Then Again - Diane Keaton [59]
When Joe and I began shooting interviews, I asked stirring questions like, “Is there sex in heaven?” “Is there love in heaven?” “Are you afraid to die?” Mom and Dad and Grammy Hall were among my first interviews. Dad was convinced. “If there is something after death, and I’ve led a good life, I can’t conceive why Dorothy and I wouldn’t be together.” Mom nodded her head and said, “It’s a subject I don’t like to think or give credence to.” “Yeah,” Dad said, “it’s something you don’t think about. I have partners that do, but I don’t.” Grammy Hall summed it up best: “There ain’t such a thing as heaven. Have you ever seen anybody who passed away that you loved and wanted to see? No! Nobody ever come back and said, ‘Well, here I am and I am so glad to see you.’ Anybody tells you they’ve died and gone to heaven is a dirty liar.”
After Paul Barnes, the editor, helped put the movie together, we began the preview process. Apparently the audience best suited to see a movie like Heaven came from two groups: women and “experiential” types. It turned out experientials were your “oddballs,” your “weirdos,” and your “downtown set.” This was concerning. Were there enough experiential women from downtown to make our movie a moderate success? We certainly had our fair share appearing in the movie, like the woman who said, “I’ve seen Jesus in the spirit. He entered my bedroom. He came from the top of the window like you roll the scroll, and he was nothing but a spirit. His chest was made out of sky, and his shoulders were made out of cloud. And he moved just like the waves in the water. All at once I heard a universal harp like … ooohhh … like a wind blowing oooohhh … like the wind when it blows like ooooohhhhh. That’s when he flipped over in my room. Then he floated through my bedroom and I said, ‘In the bathroom,’ so then he went right into the bathroom and then I said, ‘In the living room.’ He went right into the living room and sat on the ottoman. I said, ‘In the kitchen.’ But he had to go back through my dining room to get to the kitchen, and he turned and faced me, and when he turned he had on a different outfit with a little hood over his head. And that’s the truth.” It turned out we had more experientials in the movie than in the audience.
No matter how many critics hated Heaven, I have to say, I loved every clip and every interview. Spending time trying to make sure I made the smart choice about the right movie to appear in wasn’t nearly as entertaining. But Heaven, Reservations, Still Life, and even Religious Commissions were just that: completely entertaining. I recognize that these projects wouldn’t have seen the light of day if it hadn’t been for my movie-star status. My forays outside the hub of celebrity felt right, almost like home, not really but sort of.
Found
Heaven brought me something else: Al Pacino one more time. We ran into each other outside an editing bay at the film center where he was working on his 16-millimeter film, The Local Stigmatic, while I was finishing up with the hereafter. He was irresistible, as always, and we started palling around, but it was different this time. We were older. He wasn’t the Godfather. I wasn’t Kay Corleone. We were two people plugging away at a couple of independent films. There was a disheveled aspect to Al that was very appealing, almost familial. He invited me to come to his home one Sunday, then another and another. It was always