"If it's to be a bloodbath, let it be now. Appeasement is not the answer. Yipee-ki-yay, motherfucker," President Ronald Reagan famously said before machine-gunning down a bunch of Berkeley student protesters. Ok, no, but he did keep post-presidential offices in what you might call the Die Hard penthouse on the thirty-fourth floor of Century City's Fox Plaza, more commonly known to this day as Nakatomi Plaza. In the late eighties, when staffers first scouted the last empty space in the then-brand new building, production on the film had just wrapped and "the floors were littered with bullet shells and broken glass," according to The Hollywood Reporter. One Secret Service agent told Reagan's chief of staff "Great, you just picked a building where there's been a movie made about how terrorists can blow it up." (Fun fact: Alan Rickman had his feature debut in Die Hard as villain Hans Gruber; Rickman is now in theaters playing Reagan in The Butler.)
Apparently, Reagan pal/20th Century Fox owner Marvin Davis had to do some wrangling to reserve the space for the ex-pres, but eventually he ended up with 13,939 square feet "[t]astefully decorated in neutrals and polished wood," for $18,000 a month. (Wife Nancy also kept an office down the hall for her anti-drug foundation.) Reagan used the office until 1999 and his staff stayed until 2001; toward the end, the president would still come in, "sitting at his desk quietly reading the newspaper comics." When the penthouse came on the market again in 2001, it was leasing for more than $80,000 per month.
· Inside Ronald Reagan's Century City 'Die Hard' Office [THR]
Loading comments...