Beatty's Reds: Bound for Glory

What does a filmmaker want these days? Respect. A place in history. And what better way to achieve that than by restoring a great movie to its former glory with a major DVD release? Some movies stand the test of time, some become dated. As I was looking for the best movie of the last 25 years, Brian De Palma's Scarface was one of the candidates. (THR's TK Arnold examines how Universal has pushed the movie back into public consciousness.) And so was Warren Beatty's Reds, another classic on the comeback trail. This one mounted a New York Film Festival screening this week [Wireimage photo, right] and several theatrical bookings as well before its October 17 DVD release.

Saturday night L.A.'s DGA theater was packed with such directors as Joe Dante, Penelope Spheeris, Amy Heckerling, Tony Bill and Rod Lurie, many with their teen kids in tow, to see Reds on the big screen. The 1981 movie, one of my all-time favorites, holds up really well—at the same time that you can't help but recognize that the same movie could never be made today. It would be too long (at three hours and 21 minutes), too period, too expensive, and way too politically left. After all, it's a sympathetic portrait of legendary Communist John Reed (Beatty) and his wife, Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton). It was amazing that it got made at the time. (Beatty almost called the movie Comrades.)

During the Q & A afterwards, sensitively conducted by Beatty's choice, Capote director Bennett Miller (who allowed Beatty to ramble but eventually pulled him back on topic), the actor-writer-director-producer praised his editor Dede Allen and Michael Eisner (who were in the house) as well as Barry Diller and the late Gulf & Western chief Charlie Bluhdorn, who greenlit the $32 million picture. "The distribution we now have does not accommodate itself to these pictures," Beatty said. "Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago came out in two theaters, people had time to catch up with them. They would stay in theaters for a year. It's now 2000, 3000 theaters. Dick Tracy was 3500 theaters. Boom! You get it or you don't. It's gone. They're all gone so fast they don't have time to develop a following. It's bad for the content of movies."

Beatty made a provocative reference to a major movie star once represented by his publicist, Pat Kingsley: "I did no interviews for Reds. I thought the baggage I brought or some dumb thing I said in public might hurt the movie, which was a fragile thing. It's akin to a chef coming into a kitchen with a souffle and stomping his foot. I still think the massive publicity people do to accommodate 5000 theaters is unfortunate—it clouds what we think of the movie, especially the personal publicity someone might fall into."

Shooting Reds in Madrid, Seville, Helsinki, New York, Washington, London Manchester, L.A., New Mexico and Leeds was an unpleasant experience, Beatty admitted. "Making a movie is a little like vomiting," he said. "I don't like to do it, I dread it, but when I do it I feel better."

Beatty had so much fun doing his initial interviews with what became the movie's "witnesses" that he tried to put some of them on film. Although Walter Lippman and Averill Harriman wouldn't allow that, Beatty decided to use the filmed interviews as exposition, and it works beautifully. Infamous is one recent example of how his strategy has been imitated. Beatty was originally shooting the witnesses against black backdrops so that he could superimpose footage behind them, but eventually nixed that idea. "I was so much in love with them that I didn't want to compete with them."

Being a director and an actor was tough: "You have to be crazy to act and direct," he said. "As an actor you want to be in control of being out of control, that's where the good stuff happens. As a director you're in control of being out of control." And his rep for doing countless takes? "It's not to do a lot of takes. I want to give other actors the chance to do what they want and be somewhat in control. It's direct democracy. Little do they know it's fascisim. I have a grave respect for the actor." (Beatty denied that he demanded extra takes from Robert Altman on McCabe and Mrs. Miller.)

The movie is as politically relevant as it could be, now. "We are in a much more apparent jam now than we were in 1980," he said.

Comments

[Sergio]

At last, Anne a film that we can both agree on. Reds is a GREAT film, I dare say perhaps Beatty's best work. Complex, moving, inteligent and competely fascinating from beginning to end. Another film I can finally cross off my DVD Wish List

[Allen]

just curious--would you laud the pitcure if it had been a sympathetic story about young, pretty Nazis during their rise to power? Next question--what authoritarian bunch of monsters, Nazis or Bolsheviks, caused more wonton horror, slaughtered more innocents in the most gruesome fashion, and plundered their way through Europe most effectivly? Who had to literally build walls to keep their citizens trapped in ther pens? If you don't know the answer, crack open a history book. The real REDS story ain't the least bit romantic.

[Sergio]

Allen's response shows why a film like Reds couldn't be made today. Just doing a film that takes place in Russia during the revolution is too touchy a subject to deal with today. It's literally a form of censorship if filmmakers have to think twice about the kind of films they want to make today. You know, you don't have to watch it. I have no interest in seeing gore bucket horror films like Hostel or this new Texas Chainsaw Massacre film, but I'm not going to complain about someone making them (though I will admit that I saw The Descent and liked it)

But to answer his point, the film does without a doubt present a romantized picture of the early days of the Russian revolution before things went very "sour". If the story took place during the reign of terror under Stalin, it never would have seen the light of day. But what about The English Patient, a romantic love story widely hailed and seen by many people though the lead male character played by Ralph Fiennes is a Nazi spy? Or The Young Lions with Marlon Brando as the very romantized, handsome, blond haired, golden god Nazi officer or if you know your movies, what about Song of Russia with Robert Taylor, one of the most conservative right wing actors in Hollywood, which is a flat out unabashed loving Hollywood tribute to Russia and everybody's favorite "Uncle" Joe Stalin?