QUOTE : If Reagan’s story were fiction, it would seem absurdly pat and overdetermined, the irony too heavy-headed. Out of college during the Depression, he went straight to work for the new fantasy-industrial complex. In a Des Moines radio studio, he regularly pretended he was at Wrigley Field in Chicago, performing fake play-by-play broadcasts of Cubs games based on real-time wire-service descriptions. He visited Hollywood and got his first movie role — playing a radio announcer. During World War II he was an officer in the army — serving in the First Motion Picture Unit, stationed in Burbank and Culver City, where he starred in "This Is the Army," a movie in which he played a corporal who stages a piece of musical theater called "This Is the Army.