One day, Dede Allen went up to Beatty and complimented him on the script. “The dialogue, the cadences, sounds very contemporary, very modern.” He gave her a look as if to say “Duuh!” and then explained, “Dede, this is not Warren Beatty as John Reed, this is John Reed as Warren Beatty! That’s what being a movie star is.”
Keaton appeared in more scenes than any of the other actors, save Beatty, and many of them were scenes of great difficulty, where she had to assay a wide range of emotions from romantic passion to anger to sorrow, and deliver several lengthy, emotionally complex speeches. She too repeated her takes again and again, and reportedly broke down in tears of frustration. There was one scene, early in the picture, where Reed is trying to persuade Bryant to ditch her dentist husband, leave Portland, and move to New York, where the action is. Her hackles rising, she asks, suspiciously, “What as? Your concubine, your whore?” Finally Reed retorts, “It’s almost Thanksgiving. Why don’t you come as a turkey?” Says second AD Michael Green, “Warren did something like ninety takes. This was to make her paranoid, to get something out of her that she wasn’t giving him. Keaton finally [blurted out,] ‘How many ways can you say, “I’ll come as a turkey”?’”
George Plimpton, who was offered the part of a lecherous publisher after he literally tripped over Beatty asleep on the floor of the Playboy Mansion, auditioned for it by kissing Keaton with so much conviction that Beatty yelled, “Stop it.” Plimpton thought that Beatty was trying to break Keaton, turn her into what Bryant must have been like with Reed. Adds Relph, “It must have been a strain on their relationship, because he was completely obsessive, relentless.”
Keaton had mixed feelings about Beatty’s methods. She found that the great number of takes helped her discover resources she didn’t know she had. “At the same time, though, I didn’t exactly feel like I knew what I was doing,” she says. “It was really Warren’s performance, not my performance. He was never satisfied, and he pushed me and pushed me, and frankly I felt kind’a lost. And maybe that was his intention in some way, for me.”
Gene Hackman’s part was small, just two scenes. He was fond of Beatty, and still mindful that the producer had kick-started his career by tapping him for Buck Barrow. So when Beatty asked him to do what was essentially a walk-on, he agreed. “It was a pleasure to work for Warren, even though he did a lot of takes,” Hackman says. “It was close to fifty. He didn’t say a lot to me. There’s something admirable about somebody who is that tough, and perseveres that way, so I hung in there. But all those takes—I was going blind. After take 5, I’m kind of finished. I had no idea how they would change, one from the other. I don’t think that I ever verbalized anything to him in terms of my annoyance—I just sucked it up—but he must have known.”
Assistant editor Billy Scharf, who would also work on Ishtar, explains Beatty’s method best: “A lot of people say Warren overshoots. I know that not to be true. Directors who come back with insufficient material are doing a disservice to the opportunity. They get intimidated by stars. Warren does not. In the movie, when Reed wants to leave Russia and go back to America, Zinoviev tells him, ‘You will never be at this place, at this time, again.’ Warren felt that way when he shot. He believed that that was the time, and that was the place, and he had to exploit the opportunity to the hilt. He had the resources, and he wanted to use them, because he knew he would never get another chance.”
Still, a lot of the crew were unhappy. Some of them used to call him “Masturbeatty,” because of the degree to which he indulged himself. Pikser recalls, “He’s reasonably affable if he doesn’t feel under pressure, which is rare, so he’s not smiling a lot. He jumps all over people. He gets really irritated if there’s noise on the set. He worked them hard, made them wait, and was always pinching pennies. The crew hated it, the actors hated it. It’s always hell on Warren’s sets.” Says Beatty, “That may be the attitude of a crew member or someone who is looking at his watch thinking, What time will we break for tea? But that’s not my attitude, and it’s almost always not the attitude of actors that I hire. This is not something where you say, ‘What should we do, play Parcheesi?’ There’s got to be something about it that says, ‘Hey, this is important!’ Otherwise, it’s a lot of fun, but no cigar.”
THE DAYS dragged on. Not only did they have to wait on the actors’ schedules, they would break for script work, for editing, for holidays. Production was held up for a week until Beatty’s cold sore disappeared. As the bills piled up, the warm relationship between Beatty and Diller turned frigid. At the end of long shooting days, Beatty got on the phone with the Paramount head, and the two men screamed at each other until they were hoarse. “Within a week, we were a week behind,” Diller recalls. “And it just went on from there. They had all sorts of problems. They had production problems, they had weather problems, they had fatigue problems, they had Warren and Diane problems. It was all done on the fly. Which is a dopey way to make a movie. It was just a mess, and it went on and on. And it would stop a lot, and then start again, and then it would stop, and everyone would go home, and then it would start again. It was one of those rough, rough shoots that made everybody unhappy.”
But Diller was in a bind. “Here’s the dumbassness of it all,” he continues. “I should have forced him not to be Warren. But that would have been stupid. That’s his process. That’s how he functions.” Finally, the Paramount head simply ceased returning Beatty’s phone calls. He explains, “I was so angry with him, I thought it was just pointless to talk to him. I wanted to make him feel guilty. I thought that would have some effect. That was naive.” Says Beatty, dryly, “I think there was probably a point when they would have preferred not to have been involved. And that lasted through July, August, September, October, and November. They were extremely not nice. We literally were not on speaking terms. I think they felt that it didn’t hurt to have me over there in a state of anxiety. A very effective tool with me is the silent treatment, because then I feel that someone has taken his ball and gone home. And I didn’t know how to cope with that.” Then at Christmas, Diller and Eisner flew to London and saw a five-hour cut that Allen had specially prepared. Both men loved it; from that point on, Paramount was behind the movie.
When production resumed after Christmas, the show moved to Helsinki. Second AD Green was in charge of the Finnish extras. He recalls, “Around dinnertime, the night before we were due to shoot a sequence on the train in a little station an hour out of Helsinki, I got a call from Warren, who said, ‘Hey, Michael, the Russian-looking woman we’ve got in that carriage, I want you to make sure that she can actually speak Russian because I’ve got a couple of Russian words that I want her to say.’ So I called up the extras coordinator, said, ‘Listen, that old lady we’ve got on the train, can she speak Russian?’ She said, ‘I think so, I’ll check.’ She called back and said, ‘No, she can only speak Finnish.’ ‘You’ve got to recast her, then.’ That was a big deal at that time of night, because you not only have got to replace her with someone who speaks Russian—in Helsinki, not many do—then you’ve got to have a costume made. By three o’clock in the morning we finally found two women who said they could speak Russian, their faces looked right to me, I showed Warren the photographs, he picked one, then they woke up the costume lady and got her dressed by eight o’clock the next morning. I was quite pleased with myself when I knocked on the door of Warren’s trailer. I said, ‘Here’s your Russian lady.’ He was standing in the doorway looking down at us, and he said, ‘Good morning’ to her, in Russian. The woman stared at him blankly. He looked at me, and he looked at her, and he said something else in Russian, and she kind of shrugged. He said, ‘Michael, this woman doesn’t speak Russian.’ I said, ‘Well, um… she told us she did, we thought she did.’ I felt like a fool. You think you’ve pulled the rabbit out of the hat, where in fact you’ve done the reverse. Warren is an extremely clever man. With movies, things do go wrong, and usually you can double-talk your way around it, but you can’t with him.
If he asked someone a question, and they give him an answer, he would ask, ‘Who told you that?’ ‘Were they in a position to know what they were talking about?’ He’d nail it down. I learned fairly quickly that if I made a mistake, the thing to do was say, ‘I screwed up,’ because you couldn’t get away with anything.”
They had to wait for snow to fall in Helsinki and the rain to stop in Spain, their next location, where Beatty had to deal with an insurrection of the extras, about one thousand of them, gathered for a crowd scene. Ironically, it may have inadvertently been his fault to begin with, because he stirred them up by giving them his stock pep talk: “This is an important film, the first big studio film about socialism,” and so forth. It was very hot, and they had been up since four in the morning. The caterers had failed to give them rolls, and by lunchtime they were starving, with little more to eat than fruit, as they watched the actors and crew chow down a three-course meal. “They came storming into where we were eating, banging trays, and turning over tables,” recalls Wooll. Beatty was furious with him and Relph. But he handled the situation like the enlightened capitalist he is, in a manner calculated to make the author of Ten Days That Shook the World turn over in his grave, underlining the fact that for all the similarities, Beatty was not Reed. As Wooll recalls, he told the two ringleaders, “‘You’re right. We apologize, we’ll put you in charge of extras, and we’ll pay you more money.’ They both said ‘Yes,’ and from then on there was absolutely no problem at all. He took the sting out of the tail.”
The degree to which Reed became disillusioned with the revolution had been an issue from the start, and would continue to be one through postproduction. To be sure, the historical Reed didn’t like everything he saw in Russia, and did have issues with the Bolsheviks, but at the end of his life he wrote an article insisting that the revolutionary must subordinate his will to Party discipline. Besides, as Griffiths puts it, “He did not find, nor could he have, historically, the sort of full-blown Stalinism that you kind of smell in the second half of the film.”
Reed’s ambivalence toward the Bolsheviks was replicated on the set, in a milder vein, by a tug-of-war between Pikser and Jerzy Kosinski. Pikser had been cast, a trifle uncomfortably, in the role of commissar of political correctness. “Warren thought I was a Stalinist, a Lenin-loving, don’t-pee-on-my-revolution defender,” he recalls. “He used to call me to his trailer, and say, ‘Start a political argument with me.’ I would realize halfway through it was because he was going to have a fight in the scene he was shooting, and he wanted to get in that mood. He’s a Method actor. But I think he gets something from that conflictual relationship that the other person may not get.”
In the critical sequences on the train coming back from Baku, Reed becomes furious with Zinoviev because he discovers that the commissar has been changing his speeches. Reed thinks he’s been inciting the Muslims of Soviet Asia to rise up in class war, but when he realizes they’re chanting, “Jihad, Jihad,” he understands that he’s actually been recruiting them to a religious war. Beatty had been relying more on Kosinski for the script work than Pikser. To Kosinski, Zinoviev was an incipient Stalinist, changing and censoring Reed’s speeches, but to Pikser, Reed was no more than a bourgeois writer defending his copy against his editor, a Hollywood filmmaker protecting his movie against the studio. Pikser felt he was being marginalized. “Eventually I said, ‘Warren, I’m really not doing anything. Don’t you think it’s time for me to go home?’ He said, ‘You’re quitting on me. There comes a point where everybody turns their back on you.’ He wanted me to stay and fight—forever. It was as if I was betraying him.” Beatty asked Pikser to be brutally frank about his opinion of the picture and put it in a memo. He did, and Beatty was furious. Recalls Pikser, “It’s the only time he made me cry. By the end of the filming, we were not really speaking to each other. Still, these kinds of fallings out are never really personal. If I called him a week later and said I have a funny growth on my hand, he would say, ‘I want you to go to this doctor, and I’ll pay for the bill.’ There’s a tremendously loyal friendship from Warren. Regardless of any kind of work-related villainy.”
Months passed, leaves flew off the calendar. The set was closed to journalists. A shroud of secrecy, dubbed “the Beatty curtain” descended on Reds, which only served to stir up a devil’s brew of rumors. London insiders were quoted saying Reds was in trouble. The wrap date was pushed back from December 1979 to June 1980. One cast member complained, “Everyone appreciates the work except Warren.” The press reported delays, rewrites, overtime, extravagance, and waste—actors with no more than two lines to deliver shuttling back and forth between the U.S. and England. The ratio of film shot to film used was said to have reached fifty to one. Several crew members left Reds to work on other pictures, then came back. Sylbert shoehorned Partners into the Reds schedule. The budget reportedly skyrocketed to $30 million.
As the wrap date became no more than a vanishing point forever receding over the horizon, mordant jokes about the production were heard on the set, some of which found their way into the Grabber News, an occasional broadsheet put out by jaded crew members. For example, the sheet reported that The John Reed—Louise Bryant Story, the film’s working title, was a popular term for Seconal sleeping pills, and suggested alternatives such as The Longest Day, The 39 Takes, and Take the Money and Run. It even published its own irreverent version of Reed’s death, with Bryant at his side, that parodied both Reds and Heaven Can Wait:
JACK
You know, Louise, here I am dying.
I’m only 33 but sometimes I feel at
Least 10 years older. I
Feel like I’ve lived every moment
Of my life over and over again.
Sometimes I feel like I lived
Some moments over 30 or 40 times.
I guess that would have killed anyone…
Louise, if I was to come back,
As somebody else… would you…
Would you know it was me?
LOUISE
Come back? What as?
JACK
It’s almost Easter. Why don’t
I come back as a ham.
Beatty always had to be careful of his health, and it suffered, especially when he was stressed. According to Kosinski, “He was drawn, puffy, overweight; his skin had lost its freshness.” For a time, in Spain, Beatty shared a shack with Kosinski and wife. “Why was Beatty there?” wondered Kosinski. “What helped me to become Zinoviev was questioning why this crazy American was doing this crazy thing. I honestly didn’t think this was going to work. I thought he was going to be buried in the Kremlin wall again.” Says Pat Caddell, his old friend from the McGovern days, now a political consultant whom Beatty would hire to work on the marketing, “He was coughing a lot. I used to say, ‘You’re going to kill yourself.’” Pikser recalls, “Warren felt isolated. He used to say to me, ‘You and I are the only two people who give a fuck about what this movie is saying.’ Which was true. He felt like he was bogged down in the Philippines fighting the Japanese. And nobody else cared if he was going to win or not.”
James Toback thinks that there is a deep vein of depression or melancholia that laces Beatty’s personality. “He’s fighting off depression all the time,” he says. “Churchill used to refer to depression as ‘the beast,’ and everything he did was a way of temporarily keeping the beast at bay. That accounts for his compulsion to make use of time, to be engaged—with work, with his house, with something—never to be sitting around doing nothing, never do what other people call relaxing, going on vacation, which he is almost incapable of.” It’s the same impulse Michelle Phillips complained about, his ability to make her feel guilty for lying in bed all day, having sex and eating ice cream. From this point of view, making films, doing take after take, sleeping with one woman after another are just other ways of keeping the beast at bay.
“We do have our ups and downs, we do go in cycles,” Beatty confessed. “Like most people, I get ti
red when I’m trying to create. Sometimes when I’m all alone it just can be the most miserable thing in the world because I know that I don’t have the answer to a creative problem. When I go into a down, at nine o’clock in the morning, for example, things are very bleak. At ten o’clock, they start to look a little bit less bleak. And about eleven o’clock, I’m thinking, I might even have an idea. By 11:30, when I’ve mapped it out and I think I’m just about ready to go, I rehearse it a couple of times, but now I’m at twelve o’clock or 12:30, so I think, We better break for lunch because I don’t want to get halfway into it and then break. When I resume after lunch, I’m down again because my glucose isn’t really where it should be. About three o’clock or 3:30 I’ve almost got it. From 3:30 to about 4:30, I might really have it, but I’m beginning to get close to the end of the day and getting tired. By five o’clock I know I better not try to get in too much more. And by six, 6:30, seven, I’m ready to go home. I feel like I should be confined to some ward for catatonics.
“Not that everyone is manic-depressive, but everyone whose end results have to be an energetic expression of what they want to get across, whether they’re filmmakers or politicians or preachers or athletes, is subject to downs. The importance of fun to filmmaking is like saying what is more important to the making of the film, the manic cycle or the depressive cycle? Well, it’s gonna be the manic cycle, but the depressive cycle fuels the manic cycle. So I don’t think it’s good to think of this as an unhealthy condition. We try to do as well as we can do.”
Needless to say, Beatty’s relationship with Keaton, who was high-maintenance in the best of times, suffered. Indeed, it barely survived the shoot. Working with an actress with whom the star or director—both, in this case—has an off-screen relationship has always been a dicey proposition. Says Caddell, “Directing your girlfriend in something like this was insane.” Beatty admits, “Making a movie together if you’ve got someone who is even moderately obsessive-compulsive, is hell on a relationship. It’s like running down a street holding a plate of consommé and trying not to spill any.”
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