Franklin D. Roosevelt’s face fills the screen. Actually, it isn’t FDR himself but Edward Herrmann, who played FDR in the television miniseries Eleanor and Franklin. In Reds Herrmann plays Max Eastman, editor of "The Masses".

“To be serious about his work,” Herrmann says. “Clearly that was behind his madness. He conceived of the Russian Revolution as a need for power and change. That montage at the end of the first act sums up his political beliefs. One’s sexual potency, one’s drive into life, and that was all in that footage”

One afternoon, Herrmann went up to what he calls “Beatty’s beautiful Bauhaus palace up top of Mulholland Drive” to talk about playing Eastman in the movie. In the living room they discuss a picture about a rebel with a cause, while Margaux Hemingway was down below in the basement screening room watching Rebel Without a Cause.

After a while, Beatty took Herrmann into a room where a picture of Herrmann’s wife, Leigh Curran, was tacked onto a bulletin board. The husband was taken aback. He wondered what his wife’s picture was doing there.

“Do you know her?” asked Beatty.
“Yes,” Herrmann said.
“Do you work well with her?”
“She’s my wife.”
“Yeah, I know she’s you’re wife.” Beatty burst out laughing. “But do you work well together?”

Herrmann explained that he and his wife had never worked together, but thought they would work well together if they ever got the chance. So Herrmann was cast as Max Eastman, and his wife was cast as Eastman’s wife. Beatty was obviously interested in how couples in life would work as couples on the screen. Herrmann and Curran would, in a sense, be like Beatty and Keaton writ small. In this movie which happens to be about a couple who worked together, Warren Beatty was going to see how loving couples got along as working couples.

“Warren Beatty,” says Edward Herrmann, “is mysterium tremendum. We never saw a script. It was like shooting Casablanca“.

When Casablanca was being made, the actors supposedly did not have a script and more or less made up the movie as they went along. Making Reds, they had a script, but Beatty would not show it to anyone. Actually Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson had scripts, but none of the other actors did. They would be given their lines in the morning, before they worked in a scene. Or, if it was a long scene, they might be given their lines the night before. Once, Edward Herrmann complained to Diane Keaton about not having a script.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s all in Warren’s head anyway. He keeps changing it all the time.”