Quote of the Day (Diane Keaton, on Her Transformative Acting Moment)

“There was no discussion with my parents on the night I sang ‘Mata Hari’ in our Santa Ana High School production of the musical Little Mary Sunshine. Under the direction of our drama teacher, Mr. Robert Leasing, the production was worthy of Broadway—at least I thought so. I was Nancy Twinkle, the second lead, who loves to flirt with men. In my big number, ‘Mata Hari,’ I ran around the stage singing about the famous double agent ‘who would spy and get her data by doing this and that-a,’ ending with a grand finale featuring me sliding down a rope into the orchestra pit. That was when I heard the explosion. It came from the audience. It was applause. When Mom and Dad found me backstage, their faces were beaming. Dad had tears in his eyes. I’d never seen him so excited…. I could tell he was startled by his awkward daughter—the one who’d flunked algebra, smashed into his new Ford station wagon with the old Buick station wagon, and spent a half hour in the bathroom using up a whole can of Helene Curtis hairspray. For one thrilling moment, I was his Seabiscuit, Audrey Hepburn, and Wonder Woman rolled into one. I was his heroine.”—Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton (1946-2025), Then Again (2011)

Why did the passing of Diane Keaton over the weekend sadden me the way it did? It shouldn’t have. At age 79, she was at the leading edge of the baby boom, the demographic to which I belong—one that, even among friends and relatives, never mind celebrities, has faced mortality, leaving those of us left behind pondering the losses.

In her memoir Then Again, Keaton herself reflected with rueful irony on the famous people she met whose aging surprised her, notably Audrey Hepburn at the 1977 Academy Awards: “Backstage, I pretended to listen to her words, but in truth I couldn’t get my mind off age and what it does to a person.”

Maybe I was so stunned by the news of Keaton’s death—and why she was, too, by seeing Hepburn in person, two decades after she burst onto the screen—because of the nature of her medium.

If movie actors are lucky and they don’t mind transitioning into character roles, they can continue to work even after gray hairs and wrinkles become impossible to ignore. Yet it remains the case that, unlike the stage, film preserves their early appearances, when they are young, vibrant and luminous.

Maybe that’s why, for today’s “Quote of the Day,” I decided to concentrate not on Keaton’s thoughts on growing older, but on her early days—even before she was a professional.

Her “Eureka” moment in high school, I think, epitomizes what convinces so many actors to pursue this as a calling, no matter how many discouraging experiences they may subsequently have. It’s the same kind of thunderstruck realization that animates the finest show-business memoir I know, playwright Moss Hart’s Act One.

In Keaton’s case, the applause she heard from an audience enabled her to triumph over her awkwardness by incorporating it into her persona and making it endearing, the way she would more than a decade later as Annie Hall—and inspire a moment of pride in her family that would only increase with the years.

Quote of the Day (Diane Keaton, on Being 'Uninteresting')

“Choosing the freedom to be uninteresting never quite worked for me.”—Actress-director-memoirist Diane Keaton, Then Again (2011)

Nobody who has worked with her or seen her performances onscreen could ever lob an accusation of “uninteresting” at Diane Keaton, born 75 years ago today in Los Angeles.

Utterly idiosyncratic, the actress has put some people off with her mannerisms and overall quirkiness. But look past that and you’ll see an actress unafraid to defy convention or to challenge herself.

Although much of her fame in the 1970s derived from her comedies with Woody Allen (including her Oscar-winning title role in the semi-autobiographical Annie Hall), these were interspersed with dramas in which she invested her characters with increasing depth and complexity (notably, The Godfather II, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Reds, and The Good Mother).

The daughter of an amateur photographer, she has honed her eye for startling visuals with photography books of her own, as well as with her work as director for the small screen (China Beach, Twin Peaks) and the big one (Unstrung Heroes).

In the last decade, she has taken to writing, exploring the fragility of love (the most prominent past men in her life include Allen, Warren Beatty and Al Pacino), the inextricable bonds of immediate family and the endurance of memory in a trio of memoirs: Then Again, Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty and Brother and Sister.

Quote of the Day (Woody Allen, on the Keaton Females)

“We [Allen and Diane Keaton] never fought and would work together many times in the future. In time I dated her beautiful sister, Robin, and we had a brief romance. After that I dated her other beautiful sister, Dory, and we had a little fling. The three Keaton sisters were all beautiful, wonderful women. Good genes in that family. Award-winning protoplasm. Great-looking mother.”—Writer-director-actor Woody Allen, Apropos of Nothing: Autobiography (2020)

It seems that there’s a movie that Mr. Allen never quite got around to making. It would have been called “Woody Does Diane And Her Sisters.” And let’s not even talk about Mrs. Robinson—I mean Mrs. Keaton.

Please excuse me while I barf now…

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Annie Hall,’ Facing a Lobster Crisis)

Annie Hall (played by Diane Keaton): “Alvy, now don't panic. Please.”

Alvy Singer (played by Woody Allen): “Look, I told you it was a ... mistake to ever bring a live thing in the house.”

Annie: “Stop it! Don't ... don't do that! There.”

(The lobsters continue to crawl on the floor. Annie, holding out a wooden paddle, tries to shove them onto it.)

Alvy: “Well, maybe we should just call the police. Dial nine-one-one, it's the lobster squad.”

Annie: “Come on, Alvy, they're only baby ones, for God's sake.”

Alvy: “If they're only babies, then you pick 'em up.”

Annie: “Oh, all right. All right! It's all right. Here.”

(She drops the paddle and picks up one of the lobsters by the tail. Laughing, she shoves it at Alvy)

Alvy: “Don't give it to me. Don't!”

Annie: (Hysterically) “Oooh! Here! Here!”

Alvy: (Pointing) “Look! Look, one crawled behind the refrigerator. It'll turn up in our bed at night.” (They move over to the refrigerator; Alvy moves as close to the wall as possible as Annie, covering her mouth and laughing hysterically, teasingly dangles a lobster in front of him) “Will you get outta here with that thing? Jesus!”

Annie: (Laughing, to the lobster) “Get him!”

Alvy: (Laughing) “Talk to him. You speak shellfish!” (He moves over to the stove and takes the lid of a large steamer filled with boiling water) “Hey, look ... put it in the pot.”

Annie (laughing): “I can't! I can't put him in the pot. I can't put a live thing in hot water.”

Alvy (Overlapping)  “Gimme! Gimme! Let me do it! What-what's he think we're gonna do, take him to the movies?”—Annie Hall (1977), written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman, directed by Woody Allen

The comedy that brought Oscars to Diane Keaton (Best Actress) and Woody Allen (Best Director, Best Original Screenplay) premiered on this date 35 years ago. The film represents a marked step forward  in Allen’s evolution as a filmmaker, and even in his screen persona.

Gone were the rat-a-tat one-liners he had learned to grind out as a writer for Sid Caesar, and as a stand-up comic on his own; in was humor generated by character and situation. (See Alvy and Annie’s initial discussion about taking a ride in her car.) Gone were abrupt transitions and New York as a mere backdrop; in were split screens, flashbacks, and location shots in which the film takes on the force of a character in its own right, all structured stylishly with the help of cinematographer Gordon Willis. Gone was the loser, the cowardly nebbish lucky to get a date; in was the assertive New York intellectual who, for all his twitchiness, gets the girl (though keeping her was another story).

Any of a number of scenes from this cinematic, valentine-after-the-fact to former lover Keaton would be worthy of comment, but this quote does nicely here. Alvy and Annie are so comically neurotic in this scene that the lobsters practically become things out of Alien. But further down the road, how can two people who transform a minor incident into something enormous (albeit enormously funny, in retrospect) manage to live together for the long term?

There is an ironic, closing parenthesis to this scene after Alvy and Annie break up. Alvy is again preparing lobster at the Hamptons beach house, but his new date, unlike Annie, is humorless, and he realizes how hard it will be to find someone who’ll match his former love.

In her recent memoir, Then Again, Ms. Keaton sums up the magic of the movie in a few sentences: “Annie Hall was his [Allen’s] first love story. Love was the glue that held those witty vignettes together. However bittersweet, the message was clear: Love fades. Woody took a risk; he let the audience feel the sadness of goodbye in a funny movie.”

Quote of the Day (Diane Keaton, on Warren Beatty, Smooth Operator)

“When I compare Mother’s relationship with Father to mine with Warren [Beatty], there’s no question Warren’s promises were far more seductive than Jack Hall’s could ever be. After I confessed I was terrified to fly, Warren surprised me as I was about to board a flight to New York, took my hand, walked me into the plane, sat down still holding my hand, and never let me go until we landed. Once safe on the ground he kissed me, turned around, and flew back to L.A. On Valentine’s Day he bought me a sauna for one bathroom and a steam room for the other. He was full of magnanimous gestures. He also filled my head with crazy thoughts: I could be a director, a politician, as well as one of the most revered actresses in the world if I wanted. I would laugh and tell him he was out of his mind. But I loved it, every second, and I loved him, especially his insane largesse.”—Diane Keaton, Then Again (2011)

Years ago, after watching The Witches of Eastwick, a friend of mine had a dream involving star Jack Nicholson. “I’m going to get you,” he told her with the same devilish grin as his character in that movie, Darryl.

“Oh, no you’re not,” she shot back.

“Oh, yes I will!” he answered.

“Oh, no you’re not.”

“Oh, yes I will!”

“Well,” my friend concluded, laughing, “he got me, all right!”

The same self-confidence, if not the same mischievous air, for years was part of the modus operandi of Nicholson’s good friend Warren Beatty. In her recent memoir, Ms. Keaton recounts a piece of gossip related by a friend about a pick-up by the legendary lothario that ended up in the Waldorf Astoria, and how “we all swore we would never fall into that kind of trap. Not us.” Naturally, like my friend in her dream with Nicholson, Ms. Keaton did.

Over the years, in addition to Ms. Keaton, Beatty’s conquests included Joan Collins, Natalie Wood, Leslie Caron, Michelle Phillips, Britt Ekland, Janice Dickinson, Julie Christie, Carly Simon, Goldie Hawn, Isabelle Adjani, Madonna, Elle Macpherson, and Annette Bening (the only woman to get him to the altar). 

Whew, my fingers got tired just typing all those names! But evidently, Beatty’s seldom did. (What inevitably comes to mind at this moment is Woody Allen’s wish that, if there is reincarnation, he’d like to come back “as Warren Beatty’s fingertips.”)

The eternal question—why did so many women, when it came to the star, do one thing after starting out to do the other?—can only be partly explained that he was, as Ms. Keaton put it, “drop-dead gorgeous.” There’s also his keen intelligence as a film professional (witness his work on Reds, which, as I wrote in a prior post, was one of the most ambitious and fully realized epics in Oscar history), and even, astonishingly enough for a self-evident narcissist, the deep kindness and generosity recorded in Ms. Keaton’s memoir. 

Today, Shirley MacLaine’s little brother turns 75. The most wonderful thing I can say about this star, who has been in the business now for 50 years, is his acceptance speech for the 2008 American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award, when he thanked his industry for leading him to Bening, “who has given me the most important thing of all, which is her love.”

This Day in Film History (Beatty’s “Reds,” Cinema Swan Song to the Left, Opens)

December 4, 1981—Warren Beatty’s Reds, a labor of love four years in the gestation, opened the day after its premiere. A throwback to epic films of the 1960s, this movie about Ten Days That Shook the World author John Reed and wife Louise Bryant also represented a veiled commentary on the New Left that marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War before losing energy and followers.

Recently, a post by fellow blogger “Real Delia” included Reds among its “Five Political Films Worth Seeing.” I had always thought of it as an historical film, because it is set in the late Progressive Era in the U.S. and the Russian Revolution, when John Reed and fellow radicals pressed for labor rights at home and looked (mistakenly, it turned out) to the Bolsheviks as a harbinger of a better world.

But Delia is right— the film is political, and especially so in its second half, the portion that, to many reviewers, is most problematic. It’s not just that the differences between the Communist Party of America and the Communist Labor Party of America become hard to follow (something that Bryant herself, as audience stand-in, acknowledges in dialogue with Reed), but that the triumphal energy that lifted the first half of the movie begins to ooze out.

But that is the nature of the real-life material that Beatty and co-screenwriter Trevor Griffiths were dealing with, as well as part and parcel of their commentary on the nature of politics. For a longtime liberal activist such as Beatty— so heavily committed to the political process that he turned down The Godfather, The Sting, and The Way We Were so he could stump for George McGovern for President— this represented a brutally frank acknowledgement of the price to be paid in private life for total devotion to a cause. (Even the conservative Ronald Reagan, offered a preview of the film before its opening by Beatty, joked that he wished the movie had a happier ending.)

Because the narrative is a love story set against the backdrop of revolutionary Russia, Reds has been likened to Doctor Zhivago. But it might be more useful to compare it to an earlier David Lean movie, Lawrence of Arabia, another epic that traces a hero’s movement, in the realm of international politics, from revolution to dissolution to disillusion.

And that brings me back to my opening point: the parallels between John Reed’s 1910s and the 1960s are impossible to ignore.

Often, novelists and screenwriters will offer the past as a mirror on the present. For instance, one novelist friend of mine, discussing why he set one of his books in 1860s New York, noted that with its racial and ethnic tensions, that decade had more in common with the 1990s than the latter era had with the 1960s.

Average film fans, particularly baby boomers, would have been highly unlikely to know anything about Reed and Bryant (played by Diane Keaton, at the peak of her career). But they would have found tremendous resemblances between the era of these radicals and the tumultuous age then, with Ronald Reagan ensconced in the White House, assuredly at an end:

* Progressives, led by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Robert LaFollette, had their counterparts in mainstream liberals in control of the White House 50 years later: John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

* In the 1910s, a Democrat (Wilson) led the nation into a foreign war (WWI); in the 1960s, another (LBJ) did the same, with Vietnam.

* In the 1910s, suffragettes pressed for the right to vote; in the 1960s, feminists moved a broader agenda centered around the workplace and privacy issues.

* In the 1910s, the Old Left, epitomized by Reed and his colleagues, saw Russia as the wave of the future; in the 1960s, many on the New Left glimpsed it in Fidel Castro, Chairman Mao, or even both.

* Reed, Bryant and their friends centered around Greenwich Village believed in birth control, free love and an end to other restrictive social relations between men and women; the 1960s witnessed legislation permitting greater access to birth control and abortion, the rise of the gay-rights movement, and an at-times difficult renegotiation (even on the Left) between the sexes over relations at home and in the workplace.

* Louise Bryant and fellow bohemians in Greenwich Village often clashed with male partners over issues of independence and personal autonomy; the same happened in Hollywood and the music community (perhaps most memorably in the songs of Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon, long rumored a past Beatty conquest).

In both eras, the range of the changes envisioned by American radicals was breathtaking and the new world they glimpsed made them giddy. “What a time it was,“ Reed, dying in a substandard Soviet hospital, tells Bryant in the film. But, as the saltiest of Reds’ two dozen “witnesses” (surviving contemporaries of Reed and Bryant, offering commentary on the film’s events), novelist Henry Miller, noted, changing the world is well-nigh impossible: Even Christ was crucified.

In short, the 1960s, as described by singer Judy Collins in her memoir Sweet Judy Blue Eyes, sounds like a ringer for the bohemian culture of Reed and Bryant: “It was a time of tremendous hope and tremendous naivete,” one that also involved “undeniable destructiveness as the war raged and the young trashed their bodies and their lives with the drugs many of us thought were so cool.”


One character in the film notes that Reed’s commitment to Communism has become like a religion. The second half of the movie— depicting a collapse over minor differences into fratricidal “sects”— would have seemed painfully familiar to New Left members recalling how Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, and other organizations in the 1960s had splintered into self-destructive, even murderous factions. Likewise, the recreational substances used by the two generations--alcohol for the Greenwich Village radicals, drugs for the 1960s New Left--would, in time, exact a heavy toll.

Like Lawrence of Arabia, Reds is so crowded with people and events that, for all their bravura filmmaking, context and complexities become lost. One longs for the kind of program notes included in playbills for Tom Stoppard plays, offering further background on events. In particular, I wish that Reds had included a pre-closing credits epilogue that would have offered the following capsule summaries of some major characters after Reed’s death:

* Eugene O’Neill (played by Jack Nicholson), Bryant’s cynical ex-lover and fellow lapsed Catholic, became the only American playwright ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His last play to premiere on Broadway, The Iceman Cometh, featured a dozen boozy derelicts in a Bowery dive in 1912, including Larry Slade, whose sees his radical days as all a useless “pipe dream.”

* Max Eastman (played by Edward Herrmann), editor of The Masses, became, like anarchist Emma Goldman, convinced that the Russian Revolution bore the seeds of totalitarianism. By the time he died in 1969, he was inveighing against Communism in William Buckley’s National Review.

* Louis Fraina (played by Paul Sorvino), Reed’s friend-turned-enemy, broke with the American Communist Party in 1922, though he remained a Marxist. Teaching at Antioch College in the 1940s under the name “Lewis Corey,” he was once interrupted in class by several Communists with the taunt, “What did you do with the money?”--a reference to $4,200 that the ACP had accused him of embezzling during his time in the party. He died in 1953 under threat of deportation by the U.S. government for his radical past.

* Gregory Zinoviev (played by novelist Jerzy Kosinski), the party apparatchik who epitomizes Bolshevik fanaticism, fell victim to the terror he once advocated, executed in 1936 in one of Stalin’s early “show trials.”

* Louise Bryant led possibly the saddest of the lives of the Old Left bohemians in Reds. Continuing her journalistic career for a short time after Reed’s death (one scoop was an early interview with Benito Mussolini), she married her third husband, William C. Bullitt--a staffer in the Wilson administration she had once excoriated--in 1924. With this future Ambassador to Russia under FDR, she was able to have the child she did not have with Reed. But his discovery of her affair with sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne led him to deny access to their daughter in their subsequent bitter divorce. Stricken with Dercum's disease, a condition characterized by painful fatty tumors and/or fatty deposits, she lost her beauty and took refuge in alcohol, dying in 1936.

As imperfect as it was in suggesting the nature of these tangled lives, however, Reds was, as Griffiths put it, "the most important movie about politics ever to come out of the Hollywood studio system.” Or, as Norman Mailer put it in a 1991 Vanity Fair profile of the actor-hyphenate: "Who else in America had dared to produce and direct a film so monumental in scope and so avowedly sympathetic to the early aspects of Communism?"

　

Several months after its release, Reds was nominated for 12 Oscars, with Beatty himself receiving four--the only person to that point to receive four nominations for a single film in two different years (he  had pulled off the same feat three years earlier with Heaven Can Wait, the commercial film he did as a favor to convince Paramount to back Reds).

Beatty walked home with the Best Director Oscar, but Academy voters awarded Best Picture to a small-budget, optimistic film that was the direct antithesis of the downbeat blockbuster about the Old Left: Chariots of Fire. The denial of the ultimate prize meant that Beatty’s dream project, which cost nearly $36 million, would barely make a profit.

The film’s underachievement at the box office also meant that Reds would represent the last gasp of the “New Hollywood” or the “American New Wave” that arguably began with Beatty’s own Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. Films that challenged the status quo with a new aesthetic and more challenging subject matter were already yielding to the summer blockbuster phenomenon that had begun in earnest with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws in 1975.