JF Ptak Science Books (The First Entry in the Department of Two Eric/Eriks)
My polymathic friend Eric Sacharaow clued me into a wonderful image in the history of motion pictures: an encounter between The Three Stooges and Franklin Roosevelt. It occurs at the end of a movie short The Boys made in 1937 (which was evidently shot in four days) called Cash and Carry, in which (after hijinx [is this a Scrabble word?]) they pursue a hidden treasure to fund a crippled boy's operation and wind up tunneling into a federal gold vault. They are caught, other stuff happens, and then they are in the Oval Office (for some reason located in the U.S. Capitol building), where they wind up being heroes of some sort. They appear with an actor playing the role of FDR with the president sitting with his back to the camera, the other actors facing towards the camera, speaking to the seated president. The Stooges are absolve because their pursuit was pure, with FDR announcing “executive clemency”, to which Curly responds, “Oh no, not that!”.
Anyway, the first interesting tidbit is that FDR appears seated but still holding a cane—this is highly unusual because even though he had been left with paralyzed legs from infantile paralysis (polio) in 1921 most US Americans did not know that he was living his daily life in a wheelchair. (FDR virtually never mentioned his legs in public, except at the very end, after Yalta—and then it was self-deprecating.)
The big deal here, though, was that this was the first depiction of FDR in a movie, and he does so with none other than the Three Stooges. Odd but true. (And for some reason, another very odd first appearance occurs for LBJ, who winds up depicted for the first time in a movie in the magnificently bad Batman, the Movie in 1966.)
I know this because I found a fascinating list compiled by the writer Erik Lundegaard https://eriklundegaard.com/item/why-is-fdr-hanging-with-the-three-stooges-everything-you-didn-t-want-to-know-about-screen-portrayals-of-us-presidents-and-didn-t-ask listing all of the depictions of U.S. Presidents in films, showing their first appearance (with year and film and the actor portraying the president), as well as a numerical census of the numbers of movies the presidents appeared in. My hat is off to Mr. Lundegaard, because this must've been a challenging research project.
I've reproduced the bare essentials from his list (below). Again, this is not my work, all credit to Erik Lundegaard:
The list (president/total number of appearances in films/year of first appearance):
Washington, 154, (1909); Adams , 5 (1911); Jefferson, 125, (1911); Madison, 27, (1937); Monroe (1918); John Quincy Adams, 8, (1911); Jackson, 47, (1918); Van Buren, 4, (1936); Harrison, 7, (1942); Polk , 8, (1939); Taylor, 8, (1912); Fillmore, 4, (1939); Pierce, 2, (1944); Buchanan, 1, (2000); Lincoln, 327, (1911); Andrew Johnson, 6, (1922); Grant, 94, (1913); Hayes, 7, (1940); Garfield, 7, (1939); Arthur, 3, (1932) ; Cleveland, 4 (1939); B. Harrison, 2 (1952); McKinley, 11, (1936); T. Roosevelt, 86, (1917); Taft, 5, (1978); Wilson, 31, (1913); Harding, 5, (1975); Coolidge, 5, (1955); Hoover, 8, (1979); Franklin D. Roosevelt, 97, (1937); Truman, 34, (1947); Eisenhower, 37 (1955); Kennedy, 86, (1957); Lyndon B. Johnson, 32, [Batman: The Movie!] (1966); Nixon, 81, (1968); Ford, 15, (1975); Carter, 23, (1976); Reagan, 46, (1976); G.H.W. Bush, 27, (1986); Clinton, 74, (1992); George W. Bush, 112, (2000); Obama, 80, (2007).
Some presidents don't break into film for a long time after their final year in office. This is understandable of course for the earliest period of the presidency, as the very first depiction of a president occurs in 1909—and that was GW, 112 years after his final year in office. So the function of appearance or not in films of the first flux or so presidents was a function of technology rather than anything else. Once you get into the meatier part of the presidency, the psych and popular factors come into play, which explains why it took 120 years after his final year for James Madison to be depicted in a film. He is followed by W.H. Harrison (101 years), van Buren (100), Pierce at 97 years, Fillmore (72), and B. Harrison (63). On the other end of the continuum, JFK is depicted in a film before he was president (1957); Wilson appears in the first year of his presidency (1913) and FDR in his fourth (1937). Once we reach Ike all of the presidents make appearances in film during their administration (many for the first time on Saturday Night Live).
In 2016 we did the opposite, electing a tv show of nothing but commercials to the presidency.
And that, as they say, is Show Biz.
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