a month later. On November 6, Carliner returned with Schell, the actor for Lenin. Script In 1991, Carliner hired screenwriter Paul Jarrico to revise Paul Monash's screenplay. Jarrico had joined the American Communist Party in 1939 and been blacklisted for his political views during the McCarthy era. Carliner hoped that Jarrico would have a "unique connection to the material" and "benefit the project from his revisions". Jarrico was to receive a fee of $30,000 for the revisions and an additional $10,000 for a final review if required. Jarrico cut 26 pages from Monash's script, which was about four hours long. He rewrote the beginning and fundamentally changed the scenes in which fears of Sergei Kirov's assassination are expressed. Nikolai Bukharin's role was expanded and his speech against forced collectivization extended, in addition to a call for a return to Leninism. He also added two scenes where Stalin discusses the usefulness of a treaty with Germany with his diplomat Maxim Litvinov, refusing to believe that Germany would attack the Soviet Union. Monash disliked the changes, and after several meetings in September 1991, HBO opt not to request for a final review and declined payment. Having worked three days past the deadline and feeling cheated out of $13,000, Jarrico contacted the Writers Guild of America's legal department to arbitrate the dispute. After turning down $5,000 and $7,000, he accepted the third offer of $8,000, along with additional payments into his pension and health plans. Most of Jarrico's scenes were removed from the script. The actors only received the full script two weeks before shooting began. Character development Robert Duvall as Joseph Stalin Duvall was already in Russia with the director during the preparations for Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky's The Inner Circle, and was thus was able to draw on a number of experiences and aspects. He looked at old archive recordings, read several books and spoke to former companions. But he found that in the end, nobody knew about Stalin, and was surprised to discover that "more was known about Hitler than about Stalin". Unable to find anything useful depicting Stalin's character, he had to construct it for himself. He started from scratch and put the figure together based on his own considerations. It was difficult to "intellectualize" Stalin, and Duvall looked for "contradictions in his character" "to extract a few aspects from him". Duvall surmises that to portray the dictator accurately, he had to