Warren Beatty’s show is a beautiful, one of a kind epic. Never mind that it is sharply critical of John Reed, an American who was buried in the Kremlin — Hollywood never approached the title subject directly: (whisper) Commies. Beatty’s production idiosyncrasies raised eyebrows but his picture is quite an achievement in filmic storytelling, cleverly accessing a political scene sixty years gone through testimony by notables that lived it. Beatty and Diane Keaton provide the romantic fireworks that make the film commercially viable, amid all the revolutionary fervor and political chaos.
Reds 40th Anniversary
Blu-ray + Digital
Paramount Home Video
1981 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 195 min. / 40th Anniversary Edition / Street Date November 30, 2021 / 17.99
Starring: Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Edward Herrmann, Jerzy Kosiński, Jack Nicholson, Paul Sorvino, Maureen Stapleton, M. Emmet Walsh, Ian Wolfe, George Plimpton, Dolph Sweet, Ramon Bieri, Gene Hackman, Gerald Hiken, William Daniels, Oleg Kerensky, Shane Rimmer, Jerry Hardin, Jack Kehoe,...
Reds 40th Anniversary
Blu-ray + Digital
Paramount Home Video
1981 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 195 min. / 40th Anniversary Edition / Street Date November 30, 2021 / 17.99
Starring: Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Edward Herrmann, Jerzy Kosiński, Jack Nicholson, Paul Sorvino, Maureen Stapleton, M. Emmet Walsh, Ian Wolfe, George Plimpton, Dolph Sweet, Ramon Bieri, Gene Hackman, Gerald Hiken, William Daniels, Oleg Kerensky, Shane Rimmer, Jerry Hardin, Jack Kehoe,...
- 12/11/2021
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Leon Gast, the veteran filmmaker who won a Documentary Feature Oscar for helming the 1996 “Rumble in the Jungle” pic When We Were Kings, died Monday. He was 85.
The news was confirmed by the Woodstock Film Festival, of which Gast was a founding advisory board member and a 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award honoree.
Gast also won a Spirit Award, a Sundance Special Jury prize and a DGA Award nomination for When We Were Kings, which he also produced and edited. It told the fascinating story about the 1974 heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman held in Kinshasa, Zaire. The filmmaker later produced and directed The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013), which aired the following year on PBS as under the Independent Lens banner. Gast won a News & Documentary Emmy and an International Documentary Association Award for that project.
Gast began his movie career after working for an ad agency in New...
The news was confirmed by the Woodstock Film Festival, of which Gast was a founding advisory board member and a 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award honoree.
Gast also won a Spirit Award, a Sundance Special Jury prize and a DGA Award nomination for When We Were Kings, which he also produced and edited. It told the fascinating story about the 1974 heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman held in Kinshasa, Zaire. The filmmaker later produced and directed The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013), which aired the following year on PBS as under the Independent Lens banner. Gast won a News & Documentary Emmy and an International Documentary Association Award for that project.
Gast began his movie career after working for an ad agency in New...
- 3/9/2021
- by Erik Pedersen
- Deadline Film + TV
With the election just weeks away, it's more important than ever to be reminded of how we receive information and what assumptions we make about our news sources. Indiewire's latest curation of Hulu's Documentaries page explores journalism and the wider media landscape, offering analysis, critiques and, in some cases, conspiracies about the way the medium is the message. Watch these docs for free now! Rick Goldsmith's Oscar-nominated "Tell the Truth and Run" profiles famed journalist George Seldes and his long career, stretching from the 1910s until his death in 1995. Finding himself clashing time and time again with the interests of the owners of the papers for which he wrote, Seldes founded his own newsletter that focused on the undue influence money and power had on his profession, a situation that has only been exacerbated through media consolidation. Other docs in this collection looking at the vulnerability of the free press include.
- 10/17/2012
- by Basil Tsiokos
- Indiewire
By Judith Ehrlich & Rick Goldsmith
The year, 2005: The United States was involved in two wars. We had been lied into at least one of them (Iraq) by our president. The other war (Afghanistan) was already 4 years old, and there was no end in sight. The relevance of Dan Ellsberg's story with the Pentagon Papers, risking life in prison to stop a war he helped plan, was unmistakable.
We both knew Dan, who had appeared in Rick’s Oscar-nominated "Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the Am...
The year, 2005: The United States was involved in two wars. We had been lied into at least one of them (Iraq) by our president. The other war (Afghanistan) was already 4 years old, and there was no end in sight. The relevance of Dan Ellsberg's story with the Pentagon Papers, risking life in prison to stop a war he helped plan, was unmistakable.
We both knew Dan, who had appeared in Rick’s Oscar-nominated "Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the Am...
- 2/3/2010
- by Lew Harris
- The Wrap
The underreported Nazi persecution of homosexuals before and during World War II, including the incarceration of 10,000-15,000 victims in concentration camps, is the subject of a vital documentary by the Oscar-winning team of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman ("Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt," "The Celluloid Closet").
A winner of both the Sundance Film Festival Jury Award for best direction of a documentary feature and the Fipresci International Film Critics Award at Berlin, "Paragraph 175" silenced and educated the crowd in its Los Angeles debut at Outfest. Slated for theatrical release in September through New Yorker Films, the project has been in the works for several years. It originated with the efforts of German historian Klaus Muller, the European project director for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The title refers to the 1871 German Penal Code, which deemed "unnatural" sex acts between males as punishable by imprisonment and possible loss of civil rights. While this sodomy law remained on the books and was enforced until 1969, there was a period between the wars when Berlin became a center of gay culture. But the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party led to a harsh change of atmosphere.
In its early sections, "Paragraph 175" does a commendable job of summarizing the history of Nazi attitudes toward homosexuals, including the rise and fall of Hitler's close friend and strongman Ernst Rohm, who was gay and was eventually purged in a power struggle in June 1934. According to Nazi documents, from 1933-45, some 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality. Roughly half of these men were sentenced to prison.
As with the many other nonfiction works about the Holocaust, "Paragraph 175" is most moving and disturbing when the interviewed survivors tell their stories. The film interweaves these personal stories to great effect. Rupert Everett's sober narration, written by Sharon Wood ("Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press"), supports the film's structure.
Among the interviewees are Gad Beck, who joined a Jewish resistance group in Berlin and succeeded in liberating his lover from a Gestapo transfer camp by posing as a Hitler Youth member. Beck saw his lover turn around to rejoin his doomed family. Another subject is Heinz Dormer, who was forced to join the Hitler Youth in 1933 but was arrested two years later for Paragraph 175 violations. There is also Pierre Seel, a Frenchman in annexed Alsace-Lorraine who was caught in the Nazi crackdown on "antisocial" elements. Seel was interned at Schirmeck, where he was forced to help build a crematorium at the nearby concentration camp Struthof.
These individuals and several others remind us how systematically and ruthlessly the Nazis used pink triangles, the Star of David and several other symbols to mark the many religious and ethnic minorities that they deemed expendable in the insane blood bath that was the Third Reich.
PARAGRAPH 175
New Yorker Films
A Telling Pictures production
Directors: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
Producers: Rob Epstein,
Jeffrey Friedman,
Michael Ehrenzweig, Janet Cole
Director of research: Klaus Muller
Writer: Sharon Wood
Director of photography: Bernd Meiners
Editor: Dawn Logsdon
Music: Tibor Szemzo
Narrator: Rupert Everett
Color/stereo
Running time - 77 minutes
No MPAA rating...
A winner of both the Sundance Film Festival Jury Award for best direction of a documentary feature and the Fipresci International Film Critics Award at Berlin, "Paragraph 175" silenced and educated the crowd in its Los Angeles debut at Outfest. Slated for theatrical release in September through New Yorker Films, the project has been in the works for several years. It originated with the efforts of German historian Klaus Muller, the European project director for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The title refers to the 1871 German Penal Code, which deemed "unnatural" sex acts between males as punishable by imprisonment and possible loss of civil rights. While this sodomy law remained on the books and was enforced until 1969, there was a period between the wars when Berlin became a center of gay culture. But the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party led to a harsh change of atmosphere.
In its early sections, "Paragraph 175" does a commendable job of summarizing the history of Nazi attitudes toward homosexuals, including the rise and fall of Hitler's close friend and strongman Ernst Rohm, who was gay and was eventually purged in a power struggle in June 1934. According to Nazi documents, from 1933-45, some 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality. Roughly half of these men were sentenced to prison.
As with the many other nonfiction works about the Holocaust, "Paragraph 175" is most moving and disturbing when the interviewed survivors tell their stories. The film interweaves these personal stories to great effect. Rupert Everett's sober narration, written by Sharon Wood ("Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press"), supports the film's structure.
Among the interviewees are Gad Beck, who joined a Jewish resistance group in Berlin and succeeded in liberating his lover from a Gestapo transfer camp by posing as a Hitler Youth member. Beck saw his lover turn around to rejoin his doomed family. Another subject is Heinz Dormer, who was forced to join the Hitler Youth in 1933 but was arrested two years later for Paragraph 175 violations. There is also Pierre Seel, a Frenchman in annexed Alsace-Lorraine who was caught in the Nazi crackdown on "antisocial" elements. Seel was interned at Schirmeck, where he was forced to help build a crematorium at the nearby concentration camp Struthof.
These individuals and several others remind us how systematically and ruthlessly the Nazis used pink triangles, the Star of David and several other symbols to mark the many religious and ethnic minorities that they deemed expendable in the insane blood bath that was the Third Reich.
PARAGRAPH 175
New Yorker Films
A Telling Pictures production
Directors: Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
Producers: Rob Epstein,
Jeffrey Friedman,
Michael Ehrenzweig, Janet Cole
Director of research: Klaus Muller
Writer: Sharon Wood
Director of photography: Bernd Meiners
Editor: Dawn Logsdon
Music: Tibor Szemzo
Narrator: Rupert Everett
Color/stereo
Running time - 77 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 7/24/2000
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
"Nothing can stop the march of an informed people" is one of the many messages found in Rick Goldsmith's stirring documentary about newspaperman-author George Seldes, an educational and mostly reverential portrait of a muckraker who never compromised on principles and rarely passed up a chance to take on the powerful and corrupt.
Playing an Academy Award-qualifying one-week run at Laemmle's Monica, "Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press" is also an enriching encounter with the issues behind reporting the news in this century, such as the sometimes insidious relationship between advertising and editorial policy.
In his first feature-length documentary, producer-director-editor Goldsmith employs a punchy, direct style reminiscent of a hard news story. Ed Asner gives voice to many of Seldes' writings, culled from his innumerable articles, letters and many books, while Susan Sarandon provides the just-the-facts narration.
More than 500 photographs, headlines and articles are used graphically as is incredible archival footage from many sources.
Most remarkable is Seldes himself, who is perfectly lucid and engaging at age 98. (He died at age 104 in July 1995.) Interviewed at his Vermont home, surrounded by hundreds of unanswered letters and still working on an old Underwood typewriter, Seldes couldn't be gentler, although his professional voice made dictators and despots tremble through the decades.
The son of Russian Jewish immigrants who lived in the utopian Jewish colony of Alliance, N.J., Seldes first made waves in 1909 as a cub reporter for a Pittsburgh paper, where his story about a rapist preying on co-workers in a local business was killed when the advertising department used it as blackmail against the man's employers.
Exposing the "prostitution of the press" became a lifelong mission of Seldes, but his career as a foreign correspondent in World War I, the young Soviet Union and 1920s Italy made him a tireless opponent of official and self-imposed censorship. In 1924, he reported on Benito Mussolini's links to the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti, an anti-fascist, and was eventually expelled from the country.
In the late 1920s and '30s, he began a series of books critical of the so-called free press, covered the Spanish Civil War with his wife, Helen, and warned repeatedly of the "really great war for which youth is being prepared."
In 1940, he and Communist writer Bruce Minton founded the newsweekly In Fact. They had a falling out after a year, but Seldes continued putting out the publication for a decade, influencing politicians and youthful truth-seekers from Daniel Ellsberg to Ralph Nader (who are among several interviewees in the film).
His exposure of the hazards of cigarette smoking was in stark contrast to the misleading advertising of the industry that was ubiquitous in American newspapers and magazines.
The list of fights goes on, including major campaigns against the National Association of Manufacturing and J. Edgar Hoover. With the Cold War in full swing, Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his anti-communist crusade helped bring an end to In Fact, but Seldes continued to write books and eventually appeared in Warren Beatty's "Reds" as one of the "witnesses."
Truly an American original, Seldes' legacy is one that speaks courageously to a new generation that must never forget another of his benchmark statements: "A people that wants to be free must arm itself with a free press."
TELL THE TRUTH AND RUN:
GEORGE SELDES
AND THE AMERICAN PRESS
Goldsmith Prods.
Producer-director-editor Rick Goldsmith
Writers Sharon Wood, Rick Goldsmith
Music Jon Herbst
Cinematographers Stephen Lighthill,
Witt Monts, Will Parrinello, Vic Losick
Narrator: Susan Sarandon
Voice of Seldes' writings: Ed Asner
With: George Seldes, Ralph Nader, Daniel Ellsberg, Victor Navasky, Marian Seldes
Color/black and white
Running time -- 111 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Playing an Academy Award-qualifying one-week run at Laemmle's Monica, "Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press" is also an enriching encounter with the issues behind reporting the news in this century, such as the sometimes insidious relationship between advertising and editorial policy.
In his first feature-length documentary, producer-director-editor Goldsmith employs a punchy, direct style reminiscent of a hard news story. Ed Asner gives voice to many of Seldes' writings, culled from his innumerable articles, letters and many books, while Susan Sarandon provides the just-the-facts narration.
More than 500 photographs, headlines and articles are used graphically as is incredible archival footage from many sources.
Most remarkable is Seldes himself, who is perfectly lucid and engaging at age 98. (He died at age 104 in July 1995.) Interviewed at his Vermont home, surrounded by hundreds of unanswered letters and still working on an old Underwood typewriter, Seldes couldn't be gentler, although his professional voice made dictators and despots tremble through the decades.
The son of Russian Jewish immigrants who lived in the utopian Jewish colony of Alliance, N.J., Seldes first made waves in 1909 as a cub reporter for a Pittsburgh paper, where his story about a rapist preying on co-workers in a local business was killed when the advertising department used it as blackmail against the man's employers.
Exposing the "prostitution of the press" became a lifelong mission of Seldes, but his career as a foreign correspondent in World War I, the young Soviet Union and 1920s Italy made him a tireless opponent of official and self-imposed censorship. In 1924, he reported on Benito Mussolini's links to the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti, an anti-fascist, and was eventually expelled from the country.
In the late 1920s and '30s, he began a series of books critical of the so-called free press, covered the Spanish Civil War with his wife, Helen, and warned repeatedly of the "really great war for which youth is being prepared."
In 1940, he and Communist writer Bruce Minton founded the newsweekly In Fact. They had a falling out after a year, but Seldes continued putting out the publication for a decade, influencing politicians and youthful truth-seekers from Daniel Ellsberg to Ralph Nader (who are among several interviewees in the film).
His exposure of the hazards of cigarette smoking was in stark contrast to the misleading advertising of the industry that was ubiquitous in American newspapers and magazines.
The list of fights goes on, including major campaigns against the National Association of Manufacturing and J. Edgar Hoover. With the Cold War in full swing, Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his anti-communist crusade helped bring an end to In Fact, but Seldes continued to write books and eventually appeared in Warren Beatty's "Reds" as one of the "witnesses."
Truly an American original, Seldes' legacy is one that speaks courageously to a new generation that must never forget another of his benchmark statements: "A people that wants to be free must arm itself with a free press."
TELL THE TRUTH AND RUN:
GEORGE SELDES
AND THE AMERICAN PRESS
Goldsmith Prods.
Producer-director-editor Rick Goldsmith
Writers Sharon Wood, Rick Goldsmith
Music Jon Herbst
Cinematographers Stephen Lighthill,
Witt Monts, Will Parrinello, Vic Losick
Narrator: Susan Sarandon
Voice of Seldes' writings: Ed Asner
With: George Seldes, Ralph Nader, Daniel Ellsberg, Victor Navasky, Marian Seldes
Color/black and white
Running time -- 111 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 10/14/1996
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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