I wangled a last-minute entry into a big hoo-hah for Warren Beatty‘s Reds (’81) at the Directors Guild of America theatre last night. It was a four-part affair — a buffet reception at 6 pm, screening at 7 pm, coffee, fruit and brownies in the lobby during intermission, and then a q & a with Beatty and interviewer Bennett Miller (the esteemed Capote director) sometime around 10:40 pm.

Capote director Bennett Miller and Reds director-producer-star Warren Beatty during Saturday night’s q & a following a screening of Reds at the DGA on Saturday, 9.30.06.

This and Wednesday’s special screening at the New York Film Festival is part of a promotion for the Paramount Home Video double-disc DVD that “streets” on 10.17. The longish, Oscar-winning epic will also open theatrically for a week in New York and Washington, D.C. on 10.6, and in L.A. (at the Arclight) on 10.13.
I hadn’t seen Reds in over 20 years (I haven’t watched the versions on VHS and laser disc due to gross over-scanning), and I was stirred and turned on all over again — it’s a very smart, wonderfully adult historical epic that delivers at a consistently intimate-intellectual level. I was also startled at how incredibly young everyone (Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Edward Herrman) looked back then.
At the same time I was wondering if today’s under-30 viewers will care very much about a film as rich and densely political as this one. The dual servings of a troubled-relationship movie (i.e., the ups and downs between Beatty’s free-thinking John Reed and Keaton’s Louise Bryant) and a very nicely layered portrait of old-school lefty idealism may seem a bit…I don’t know, musty.
And I wondered, also, if the early ’90s collapse of Russian communism, which Reed cared about and worked for with such feeling in the late teens and early 1920s, has enhanced the film by making it seem more like a tribute to lost-cause Quixotic dreams, or diminished it because it Bolshevism (which the film portrays as being a brutal and failed system almost from the get-go) came to naught at the end?

I’d forgotten what a deeply annoying piece of work Keaton’s Bryant is — insecure, snappy, under-talented, ready to argue at the drop of a hat. She has an affair with Nicholson’s Eugene O’Neill and that’s…well, emotional indiscretions will happen every so often, but she walks out and all-but-terminates their relationship when Reed acknowledges he’s had a dalliance or two on the side and what-of-it?
Miller and Beatty had only met once before, but they seemed relaxed with each other. I liked Beatty’s observation that directing a movie was a bit like vomiting. “When things build up inside you eventually start to feel like vomiting,” he said. “You don’t want to vomit, but when you finally do you feel much better.” And I enjoyed a later moment when Beatty said to Miller, “You’ve acted, right?” and Miller, “What the fuck are you talking about? I haven’t acted since high school.” And also when Miller said, “You began filming the ‘Witnesses’ in the ’70s,” and Beatty replied, “The 1870s.”
Beatty mentioned during the q & a that his 12 year-old son Ben said earlier in the evening that he thought Reds was too long.
I spoke to Beatty this morning and asked him how Reed might have evolved in his thinking if he hadn’t died at such a young age, and what would he have said about the ultimate fate of Russian communism?
“I feel he wouldn’t have moved to the right [if he’d lived],” said Beatty. “And uhm…it’s very interesting. How some people moved from the far left to the far right, like Max Eastman. And you know, what happened to people during the Stalinist purges moved a lot of people to the right…and then there were a lot of people who didn’t. I believe Reed would have…well, of course, I don’t know…but I believe he would have remained true to that which he thought was workable. I also think he saw the upcoming problems with Communist dictatorship.”
Beatty said that he’d “he’d never taken DVDs seriously until now. I thought it was retrograde. I thought the picture is what it is and why excessively look back? I don’t feel that anymore because I think the nature of distribution has had a deleterious effect on certain content.

“This film, which cost $32 million to make…this film, Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia wouldn’t and couldn’t be made in today’s environment — they wouldn’t be financed. Can you imagine anyone today putting $150 million or $200 million dollars into a story of a very strange Englishman who goes to Arabia, behaves peculiarly and dies on a motorcyle…and played by an unknown?
“DVD releases and the obviously long shelf life that comes with the DVD market are the replacement for the long theatrical life that films used to have in theatres, plus it saves the audience from having to experience the mall experience, which is largely a hormonal matter these days. The home screens are getting bigger” — Beatty has a high-def system in his home — “and the multiplexes are…well, the large theatres at the Arclight are more of an exception than the rule.”
Reds will be at the Arclight on October 13th, as well as at the City Cinemas Village East in Manhattan and the E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C., on October 6th.
“I’ve never before studied the [DVD] situation, ” said Beatty, “but with theatrical you sometimes have your film opening against four or five movies on the same dates. There are 117 other DVD titles coming out on October 17th.” Before he said that I had guessed there were probably 20 other recongizable titles coming out that day.
I don’t think anyone gives a damn about the other 100.
Reds is unusual in that it will be issued in three formats on 10.17 — on regular DVD and on both Blu Ray and HD-DVD high-def.

“The fate of most movies is decided by the first day of principal photography. Pirates of the Caribbeanwas destined to be a blockbuster irrespective of its sloppy storytelling. All the Kings Men from day one was the wrong idea with the wrong cast.” — Peter Bart in his 10.1.06 Variety column. What other preordained success and failures are waiting in the wings? I could run my lists, of course, but how about some reader calls?

John Clark has written a piece in the N.Y. Times about aging independent filmmakers who made their bones in the late ’80s and early ’90s who are now grappling with tough financial times in the hardball, corporate-driven moviemaking world of 2006. In some cases only eeking out a living, scraping by, etc.
“The indie business was full of mom-and-pop operations with nickel-and-dime aspirations, [but] now the corner stores have been edged out by studio specialty divisions with far larger appetites and needs. Geoffrey Gilmore, the director of the Sundance Film Festival, says that in the early 90’s an independent film was considered a hit if it grossed $1 million. Now it’s $25 million.”
Jeez…bummer. But then the entertainment industry has always been a feast-or- famine environment. If you’re in the creative end, either you’re flush or struggling — there’s almost never a middle ground.

The reason I haven’t put The Departed into the Best Picture category in the Oscar Balloon is that there’s not a whole lot going on underneath. It doesn’t have any kind of human-condition theme that hatches and builds and sticks to your ribs after it’s over. But did The French Connection, which won the ’71 Best Picture Oscar, have any kind of theme? Not that I can remember. Shouldn’t pure moviegoing pleasure — the kind that comes from a film that’s knows what it’s doing and how to deal it, and is therefore totally confident and well-ordered — be one of the criteria that qualifies a film for Best Picture? Maybe The Departed should be one of the nominees on this basis.

It’s amazing what can happen when the right song is laid onto the soundtrack of the right scene in the right film. This special chemistry happens for reasons I don’t yet fully understand when Martin Scorsese uses John Lennon‘s “Well, Well, Well” in a scene in The Departed — a scene between Leonardo DiCaprio‘s frazzled cop-mole character and Jack Nicholson‘s grizzled mob boss.
I haven’t listened to this song in a long time, but it popped through in some live-wire way the other night when I was watching The Departed for a second time. A couple of lines of dialogue about Lennon are heard around the same time. Nicholson asks DiCaprio, “Do you know who John Lennon was?” and DiCaprio answers, “Yeah…he was the president right before Lincoln.”
The musical ride that Scorsese takes you on in this film is great — a series of late ’60s/early ’70s rock tracks that fortify the scenes (or portions of scenes) they play under, but not in any literal “oh, the lyrics are commenting on what we’re seeing” way. It’s more of a visceral -emotional thing, and it feels dead perfect.
Scorsese achieved a similar connection when he used Mott the Hoople‘s “All The Way to Memphis” at the very beginning of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I had never given much of a shit about Mott the Hoople before seeing that film, but I always felt a measure of respect for those guys (and certainly their son) after they were processed through the Scorsese grinder.

Warren Beatty‘s Reds is having its big New York Film Festival revival showing on Wednesday, 10.4, but the Paramount Home Video double-disc Reds DVD won’t be out until 10.17.

The 1981 Oscar-winning biopic of journalist and “romantic revolutionary” John Reed, beautifully shot by Vittorio Storaro, was restored at least five years ago. I know this because I was told sometime in early ’02 by Paramount Home Video exec Martin Blythe that the work had been done a while before that, and because a spotless, superb looking print was shown in concert with a Beatty tribute that I attended at the San Francisco Film Festival in late April 2002. (Here’s a shot I took of him and Elvis Mitchell at a party before the screening.)
Blythe told me around this time that PHV had wanted to release a Reds DVD but they could never get Beatty to record a narration track or participate in any retropsective/making-of documentaries. I don’t know the particulars and I’ve pretty much gven up trying to learn anything from Beatty about anything, but I know he was generally gun-shy about DVDs for a long time, saying over and over that he felt the value of a film should speak for itself.
Something finally changed his mind, however, as Beatty and and Reds costar Jack Nicholson were taped and interviewed for the DVD. The second disc contains a six-part history of how Reds came into being: (1) Witness to Reds: The Rising (about how the project came about); (2) Witness to Reds: Comrades (about the casting of the film); (3) Witness to Reds: Testimonials (about the “witnesses” featured throughout the film); (4) Witness to Reds: The March (about the location and the sets — the late production designer Dick Sylbert used to regale me with stories about this aspect, since he was in charge); Witness to Reds: Revolution Parts 1 & 2 (about the making of the film); and (6) Witness to Reds: Propaganda (about the editing, scoring, release and Oscars).
One of my first big-time interview scores happened with Beatty. It was November of ’81, and in my capacity as managing editor of The Film Journal I was looking to write a piece on Reds, and I somehow got in touch with Beatty’s producer cousin David L. MacLeod, who suggested I call Beatty back later that day. I did and Beatty picked up. We talked — fenced is a better word — and he kept saying “don’t quote me…will you please not quote me?”, but he generously set up a private screening of Reds, enabling me to see it way ahead of everyone else. That was a very nice thing for a guy like him to do for someone relatively low on the totem pole.

“Guillermo Del Toro was a man on a mission. He’d been sent a tape of Amores Perros by a mutual friend, another up-and-coming Mexican auteur, Alfonso Cuaron, who [like Del Toro] thought the movie was an overlong chef d’oeuvre.
“Though Del Toro was ‘very broke’ at the time — he’d recently paid a hefty ransom to rescue his father from a kidnapping — he caught one of the first available flights to Mexico from Austin, Texas, where he was living then.
“‘Next day, or two days after, I opened the door and I see a fat man with the face of a kid, and with very intelligent blue eyes,’ Inarritu, 43, recalls. ‘And in the next three days he ate all the food in my refrigerator but he made me laugh like nobody, he made my life so happy. And he helped me, really toughly, to get those seven, eight minutes out of it.’
“For the record, Del Toro insists it was 20 minutes, and he swears that every time Inarritu tells the story the tally gets shorter. ‘Alejandro, come on!’ he says, laughing as he relates the anecdote. ‘Next time you’re going to say we took out four minutes!’ — from Reed Johnson‘s nicely detailed L.A. Times piece about Inarritu, Del Toro and Cuaron, obviously in the same vein of Anne Thompson’s 9.8 “Three Amigos” piece in the Hollywood Reporter, only longer and more lusciously written.

Sometime around ’82 or ’83 there were two plays playing next to each other on 45th Street — one was called “Good” (written by C.P. Taylor, about an ordinary guy who becomes a Nazi) and the other was called “Plenty” (by David Hare). It was silly — bizarre, really — but those titles being proclaimed from their respective marquees looked like some kind of put-on. I remember standing nearby after the two were up and flashing and saying to myself, “This is a joke, right?”

In the same silly-ass vein we have two “good” movies coming out in December — Steven Soderbergh‘s The Good German (Warner Bros., 12.8) and Robert De Niro‘s The Good Shepherd (Universal, 12.22) which I’ve begun to refer to as German Shepherd .
The lameness of this juxtaposition plus the two-Goods-in-December are bonds of total brainlessness, agreed, but there’s more. They’re both adult thrillers, and both period pieces about cold-war political intrigues (the Soderbergh is set in Berlin in ’47 or ’48, and the De Niro flick begins its story about a James Angleton-like CIA figure in, I believe, the late ’40s). And their respective stars, George Clooney and Matt Damon, are topliners in the Oceans trilogy (Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen).
Plus the early buzz on both films is sorta similar. If I were writing for the New York Times, my editors would suggest the following sentence: “Whether these two films will be bet with critical and commercial success remains to be seen.”

Is it me, or do these Departed judgments sound vaguely similar?:
(a) “Mixing it up with modern mobsters for the first time since Casino 11 years ago, Martin Scorsese cooks up a juicy and bloody steak of a movie in The Departed…[which] pulses with energy, tangy dialogue and crackling performances from a fine cast…after the elaborate exertions of the period pieces Gangs of New York and The Aviator, it’s good to see Scorsese back on home turf” — Variety critic Todd McCarthy;

(b) “Thank God we have Martin Scorsese back…after a couple of films where one of the best directors ever seemed more intent on pleasing Academy voters than millions of admirers, Scorsese returns to contemporary crime fiction with a hugely satisfying bang” — Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt;
(c) “What a relief! The fabled director of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas is back on the contempo urban turf where he once belonged…here, at long last, is a return to an old-school, brass-knuckles crime flick with piss and vinegar and style to burn. It may not be profound or symphonic, but it’s cause for real cheering ….after two middling efforts (Gangs of New York and The Aviator) Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have finally generated real electricity.” — me.

What’s made clear in Jackass: Number Two when Johnny Knoxville and Chris Pontius take a couple of swallows of horse semen “is that in a society still driven by the Christian right and red-state morality, 30-year-old men with wives, girlfriends, and masculine reputations to uphold still cannot whip out the lubricant and give in to their primal urge to slip it into the backdoor.
“And unfortunately for these poor, subdued men — two of whom have children — the only real outlet for the repressed sexual frustration is to drink the ejaculate of a horse, or stand around in the nude and inflict pain on one another, while anointing the appropriately named Wee Man as their phallic mascot. It’s a cheerless state of affairs — nearly a year after Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger mainstreamed man-love into our cultural zeitgeist — that this group of men still must play with poisonous snakes in lieu of one another’s sexual members or, worse still, substitute the goring of a bull’s horn for the feel of a man.” — from Dustin Rowles‘ review on Pajiba!, a forum for “scathing reviews by bitchy people.”

Here’s the trailer for Gabriel Range‘s Death of a President, winner of the Fipresci International Critics Award at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, and opening via Newmarket on 10.27.06.

The New York Film Festival selections “aren’t so much programmed as curated,” observes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott. The curators are led by program director Richard Pena, the festival’s program director, and otherwise made up of film critics — Film Comment editor Kent Jones, Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbaum, Vogue magazine critic John Powers , and Phillip Lopate, “editor of a recently published Library of America anthology of American movie criticism.
“These critics, like others in their profession, incline toward material that is sometimes described as difficult or challenging, but that requires a disciplined, active attention,” Scott writes. That’s a polite way of saying they’re film snobs. I don’t think Schwarzbaum is an elitist (she writes like a person who lives in a real world), but the others, I believe, probably are. There’s no avoiding this syndrome among Manhattan film congnoscenti. If you’re a serious film lover you’re going to feel the same way as the snobs do about this or that film, and that’s not such a bad thing.
But there’s something vaguely arid and ingrown about this culture also — a certain tendency to sidestep films with what an elitist would probably describe as plebian emotionalism.