this, but encounters with Beatty are almost always a form of seduction. In the case of men, he goes for your talent. He had read my work and was aware of my leftism, obviously, but I was still surprised that the first thing out of his mouth after saying hello was whether I knew who John Reed was. Sure, I quickly replied, mentioning Ten Days That Shook the World, Reed’s seminal 1919 work on the Russian Revolution, as if I had read it. I hadn’t. Well, Beatty continued, he was planning on directing and starring in a biographical movie about Reed and his relationship to Louise Bryant—the Marxist/anarchist and proto-feminist glamour girl of journalism. It’d be an epic of romance, politics, and revolution. He was planning on picking a screenwriter soon, and wanted to know if I was interested. It was between Paddy Chayevsky and me.
At that point the phone rang again. I was relieved; if it hadn’t, I might have fainted. Forget Moses Wine and the horse he rode in on. There was nothing I could have imagined wanting to write more than this, though I knew that Chayevsky—the author of Marty, The Americanization of Emily , and Hospital—meant stiff, probably impossible, competition.
The call turned out to be from Jimmy Carter. That’s how I can recall that this meeting took place in late 1975 to early 1976; Carter was just launching his run for the presidency. I listened as the Southern governor kowtowed and kissed up to the movie star in search of his support, which obviously meant money and a significant endorsement, also entrée into the liberal Hollywood crowd. The name “Jack” was mentioned. Warren seemed to be enjoying the exchange and was acting out a bit for my benefit. This was my first brush with the Hollywood-Washington nexus, which is now a commonplace.
When he hung up, Beatty asked if I thought Carter would make a good president. I don’t remember my answer, but I probably equivocated. (Now I would just snort.) I was far more interested in my own advancement, and I didn’t want to disturb that possibility with any rash statements. Beatty didn’t do much to tip his hand either. As I later learned, that was typical Warren. He played footsie with politicians the same way he played footsie with potential film collaborators (and, needless to say, girlfriends), relishing his power until he made a decision based on a timetable known only to him—and probably not even to him. The same ambivalence has been apparent in his own tentative steps into electoral politics, when he’s been touted for the California governorship or the Senate, and has publicly played with the idea and then backed away. I was never surprised. He is far too much of a control freak to tolerate the hurly-burly of politics, in which it’s highly difficult to regulate your press in the way a movie star of his stature is used to doing. And he was more obsessive about that than most of them. This is a man who definitely only wants to be photographed one way.
To be fair, Warren was the only person on the Hollywood Left who has ever impressed me with his knowledge of radical politics. That’s not necessarily saying much, but he was familiar with the finer points of theory to a degree that would have left most of his entertainment industry colleagues—and probably some college professors—glassy-eyed. I heard years later that his name appears on the checkout list for several arcane texts about socialist history—works on the Third International and such—at Harvard’s Widener Library. Does that mean he really read them? No, but I suspect that he may have while writing Reds, the movie he was dreaming that day we met in the mid-Seventies. Reds, his highly romantic version of the John Reed-Louise Bryant story, finally reached the theaters in 1981, with Warren playing Reed and Diane Keaton as Bryant. Beatty won the Oscar for directing the film. Its Oscar-nominated screenplay is credited to Beatty and British playwright Trevor Griffiths—no Roger Simon or Paddy Chayevsky in sight.
I may have lost my chance at writing it a few days after that first meeting. I received a phone call from Warren out of the blue asking whether my wife and I would like to go out to dinner that night with him and “Michelle.” By Michelle I knew he meant his main squeeze “Mama” Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. Dyanne and I had another engagement that night, to go to a spiritualist “table tapping” (calling forth of ancestors) with our friend the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff. (Barbara apparently believed in such things.) Careerist that I was, I was more than willing to cancel and dine with Warren and Michelle. Dyanne wasn’t, and insisted, for whatever reason, that we honor our obligation to Barbara. I remember fighting about this, claiming that the “table tapping” was nonsense, anyway, but Dyanne wouldn’t relent. Off we went to the tapping, which was, indeed, even sillier than one could imagine. Warren didn’t call me again for several years.
I was with another woman when I first saw Reds in 1981. She was the producer Renee Missel, who would become my second wife. We were at a very romantic point and she thought the Reed-Bryant story was about us, metaphorically, anyway. I don’t know if I was so sure, caught up as I was in very conventional bourgeois feelings of guilt about leaving my first wife and children—though almost all of that guilt was about the children. As for Warren, he, of course, never played Moses Wine. By that time, The Big Fix had already been a successful film starring Richard Dreyfuss.
Considering all the ups and downs of the previous attempts to make a Moses Wine film, the production of Fix, as it was called on the set, came about relatively easily. I’d stayed in touch with Dreyfuss, who’d always wanted to do the character. By 1978 or so, his power in the business had reached the level of a “bankable” actor, someone with so much box office clout that he could pretty much pick his project, as long as it wasn’t a dramatization of the phone book. (With some “bankable” actors, like Beatty in those days, it could be the phone book: “So, Warren, are we talking the Yellow Pages or the White Pages?”) Richard and I got together with his buddy Carl Borack—a commercials producer who would take the lead in the production area—and formed the Moses Wine Company. We took the package to Universal, where Richard had made Jaws, through Verna Fields, the film’s editor, who had gone on to become a studio executive. Verna, everybody’s den mother, passed it on to Ned Tanen, the head of Universal.
It was an easy sell, not only because of Richard but also because Ned identified with Moses Wine. I was at first astonished that a rich and powerful studio chief could identify with a hippie detective living in a working-class and Chicano barrio of LA. But it didn’t take me long to understand that I had created a kind of mirror for people’s counter lives. A studio head was in his soul a down-at-the-heels gumshoe out to buck the system and to save the poor and downtrodden. Never mind that he was experiencing these feelings in a multi-million-dollar ocean-view home in Pacific Palisades, a home adorned with museum-quality Navajo rugs. Ned was married at the time to Kitty Hawks, the daughter of director Howard Hawks and fashion icon Slim Keith (later Lady Keith)—not exactly the company Moses Wine traveled in.
I didn’t realize it then, but I was witnessing one of the first cases I would see of the bifurcated Hollywood personality. In Ned Tanen’s case it was relatively benign, because he had a sense of irony about his position. In many other cases it was far less so.
The studio left me alone with Dreyfuss for the writing of the film. In fact, I was treated remarkably well by them the entire time, contrary to the fables of Hollywood’s cruelty to writers. Part of this was that the star protected me, but it was also because I had written the book and they had heard of it. I wasn’t just a screenwriter. I was a novelist who might not even need them. (I learned to encourage the studio executives’ belief that I earned much more money from my books than I did; it made them insecure about their hold on me. It was a lie, of course. I badly needed the screenwriting money to support my family.)
Even then, novelists in Hollywood were a diminishing number. Most of the writers were film school grads using their screenwriting as a wedge to get a directing assignment. This didn’t make for exceptional writing. It’s not by accident that the films from the Golden Era were better written—many of them by Broadway playwrights.
More surprisingly, the studio didn’t interfere with the film politically, to the extent that the roll-up at the end shows Moses Wine marching off away from camera, his arms around his young children, jocularly teaching them to sing the
