In 1976 he had finally found a writer for the project: Trevor Griffiths, a successful playwright whose London hit, Comedians, Mike Nichols was taking to Broadway. A Marxist intellectual, Griffiths wasn’t about to get his head turned by a movie star. According to Jeremy Pikser, a protégé of Griffiths’s, whom Beatty hired as a research consultant and who later went on to co-write Bulworth with Beatty, “Trevor felt, ‘I’m a historian, a playwright. You’re a Hollywood movie star. What can you tell me about how to tell the story of John Reed?’ I couldn’t imagine two less likely people to have an effective collaboration.”

To Griffiths it was clear how much Beatty identified with Reed. “Warren spoke as if he was the reincarnation of Jack Reed,” Griffiths says. “Reed was a golden boy. I would get that sense as we talked that Warren had been born to play him. Or Jack Reed had been born so that at a later moment Warren could play him!”

Griffiths’s wife was killed in an airplane crash while he was working on the script, which delayed a first draft considerably. He finally finished around the end of 1977. “Warren rang me up and said, ‘This is wonderful. This is just terrific. I’ve got to read it again,’” he recalls. “When he rang me again about it, a week later, there was a completely different tone to his voice. He basically wanted to start again, keep the outline, keep the shape, keep some of the characterizations, and begin again. And, indeed, that’s what we did.”

According to Pikser, “The first script was much more tendentious. Humorless. It was much more historical, in that the relationship between John Reed and Louise Bryant was not nearly as modern. And Reed was more of a character than a vehicle for Warren Beatty. In one scene, Reed embraced Louise and said, ‘Your hair smells like damsons.’ Damsons are a kind of plum, and they do exist in America, and they are likely something that Reed might have known about and, as a poet, might have made a reference to. But Warren’s attitude was ‘What the fuck is a damson? And I sure would never say that about a woman! What kind of an idiot is this guy Trevor Griffiths? It must be some sort of English thing.’ But I don’t think Warren hated the script any more than he hates other first drafts. He never has a draft he likes. It’s never ‘O.K., now the script is done,’ in my experience. It’s like ‘Let’s work on it.’ You go into a film re-writing while it’s being shot.”

Says Beatty, “That draft had serious problems. There was no tension between Bryant and Reed. What I needed to do was pit her feminism against his chauvinism, turn a woman who was in love with a man against that man.”

Griffiths returned to New York in the middle of 1978 to hash out the script with Beatty. “We sat down in a hotel bedroom at the Carlyle and we worked for about four and a half months,” Griffiths recalls. “It was a pretty unpleasant four and a half months … really painful. I was sitting in a room for six or eight hours a day with a guy that I was increasingly growing to detest, and who was increasingly growing to detest me. That’s the Sartrean version of hell.”

In his everyday exchanges, Beatty is invariably polite and soft-spoken, with a dry wit. When he’s relaxed and unguarded, as unguarded as he ever gets, he’s ribald and funny. He rarely loses his temper, rarely allows himself to get annoyed or irritable. But script meetings are, for Beatty, something else: free-for-alls, extreme combat. “When you’re collaborating, you have to be able to take the gloves off,” Beatty says. He is a firm believer in the adage that two (or more) minds are better than one. He calls them “hostile intelligences.” But, observes Pikser, “it’s often more hostile than intelligent.” He goes on, “Warren functions creatively in a pugilistic manner. He likes to fight. It’s not fun to fight with a stupid person, so he likes to have smart people to fight with. You stop working on the script, he’s sweet as honey. You start working on a script, you can expect to be abused. Anybody who’s ever worked with him who doesn’t admit that is lying. That’s how he is with Robert Towne, that’s how he is with Elaine May, but they love it. They throw things, they scream. They swear at each other. I think they feel that this is what it means to be creative. The first time I met Towne”—the screenwriter kibitzed on Reds, as did writer-director May, more extensively—“he walked up to me and he said, ‘I just want you to know something.’ Right up in my face. ‘I don’t give a fuck about history.’ I was like, ‘What do you want from me, man? I’m just a kid here.’”