RON & NANCY’S POINT OF VIEW

How movie nights at Camp David shaped the Reagan years

AS THE lights dimmed on the most powerful man in the world and his wife, sitting on a living room couch, the young White House staffer two seats away had a moment of personal crisis. “Is this a dream? Am I really supposed to be here?” he thought. It was a hell of a way to spend Valentine’s Day of 1981.

“I was half expecting somebody to tap me on the shoulder, a big burly man in a black suit . . . and say, ‘OK, you know you don’t belong here, come on,” Mark Weinberg, who served as a White House Press Office aide in the 1980s, tells The Post. And he continued to feel that way during countless nights watching movies with Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

On weekends throughout the presidency, the Reagans would decamp to Camp David, the presidential retreat. There they would relax with their staff and friends, and, unsurprisingly for two showbiz veterans, watch the latest Hollywood releases. Nancy usually made the selections.

Camp David movie night was a ritual repeated hundreds of times over Reagan’s two terms in office. The 1980s boasted a robust slate of sometimes muscular movies: Rambo, the “Rocky” sequels, the “Star Wars” sequels, the Indiana Jones movies, “Ghostbusters.” The Reagans watched them all, and Weinberg was there for most of them. He fondly explores the delights — and complications — of Ron and Nancy’s relationship with the movies in his new memoir, “Movie Nights with the Reagans” (Simon & Schuster). W HEN Ronald Reagan watched a movie, he watched a movie,” Weinberg says.

“The lights would be lowered, the screen would come down — there was a screen hidden in the ceiling in their living room in Camp David . . . The Reagans would be seated next to each other on the couch, holding hands, as always. And the movie would start. Ronald Reagan did not take his eyes from the screen from the moment the movie started until the moment the movie ended.”

That very first Valentine’s Day movie Weinberg watched with the Reagans was the comedy hit “9 to 5.” The workplace ensemble, which in some ways presaged the #MeToo movement, made a strong impression on the Reagans, though not necessarily for its feminist message. One seemingly innocuous scene in the picture got the Gipper’s goat: when Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin’s characters share a joint while commiserating about their sexist boss.

“This scene would have been ‘truly funny,’ Reagan said, ‘if the three gals had played getting drunk, but no, they had to get stoned on pot.’ The president found that to be a distasteful endorsement of pot smoking,” Weinberg writes. The horrors of the chronic in “9 to 5” made such an impression on Nancy that she disapprovingly cited the movie the following year as she launched her “Just Say No” antidrug campaign.

It would not be the last time that one of the Reagans’ movie- night films would weave its way into their personal or political lives. Weinberg relates that in early June 1983, the Reagans screened “WarGames” at Camp David. The nuclear thriller featured a teen hacker, played by Matthew Broderick, who logs on to a Defense Department computer and nearly trips it into starting World War III. Weinberg remembers the room being “uncharacteristically quiet” after the screening. “WarGames” lingered in the president’s mind; a couple days later, in a meeting with congressional Democrats about his missile-defense plan, Reagan brought up the movie and the unintentional cataclysm scenario it raised.

Matthew Broderick also starred in what Weinberg says was one of the Reagans’ favorite films from the ’80s, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Broderick’s titular character raised playing hooky to a high art, as he and his pals traipse through Chicago, one step ahead of their angry principal.

The Camp David screening in June 1986 came on the heels of a stressful hospital visit for the

president, and he and the staff were in need of a good laugh. They got just that. Weinberg writes, “Both the president and Mrs. Reagan enjoyed the movie from beginning to end,” relishing the “pure entertainment and unabashed fun.” He says Reagan believed it “was the type of film Hollywood should be putting out, instead of movies filled with gratuitous violence and sex.”

Also, the president was reportedly delighted to see Ferris lipsync Wayne Newton’s “Danke Schoen” in a parade scene, because Reagan and Newton were friends.

The Reagans favored “big” entertaining movies like “Ferris Bueller,” “Back to the Future” and “Top Gun.” “Back to the Future” got high marks from the first couple, “because,” said Weinberg, “it was creative and it was clever and it was a little bit fun and it was silly but not ridiculous, and there wasn’t gratuitous sex and violence.”

BUT were there any movies the Reagans especially disliked? Weinberg recalls “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” rec- ommended to them by a former White House aide. The dark indie film, set in a South American prison, tells the story of a romance between Raúl Juliá’s leftist revolutionary and a sexually ambiguous character played by William Hurt.

“No one said anything, but at the end of the movie the president said, ‘My golly, what the heck has gotten into’ — and then he named the staffer whom I will respectfully keep out of this — ‘since he went into the private sector?’ And everybody had a good laugh. That just wasn’t up their alley.” (The 1985 film received Oscar nominations for best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay, and Hurt took home the statue for best actor.)

On occasion, Ron and Nancy would screen movies they starred in themselves: “Bedtime for Bonzo,” “Knute Rockne All American” or “Hellcats of the Navy.” For the two former actors, watching movies was a bit like looking at their old high-school yearbooks. They could check in on their friends and former colleagues.

Sometimes those old pals were a snooze. Weinberg recalls screening the 1951 version of the musical “Show Boat.”

“With all due respect to Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner, and Howard Keel,” Weinberg writes, “it was the most boring movie ever shown at Camp David. By far.” And yet, “the Reagans loved it.”

The young press aide slept through the box-office success, which featured a score by Jerome Kern. And Weinberg almost got away with it, too. But as he was filing out of the room after the screening, the commander in chief tapped him on the shoulder: “Guess you were pretending it was a Cabinet meeting.” Busted.

There were many years of shared moments among the Reagans and the staff who joined them at Camp David, gathered in a living room watching movies for fun. Weinberg tells The Post, “I learned a lot from both of them.” But perhaps the most profound lesson Weinberg drew from his time with the Reagans at Camp David was also a very simple one. It could well be applied to most any family, group of friends or presidential ad- ministration, regardless of party: “It’s a good thing to slow down, and take time to watch a fun movie. That’s a good thing, no matter how busy one is, or how serious they problems they are facing, it’s OK to take a breath and to watch a movie and to be transported and to be entertained for a couple hours.”