Star

by Peter Biskind

  Coming off the box office success of Heaven Can Wait, Beatty was probably the only star with the clout (or desire) to launch a major motion picture that would dramatize the Russian Revolution from a not entirely unsympathetic perspective—and get a studio to pay for it. Reds not only pioneered the big screen blend of fact and fiction that was known as docudrama, it lavished on this taboo subject the vast resources at Hollywood’s disposal: a big budget, A-list stars, and, in this case, the brains, skills, and talents of that generation’s best and brightest. All of this at a time that could not have been less hospitable to the subject. That Reds was made at all is almost incomprehensible, and all the more extraordinary for being a testimony to the vision and persistence of one man. As Dick Sylbert, put it, “Talk about obsessed! Warren’s ability to will something to happen was mind-boggling.” Simply put, no Beatty, no Reds.

  By this time the studios had recovered from the wild-in-the-streets fever of the early 1970s, were sitting up in bed and beginning to eat solid food, especially Paramount, which had scored with Saturday Night Fever, Grease, and Heaven Can Wait. When the last got its nine Oscar nominations in February 1979, Beatty made his move. He did what he always did: he played the field, making the studios compete for his favors. After Warners had passed on Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait, a humbled Frank Wells told him that he wanted his next picture, whatever it was. But Paramount was Beatty’s first choice. “I’d been hearing about Reds for years,” says Barry Diller, the studio’s chairman and CEO. “It’s like remembering when you first heard about Santa Claus. It was pervasive. I was fascinated by it. I thought it was an impossible idea for a movie, but Warren created success with Heaven Can Wait, and if you create success, you are entitled to extra room.”

  Beatty knew that Reds was going to be a tough sell. He told Diller that it wasn’t fair to submit this to him alone, so he went to New York to give what then passed for a script to Gulf + Western chairman Charlie Bluhdorn. “Charlie really loved Warren—he was such a star-fucker—and he’s the one who committed,” says then head of production Don Simpson, who died in 1996. “How much iz diz goyink to cost?” Bluhdorn asked, in the guttural accent of his native Austria, which Paramount executives used to mimic, calling him “Mein Führer” behind his back.

  “I’ve got to be honest with you, I don’t know,” Beatty told him, “but it’s a long, long movie. It’s about a Communist who dies at the end, doesn’t get the girl, and there’s virtually no script. I would expect that it may be a very dodgy commercial subject, but if you want to do it, I gotta have an answer from you in a couple of days. I’m gonna lose Diane Keaton to another movie if I don’t start. But if it’s no, I’ll take it elsewhere. And if somebody else makes it instead of you, I would be likely to bring to that other studio anything I did after that.”

  “Go outzide.”

  Beatty seated himself by the door to Bluhdorn’s inner sanctum in what looked to him like a dentist’s chair.

  After a few minutes, the chairman poked his head out, and barked, “Cum ink.”

  Beatty recalls, “They were all looking at their shoes. Bluhdorn started talking about Castro, whom he knew because Gulf + Western was in the cigar business. Finally, he said, ‘We’re going to make it.’ But it was clear they didn’t really want to. He made the movie because he didn’t want to lose the movie.”

  Indeed, a few days later, Bluhdorn came down with a bad case of buyer’s remorse. Beatty explains, “Charlie went back and forth, probably because of the political nature of the movie. Rumors were flying that this was a pro-Communist picture, with a Communist hero, and that was very disconcerting for this big conglomerate. There couldn’t have been more hostility to Communism at that time in history, with everything shifting to the right.”

  Again Bluhdorn asked, “Vat iz diz vilm goyink to cozt?”

  “I can’t really tell you.”

  “Name zee figure.”

  “Why would I do that? That would be dishonest.”

  “Letz zay diz vilm iz goyink to cozt tventy-fife million.”

  “Okay, $25 million.”

  “Do me a vayvor. Take diz tventy-fife million. Go to Mexico. Keep diz tventy-vor million vor yorzelf. Spent diz vun million on a vilm. Juzt don’t make diz vun.”

  “Charlie, I have to make this movie.”

  Finally, Bluhdorn acceded to the inevitable. Then Beatty got a call from one of Bluhdorn’s pals. (The Gulf + Western head was suspected of underworld connections, among them the attorney and mobbed-up Hollywood fixer Sidney Korshak, although Beatty says the caller was not Korshak.) The man said, “If you know what’s good for you, you won’t make this picture!” Beatty says he replied, “I’m making the picture and I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear what you just said.”

  At that point, the budget was hovering in the low $20s. Recalls Diller, “It was really not possible to budget the movie. We did a kind of estimate, and we were of course terribly wrong, which is why Warren and I got into enormous difficulties later. I don’t know what we would have done if we knew what the real cost was. I doubt we would have done it, but who knows?”

  BEATTY was still mulling over Love & Money. One day, he told James Toback, “You need a producer regardless of whether I’m in the movie or not. And we need a third intelligence anyway, because you and I have pretty much said what we have to say. And since Pauline Kael’s telling me how great you are and that I should work with you, let’s see if she has the balls to quit her job and produce the movie.” Beatty confronted her, saying, “You tell Fellini how to make movies—if you think it’s so easy, you ought to try it yourself. Stop telling me how dumb I would be not to do a movie with Toback, quit your job and come and produce, and the three of us will work together.” She replied, “Maybe I should.” She felt that by the late 1970s, movies had become so awful that her job had lost its luster.

  In early 1979, he hired her to produce Love & Money in a pay-or-play deal reportedly worth $200,000. She took a five-month leave of absence from The New Yorker, went to L.A., and brought along Albarino. This was a bold move. Warrenologists were mesmerized. Says Paul Sylbert, “Here was the Voice of Movies in America, and Warren addressed her ego with notions that she could do something about the business, how bad it was.” Adds Paul Schrader, “Because of her power, executives used to be terrified of her. There was a feeling in the industry that Warren was the only one who could bring Pauline down. The ultimate smooth move was to flatter her to death, give her a little power and put her in an office until she was gradually exposed as being one of us and therefore not dangerous. I really believe he brought her out there to humiliate her, maybe not consciously, but some part of him did.” Says Buck Henry, “The whole point of it was to keep her away from Reds. Warren knew he was going to make Reds and he knew that Kael was always incredibly patronizing towards him. He thought, If I put her together with Toback and make her think she’s part of the company, even if I dump her in a year, she can’t come back and slam me. Guys like Towne knew she was completely seduceable. Warren just took the next step. We’re talking about manipulation on a level unknown to man. Even I can’t quite believe it, except that it was Warren.”

  As the scenario played out, however, everybody failed. Beatty and Kael wrangled over Reds, which she still did not think he should make. “She would not give up on Reds,” says Beatty. “She even called Diane Keaton, called my fucking girlfriend, to get her to persuade me not to do Reds!”

  Then she read Toback’s script for Love & Money. She told Albarino, “This is terrible.” According to him, she was so powerful that she thought other critics were out to destroy her (which they were), and if she produced this film, she would just be handing them a club with which to batter her. “This will be a major embarrassment for me,” she continued. “I’ll be a laughing stock.” She asked Albarino to do a page one rewrite that Toback hated.

  Finally, Kael asked Beatty, “This is awful. What should I do? Should I give him the money?”

  “Yes. You�
�re the one who convinced me what a genius he is.”

  Says Toback, “Warren wanted to work it out, wanted the three of us to work together. But after six weeks with her, I said to him, ‘That’s it, either I’m going or she’s going.’”

  Beatty thought Toback was making a mistake, and told him, “You’re being very stupid. What are you worried about? You get to the point where you’re shooting and then you can do whatever you want. But if you unload her now, Barry will say, ‘[without Pauline,] I have been sold a false bill of goods.’ And he will not make the movie.”

  “I’ll have to deal with that.”

  By the middle of May 1979, Kael was out. Beatty told her, “Toback, against my wishes, feels this can’t work.” Later, Toback confessed, “I was polite in the press, making it seem as if it were a mutual decision, but it wasn’t a mutual decision at all. I got rid of her.”

  Beatty felt some measure of responsibility for her, but he also knew that if and when she went back to The New Yorker, she would become a time bomb waiting to go off. He had to let her down easy. He told her, “Let’s see if we can work something else out at Paramount.” He got her an overall deal at the studio. Shortly before she died in 2001, Kael said, “Don Simpson had no interest in any projects of mine.” Rumor had it that she would go over to director Richard Brooks’s office, complain that she had been put out to pasture, and weep. Looking back on the sequence of events some years later, Beatty says, “Hiring her was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”

  ALONG WITH Keaton, Storaro, Simon Relph, Dick Sylbert, and others, Beatty made another trip to the Soviet Union in 1979 in a last-ditch effort to persuade the authorities to let him film there, and also to let Sylbert see the place, in case they had to shoot in Helsinki, their fallback location, since it was designed to replicate St. Petersburg. “We sat in Moscow with these guys for days,” Sylbert recalls. “They said, ‘Comrade Beatty, we think it’s very, very progressive, you making this picture about John Reed, but we have to see a script.’ He said, ‘I’m not going to show you a script.’ ‘But Comrade Beatty, then it’s impossible to do.’”

  Beatty was no more comfortable there than he had been ten years earlier, and didn’t hesitate to bait the Soviets. When he visited the Museum of the Revolution, he asked the guide why there were no photographs of Trotsky! At a meeting with officials of Mosfilm, the state film company, Beatty recalls, “Everyone was in good humor, they were all smiling. I was talking really fast, and I made the mistake of referring to the ‘Bolshevik takeover’ instead of the ‘glorious Revolution.’ I saw their faces fall, and as the words came out of my mouth, I leaped forward to try to pull them back, and failed. I realized then that we weren’t going to get permission to shoot anything there. But I knew that going in.”

  Principal photography began on or about August 8, 1979, in London. It could not have been a worse time to begin a picture that treated the birth of the Soviet Union in heroic terms, however qualified. This was the year the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and production and postproduction would spill over into the early 1980s, when the new U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, famously dubbed the Soviet Union the “Evil Empire,” igniting yet another round of anti-Communist hysteria. The Iran hostage crisis was dragging on, and in Poland, the Communist puppet government was locked in struggle with Solidarity.

  Reds was based at Twickenham Studios, aka “Twickers,” but it wasn’t big enough, and they built sets at every studio in and around London. The sheer size of the production—it sprawled over several countries—and the glacial pace at which it proceeded made it quickly apparent that Reds would stay neither on schedule nor budget, especially when Beatty was wont to say things like, “There are some movies that just can’t be clarified on paper, and they make themselves as you go along. You know what you’re going after, and then you adhere to Napoleon’s battle plan. When they asked him how he planned a battle, he said, ‘Here’s how I do it—first I go there, and then I see what happens.’”

  Beatty would spend whatever he needed to get what he wanted. Says Relph, “The budget was actually quite low, given how ambitious a film it was, but it started to swell once we began shooting, and we more than doubled the production time. I think the original intention was probably fifteen or sixteen weeks. We actually shot the film over a whole year, some thirty-odd weeks, plus these ‘hiatuses’ where Warren went back to the drawing board.”

  Beatty had energy and stamina to burn, but he had already put in a herculean effort on this picture, the shoot was just beginning. There was so much name-brand talent involved that just slotting Reds into their busy schedules was like solving a Rubik’s Cube. “We had to wait for Maureen Stapleton,” remembers production manager Nigel Wooll. “She wouldn’t fly. We wanted her in November, but in November there are no oceangoing liners across the Atlantic because it’s too rough.” Finally, she agreed to take an ancient Polish freighter. David MacLeod picked her up, along with her son, Dan Allentuck, and his partner, Nina Rosenblum, in New York, and squired them to Baltimore, where they would take the Polowska to Rotterdam, and then continue on to England on a hydrofoil. The freighter broke down in the middle of the Atlantic, turning a one-week trip into a two-week trip, during which they subsisted on tripe and cabbage. The New York Times reported, “Maureen Stapleton Lost at Sea.”

  When they reached Rotterdam, MacLeod met them, accompanied by a young boy who would be known as “Little David” and looked to them as if he were no more than twelve years old, although he was older than he seemed, maybe seventeen. MacLeod introduced him variously as his ward or his girlfriend’s son. He was always rubbing his back, alarming Stapleton, who thought there was something peculiar about the relationship. “He was as good-looking a guy as I’d ever seen,” says Toback, who met him through MacLeod. “He was in the Warren Beatty, Alain Delon category, better looking than James Dean. He had a magnetic physical presence.”

  Stapleton spent two months sitting by the phone in her rented London apartment waiting to be summoned to the set. Beatty would often appear in the evenings to take her out to dinner with the rest of the cast. He threw a boisterous party for Paul Sorvino when he arrived, during which the actor sang arias and told Woody Allen’s famous joke about Beatty: “If I’m reincarnated, I want to come back as Warren Beatty’s fingertips.” No one laughed.

  As it was on Heaven Can Wait, “Do it again” became the refrain. Beatty shot take after take, as if the best take were just around the corner. He was unapologetic. “It’s axiomatic that the cheapest thing we have is film. It’s the hours that people spend on the day that cost you money,” he says. “But that’s a hell of a lot less time than coming back and adding another shot. What you do is say, ‘Do it again.’ And you hire good actors.”

  Stapleton didn’t have much patience for Beatty’s “Do it again” habits. In one scene, shot in Manchester, she was addressing a rally of six hundred or so extras. It was raining hard, and Beatty was doing take after take, never saying what he wanted. At one point she exclaimed, “What do you want me to do? Take off my clothes?” She once recalled, “He was such a goddamned perfectionist.… We had done eight or nine takes, perhaps ten or eleven. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it—they all looked the same to me. Anyway, he was way down the other end of the block and shouted for the umpteenth time through his bullhorn, ‘One more time, sweetie.’ I took the bullhorn from Simon [Relph], one of the unit directors, and I shouted back, ‘Warren, are you out of your fucking mind?’ And the whole crowd of extras cheered and clapped. So he comes back on the bullhorn: ‘I may be, darling, but do it again, anyway.’ So we did it again.” Her son, Dan Allentuck, recalls, “After a while, she was just thinking, Over, over, over.”

  It wasn’t just the big scenes that Beatty shot and reshot, or the complicated ones, or the intense ones that required a real performance. There was one scene in which he enters a room and tosses his hat onto a chandelier. He did something like 107 takes, even though he snagged the chandelier with his hat thre
e quarters of the time. Customarily, a director will say “Cut” at the end of a take. The cast and crew break while the DP prepares for the next one. According to production manager Nigel Wooll, Beatty “wouldn’t stop the camera. Instead of going to take 2, take 3, take 4, he’d do it all in one run until the load of film ran out after ten minutes.” But this created its own peculiar problems. Wooll recalls, “We burned out three camera motors because they overheated. I’ve never, ever burned out a camera motor before or since. It was extraordinary.”

  Some of the actors welcomed the challenge. Recalls Paul Sorvino, who says Beatty had him do as many as seventy takes for one of his scenes, “It was a point of pride with me to do as many as Warren wanted. It was like, ‘Yeah, you want another one? How ’bout ten more, how about twenty more?’ It was that young macho thing in me that said, I can stand up to anything. I thought Warren felt he had to strip the actors down. A lot of directors do that in a cruel way, skinning them, flaying them. But Warren just wanted the best that I had, so I gave it to him.”

  Others were not so amenable. Says one source, “I saw several actors actually break down and start crying. Jack was almost in tears. In one scene with Diane, I remember him screaming, ‘Just tell me what the fuck you want, and I’ll do it!’ Literally, his eyes filled with water from the frustration of not knowing why he was asked to do it again.” Retorts Beatty, “Put it this way. It was a scene of great frustration, and a scene of great emotion. Maybe it just means I’m a good director!”

  Whatever it was he was looking for, Beatty got what he wanted. The scenes between Nicholson and Keaton represent some of the best work either actor has ever done, helped enormously by Beatty’s and May’s dialogue, alternately passionate, biting, and just plain funny, as when O’Neill, who is in love with Bryant and using her in a pickup performance of The Emperor Jones, just can’t resist complaining, “I wish you wouldn’t smoke during rehearsals. You don’t act as if you’re looking for your soul, but for an ashtray.”