126 - Reds (feat. Jake Beckhard and Andy Boyd)
Added 2024-02-21 08:30:02 +0000 UTCJake Beckhard and Andy Boyd (Three Scenes in the Life of a Trotskyist) join the lads as they head on back to the U.S.S.R. to cover Warren Beatty’s 1981 communist blockbuster: Reds. Topics include the brilliance of Diane Keaton, the terrifying smoochability of Eugene O’Neill, and how to make art in a world teetering on the edge of revolution.
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Three Scenes in the Life of a Trotskyist - Tickets // Instagram
Jake Beckhard - Website // Twitter // Instagram
Blue Balls NYCFC: You’ve got Blue Balls! How lucky for you. Check in every week for rapturous pod talk on all things NYCFC. With NYC Hosts Jake Beckhard and Trey Fillmore. Listen on Apple Podcasts // Spotify // Podomatic
Andy Boyd: Website // NPX // Instagram // Better Than Shakespeare Podcast
Media Referenced in this Episode:
- Reds. Dir. Warren Beatty. 1981.
- Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany by Stephen Sondheim. Penguin Random House. 2011.
- O’Neill: Son and Playwright by Louis Sheaffer. Little, Brown, and Company. 1968.
- “Thunder on the Left” by Peter Biskind. Vanity Fair. January 22nd, 2007.
TWOAPW theme by Brendan Dalton: Patreon // brendan-dalton.com // brendandalton.bandcamp.com
Commercial: “‘Goodbye For Now’ Demos” feat. David Armstrong as “Stephen Sondheim”.
Comments
Looking at this movie from a Marxist perspective, I feel like it's best read as a criticism of being Terminally American. Reed and Bryant are both clearly intellectually radicalized and educated in theory, but they are consumed by their own individualist flaws and biased perspectives. Reed's racism and inflexibility in doing what's best for the revolutionary cause for one. But I think that the point made on wanting to be the one who is right is their biggest issue. The point of socialism is collective liberation and empowerment, there's no place for ego. You shouldn't fight a revolutionary struggle because it's just the thing you've found that you can get behind, you should fight because it's what's best for everyone. You make decisions based on what you think is best for the movement and building the road towards socialism, not petty grievances over personal beef or things not aligning to your ideal vision of revolution. I think that the idea that an artist is not an organizer or a politician is important to remember. An artist racializes people's spirits and shows them a view of how things could be, but they don't have the temperament to make the necessary decisions in leading a mass movement.
NowhereMan661
2025-06-15 15:11:42 +0000 UTCQuite a few years ago now when I was in high school, and would go to see plays and talk backs with actors on field trips,My teacher told us never to ask actors “how do you memorize all of those lines?” Because it’s like asking Michael Jordan “how do you run?” It’s a thing you have to do, but it’s totally not the point. My only vague familiarity with this movie is knowing that Sondheim wrote the music for it, and watching a scene out of it once when I played Emma Goldman in a different play. At least as portrayed, she was very cool and I had an amazing time. Come to think of it, I mostly know who Emma Goldman is from her being portrayed in various things like this movie, The play I did , Ragtime, and Assassins. I sometimes wonder what she would think of that.
Elizabeth Power
2024-04-04 16:56:53 +0000 UTCCould one shorten "On God, No Cap" to "Onghat"?
Evan Hawkins
2024-02-27 19:35:07 +0000 UTCI showed this podcast to my mom bc she was interested by Whit's Endless Summer and BAM goku inflation returns
Potato
2024-02-24 15:01:42 +0000 UTCnot to bee too feral but this week's interstitial had me saying "too real" out loud
Elah
2024-02-23 23:59:47 +0000 UTCElaine May, also famous for directing one of the greatest pieces of cinema ever filmed: Ishtar.
Henry Martyn
2024-02-23 19:03:17 +0000 UTCNo that’s ludicrous His mom is Annette Benning
John Leavitt
2024-02-22 04:38:43 +0000 UTCIs your friend's dad Warren Beatty?!?!
The Worst of all Possible Worlds
2024-02-22 03:16:52 +0000 UTCApologies for hitting enter when I was only halfway through typing that wall of text.
Forrest L Norvell
2024-02-22 02:59:18 +0000 UTCSo, like, I was a teen in the late 80s going to a Portland high school with an international studies magnet program. I had a mother with a graduate degree in Slavic languages and literature, so it was sort of inevitable that I'd end up taking Russian for my language elective (and, later, a whole-ass Soviet studies class – a very specifically 1988-1990 vibe that only true Gen Xers will even have a chance of remembering (and somewhere in the middle went on an exchange trip to the actual Soviet Union!! Which is a whole other story!!!)). What I'm saying is you'd best believe I watched this movie, repeatedly, in school, for multiple classes, and the funny part is I don't remember it being that long at all. We must have watched it over the course of a week (because we only watched movies in class), so maybe its length was less evident than it would have been if somebody had to go swap VHS tapes partway through. Also the other movies we were watching were things like Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, The Cranes Are Flying, and this incredibly downer Perestroika curate's egg / didactic allegory for the Stalinist Terror called Чучело / Scarecrow that I don't think anybody wanted to remember after the Soviet era ended. My standards were probably a little skewed. (This also probably explains why I didn't get what the big deal was about the pacing of Tarkovsky's films – as far as I was concerned, Russian movies were just Like That.) The sort of funny part is that all of the arguing and speeches in the movie seemed completely normal to me, because I'd started getting involved in the fringes of Portland's various activist communities and the ISO / Comintern had a LOT of influence over a certain kind of Portland leftist who, if they're still around, is probably very committed to building little house communities for the houseless as long as they're somewhere else and are in theory committed to LGBTQIA+ rights but wish they could just get a fucking cup of coffee without having to pay attention to the barista's preferred pronouns. I'm going to presume that y'all know the type. There were almost always a couple dudes (I cannot overstate how much leftist Portland in the 80s was dominated by white dudes) who would be there to filibuster everyone else into doctrinaire compliance (excepting the kind of hairy environmentalists who looked like lumberjacks except for their deep and abiding hatred for actual lumberjacks). I was young and easily overwhelmed and I couldn't figure out how people who spent so much time being total assholes to each other ever got anything done, and also despairing that I was ever going to master socialist / communist rhetoric, which felt like a requirement for actually being a "real" radical. Portland wasn't really "Portland" (at least, it wasn't "Portlandia" Portland) as it currently exists in the popular imagination by that point, and it was still shaking off being a sleepy conservative Democratic machine town with some truly appalling racist skeletons in its closet, so there was some real oppositional culture between the leftists and a good chunk of the rest of the state. Maybe it's just because of when and where I watched it, but I've always felt like Reds felt more like Portland than Hollywood. (I feel the same way about Matewan, the other American 80s movie that had a lot of time for the Wobblies. Which I ALSO watched – in the theater! – for class in school. High school sucked, but I had a lot of really cool teachers.) Also it may or may not amuse you to learn that it took me, like, a WHILE to clear up my confusion about the relationship between John Reed and Reed College (there is none). If you've ever met any Reedies you will probably understand my confusion.
Forrest L Norvell
2024-02-22 02:33:29 +0000 UTCA friend of mine’s dad is in this!
John Leavitt
2024-02-21 23:18:18 +0000 UTCjosh is means testing a move to helsinki
The Worst of all Possible Worlds
2024-02-21 18:36:31 +0000 UTCStarted this episode thinking it was the movie Red with Bruce Willis and wondering why you’d do that movie only to have a flashback to when I was 19 sick in bed watching this movie.
James Cézanne-Taipale
2024-02-21 14:55:52 +0000 UTCThere is no Finnish conspiracy. Ignore my second last name.
James Cézanne-Taipale
2024-02-21 14:53:30 +0000 UTCAJ and Carl Ludvig Engel are conspiring together, I knew it all along
Max Johansson
2024-02-21 12:14:00 +0000 UTCHoly shit, it’s Glupimir Shittovich Lenin
Max Johansson
2024-02-21 12:13:19 +0000 UTCThis movie has a Finland connection besides being the secret Alan Wake film adaptation and the scenes taking place in Finland. A lot of the outdoor scenes for the revolution were shot in Helsinki due to some parts looking like budget St Petersburg. So, was it AJ who is secretly Finnish and keeps pushing an agenda to make the show a FinlandPod?
hexapus
2024-02-21 11:32:35 +0000 UTC
