Beatty got back

Usually, the news that someone is about to write, direct, produce and star in some film of no clear description for Paramount wouldn’t seem particularly worthy of notice until the parties involved release a few more details.

But when the “someone” in question is 74 year-old Warren Beatty, the one-time Hollywood monarch whose name hasn’t appeared on screen since 2001 (as an ensemble member of all-star embarrassment “Town and Country”), it’s hard not to get curious.

With Beatty not having steered a film of his own since 1998’s “Bulworth” — the fascinating but frustratingly scattershot political satire that never found a place in the popular imagination, despite netting him a writing Oscar nod and arguably featuring Halle Berry’s strongest performance — there’s likely a generation or two with little concept of what an industry force the man was across four decades. (Perhaps more enduring, on the pop-culture scale, is his reputation as Hollywood’s most storied lothario, though Annette Bening put a stop that 20 years ago.)

Coincidentally, Beatty was on my mind mere days ago, after our friend Chad Hartigan sang the praises of his 1990 blockbuster “Dick Tracy” in our “Green Lantern” reaction thread. I agreed. Beatty’s lavishly mounted realisation of Chester Gould’s long-running detective comic strip was assembled with a level of affection, wit and attention to detail that the contemporary wave of comic-based films can only dream of — yet that film too, perhaps because it was so backward-glancing at the time, is rarely spoken of today.

Also surprisingly low-profile these days is 1981’s “Reds,” the directorial effort that preceded “Tracy.” (As you can see, he was never particularly prolific on that front.) Beatty’s vast Russian Revolution biopic was a huge deal at the time, and remains a rousing, impressively expansive feat of filmmaking — it won him his only competitive Oscar (for directing), though in a unique stat, his tally of career nominations stands at 14 across four disciplines. (“Reds” famously lost the Best Picture Oscar to Brit underdog “Chariots of Fire,” yet neither is the film from that race to have endured most steadfastly over 30 years: film buffs today would probably pitch it as a multiplex-arthouse battle between “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Atlantic City.”)

But if not all his films — his widely-spaced directorial efforts, in particular — have retained the currency people once thought they might, that’s not to deny the significant role he played in challenging and expanding the strictures of studio moviemaking. As early as 1967, he put his comfy matinee-idol status on the line to produce and star in “Bonnie and Clyde,” a blood-on-the-lens classic that merits the oft-abused term “game-changer” (and features his own most vital onscreen work). His next off-camera milestone, 1975’s “Shampoo,” which he wrote and produced, may not carry the same weight, but it’s still a key marker of a political strain in American filmmaking that he helped usher into the mainstream.

Beatty’s combination of old Hollywood glamor and progressive Hollywood politics always made him an odd fit in the industry — and with him having been absent from the scene for so long, it’s hard to speculate what place he’ll carve for himself in 21st-century film. (The disconnect between Beatty’s venerable star persona and the contemporary, hip-hop-soundtracked material of “Bulworth” may have accounted for the film’s modest performance.)

Some have speculated that the unnamed new project is a sequel to “Dick Tracy,” which is hard to believe for a number of reasons — the implausibility of a septuagenarian Tracy aside (why revive the franchise and deny Jon Hamm?), producer Brad Grey’s statement that Beatty’s script is “quintessentially Beatty, elegantly written and wonderfully entertaining” implies to me that something more individual is on the horizon. (Beatty didn’t write the 1990 film.) Here’s hoping the man returns with something sufficiently substantial to justify the wait.

[Photo: E! Online]