There's an excellent Peter Biskind

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There's an excellent Peter Biskind piece in the new Vanity Fair about Warren Beatty's long and difficult effort to make Reds (1981), his Oscar-winning epic about journalist and romantic revolutionary John Reed. (The cover tease reads, "What did Warren Beatty do to make Jack Nicholson cry?" A Beatty pull-quote reads, "I told Jack I needed someone to play [Eugene] O'Neill, but it had to be someone who could convincingly take this woman from me." A Diane Keaton pull quote: "I don't think we were much of a couple by the end of the movie.") The piece is an excerpt from Biskind's Beatty biography. He's been working on it for a year or so but it probably won't be on the stands until sometime in late '07 or early '08, he told me this morning. Biskind added that Paramount Home Video is finally putting out their long-delayed Reds DVD in November. It took them years to get it done and on the schedule, in part (largely?) because of Beatty's reluctance to sit down for an interview and/or record a commentary track. (PHV spokesperson Martin Blythe acknowledged three or four years ago this was an issue/concern.) Reds is one of the greatest and proudest achievements of Beatty's career, so naturally he hems and haws when it comes to providing supplementary materials for the DVD.