, "Dutch," about AIDS being a plague brought down because of illicit sex. Ackerman said the line the filmmakers used was intended to soften what had been reported.

James Brolin, who portrays Reagan in the film, dismissed speculation that his wife, liberal activist Barbra Streisand, had anything to do with the movie.

His co-star, Judy Davis, criticized the "level of censorship" involved in CBS' cancellation of the movie.

"The film being taken off the air ... appears to be an attack on free speech," said Davis, who plays Nancy Reagan. "We don't like what we suspect you might be saying, so we'll do everything in our power to remove it from a major network so people can't hear what you're saying."