Putting on the White House premiere of Amazon’s new Melania Trump documentary Melania, a $75m project directed by Rush Hour’s Brett Ratner, required some improvisation this week. A makeshift cinema had to be put together in a grand reception room to accommodate the tux-wearing VIPs on the guest list.
A year ago, Mike Tyson, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Queen Rania of Jordan and the other VIPs on the invite list might have been ushered into the East Wing’s historic White House Family Theater instead. But President Trump’s demolition of a whole wing of the White House in October 2025 – to make way for a planned $300 million, 90,000 square foot ballroom – has left the White House without a cinema for the first time in 80 years. It was an ignominious end, not only for the historic East Wing but for the 42-seat cinema tucked away within it.
The best perk of the White House
Film at the first family’s residence had a pretty ignominious start, too: the first movie ever screened there was DW Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation in 1915. The building’s own movie theatre, however, only screened its first film in 1942, when Franklin D Roosevelt had it converted from a cloakroom. Bill Clinton once told film critic Roger Ebert that the ‘wonderful’ movie theatre was ‘the best perk of the White House’.
Despite having converted the screening room in the first place, Roosevelt (1933-45) – who, before he became president, wrote a movie treatment based on the life of American Revolutionary War hero John Paul Jones and sent it unsolicited to Paramount Pictures – appears to have mostly watched Mickey Mouse cartoons. Harry S Truman (1945-53) enjoyed John Ford western My Darling Clementine, while Dwight D Eisenhower (1953-1961) also watched westerns, with High Noon a particular favourite. But it was only in 1961, when White House projectionist Paul Fischer began recording every film screening in a notebook, that other presidents’ viewing habits were revealed.
JFK settled in for a screening of The Misfits, starring his lover Marilyn Monroe
John F Kennedy’s (1961-1963) first film as POTUS was a 70mm screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, which he was obliged to watch at the nearby Warner Theatre because the White House was only able to screen 35mm and 16mm films. He also settled in for a screening of The Misfits, starring his lover Marilyn Monroe, although the legend is that he didn’t care for it and left halfway through. The World War II veteran enjoyed foreign-language films (Last Year at Marienbad, L’Avventura), the odd war film – including multiple screenings of PT 109, the story of his own wartime service starring Cliff Robertson – and even a Carry On film,1960’s Carry On Constable. Most chilling was a screening of the prophetic 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate, about a patsy brainwashed into becoming a political assassin.
Perhaps the most poignant entry in Fischer’s log, however, is the final one: between a screening of James Bond film From Russia With Love on November 21, 1961 and ‘Little John [F Kennedy Jr’s] Birthday Party’, planned for November 29, the projectionist records that ‘Pres Kennedy was shot + died in Dallas Texas’.
Paranoid thrillers and nuclear nightmares
Richard Nixon (1969-74) was a huge cinephile, watching a wide range of mostly American movies, ranging from musicals to comedies, war films to westerns, thrillers and historical dramas. His obsession with Patton – the World War II general and the 1970 movie in which George C Scott played him – is believed to have partially inspired the invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
Standouts from the other 400 or so films on his list include Cold War comedy The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, nuclear nightmares Fail Safe and On the Beach, and – shortly before he resigned in disgrace – The Great Gatsby, which uses the story of literature’s most hollow man to symbolise the corruption of the American dream, erosion of morality and the rot beneath the surface of the nation’s so-called elites.
Jimmy Carter only served a single term, but he served a lot of popcorn
Jimmy Carter only served a single term as President (1977-81), but he served a lot of popcorn, screening over 400 films, beginning with Watergate scandal thriller All the President’s Men. He snagged a pre-release screening of Apocalypse Now, and watched Star Wars with the President of Egypt. But perhaps the most interesting choice for the President who served during the US energy crisis was The Formula (1980), about an oil company conspiracy to hide a revolutionary synthetic fuel. A few months later, he was replaced by former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan. Coincidence or conspiracy?
It could be argued that one of Reagan’s first White House screenings – Being There, the story of a man fond of simple homilies who ascends to the presidency – was a little on-the-nose. But who knows if Reds, Gorky Park and Moscow on the Hudson had any influence on Reagan’s transition from planning a missile defence system named after Star Wars to the joint pioneer of ‘tear down this wall’ glasnost with Gorbachev? Reagan’s choices could be meta; he screened a TV movie called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House, and several films he starred in, including Bedtime for Bonzo and Cattle Queen of Montana. Steven Spielberg brought a print of E.T.: the Extraterrestrial to show in the summer of 1982, but it was a screening of 1983’s nuke thriller WarGames that famously inspired ‘the Gipper’ to pursue nuclear disarmament with genuine zeal. Luckily, the following year’s guerrilla flick Red Dawn failed to inspire similar sentiments towards a potential Russian invasion of America.
Bill Clinton’s movie appetites are a little sketchier, since screenings that took place during his affair with Monica Lewinsky have been redacted from the official record. Although he claimed to be a huge fan of Casablanca (which coincidentally translates to ‘white house’) and to have seen High Noon more than 20 times, Clinton didn’t watch them at the White House; he preferred new releases, ranging from The Patriot to Forrest Gump and Apollo 13. Clinton is known to have watched multiple films in which he appeared as himself, in clips from his televised appearances – most notably The Siege, in which CIA-trained Middle Eastern terrorists set off bombs in New York.
Clinton is known to have watched multiple films in which he appeared as himself
No one knows what movies George W Bush watched at the White House – though his post-9/11 demeanour suggests he’d noted Bill Pullman’s role as a flightsuit-wearing, jet pilot President in Independence Day. But his successor, Barack Obama, declared himself to be ‘a movie guy’ and posts an annual list of his favourite films on social media. Obama, who has so far had two films made about his early years, Barry and Southside Tales, hosted a cast and crew screening of Selma. He and his family also watched films as diverse as La La Land and goofy car-creatures flick Monster Trucks.
Obama, of course, was replaced by Donald Trump, who got his second term underway with a screening of Finding Dory (it took place in the same week as his decidedly un-Dory-like immigration ban kicked in).
The 45th (and now 47th) President’s demolition of the East Wing and with it, the White House movie theater, leaves a question over the future of the White House Family Theater, although the former star of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York may yet leave a cinema legacy of sorts. He may never see a follow-up to his favourite action flick, 1988 Van Damme actioner Bloodsport, but Trump is getting the sequel he most longs for: a fourth Rush Hour movie, directed by Melania’s Ratner. If only he had an actual cinema to screen it in.
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