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So Beatty is still a little bleary-eyed at 10 for his first interview of a day devoted to promoting, explaining and defending his lacerating political satire, Bulworth. It is a movie which Beatty conceived, co-wrote, produced, directed and stars in as an alcoholic U.S. senator on major burn-out mode as he runs for re-election in California in 1996.
Buzzed through booze, refusing to eat or sleep, and inspired by his sexual attraction to a young woman from the ghetto of south-central Los Angeles, Senator Bulworth 'loses it' and starts telling the truth about politics.
He does it in the most crude, profane and funny way possible. When he is not insulting his political audiences, he is rapping about social, racial and class injustices. I mean rapping, as in musical rhyme.
"I wanted to go to the thing that was the most opposite of me," Beatty says, admitting that he knows he's bad at rapping and is supposed to be. "I mean, I would be more likely to be out there doing Stardust."
The insults are extreme. A group of black community leaders ask the senator why the Democratic Party is not doing more for their community. "Isn't that obvious?" Bulworth roars. "I mean, if you don't put down that malt liquor and chicken wings and get behind somebody other than a running back who stabs his wife, you're never going to get rid of somebody like me."
If movie audiences don't find this as funny as Beatty thinks it is, Bulworth is doomed when it opens May 22.
"The thing for me was to never lose the fact that (Bulworth) had to be entertaining," Beatty says. "If it didn't make you laugh, nobody would stick around."
But this is no throwaway comedy, no banal romance like his sentimental flop Love Affair. Bulworth, fueled by Beatty's long-standing, left-leaning liberalism, tries to address complex issues such as American class divisions, economic repression and enslavement, political corruption and the stranglehold of what Beatty calls Big Money has on society.
"If you hear that I've produced a picture, believe me I've done the research," Beatty says of his preparation for this film, which had been percolating for years before he finally got in front of the cameras with a cast that includes Halle Berry as the young woman who transforms Bulworth's life.
"I did the research," Beatty repeats. "Most of it was done here in Los Angeles because the picture is set here. But it's not as if I've been whistling Dixie. I've spent a lifetime in politics, really, so that's brought me into the inner city and in touch with a lot of these problems. It's a subject I really know. I like to think I know it better than anybody. I don't know that I do but I like to think that I do."
Beatty, a compulsive name-dropper and quote referencer, figures he has scored a direct hit on the issues because his friend, author Norman Mailer, reacted so favorably to an early screening of Bulworth and described the movie as "a transcendental tragic farce."
That has to do with the extremes in Bulworth. Don't just make a character or make a point: Exaggerate them both inside the satire. "In this type of stylized comedy, it is what I would called heightened characterization," Beatty says of the snapshot portraits of people in the film.
From the black ghetto kids with guns in their hands to the L.A. cops with racist attitudes to the morally bankrupt politicians, Beatty uses twisted cliched images. "So an African-American would look at it and say: 'Well, these are stereotypes.' But I'm sure a white policeman would look at it and say: `These are stereotypes.' When I showed it in Washington, people thought I was stereotyping politicians.
"I'm not. It's just to get laughs. To make it entertaining you have to go to exaggerated things that we recognize and we laugh at. When Jack Benny is slow with a buck, we say he's a great comedian. We don't call him a stereotyped cheap Jew.
"In trying to get this subject around to something that I thought would get some laughs, I had to abandon the political correctness police and just do what I thought was funny and do it with the support of the people I was doing it with. I was particularly sensitive to the African-American thing because the African-American actor has a difficult time. It's what Jimmy Baldwin used to call 'the burden of representation.' Well, the black actor has to be freed from the burden of representation in the same way as the white actor."
In other words, in Bulworth, anyone can do anything, no matter how insulting it may first appear to a particular community, as long as the satire is served. This is Beatty's riskiest film. It certainly is his most crude. Especially when he is rapping, he uses the most base street vocabulary.
"Is is inescapable to me that the people who complain about the obscenity in rap are people who don't want to face the real obscenity in the social structure," says Beatty. "The use of certain vocabulary is necessary just to get heard."
Some rappers are "politically overt," says the filmmaker. "Some of it just sounds dumb." But rap is all relevant. "If you really listen to it, an awful lot of it emanates from the social problems. The breakup of the family in the inner city is at the root of so much of this kind of expression."
The 61-year-old Beatty, who admits he was apathetic about politics when he dropped out of college in the 1950s, became an activist and maverick when he campaigned for Bobby Kennedy in the 1960s. He since has forged a complex web of connections in Congress, giving him inside access to the system. You wonder why he has never run for office.
"There was a time when people said: 'Did you ever think of getting married?' Of course, you think about it. You just don't do it!" Beatty says in one of his typical tangents. "I did that (get married). But I think I would be seriously unlikely to do the other. What you're asking is: Would I ever be generous enough to throw myself into public service and put up with the crap that those guys have to put up with?
"I think that would be unlikely, particularly because I am such a lucky person. If I want to say something I can can just sort of get it out in this medium (the cinema). I'm a really lucky guy to be able to do that -- and I do it well. So it would seem goofy to go and do it badly in public office."
Making Bulworth is Warren Beatty's public service, at least in his own mind. "I think, I believe, and I'm probably wrong, that this is the best movie I've ever made. I think it is because I think it's informed with a certain energy, it makes me laugh and I've seen it with audiences and they seem to agree with me."