Last night Warren Beatty did a half-hour q & a with TCM Classic Film Festival host Ben Mankiewicz following a 6:30 pm screening of Heaven Can Wait (’78), which WB co-directed with Buck Henry.
Beatty was sharp and playful and half-evasive, as always. If he wanted to (if he had the herculean will), Beatty could write perhaps the greatest American history novel and first-hand confessional of all time, as he was right smack dab in the middle of things from 1959 on…he was friendly with everyone who ever mattered (including all the big politicians and corporate tycoons), did everything, swaggered around, had affairs with dozens of accomplished women…a first-hand witness to and participant in the last great period of American history…what a life! And having been out of the game since Rules Don’t Apply, the wokester Stalinists never came for him,
If you turn the volume all the way and listen on headphones, you just make out what they’re saying. Barely.
Remember: Beatty is the only person to have been nominated for acting in, directing, writing, and producing the same film, and he did so twice: first for Heaven Can Wait and three years later with Reds.