John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World and Warren Beatty's Reds both are recognized as American classics.

Leading off, dialogue from Warren Beatty's classic film Reds, with Beatty as journalist/socialist John Reed, who is meeting with factory workers trying to unionize when the cops arrive to break up the "unAmerican" gathering.

Reed: Officer, these men have the legal right to assemble.

Policeman: What the hell're you doing?

Reed: Me? I write.

Policeman: You right? Uh uh. You wrong ... (skulls are cracked and the oligarchy is buttressed).

The scene is so vivid and lifelike that a Floyd County Democratic Party elder or One Southern Indiana operative might as well be playing the gap-toothed restorer of order, albeit brandishing an electronic muzzle rather than a billy club.

My name's not Reed, but I read, and it's been only a week since I wrote about my limited yearly intake of cinema, but this shouldn't be construed to mean that I don't have favorite movies. Having failed to assemble the requisite "Top Whatever" list, a few preferred films spring to mind:

Animal House
The Lives of Others
Bull Durham
M*A*S*H
The Dark Knight
Anything by the Marx Brothers and Errol Flynn
Foreign films that aren't stupid and violent

And so on, although perhaps my number one movie remains Beatty's 1981 epic.

Based on Jack Reed’s 1919 novel Ten Days that Shook the World, which also provided the title for Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece of Soviet montage “October: Ten Days That Shook the World,” Reds is a first-hand account of the Bolshevik Revolution. It follows Reed’s life as a Communist journalist and writer, both in the U.S. and abroad in the streets of Petrograd.

Jason Fraley tells the whole story of Reds, which would appeal to me for no other single reason beyond it being released at precisely the point of highest Reaganism, and moreover, for Beatty's use of what were referred to as witnesses.

Most memorable is his decision to intersperse his narrative with actual interviews of prominent real-life figures of the movement — doing for politics what When Harry Met Sally (1989) did for romance. These voices — credited as “Witnesses” — appear in several forms: between sequences as interviews, as voiceover narration and even voiceover music as witnesses sing songs like “Over There,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and the film’s recurring favorite “You Can’t Come in Play in My Yard.” This fusion of reality and melodrama is a credit to Beatty’s filmmaking ability — and a testament to how personal the project was to him. In fact, Beatty began filming the interviews back in the early ’70s before Reds was even an official project, but no doubt already weighing on his mind.

Many of the witnesses had died by the time of the film's release. Writer Henry Miller, another of my faves, was one of them. Now, about those ten days ...

Everybody Knew That Something Was Going to Happen, but Nobody Knew Just What, by Andrew Hartman (Society for U.S. Intellectual History)

This essay, by me, is the first post in our roundtable dedicated to John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World.

John Reed arrived in Petrograd at the dawn of history. The globetrotting journalist had traveled to Russia with his feminist wife Louise Bryant as soon as news of impending revolution broke. It was 1917, and “Jack,” as his friends knew him, had a front-row seat to the October Revolution.

Famous for his vivid first-hand accounts of labor conflict and war, Reed was the perfect writer to tell the electrifying story of Lenin and the Bolsheviks seizing power. Ten Days that Shook the World, Reed’s celebratory account of the Russian Revolution, is now hailed as an American classic. George Kennan of all people praised it as “a reflection of blazing honesty and a purity of idealism.” In a recent New York Times retrospective, Condoleezza Rice, no Bolshevik, writes that Ten Days “provided a riveting and vivid—if not impartial—account of the most pivotal phase of the revolution, as viewed from the ground.”

But Reed’s “slice of intensified history,” as he called it, had trouble finding an audience at first. “Here by wide acknowledgement,” a sympathetic Reed biographer wrote, “was a great American journalist, an eyewitness to the greatest story of the time, but not an editor outside the tiny radical press would give him an inch of space” ...

And who defines this truth? "Bookmark: Sex, Lies and Jerzy Kosiński."

A recent oblique reference ...

What do you know? Chance the gardener was right, after all.

 ... led to refresher about the life of Jerzy Kosiński, author of Being There.

This clip repeats midway through, but contains an interesting conversation about television and the passive act of watching.

He was an actor, too. Here's a clip from the only Warren Beatty film that really matters, Reds, with Kosiński appearing as Zinoviev.

A strange and contradictory figure, indeed.

Sex, Lies and Jerzy Kosinski

The BBC documentary on the life and art of enigmatic novelist Jerzy Kosinski. Through interviews with his second wife Kiki von Fraunhofer-Kosinski, friends and fellow authors, and Polish villagers who knew Kosinski when he was a child hiding from the scourge of Nazism, this program attempts to assess the verity of Kosinski's "autobiographical" fiction, the need for him to maintain a nebulous mystique about his early life, and to understand his obsession with S&M sex clubs in Manhattan during the 1970s and 1980s.

Curtis Morrison and the curious case of adult supervision at Insider Louisville.

Dear Terry,

Seriously?

Might a wee bit of this "adult supervision" be advisable for some of your other Insider Louisville writers?

Hint: I'm thinking of this fellow named Tierney.

Full disclosure: I've known Curtis for ten years or so, ever since I was a tenant during his in real estate days.

Can't say I have a dog in this fight; just curious as to your selective application of the supervision doctrine. Tierney's beer blather in the Forecastle series was about as wrongheaded as you're accusing Curtis of being.

Just saying.

R

Terry Boyd: The curious case of Curtis Morrison

By TERRY BOYD | Published: APRIL 12, 2013

Curtis Morrison

Last night, I got emails from Ruby Cramer, a reporter atBuzzFeed.

Cramer wanted Curtis Morrison’s contact information.

All I could tell her is, “Curtis is no longer a contributor to Insider Louisville.”

Which is a shame.

Curtis has the makings of a solid reporter, under adult supervision.

Exceptional when it comes to getting public documents under the Freedom of Information Act, then squeezing out all the data and nuances on the way to documenting an important story.

Unfortunately, Curtis is also an overt and dedicated political activist, and you can’t be both at the same time at Insider Louisville.

It was my mistake to keep Curtis without an explicit guarantee he wouldn’t indulge in politics.

A painful lesson we’ll never repeat.

REWIND: Inspired by George Clooney and Warren Beatty.

The original title of the following essay was: George Clooney's “Good Night, and Good Luck” will lure NA Confidential to the multiplex.

On 10/13/05, I vowed to obtain a DVD of the movie "Reds." It never happened, but this weekend we're watching it courtesy of Netflix. This inspired me to search the NAC archives, hence today's reprint. Eventually we saw Clooney's paean to Edward R. Murrow, and my recap can be read here: Drop everything you're doing and go see Good Night, and Good Luck.

Meanwhile, the experience of watching "Reds" again after so long has been inspiring, and I recommend it to readers. Speaking of Reds, in this case the Cincinnati variety, we're off today to watch the home team play the Red Sox. I'll have a tankard for you at the Hofbrauhaus in Newport ... and contemplate the New Albanian revolution.

---

On average, NA Confidential views one film every two weeks.

Recent choices have included the documentary “When We Were Kings,” foreign films “The Dreamers,” “Goodbye, Lenin,” and “Colonel Redl,” and “Beyond the Sea,” Kevin Spacey’s bizarre paean to the singer Bobby Darin.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” fell into the play list somehow, and although it was amusing, one cannot do justice to the concept without explaining exactly why travelers must carry a towel.

To be truthful, if it were not for the convenient “order history” feature at http://www.netflix.com/, it would have been difficult to compile the preceding list.

When it is suggested that I accompany Mrs. Confidential to an actual movie theater, my astonished reaction invariably apes that of fictional detective Nero Wolfe’s annoyance at being asked to walk from his brownstone out onto the street.

“Out there? To the theater?

Merry disclaimers aside, when the opportunity to see George Clooney's “Good Night, and Good Luck” comes around, I’ll not only go to the theater to see it, but I’ll offer to drive.

That’ll confuse her.

The movie is reviewed in the current issue of Rolling Stone, and here are excerpts.

Does George Clooney have a box-office death wish? You have to wonder why the star of Ocean's Eleven would risk his standing as a pinup for ka-ching to direct, co-write and co-star in a movie set in the 1950s, shot in black-and-white and focused on a fifty-year-old battle between TV newsman Edward R. Murrow, indelibly played by David Strathairn, and the Commie-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Wonder no more. Clooney knows exactly what he's doing: blowing the dust off ancient TV history to expose today's fat, complacent news media as even more ready to bow to networks, sponsors and the White House. As Murrow said in a 1958 speech, which frames Clooney's dynamite film, the powers that be much prefer TV as an instrument to "distract, delude, amuse and insulate." Challenge is a loser's game …

… For a paltry $8 million, Clooney has crafted a period piece that speaks potently to a here-and-now when constitutional rights are being threatened in the name of the Patriot Act, and the American media trade in truth for access.

Obviously, the subject matter of Clooney’s film is a fastball in NA Confidential’s socio-political wheelhouse.

Journalist Edward R. Murrow was referring to the McCarthyism of the 1950’s when he said, “We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason," but I’m certain that he’d have no objection to my applying this sentiment to the vacuous populism of New Albany’s Siamese Councilman, Dan Coffey & Steve Price -- but where's the Tribune's Murrow when we need him?

Besides that, it’s always enjoyable to view the reaction when handsome Hollywood idols turn inexplicably subversive and craft important films about genuinely significant historical topics.

In 1981, at the height of the Reagan Revolution, Warren Beatty completed and released “Reds,” a three and a half hour dramatization of leftist American journalist John Reed’s life and times during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent red baiting of the post-Great War era.

A quarter century later, “Reds” remains a great favorite, but my elderly videotape is shot, and a replacement DVD purchase looms.

Murrow said, “Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.”

He might have added, “especially when it comes to ideas.”

Ideas are the currency and the lifeblood of progress, and proliferate when the human mind is challenged and stimulated – by conversation, reading, playing … and sometimes even watching movies.

Next up for Clooney: Ocean's 13, in which he leads the gang to New Albany to help UCM Price uncover those missing nickels and dimes, because as you know, nickels and dimes add up ... to inanity.