Jimmy Carter screened a lot of films while he was president

“All presidents are lonely guys,” humorist Bruce Jay Friedman once wrote, “since they have to go off regularly and make decisions that affect the hearts and minds of all Americans for generations to come. They usually do that after lunch.” As it happens, a film scripted by Friedman—the 1980 Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor prison comedy Stir Crazy—was among the dozens of motion pictures screened in the White House by Jimmy Carter during his one term in the Oval Office from 1977 to 1981. Paleofuture writer Matt Novak has documented that Carter was a positively voracious cinephile, even more so than ex-movie actor Ronald Reagan. So Novak has compiled an exhaustive and exhausting list of all the movies the 39th President of the United States screened during his time in the White House. He created the list by “painstakingly going through the President’s daily journal” and denoting every mention of film screenings. The resulting article, arranged chronologically, actually includes links to this journal, so readers can click through to see what else President Carter was doing on those particular days. His March 26, 1977, viewing of The Bad News Bears, for instance, seems to have been the culmination of a day of family fun, which included bowling and swimming.