When he finally did screen Reds, he did so first for Diller, then for Bluhdorn. There was a protocol for these screenings: The guest of honor was never on time. How late he was depended on where he stood in the pecking order. If, say, a screening was scheduled for Beatty at eight in the evening, he might show up at any time after that, but never at eight. When he screened the film for Diller, Beatty would arrive punctually at eight, but Diller was late. (Nicholson was at that screening, and he drawled, in his Nicholson voice, “Hey, Dil, hy’a doin’ Dil?”) When Beatty showed the picture to Bluhdorn at the screening room on the thirtieth floor of the Gulf + Western Building on Columbus Circle in New York, he and Diller were on time, but Bluhdorn was late. (He was accompanied by bodyguards, who locked the doors of the room.) During the intermission, picking food off silver trays, Bluhdorn said something like, “Vahrren, yoo haf made a vonderful movie, iz fantaztic, I luff yoo in dis, ezpecially, but I haf vun question.”
“What is that Mr. Bluhdorn?”
“Vill it zell in Indiana?”
The answer was, “No, of course not.”
As postproduction was winding down, the sticky question of writing credits arose. Beatty was anxious for Griffiths to share the credit, probably because otherwise he’d have to say he’d written it himself, and no one would have believed him. Beatty persuaded him to watch the movie before he made up his mind. He was impressed by Reds. “John Reed definitely left a mark in the sand,” he says. “Unfortunately, the American tide came in and wiped it out. It’s to Warren Beatty’s eternal credit that he produced a movie that again gave Reed some kind of visibility.” Griffiths agreed to take the co-writing credit.
Powerful directors and producers collect writing credits like butterflies, which is why the Writers Guild raises the bar for them, but a determined director or producer (in this case Beatty was both) can often get his way. Did Beatty deserve his credit? In a lengthy and close collaboration like this one, it is often impossible to untangle the who-did-what knot. Beatty was not a facile writer, but by the time he started on Reds, he had spent plenty of time doing it. As Griffiths admitted, “He’s written thousands of lines of dialogue.” Indeed, much of the dialogue in Reds, even that spoken by characters other than Reed—rings with the cadence of Beatty’s voice. To hear him tell it, he continually rewrote on the set. Says Pikser, choosing his words carefully, “Warren made some contributions in terms of actually moving a pencil across a yellow pad. The scene on the train with Zinoviev, where Reed says, ‘The revolution is dissent,’ that’s Warren.” Structure, character development, ideas? “I don’t think he does much of that,” Pikser continues. “But every line that anybody writes has to be processed through the filter of Warren’s sensibility. A lot of the time, writing with Warren is like channeling him. You’re gonna write jokes that are his jokes. He may not write them, but neither would you were you not writing a Warren Beatty script.”
The rewriting, rerecording, and remixing went right down to the wire. With the premiere—to the editors, it was like the Second Coming—scheduled for December 3, 1981, Beatty and company were still working feverishly into the final days of November. Recalls Fleischman, “The last night that we mixed, we had to have a track negative finished and on the plane at seven o’clock in the morning so they could get the film to Technicolor in Rome, where they were printing it. But that night, Elaine and Warren were writing lines of dialogue! We were just waiting there, 7:30, eight o’clock at night, while they were recording it. They didn’t get it to us till midnight. We mixed it in a couple of hours, and delivered it to the guy who had to shoot the negative—he kept his lab open—at two in the morning, then it went to the plane.”
Playwright Herb Gardner once said, “Films are never finished, they’re abandoned.” This was certainly true of Beatty’s. But not everyone likes to work that way. McKay says he would never work with Beatty again: “We were going crazy. The process of Reds was trying stuff and trying stuff and trying stuff. Then all of a sudden, you’re over the cliff. We just ran out of time. Wherever we ended, that was the movie. It wasn’t a process that made it possible to work it into a shape. There were parts towards the end that just got left in that should never have been left in. It could have been more refined. And then he still wasn’t willing to let go, and say, ‘This is it, my movie.’ I didn’t like working that way. But I have to say, I’m proud of that film. We did a lot of really good work on it. This is a guy who had a passion, and followed his passion, you gotta say that for him.”
MARKETING REDS was going to be no picnic. The film was long, complex, and the subject matter was alien if not distasteful to a large segment of the American audience, which had just elected Reagan president. Moreover, the Paramount marketing team was not used to selling films like Reds. The exhibitor screenings raised a red flag, so to speak. Theater owners complained about the length and the subject matter, said things like, “Oh my God, Communism—I know it’s a part of our history, but do we have to have a movie about it?”
Beatty was used to controlling every aspect of the production; marketing, generally the province of the studio, was going to be no different. Nothing Paramount did was right. Beatty hated the trailer, so much so that when the trailer guys came in to show him what they’d done, he was so hard on them they started popping Maalox tablets like M&Ms. But Paramount was not about to roll over and play dead; Beatty would have a fight on his hands. In the same way that he brought Elaine May and others into the editing room, he injected Pat Caddell into the marketing process, armed with his expertise at surveys and polling. Alluding to Francis Coppola’s way-over-budget Apocalypse Now, Caddell says, “Everyone was telling him this was the greatest disaster since—I used to call it Apocalypse Again.” Marketing and distribution were headed by Frank Mancuso, who would later become head of the studio. “Frank was not a big fan of it,” Caddell recalls. “He thought this thing was death. Except for Bluhdorn and Diller, the suits, down the line, just wished it would go away. They were terrified. The marketing of this movie was undermined the whole way through.”
Neither age nor experience had dulled Caddell’s edge. He wasted no time telling the studio people they didn’t know what they were doing. “Of course nobody in the movie industry had done any real surveys, except for those yo-yo things they did,” he says. “They knew nothing about their audience in those days.” But the Paramount executives didn’t like to be told their business by an outsider who was Beatty’s creature, and arrogant to boot. Caddell was the match that ignited an explosion. “Warren just ripped the shit out of them. He was just angry because of the way they were treating me, because he read that as treating him [badly]. He just took apart the whole place. He and Barry would just knock the living hell out of each other. Warren would drive Barry wild, and Barry would not put up with it. He reamed Warren out because he was bullying and browbeating everyone at Paramount, while they were all breaking their asses trying to help him, and would he please stop this before he destroyed the place! Sometimes Barry would say, ‘Fuck it,’ and just get up and leave.
“Frank [Mancuso] used to say of himself, ‘I think I’m the only adult around here.’ Warren at that time was operating on the Reds campaign schedule, as we called it, where meetings didn’t start till two in the morning, if you were lucky. It would just drive Frank nuts. This was not the only project Paramount had. He and the rest of them had their day job, with other movies. But it was gobbling up 90 percent of their time. With Warren, there’s only one film, his. And he’s got the strength of personality to impose his will. Warren is a really manipulative person. He would have been an unbelievable politician. He’d put Lyndon Johnson to shame.”
Paramount was frightened that Beatty and his film would be red-baited by the Reagan right. Caddell dismissed this as a “paper tiger.” There were a few predictably hostile editorials in The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and other corporate mouthpieces, of which Beatty observed, they attacked Bluhdorn “for having financed the movie—fearful, under
neath, that Khrushchev was right, that when he banged his shoe and said, ‘We will bury you,’ that, yeah… we were going to get buried by Communism eventually. Well, all you had to do was go there to know that you weren’t going to get buried.”
Beyond that, the red baiting never materialized, perhaps because Beatty cleverly headed it off by screening the picture at the White House for Barbara Bush (her husband was the vice president), Nancy Reagan, and the president himself. Beatty was first exposed to the idea of Reagan as the great white hope of the right wing by Jules Stein, who founded MCA in 1924. Stein told Beatty, “ ‘I was talking to Walt [Disney], and we got a guy who we think would make a hell of a president.’
“‘Who’s that?’
“‘Ronnie. Ronnie Reagan.’” Beatty recalls, “I thought, Jules is senile. He’s gone.” He continues, “I met Ronnie at this poolside party at Jules Stein’s house when I first came to Hollywood. I was about twenty. He was a very friendly, very affable, very loquacious and cheerful man. And we developed a kind of running banter through the years, with me expressing my sadness about his inability to see the wisdom of my political ways.”
By 1980, Beatty had changed his mind about Reagan. “We used to laugh at Warren, because he argued that Reagan would take the presidency,” says Caddell. “He smelled some very bad things, so he dropped out to do Reds, was out of the country for a whole year.” Beatty continues, “Ronnie was not someone that had any particular interest in a left-wing hero. He was very complimentary, but he said he was kind of hoping for a happy ending. Which I think he thought he got in 1989, when the Soviet Union disintegrated.”
The damaging buzz about Reds came from elsewhere. Well before postproduction ended, the press began sniping about the cost of the picture. Says Dick Sylbert, “We shot in studios all over Europe, we shot in every fucking country in the world, we came back and filled the studios in L.A., we were in New York, we were in Washington. You couldn’t pay for that picture today.” (Beatty shot in sixteen cities in six countries.) The figure Paramount was giving out was $33.5 million. Beatty says he’s not sure, maybe $34 million. The figures in the press, which weren’t really based on anything but one another, gradually crept up into the $40s. But Aaron Latham in Rolling Stone quoted an unnamed Paramount source who put the figure at near $50 million. And according to Caddell, the budget was over $50 million—“no one would ever say the right number”—which would be equivalent to about $250 million in today’s dollars. (For comparison’s sake, the budget of Heaven’s Gate was estimated to be $44 million.) Says Bob Evans, “I don’t know how much Reds was in the red, it never came out, but you and I for the rest of our lives, should make what that film lost. No one will ever know. When it came to fixing the books, Bluhdorn was a genius.”
To make matters worse, British producer David Puttnam, shortly to become chairman of Columbia Pictures, harshly and publicly attacked Beatty for overspending, calling Reds “lunacy” and “despicable.” He even said that Beatty should be “spanked.”
(It didn’t escape the notice of Oscar watchers that this was probably the first shot in his campaign for his own picture, Chariots of Fire, which could be expected to go up against Reds. There were already hard feelings between the two productions. When Chariots’s Milena Canonero tried to find costumes for her film, she discovered that Reds had hoovered up everything in England from caps to socks for the same period, and had to have hers handmade in Italy.)
Beatty flummoxed the studio by declining to do press, making a difficult marketing job nearly impossible. His thinking, which he now calls “quaint,” is that he would have inevitably oversimplified or caricatured the film by speaking about it. He refused to screen it for Life magazine, which was prepared to do a major spread. Ditto Newsweek and The New York Times. “He had his own psychology about being a recluse and all that,” observes Caddell. “Of not being worn out by TV, the small box that tends to diminish stars if they’re on too much.” Adds Pikser, “His whole approach is constantly rope-a-dope. ‘I’m going to do everything I possibly can to lose, and see if I can somehow win.’ That’s Warren.”
But that didn’t mean that he didn’t care about press. When he screened the picture for the Times’s Vincent Canby, he sent Cindy Kaplan with it, to keep an eye on the film cans and assess the reviewer’s reaction. “Warren grilled me about every little eyebrow movement, every flicker of his eye. Did he like it? I couldn’t tell.”
When Reds was screened for the cast and crew, the audience—mostly the crew—was so disgruntled that they actually booed when Beatty’s name flashed on the screen.
REDS OPENED on December 4, 1981, in 389 theaters, a relatively modest number, and took the weekend with a $2,411,083 gross. (On Golden Pond opened the same time.) Reds was so long that it could only play once on weeknights, and three times a day on weekends, reducing the box office, which was good, but not great. In its first run, it grossed $30 million. Theater owners complained that had Beatty promoted it, it would have brought in an additional $25 million. Caddell says Paramount considered it a disaster, although the studio had tax-sheltered Reds with Barclays Bank, easing the pain with a sale-leaseback agreement, and put together a currency deal hedging pounds against dollars that went the studio’s way. “That was just a piece of bird-brained luck that took any sting from Reds,” Diller says. “By the time the picture was finished, we were in profit!” Beatty too says the picture eventually made its way into the black.
As it turned out, Canby, like most other critics, loved it. He called it “an extraordinary film, a big romantic adventure movie, the best since David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia,” high praise indeed. Comparing Reds to Doctor Zhivago and Citizen Kane, Richard Corliss wrote in Time, “Reds is a big, smart movie, vastly ambitious and entertaining, full of belief in Reed and the ability of a popular audience to respond to him.” Ironically, Pauline Kael, who arguably might have recused herself on the basis of her personal involvement with Beatty, panned it. “It isn’t really very good,” she wrote. “The movie keeps backing away from its subject. It’s possible that Beatty… got so far into the material and changed his thinking so many times that he lost the clarity needed to dramatize it.… The film is tentative, full of doubts and second thoughts and fifteenth thoughts.” She added that “Beatty could have been reciting from a manual, and Keaton might be dubbed—the words don’t seem related to anything going on in her head,” which was total nonsense in view of the across-the-board electric performances to which she was oblivious.
Kael was so far off base that it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that her spleen was showing. Says Toback, “I was the reason she left Paramount, and yet for reasons I will never understand, she harbored resentment towards Warren, which is reflected in her review of Reds, which I think was personally vicious, intended to wound him. She must have thought to herself, What can I say that will hurt him the most. And what would that be other than he didn’t direct Diane Keaton well. This was his girlfriend, this was the female lead, and he’s supposed to know more about women than anybody, and he failed with her.” Paul Sylbert adds, “Warren betrayed Pauline. She was a woman who was small and not particularly attractive. But make no mistake: she had a real ego too. Every movie she viewed, she went in there like it was a date. I said to her once, ‘At the age of twelve, you sat in a movie with one hand in the popcorn and the other hand on your crotch, having yourself off.’ Look at the titles. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I Lost It at the Movies. That’s the reason she turned against these people. It was like a bad fuck.” Said Beatty, in the mid-1990s, “I haven’t spoken to her in ten years. And do you know what’s worse? She doesn’t know it! The vituperative bitch.”
Critics of the film have said that Keaton was miscast, and it’s true that she doesn’t convey the sexual heat that would have made Bryant a “heartbreaker” as Nicholson’s O’Neill calls her. She’s too fragile, too brittle. But there is an undeniable intensity to the relationship between Reed and Bryant, and the film comes to life more in confl
ict than in passion—their screaming matches appear to be so authentic they’re scary—a testimony to Beatty’s success in tapping into the combustibility of their off-screen relationship with endless retakes. Whether the inspiration for their performances lies in anger or affection, in the actors or the characters, or in all of the above, they work, as do all the other performances with which this movie is packed. We care about them. And in that sense Beatty’s gamble casting his lover paid off: he never spilled the consommé.
Bryant repeatedly asks, “What as?” querying the different roles she is asked to play in her life, so much so that it becomes a refrain, and we have to ask, Just what are these two to each other? Ultimately, they are “comrades,” the title of Griffiths’s first draft, and the word Reed whispers in Bryant’s ear on his deathbed. More than just lovers, more than just revolutionaries, they have made political lives, lived their politics. If nothing else, Reds is a tribute to that kind of high political seriousness.
But it was not like Beatty to explore one half of a dialectic without the other, so at the same time, Reds dramatizes the high costs of the political life, the sacrifice of the personal, which, among other things, gives the film its complexity. The puppy that Reed gives Bryant, which Kael makes fun of and many took to be no more than a sop to the audience intended to sugarcoat the political pill, for Beatty also stood for the child the couple never had. He underlines this by letting his camera linger on a boy Bryant encounters as she tends to Reed dying in the hospital. Reed has to learn to stop running away from himself and his relationship with Bryant. Ultimately, of course, he chooses political commitment over personal commitment, and is punished by death, the ultimate disincentive.
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