Star_How Warren Beatty Seduced America by Peter Biskind

Author:Peter Biskind [Biskind, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9780743246583
Goodreads: 7311628
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

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

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