Tom Hanks in Berlin

  • 17 years ago
When Tom Hanks met Günther Reisch to talk about Dean Reed.

Web-Exclusive from "The Red Elvis", the documentary about socialism's biggest superstar Dean Reed.

“From the Berlin Wall to Siberia – Dean Reed from Colorado is the biggest star in popmusic. Reed is called the most prominent American after President Ford and Henry Kissinger by Russians and other East-Europeans.” (People’s Magazine, 1976)

On the 17th of June 1986 a man is dragged out of a lake in the outskirts of East Berlin. He turns out to be the American singer and actor Dean Reed, one of the most mysterious legends of global pop culture during Cold War times. Dean Reed was a good friend of Salvador Allende and Yasser Arafat, throughout the whole world he protested against military regimes and the Vietnam war, he acted in spaghetti westerns in Italy, he was the first US-American to tour across the Soviet Union, he sang country songs on GDR television and posed for photographes in Lebanon with a machine gun in his hand.

As a young man from a small town in Colorado he moved to Hollywood to record a handful of singles. „Our Summer Romance“ conquered the charts in South America. Dean Reed was a cowboy and an entertainer, he was admired like a teen idol and a heartthrob, he was a freedom fighter and a rebel, who travelled around the globe with endless energy – thereby not only challenging his own limits, but also the boundaries of the contemporary map of ideologies. When he moved to the GDR in 1972, Dean Reed was a celebrated star of socialism.

Check
www.theredelvis.com
www.myspace.com/theredelvis
www.deanreed.de

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People