"Sing it in Russian!"
In the spring of 1986, Dean was working like crazy on Bloody Heart. June 24, the start date for the movie he'd been working on for five years, was coming at him like a train down a track. As he said, there was no stopping it, no changing the date, and if the deals weren't done and the production not ready, it would be over for him.
From Leningrad I went on to Moscow to try to find out what had happened to the movie, because the deal had been negotiated in Moscow, and I knew that something had gone horribly wrong, something I was now convinced led to his death in the lake near his house in East Germany.
Bloody Heart was going to change Dean's life. It was the crossover picture that would make him a real contender as a director in the East. Having been to America, he was obsessed with making a real movie with good production values instead of what he called "a piece of garbage where you could punch your fists through the sets." Sing Cowboy Sing had been an enormous hit, but Dean was fed up with playing an idiotic cowpoke, as he put it. A new career as a director would also release him from life as a fading pop star.
On May 30, 1986, Artemy Troitsky organized a concert in Moscow to benefit the victims of Chernobyl - the nuclear power plant had blown up on April 25-26 - and it was the first event of its kind. Everyone signed on, all the biggest bands and singers. There was a rumor that Dean Reed showed up and stood backstage at the concert and nobody asked him to play. Nobody cared.
For the whole of the spring, Dean led an increasingly frenzied life - the film, concerts, albums, television shows. He was always on the road - Potsdam, Prague, Moscow, Berlin. He sat up late in Schmockwitz, reworking the script for Bloody Heart. It was never out of his mind.
Renate would star with him in Bloody Heart. They would be together all summer long. They would have a chance to patch things up and get past the quarrels they'd been having which were nagging at Dean like his ulcer.
He was also desperately involved in the complications of pre-production; making a realistic movie about America in East Germany and the USSR meant he had to attend to a million details and he did it obsessively. Dean cast his "Indians" in Alma Alta in Uzbekistan, and from a collective farm that was populated entirely by North Koreans. American police cars and jeeps, as well as period sedans, were hired from vintage car clubs that flourished in the Baltic cities of Riga and Tallinn. Already that spring, a credible version of an American church was under construction in Yalta in the Crimea, which was to be the principal location for Bloody Heart, but the wood had to be shipped in from Riga because wood was scarce in the Crimea.
He was determined. When Bloody Heart was finished, Dean would show his movie in America and he was convinced that it would be his ticket home.
"It was really a dream world in some ways," Victor Grossman said. "But Dean had high hopes and met someone in America who was willing to manage him, a woman who talked about fan clubs and making pencils and all kinds of things with 'Dean Reed' on it." He meant Dixie, of course.
In Potsdam, Dean struggled with the changes at the DEFA Film Studios, which was his professional base. The great Berlin movie studios, where films like the Blue Angel had been made before World War Two, had been taken over by the Communists in the 1950s as part of the socialist network of movie facilities.
By the 1980s the studios were a mess. On DEFA's vast back lot, broken Roman columns lay on the ground. Inside the studio, the sound stages were shabby and so were the sets, except for one improbably imperial bedroom and bathroom constructed of fake marble.
DEFA was in trouble. Erich Honecker still ruled East Germany, but hard currency was increasingly what mattered, and the producers at DEFA dreamed of deals with the West. Maybe Dean thought that Bloody Heart was the perfect vehicle for his return to America, but the smart money at DEFA knew the West wasn't interested in a movie where the FBI were the bad guys.
Bloody Heart was cut back. In the Soviet system, everything on a movie was painstakingly planned because everything was so expensive, even the lousy film stock. You had to calculate the number of shots - there were two and a half meters of film per shot - and submit your plan. At almost seven hundred shots, Bloody Heart was two hundred more than the norm. Dean was planning a movie that would run over two hours.
"I must show the American life with all the details. There must be lots of short scenes," said Dean who, like all movie directors, dreamed of movies with thousands of extras. He was forced to scale back from a cast of six hundred to a cast of sixty.
Dean needed Soviet coproduction money to make his film. In fact, half of the money was to be Soviet, but, even more than in Germany, in the Soviet Union money for old-style socialist movies was drying up. In spite of his impossible schedule in the winter and spring of 1986, until the week before he died in June, Dean shuttled to and from the USSR as if his life depended on it. He was worried, frantic, his face lined, Lilia Liepine told me when I met her in Moscow. She had been Dean's production manager on Bloody Heart.
In her pink angora sweater, Lilia looked like Mrs. Brown and she said she had mourned for Dean like a mother. She was from Riga. In the Soviet Union, the production of every movie was assigned by Moscow to a regional studio. Bloody Heart, a German coproduction, was given to the Riga studio, in part, at least, because in the Latvian capital most people spoke German.
"Dean felt we were like Germans, that we were too polite, too reserved for his taste," said the good-natured Lilia.
She told me sadly that, in the Riga studio, the boxes of props for Bloody Heart were still stored, including a cracked Coca Cola sign and the footage, which Dean had shot on Denver's skid row when he was in Colorado.
He had been convinced that it would give the movie a real feel of America, and the tale of the filming was already added to what he called "The Annals of Deano." He loved telling how he found himself in the middle of a burglary that day on Larimer Street where the bums lived, how a real American cop stopped him with a big riot gun, how he, Dean, bravely kept the cameras turning and got the real goods, how frightening America sometimes was, with its hundred million handguns. Dean was frightened by the guns, but exhilarated at the same time.
Possessed by the vision of the professional American film, but doomed to make it in two countries where every piece of equipment was forty years out of date, Dean himself oversaw the casting and the sets and even the make-up tests and the animals.
He chose a horse for himself at a collective farm in the USSR where wild horses were broken. Month after month, he traveled the whole of the Soviet Union with Lilia Liepine, restless, anxious. In Yalta, mobbed by fans, Dean gave an impromptu concert at the end of a long hard day and Lilia said to him, "How can you stand it?"
"I like it," he said. "I need it."
Then the tank was late arriving from North Vietnam.
Hanoi was the only place you could put your hands on an American tank. People filming in the Soviet Union who needed a US tank had to buy one from Hanoi. I remembered that I had seen a photograph of Dean with some North Vietnamese generals. He appeared to be joking around with them and maybe it was how he had finagled his tank. I asked Lilia Liepine if people would be frightened by the sight of an American tank being driven down a road in the Crimea.
"USA, USSR, there isn't a lot of difference between tanks," she said.
"Of course, in the end, the Soviets canceled the money for Bloody Heart," said an American diplomat who had known Dean and was retired and bored and happy to talk. "The Soviets killed the movie," he said with absolute certainty. "Everyone knew," he said, "the movie was kaput."
Kaput. Finished. If it were true, the emotional fallout for Dean would have been like Chernobyl.
In Moscow at the end of 1988, I discovered just how much the new freedoms in the USSR were changing things. Perestroika - the restructuring of the economic and political institutions - meant that, where movies had once been completely subsidized by the state, every studio now had to turn a profit. Movies had always been big in the Soviet Union. The Soviets went to the pictures all the time - as much as nineteen times a year, some people said - largely because there wasn't much else to do. Their flats were crowded and the restaurants were disgusting; at least the movie theaters were warm and you could make out in the back rows.
Even before Gorbachev took office in 1985, people were fed up with the crap that came out of the Soviet studios. State censorship, the yes-men of the Brezhnev era, and the decades of stagnation meant that movies ran largely to provincial romance and costume drama. The Russians were crazy for costume drama and heroic space pictures, including Cosmonaut #2 in the USA. The Russian version of Mary Poppins had been the biggest cinematic event since Battleship Potemkin; the Sherlock Holmes movies, too, were very popular.
A sign of change, and there were people in Moscow who read these signs meticulously, obsessively, was the election of Elem Klimov as head of the cinematographers' union. It took place a few months after Gorbachev came to power. Klimov's films had been banned for years; then, suddenly, he was official.
Censorship crumbled. Movies once considered irreverent were screened. Sexy movies. Political movies. Soviet film stars began appearing in Playboy. In 1987, Juris Podnieks made Is It Easy to Be Young? and it was another watershed because in his dark, tough picture, he portrayed hostile punk kids and their passionate desire above all else for money and good times.
One night I met a writer at Dom Kino. Moscow's film house was jammed and the stylish crowd of movie people drank and kissed the air a lot and Nikita Khrushchev's grandson, a balding, plump young man in jeans, ate ice cream. Over vodka, the writer looked at the crowd and said, "Just remember, these people who now dance to the Gorby Gavotte, used to do it to the Brezhnev Boogie and before that, in some cases, to the Khrushchev Carioca."
Mosfilm, the city's main studio, was in the Lenin Hills on the outskirts of Moscow. Leslie and I went with our guide, Vera Reich. As we drove up to the studio gates, Vera said that she worked mostly for film people and that her last client had been the director Roland Joffe. Leslie Woodhead said we knew Roland and we'd seen him recently in Beverly Hills. At this Vera's face lit up: this connection with Roland somehow made us all friends.
Even in her tiny high-heeled leather boots, Vera Reich was very short. She was curious about everything. She had a genuine smile and she was completely incorruptible.
"Film is our most important art," Lenin said, and it was inscribed over the front door of the studio. The studio was vast; it had offices, sound stages, prop shops, costume stores and a huge back lot where vintage trams lay rusting in the dirty snow.
The lobby at Mosfilm had the silvery, stylized feel of an RKO set with Art Moderne corridors, the kind where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers might have danced; black-and-white photographs of great Russian movie stars lined the walls. I couldn't find Dean anywhere on the wall of stars.
The man in charge of foreign coproduction wore a very good suit and had an office as big as a conference room with a map of the world on the wall. He looked like a producer. He did not introduce himself or respond to a request for his name, or maybe he didn't understand. Anyway, I never knew his name and I thought of him as Mr. Big. He addressed himself entirely to Leslie Woodhead because Leslie was also a producer in a good suit and a Western coproduction of any kind was a juicy prospect.
Mr. Big wanted to talk deals. He wanted to talk to Leslie about the prospect of his shooting Dean's life story at Mosfilm and how much stuff - lights, sets, costumes, crew - he could sell. Production at Mosfilm was way down. Times were tough.
Mr. Big ordered his secretary to bring coffee. I wanted to talk about Dean Reed, but he yawned, interested only in the deal, and so I drank my coffee to cover my boredom.
"You'll want to see a script, of course," Leslie said.
No, Mr. Big said and offered him a Havana cigar.
Nothing was more astonishing than that no one in Moscow asked to see a script anymore; they asked how much money you had to spend. Leslie had been sneaking around Eastern Europe for years in order to make his ground-breaking drama-documentaries and he had met secretly with Soviet dissident generals in back alleys and taken illegal photographs of the Communist Party headquarters in Prague and the shipyards in Gdansk. Suddenly, in the heart of Moscow, all anyone talked to him about were below-the-line costs and exchange rates.
Hopeful, Mr. Big pushed his box of Havanas at Leslie.
"Cigar?" he said in English.
"Can we film in Red Square?" Leslie said for the second time.
Sure, you could film in Red Square, although the Kremlin is heavily booked years in advance.
"What did you think of Dean Reed?" I finally said.
Mr. Big shrugged his beefy shoulders. It had been Dean's ambition to play John Reed, the American who took part in the 1917 Russian Revolution. Around 1980, the director, Sergei Bondachuk had planned to make a Russian version of John Reed's life and Dean promoted himself for the part. Bondachuk went to California and, language notwithstanding, offered the part to Warren Beatty. Beatty subsequently made his own version instead and called it Reds.