charges of sedition. With no other recourse, Louise illegally travels to Finland herself, but by the time she arrives Reed has been returned to Russia as part of a prisoner exchange between the two countries. Now living in Petrograd, Reed is employed as a propagandist with the Comintern, and shares an apartment with Emma Goldman, who had been deported from the U.S. Unaware that Louise has traveled to Finland, he repeatedly tries to make contact with her by sending telegrams to New York and becomes increasingly frustrated by the lack of response. Louise makes her way to Petrograd, where she is found by Emma, who tells her Reed was sent to deliver a speech in Baku. On his return to Petrograd, the Czarist White Army attacks Reed's train. Reed manages to survive the attack and is reunited with Louise at the train station. Soon thereafter, he is admitted to the hospital, where he dies of typhus, with Louise at his side. Cast Production Development Beatty came across the story of John Reed in the mid-1960s. Executive producer and film editor Dede Allen remembers Beatty's mentioning making a film about Reed's life as early as 1966. Originally titled Comrades, the first script was written by Beatty in 1969, but the process stalled. In 1973, Beatty was offered the role of Reed in Sergei Bondarchuk's Soviet film production Red Bells, but declined, and felt further driven to make his own biopic about Reed to compete with the Soviet version. In 1976, Beatty found a suitable collaborator in Trevor Griffiths, who began work but was delayed by his wife's death in a plane crash. The preliminary draft of the script was finished in 1978. Beatty still had problems with it and he and Griffiths spent four and a half months fixing it. Beatty also collaborated with his friends Robert Towne, Peter Feibleman and Elaine May to continue polishing the script after shooting had begun. Financing Beatty achieved tremendous success with 1978's Heaven Can Wait, which he produced, starred in, co-wrote and co-directed for Paramount Pictures. The success gave Beatty the clout to seek funding for his long nurtured Reds project, which was difficult to secure because of the controversial Communist subject matter and high price tag. Beatty succeeded in interesting both Warner Bros. and Paramount, before the head of Gulf+Western (Paramount's parent company), Charles Bluhdorn, agreed to finance the project. Bluhdorn soon had