Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America

by Peter Biskind

According to Pikser, outside the script meetings, Beatty reverted to his default personality: “He was sweet as honey.” But Griffiths disagrees: “It was not just in script conferences. I think he is a brute, I think he is a bully, there is something not terribly grown up about him that is smeared across his life. But it’s not just personal, it’s to do with being unimaginably wealthy within the superpower that is America. Movie stars are about power. Because they have power they believe they have authority, and it’s a very hard realization they have to make occasionally that they don’t have authority, they just have power. I knew that if I’d gone into production with him, it would have been bloody, physically bloody.”

  After four and a half months of struggling with the second draft at the Carlyle, Griffiths told Beatty in late August or mid-September 1978 that he had to go back to London. According to him, the conversation went like this:

  “Listen, I have three children, they have no mother, and I need to be back home.”

  “You can’t go home. Once you sign on with me, you surrender all rights to your life.” Griffiths laughed.

  “I don’t know what you’re laughing for,” Beatty continued. “I’m serious.”

  “I’m laughing because you can’t be serious. My life is my life, and nobody takes it away from me. I’m going home.”

  “I’m coming with you!” So they ended up together again, this time working at the Dorchester Hotel in London.

  Beatty heatedly denies this account. As someone who now is the father of four children, he says, “Would I do something like this?” Maybe not now, but then he didn’t have children and regarded them as impediments to his work. In answer to Beatty’s question, Buck Henry says, “Absolutely! But he would have a rationalization. Not only was it good for him, it was good for Trevor Griffiths too. ’Cause it would advance his career, keep his mind occupied, give him something to think about other than the tragedy.” Adds writer Bo Goldman, “Pure Warren Beatty. He’d say something like that, because he gets so obsessive about the work. The guy’s wife had died, he has to let him go. So Warren’s gonna fight about it. It’s like something he couldn’t control.”

  In any event, the chasm between the two men was too wide to bridge. “The atmosphere around us was poisonous,” says Griffiths. “It was messy, it was vile, it was foul-mouthed on both sides. Towne’s critique was much more fundamental than Warren realized. Because he was basically saying, ‘Make another movie, don’t do this one.’” There is a key sequence near the end of the script aboard the train on the way back from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan in southern Russia, where Reed berates Zinoviev, the Soviet commissar, for rewriting his speeches. Suddenly, in the middle of a heated exchange, the counterrevolutionary White Army attacks the train. Griffiths complained, “Do we really need this scene? What is important is the argument, not the attack on the train.”

  “Listen,” said Beatty. “One thing you have to learn—in a movie, one bullet is worth a thousand words.”

  “That’s terrible, because I’m a writer, and all I’ve got are words,” he roared, exasperated beyond understanding. “And then,” he recalls, “Beatty exploded, and I exploded again, and walked out of the room, packed my bag, and left. I never saw him again.”

  Of course, Beatty was right. Reds is not a novel or a play; it is a movie, a popular entertainment, or at least that was the hope. Would audiences go for it? “That’s the great thing about Warren,” says Pikser. “It’s a gamble. That’s what makes it fun. If he thinks there’s no chance that people will hate it, he’s not interested in doing it.”

  “It was a huge relief when we separated,” says Beatty of Griffiths. “I thought it would be good for me to have a doctrinaire Marxist to keep me from [wandering off the straight and narrow]. But the truth is that I’m not a Communist, I’m not a Marxist, I’m a centrist. So we just couldn’t continue.”

  “CASTING IS the whole ball game,” Beatty says. “The character of Louise Bryant holds the movie together. When I do a movie I get an actor in my head, and then I better get them.” Beatty had been planning to ask Julie Christie to play Louise Bryant. After all, as Buck Henry puts it, “He was making his Doctor Zhivago,” and she had played Lara in David Lean’s film. But that didn’t happen, ironic, in view of the fact that it would have been the role of her career, and Reds the serious picture suited to her politics she always wanted him to make. Instead, he asked Diane Keaton to be his Lara—that is, his Louise Bryant. It was announced in the trades on June 6, 1979. (Beatty did dedicate Reds “To Jules.”)

  Some thought Keaton was a mistake. The real Bryant was much tougher, brassier, opportunistic, and sexually voracious than the woman portrayed in the script that Keaton would play in the movie. But he seemed to regard Keaton as something of a muse, or at least that’s what he told the press: “It sometimes seemed I had very little interest in making a movie until I was romantically motivated. You need and want that in order to build, to produce, to direct, to schedule, to act in, to finance… if Diane Keaton had not made Reds, I don’t know what I would have done.” For her part, Keaton says, “I didn’t really believe it was going to happen. He would say, ‘We’re going to shoot now, and then we would not shoot now, and then he would say, ‘Okay, the next few months,’ but it kept getting put off and put off for what seemed like an endless amount of time. So it really wasn’t a reality until we were actually in England, and we started to shoot. And then I believed we were doing it.”

  The other key role, of course, was Eugene O’Neill, who was a friend of Reed’s but had an affair with Bryant. One day, Beatty invited Jack Nicholson to a casting session. Under the pretext of asking for advice, Beatty recalls, “I said, ‘I’ve got to get an actor to play Eugene O’Neill and it’s got to be somebody who leaves not a shadow of a doubt that he could take Diane away from me.’ He said, ‘Well, you have no choice. There’s only one person—me!’” (There was some speculation in the press that Nicholson in fact took the part because he wanted to steal Keaton from Beatty after Michelle Phillips had made her way from him to his friend.)

  According to AD and executive producer Simon Relph, Beatty “worried and worried about casting Jack, because he was too old. They were both too old. When we met Jack, he was doing The Shining. It was towards the end of the film, and Kubrick had got him into the most shambolic state. A kind of grotesque figure appeared at the hotel.” Adds Dick Sylbert, “Jack gave up the idea of worrying about getting older. He looked at his hair, he looked at his stomach, and he said, ‘Fuck’em.’” Relph continues, “Warren said to me, ‘Do you think Jack can get in shape?’ We only had three or four months. I said, ‘If he wants to do it, I’m sure he can.’ He did really want to do it. When it was time, he appeared, having shed a huge amount of weight, and all the years. He was fantastic.”

  Beatty rounded out the cast with Paul Sorvino, who played the fiery Italian-American Communist Louis Fraina; Gene Hackman, who had the small but memorable part of Peter Van Wherry, a magazine editor; and Maureen Stapleton, who would prove to be splendid as anarchist Emma Goldman. Stapleton was an eccentric, a heavy drinker who could memorize a play without trouble, but according to Nina Rosenblum, her son’s partner and a documentary filmmaker, “did not know how to turn on the radio, the cold and hot water, or a light bulb.”

  Stapleton didn’t like the character. She felt Emma Goldman was a self-righteous, humorless ideologue on a mission, and she just despised that in life, either on the right or the left. She turned Beatty down. Beatty came back, said, “Maureen, if you don’t do the movie I’m going to kill you.” Eventually, she gave in.

  Beatty was largely using British locations to stand in for American ones like Provincetown and Greenwich Village, but he worried the locales wouldn’t be convincing to U.S. audiences, so he took care to populate the picture with veteran American character actors like Ian Wolfe, R. G. Armstrong, Jack Kehoe, and Emmet Walsh, who were familiar from dozens of movies. He also made strategic use of nonactors, such as Paris Review edito
r George Plimpton playing a fashionable publisher with an eye for the ladies, including Bryant; and writer Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird) who was marvelous as Zinoviev. An outspoken anti-Communist, Kosinski initially turned Beatty down because he feared he would be kidnapped in Finland (where Beatty planned to shoot the Russian scenes) by the KGB. Kosinski told him, “You’re crazy to do this.… I can’t.” Beatty countered with, “Why don’t we shoot you in Spain? You’ll have Franco to protect you!” Of course, Kosinski understood that Beatty was joking. Franco was dead, but shooting his scenes in Spain did assuage his anxieties, and he agreed to do the movie.

  Once again Beatty did not initially intend to act in or direct the film. He knew how difficult it was simply to produce a picture of this size and complexity, and as an actor he would have to appear in big chunks of the movie. He briefly considered John Lithgow, who resembled Reed physically, but eventually decided to do it himself, just as he became convinced there was no one else to hold the reins, save for him. He told Dick Sylbert, “I can’t trust anybody to direct this movie but me. If Kubrick called me tomorrow I’d turn him down. But I hate the idea. To be a director, you have to be sick.”

  To ease his way, he surrounded himself with confidants—MacLeod, script supervisor Zelda Barron—as well as trusted collaborators, like Dick Sylbert, who was fresh from three years running production at Paramount, and was arguably the most skilled production designer in the business. He hired Dede Allen, who since Bonnie and Clyde had done Little Big Man, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon, and was the doyenne of the New York editing world. He persuaded Stephen Sondheim to do the score. “Warren has enthusiasms that surprise you,” says Sylbert. “There’s something that Stephen Sondheim does to Warren that has him in tears. I never got it.”

  Vittorio Storaro, who was responsible for Bernardo Bertolucci’s stunningly photographed pictures, and had most recently survived Apocalypse Now, was a master of lush lighting and the moving camera—though Beatty, raised at the knee of George Stevens, who never moved the camera unless he had to, had his own ideas about how the picture should be shot. Beatty recalls, “One day Vittorio came to me in tears. ‘Warren, I want to please you, but the camera just sits there. You never move it.’ His crew had pieces of dolly tracks in their hands.” But in a concession, Beatty did agree to process all the film at Technicolor in Rome—which entailed lengthy delays—because it was the only place where they knew how to add silver, making for more saturated colors, which Storaro (and he) wanted.

  No one knew better than Beatty that Reds was not going to be just a series of pretty pictures, and that presented a problem. As Pikser puts it, “We had an audience which didn’t know the first fucking thing about any of this stuff, and if we were going to educate them with the dialogue, it was going to be deadly—it would ruin the film.” For example, approximately ten to twelve minutes—an eternity in screen time—is devoted to internecine squabbles within the American left. “It’s not like you think, Hey, let’s make a lot of money with the breakup of the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party, coming out of the Socialist Party,” Beatty recalls. “The idea that anyone would be crazy enough to try to interest a movie audience for that long in something so arcane is pretty amusing. What a ticket to the candy counter that would seem like.” When he saw Reds again after many years, he thought, I don’t even know what the hell they’re talking about, and I wrote it!

  Some years earlier, Beatty had come up with an elegant solution to the problem: the Old People, aka the Witnesses, the talking-head interviews with thirty-two survivors of the period who knew or knew of Reed. Pikser recalls, “If exposition kills historical dramas, why not just take the bull by the horns, and say, ‘We’re going to make a little documentary that will provide the information we need, but it won’t be purely didactic, it will be funny, it will have entertainment value.’” Mischievously, Beatty has the Witnesses, who are on display for their recollections, begin by contradicting one another, and talking about the fallibility of memory, its lapses, and tricks it plays.

  The Witnesses included Roger Baldwin, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, along with writers Rebecca West (The New Meaning of Treason) and Henry Miller, whose Tropic of Cancer, published in the U.S. by Grove Press in 1961, struck an early blow for the sexual revolution when the Supreme Court ruled it literature, not pornography. Beatty had read an interview with Miller where the writer described himself as “the Warren Beatty of his day.” Says Dede Allen, “Miller had nothing to do with Jack Reed, but Warren just wanted him.” Pikser wrote him a polite letter. Miller wrote back saying, “You seem to be after the same kind of academic crap I’ve always hated my whole life, I think I would be terrible for you, there’s no way you could make use of me, I don’t think I would like to meet you, I don’t think you would like to meet me.” Pikser was crushed, wrote an abject apology, “You misunderstood me, we think you’d be great, blah blah.” He showed it to Beatty, who said, “Throw that out, send him a telegram: PERFECT! WHEN DO WE ARRIVE?” Pikser did so, and the next thing he knew he had an invitation to dinner at Miller’s house, with the novelist and his final (and platonic) girlfriend—an actress named Venus, of course, in her late twenties (Miller was a spry eighty-eight). Miller’s only request was that Beatty find Venus a movie part. Beatty always spoke well of her, but wasn’t going to have anyone telling him who to cast. He didn’t give her a part.

  After Griffiths walked out, Beatty continued to work on the script himself. He knew that he was going against the grain, and from the very beginning, according to Pikser, he said, “I have to make an absolutely conventional, corny love story. I want a puppy. I want American flags all over this movie. I want every hokey, old-fashioned Hollywood convention we can come up with so that we can hang the rest of the story on them.” Pikser adds, “He knew he needed things like the dogs to make this thing not feel like an alien conspiracy of Russian Jews, to give it something that Americans could feel was American.”

  Beatty consulted and/or used other writers, including Feibleman, Towne, and Pikser, as well as Hellman, Schulberg, Chayefsky, but primarily May. Says Henry, “If you have the structure and need help, you can’t get better help than Elaine.” The brutal script meetings began again. “Warren functions creatively in a pugilistic manner,” says Pikser. “He likes to fight. It’s not fun to fight with a stupid person, so he likes to have smart people to fight with. You start working on a script, you can expect to be abused. Anybody who’s ever worked with him who doesn’t admit that is lying. That’s how he is with Towne, that’s how he is with Elaine, but they love it. They’re extremely volatile. They throw things, they scream. They swear at each other. They feel that this is what it means to be creative. The first time I met Towne”—who only kibitzed on Reds, while May worked on it extensively—“he walked up to me and he said, ‘I just want you to know something.’ Right up in my face. ‘I don’t give a fuck about history.’ I was like, ‘What do you want from me, man, I’m just a kid here.’”

  May focused on the relationship scenes between Reed and Bryant, and Bryant and O’Neill. Unlike Griffiths, she understood that Beatty was the star, that Reed was in large part a vehicle for him, and that the Reed-Bryant relationship had to have contemporary resonance, a modern flavor. The tension between the two, although rooted in the historical reality of the period, had to crackle with the passions that roiled the women’s movement of the 1970s. But like Towne, she had no feel for or interest in the period in which the film was set. Echoing Towne, she said blithely, “I don’t know anything about this history, and I don’t particularly want to know anything about it.” But somebody needed to, so she insisted that Pikser be part of the process. Holding up some pages, she would say, “Jack and Emma Goldman need to fight here. I don’t know what the fuck they would fight about,” and throw him a pad. He wrote a fight and showed it to her. She would take a line at the bottom and move it to the top, a line in the middle and move it to the bottom, and say, “Okay, that’s great, do
it again!” He recalls, “That’s one of the things that she taught me. She’d always say, ‘There’s no such thing as writing, only rewriting. That’s great, write it again!’ Then she’d say, ‘That’s how Warren directs: “It’s a great take, let’s do it again.” ’”

  To Pikser, Beatty’s odd-couple approach to script development—May tossing Griffiths’s historical drama into the pop culture blender—was incomprehensible. It would have made more sense to tap someone from the pool of ex-Communist or fellow-traveler screenwriters who knew the history and the movies. “Stitching together that kind of writer out of Warren and Elaine, Trevor and me, was stupid,” he says. “Abe Polonsky could have done it, Waldo Salt could have done it. But Warren was so not interested in that. He’s very smart about his own [limitations]. Any of those guys would have made him feel diminished as a contributor. He wanted it to be his vision.” But it was also true that the finished script was very, very good, better, probably, than anything Polonsky or Salt could have written on their own, and in many ways the ripe fruit of Beatty’s “hostile intelligences.” One way of putting it is to say Griffiths provided the trunk, Beatty the branches, May the leaves—and Beatty again, rewriting on the set, the forest.

  7

  FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

  How Beatty made a budget-busting epic about the Russian Revolution at the height of the new Cold War, and got Paramount to pay for it.

  “After Heaven Can Wait, Warren could dictate what he wanted to make. Reds was his come shot.”

  —Robert Evans

  WAY BACK IN 1967, in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde, Beatty had quipped that the picture was so successful the studios would have backed him to make a musical of the Last Supper. But they never in a million years could have imagined that he would want to do a picture like Reds. It may not have been as revolutionary as Bonnie and Clyde, as sharp as Shampoo, and it may have been a good twenty minutes too long, but Reds is without question his masterpiece, his Citizen Kane, his 1900 or Raging Bull—the fuck-you film, the go-for-broke film, the film toward which his career had been building.