Mark, thank you so much for joining me today.

It's great to be with you, Dr. Phil.

You're not new at this.

And look, just making a movie, let's just say you were making a movie about sunshine.

I mean, dealing with actors, dealing with Finan Sears, dealing with all the things that go into navigating the shifting sands of Hollywood,

you and I have both been in that world for a long time. That's treacherous terrain in the best of

circumstances, right? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I joke with my friends that if you have a young

person in your life who wants to go into filmmaking, give them this book and you'll talk them out of it.

Yeah.

And they'll go into something sensible like dentistry or the law. It is. It's incredibly difficult and it's treacherous. And so, you know, the book really covers a lot of different areas. One of them is kind of in search of Ronald Reagan, trying to figure out who

this guy was. And then the second is more the filmmaking process, all the things you talked about,

the financiers who disappear and others who come alongside and actors' schedules and so forth. But

I think the primary thing that really interested me was, you know, Ronald Reagan is

really, really difficult to understand. There's a biographer named Edmund Morris, who was hired

to do the official, kind of be the official Ronald Reagan biographer. And he finally threw up his

hands and just said, I find the guy inscrutable and sort of gave up and did a goofy book that was part fiction,

part real. But this is a person who did not make it easy to be understood, but left breadcrumbs

along the way. And so that was part of my challenge was to talk to 50 or 60 of the people that

knew him and worked with him and try to piece together who he was and tell the

story. As I say, you're not a rookie at this. When you came to do Reagan and you purchased the rights,

you were not naive about this. You had produced some short films in particular that were not

middle of the road. Some of them were controversial, like the bridge, for example.

...