By Ron Holloway
(Moving Pictures blog, 31 July 2007) Dean Reed - American Rebel Tom Hanks is going to make a movie about Dean Reed - the "Red Elvis" of the socialist bloc. The lanky, handsome, charismatic Colorado cowboy singer who chose the communist East over the capitalist West. The actor-singer who starred in 18 movies, recorded 13 rock albums, and toured eastern Europe as a protest singer and political activist – all the while polishing his image as an American rock 'n' roll rebel. You can find a lot of free-falling information on the Net about the life and times of Dean Reed (1938-1986). But you're better advised to view any one of three documentaries about the man and the myth. The most interesting of the lot is Will Roberts's American Rebel: The Dean Reed Story (USA, 1985). Filmed in Colorado, Los Angeles, Chile, Argentina, Germany, Italy, Russia and the Middle-East, American Rebel premiered at the Denver film festival with both Reed and Roberts present. Among the interviewees in the film is Paton Price, the Hollywood acting coach who had introduced the singer to left-wing political action. A year after American Rebel was released, Dean Reed was dead. His body was found in a lake near where he lived in East Berlin. As mysterious as was Dean Reed's death, its cause was not explored in a film until eight years later. Some details began to come to light in Peter Gehrig's documentary Dean Reed - Glamour und Protest (Germany, 1993), also known as Ein Cowboy im Sozialismus (A Cowboy in Socialism). Gehrig interviewed Reed's two German wives, Renate Blume and Wiebke Reed, along with East German colleagues who knew him well. According to one filmmaker friend, Gu"nter Reisch, who was collaborating with Reed on a film about the February 1973 American Indian standoff at Wounded Knee when he died, Dean had committed suicide - death from drowning and an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. Recently, triggered perhaps by Tom Hanks's interest in Dean Reed as material for a Hollywood production, a third documentary has now appeared on the scene: Leopold Gru"n's Der rote Elvis (The Red Elvis) (Germany, 2006). Programmed in the Panorama at this year's Berlinale, The Red Elvis picks up where Dean Reed - Glamour und Protest left off. Only this time, the myth and legend take priority. The Red Elvis opens with an interview with Lana Davis (formerly Svetlana Novikova), a Russian e'migre' and die-hard Dean Reed admirer. Unabashedly, she tells how Dean Reed had enlivened her drab life - and thousands of others - with his rock concerts during the stifling Brezhnev era. For his sake, she taught herself English and emigrated to Denver, just to be near to his grave. German fans of Dean Reed - and there are many - have been celebrating the commercial release of The Red Elvis across Germany at the end of July. Just check the Dean Reed website and you will find fan-club references to the "American Rebel" as freedom-fighter, singer, actor, director, whatever. Over Dean's portrait runs the line "Let Me Sing With My People" - followed by an appeal for donations to keep the website going. Dean Reed - Comrade Rockstar A half-dozen lengthy essays and some rather detailed biographies offer both complementary and contradictory information about Dean Reed's amazing career — and about the mysterious circumstances of his death. Indeed, some of these accounts seem more concerned with the unresolved details about his apparent suicide than with the highlights of his career. Others are clearly pushing myth over fact. Reggie Nadelson, a pulp detective writer based in New York, started the ball rolling back in 1991, when she published a Dean Reed biography titled Comrade Rockstar. As she herself candidly admits, the biography was hatched when she saw the Mike Wallace 60 Minutes interview with Dean Reed that was broadcast on CBS in April of 1986. (For that broadcast, possibly triggered by Will Roberts's documentary American Rebel, Mike Wallace had interviewed Dean Reed in his East Berlin home - just three months before his death. And those "60 Minutes" were anything but flattering for the American Rebel. Particularly when it came to defending the Berlin Wall and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.) Reggie Nadelson's Comrade Rockstar, as a factually objective account of Dean Reed's life and career, was also wanting in many respects. But, although more hardboiled detective fiction than hardnosed research reporting, her account was good enough to spawn a BBC-2 documentary: Leslie Woodhead's The Incredible Case of Comrade Rockstar (UK, 1992), produced in collaboration with Reggie Nadelson. Fifteen years later, in 2004, Nadelson pulled her hardcover Comrade Rockstar off the shelf and updated it into a paperback edition. Subtitled The Life and Mystery of Dean Reed, The All-American Boy Who Brought Rock 'n' Roll to the Soviet Union, it accents Dean Reed's career like a trailer for a Hollywood B-movie. Currently, due to access to GDR State Security (Stasi) files, another Dean Reed biography is making waves on the literary front. This one digs a bit deeper into the demise of Comrade Rockstar. In Chuck Laszewski's Rock ‘n' Roll Radical: The Life and Mysterious Death of Dean Reed (published in 2005) a suicide note has surfaced. An apology, no less, to GDR Premier Erich Honecker. Moreover, it was written on the back of a page from the "Wounded Knee" screenplay. Another biography, Stefan Ersting's Der rote Elvis (published in 2006). served as the source for Leopold Gru"n's documentary with the same title that was released in the same year. Meanwhile, Dean Reed's mother has transported her son's remains back to Colorado and a Denver graveyard. She doesn't believe that Dean had committed suicide. Nor does she accept the coroner's report of an accidental drowning. The family believes he was murdered. Whether true or not, the fact that the GDR authorities had withheld some of the information currently found in the Stasi files opens up a pandora's box. And feeds the myth. Today, Dean Reed's memory is kept alive by an annual essay contest sponsored by the University of Colorado. It's called the "Dean Reed Peace Prize." Dean Reed - As I Knew Him Our paths crossed for the first time at the 1975 Moscow film festival. At that time, I was covering the festival for Variety. And Dean was promoting a DEFA "western" titled Blutsbru"der (Blood Brothers) (East Germany, 1975), directed by Werner W. Wallroth. It had been released in the GDR just a couple weeks before the Moscow festival opened. Blood Brothers is the story of a cavalryman (Dean Reed) siding with the Plains Indians after a bloody massacre by American troops. The reference is to the infamous Sand Creek Massacre of the Cheyennes that had taken place in eastern Colorado in November of 1864. Since Dean Reed had collaborated on the screenplay for Blood Brothers, I wanted to know more about the inspiration behind the making of the film. (Years later, when Kevin Kostner's Dancing With Wolves was screened at the 1990 Berlinale, I - and other East Berlin cineastes - noted that film's thematic similarity to Blood Brothers.) It turned out that Dean was more interested in talking about his next project. For, as interesting as Blood Brothers was, he was planning to direct his own screenplay for El Cantor (The Singer) (East Germany, 1978) - the story of popular Chilean balladeer Victor Jara (1932-1973), who had been killed during the Pinochet coup. Since Reed had known Jara personally, he felt that he could both direct and interpret the role of the Chilean idol with some force and dignity. (Made for GDR television, El Cantor never got the commercial exposure it fully deserved, particularly in the West. But even though El Cantor came across as a rather far-fetched biopic about a legendary hero, it's still one of the most noteworthy of the Dean Reed movies.) When I asked Dean why he had left Rome and the Italo-Westerns behind to work in East Berlin, he only hinted that Blood Brothers wasn't much different than what he had been doing before. But my query was just a ploy anyway. I knew that he was already an immensely popular rockstar in the Soviet Union and throughout Socialist Europe. So why keep milking a faltering movie career when thousands will turn out for a concert by "Comrade Rockstar"? On another occasion, when I was hiking my way to Dom Kino, the headquarters of the Union of Soviet Filmmakers, Dean stopped me on the street and invited me to jump in his taxi for the ride. When we got there, the taxi driver refused payment. Instead, he wanted an autographed photo - for his daughter. Dean told me later this was nothing usual. Once, he said, he motorcycled across the breadth of the Soviet Union. "It was a snap. Along the way everyone knew who I was. My rock concerts had been televised." Our paths crossed briefly in the spring of 1978. In Iraq. At the Baghdad Festival of Palestinian Films. I was there covering the festival for Variety. Vanessa Redgrade was promoting her production of Roy Battersby's The Palestinian (UK, 1977). Gina Lollobrigida was taking photographs. And Dean Reed was singing the praises of Yasser Arafat. Dean did his show, then left in a hurry for another concert engagement. We met for a third time in October of 1985. In his hometown. At the Denver film festival. Festival director Ron Henderson had invited Will Roberts to present his documentary American Rebel: The Dean Reed Story. It proved to be one of the main attractions of the festival. Relaxed and in his element, Dean talked a great deal about his popularity as a rockstar in Argentina, about beating out Elvis Presley on the charts with "Our Summer Romance," and about his own talkshow in Buenos Aires. In fact, he covered his whole career in private conversations and at press interviews. When the topic of conversation shifted to radical political thought, he didn't hesitate to speak his mind. About meeting Salvador Allende and Victor Jara in Chile. About accepting an invitation to perform in Russia while attending the 1965 World Peace Conference in Helsinki. About being expelled from Argentina in 1966 for his political activism. About moving on to Italy, where he starred in 15 "spaghetti westerns" and other potboilers. About leaving Rome for East Berlin in 1973. Unless I am very much mistaken, that Denver film festival turned out to be the watershed moment in Dean Reed's life. For, while he was there, he was getting hammered from all sides by the press and media. A local radio show questioned his American patriotism. A national publication ridiculed his singing and acting talent. The only visible support he had on the occasion was his Denver family. And then came a phone call from a guy named Davidov in Minnesota. Marv was organizing a weekly vigil before the Honeywell Building in Minneapolis. Honeywell manufactured land mines and cluster bombs. Would Dean care to visit?
Our last meeting was in West Berlin. In late May of 1986. Shortly after my return home from the Cannes film festival. And a few weeks before his death. My wife, Dorothea, and I were attending a premiere at the Theater des Westens. When we bumped into Dean Reed and Renate Blume in the foyer, I invited them to a late dinner in a Chinese restaurant across the street. We spent an hour together chatting about his next film project: The occupation of Wounded Knee by the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the subsequent FBI siege. No longer "Wounded Knee" - but now "Bloody Heart" - the production had changed titles and was going through a final rewrite. Gu"nter Reisch, was to co-direct, with Dean Reed in the role of the American photographer Dave Miller and Renate Blume as the Mexican journalist Jane Gonzales. Dean didn't look depressed at all. And hardly a suicide case. But then who really knows what goes in the mind of a radical rockstar? They live on a different planet than the rest of us. Gu"nter Reisch stopped by while I was putting the final touches on this blog for MPM. He handed me the last rewrite of the screenplay for the "Bloody Heart" project that was to have been produced by the DEFA-Studio in East Germany. Fascinating reading. A different image of Dean Reed than seen in his previous films. A whiff of Robert Jordan, the Hemingway antihero in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Reisch also confirmed that location shooting in Kirghizstan had been subsequently approved by the Soviet Union, with a Soviet co-production also possible. And photos in his dossier also show that Central Asian actors do bear a close resemblance to the Dakota Sioux.
The approval, however, had come too late.
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