Then Again - Diane Keaton [55]
Everyone knew I didn’t take well to Warren’s direction. It was impossible to work with a perfectionist who shot forty takes per setup. Sometimes it felt like I was being stun-gunned. Even now I can’t say my performance is my own. It was more like a reaction to Warren—that’s what it was: a response to the effect of Warren Beatty.
It took the tragic reunion of John Reed and Louise Bryant at the train station for me to find a sense of pride in playing such a provocative character. Warren waited through something like sixty-five excruciating close-ups before I finally broke through my self-imposed wall of defiance and let go of my judgment call on a woman I needed to love in order to play. Shooting the scene was an experience I couldn’t have foreseen. Because of Warren’s tenacity, suddenly, against all odds, love came rushing through when Louise Bryant saw John Reed’s face approaching hers at last. Reds was an epic with themes enriched by human ideals. John Reed sacrificed his life for his beliefs. But for me, it was imperfect love that was at the heart of Warren’s movie.
PART THREE
9
ARTISTIC
Focus
It was the eighties. I was nominated for an Academy Award for Reds but lost to Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond. My next movie, Shoot the Moon, was released to mixed critical success. The Little Drummer Girl tanked big-time. Mrs. Soffel with Mel Gibson also bombed. Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart, with Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek, was sweet but did little business. Somehow, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro agreed to have a meet/greet for their upcoming film Cape Fear. They went with Jessica Lange. Other projects, including Almost Human, Reform School, Klepto, Whatever Happened to Harry, and Book of Love, never saw the light of day.
It’s not that I didn’t work. I worked in Canada, Los Angeles, Finland, Spain, Russia, Great Britain, Greece, Napa, Israel, Germany, and Southport, North Carolina. It’s just that for the most part my contribution to the art of filmmaking wasn’t particularly inspired. When I wasn’t on the road I continued to live in New York. Warren, having won his Oscar for best director, was here and there, until there won out. Woody met Mia Farrow and began a new alliance. Without a great man writing and directing for me, I was a mediocre movie star at best. I didn’t have a publicist. I chose not to brand out with an Annie Hall line of clothes. I didn’t have a manager, nor did I want one anymore.
When I wasn’t acting, I pursued a variety of visual hobbies under the umbrella of “art.” My friend Daniel Wolf even agreed to give me a show of paintings based on religious pamphlets I’d collected at swap meets. I commissioned a Kansas City sign painter named Robert Huggins to put my ideas on several billboard-size canvases. When Religious Commissions proved to be inexplicably bizarre, I took photographs à la Sandy Skoglund, most famous for Radioactive Cats, which features green-painted clay cats running amok in a gray kitchen. In honor of Sandy, I assembled a tableau setting in my living room that resembled the view from an alpine ski lodge, complete with fake rocks bought at a prop shop and genuine-looking crows flying overhead. Nine willing ballerinas in pink tutus and masks agreed to stand in front of my homemade diorama and have their photograph taken. It became glaringly apparent I was no Sandy Skoglund, so I took portraits of friends like Carol Kane sitting inside boxes with polka dots framing their faces under patterned light casting shadows. I also wrote lyrics to songs that were never recorded. “She sits in a Chinese restaurant. She’s crappy. She’s a creep; she looks at him. She’s lost too much sleep. And a one, and a two, a one two three. Two different