In 1987, the news that Diane Keaton had directed a movie about the celestial firmament was met with bumfuzzled curiosity among the general populace, who had hitherto not had the slightest notion that she had harbored any such ambitions. The resultant movie, Heaven, was about as distinctive a film as came out in the 1980s and certainly did a good job of representing Diane Keaton.

The movie is a combination of found footage and subject interviews, most of whom appear to have been rounded up in a dragnet at Venice Beach. The movie feels very California, both in the number of pop culture references that get dropped as well as Keaton’s evident assumptions that the Christian heaven is most likely bunk and that the New Agers or the Zen people probably have it figured out. Of God Himself, one intense lady says, “I see him like Groucho Marx, and he’s always playing tricks on us. When we think we’ve got it, we’re sitting in a pile of cow manure, so he really is a practical joker.” One fella muses that in heaven “I’ll be just like Burt Reynolds or any other star” while another identifies it as the site where everyone wins an Oscar. Asked whether there is sex in heaven, one dude blurts, “Heaven is an orgasm! I mean, why not? It’s the best!” which comment embarrasses his girlfriend no end. Just in case we get bored, there arrives the unmistakable image of boxing promoter Don King to explain his take on heaven.

The music on the movie was the responsibility of frequent Cronenberg collaborator Howard Shore (who also worked on some Tolkien movies) as well as CD compilation empresario Hal Willner. The canny musical choices include the Dream Academy’s obscure gem “Heaven” and The Residents’ “Walter Westinghouse.”

One of the best elements of the movie are the incredible art deco intertitles, which were done by Geppetto Studios in Brooklyn. Here are a couple examples:
 

 

 
The found footage relies a lot on hokey black-and-white movies as well as bizarre footage from evangelists and so forth. The middle American true believers come in for a hard time in Heaven. Two of the quotes are so good that I’m going to reproduce them here in full; the first we only hear as an audio track:
 

The summer is ended, and you’re not prepared to meet God. The summer is ended; why has God let this happen to us? GONE will be the late night drunkenness, GONE will be the massage parlor, GONE will be the nude beaches, GONE will be the bars on every corner, GONE will be the automobiles and the riches, GONE will be the television sets and the movies, GONE will be the Chevy Chases and the Erik Estradas and the weirdos of Hollywood!

 
I don’t know about you, but I’m not soon going to forget the frenzied cry of “GONE will be the Chevy Chases and the Erik Estradas and the weirdos of Hollywood!”

In the second one, we have video—I’d love to find out who this guy is, he’s the big beardo who pops up during the “sex” segment around minute 43 to explain,
 

Sex is all right. I like spitting, too. I like washing my eyes, too. I like getting a haircut, too. I like scratching. But I’m not gonna miss it, no. You see, if you miss something, that’s because you’ve made it your god. But if sex is your god, which it usually is, look down that perverted town of Hollywood. On Fag Day, when they got their giant phallix parading up and down the street. You see, this is their god! You see? Well, one day, their god will be dead! They’ll be alone, and they won’t have a big phallic to lay on, to cuddle, fondle, and enjoy.

 
Oh shit, Fag Day is coming up and I haven’t even started shopping yet!

Heaven probably would have benefited if Keaton had gotten out of El Lay and found some folks in a less west coastal environment to talk to, and the use of found footage feels dated, like a segment on Night Flight. It’s almost disorienting to see a documentary on a subject that almost by definition, nobody knows anything about, but in a way, that very fact excuses Keaton’s offhanded approach. It might have been better to corral a handful of people who had had life-after-death experiences and really figure out what was going on there, but that’s not what Keaton was interested in. If Heaven is about anything, it’s about the folly of people. It’s a difficult movie to dislike, and it’s a hell of a lot more rewarding than the otherwise similar, but insipid, What the #$*! Do We Know!?
 

 
By the time Woody Allen made “Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story” in 1971/72, messing with found footage as well as the documentary form had become old hat for the restlessly experimental moviemaker. After all, his feature-length experiment of fusing new dialogue to existing footage, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? has been released several years earlier, in 1966. His first faux documentary (and one of the first “mockumentaries” in cinema history), Take the Money and Run, had come out in 1969.
 

 
“Men of Crisis” seems more than a little perfunctory. Wallinger is clearly a substitute for Henry Kissinger, but there’s really nothing about the Kissinger-Nixon relationship (as it was perceived in 1971) that was all that funny; the humor lies in the notion of Woody being “the second most powerful man in America.” The movie was supposed to be an hour long, but the final product delivered by Woody ran only 25 minutes long. Clearly the subject of the reprehensible Nixon presidency (pre-Watergate, of course) did not really animate Woody. The movie feels a lot like an extended sketch from HBO’s “Not Necessarily the News” in the 1980s, which usually juxtaposed perfectly normal footage of e.g. Ronald Reagan with concocted footage to produce a ridiculous effect. One thing that makes “Men in Crisis” noteworthy is that it marks the first occasion Woody Allen and Diane Keaton worked together on a movie. Keaton plays Wallinger’s ex-wife, “Renata Baldwin, who attends Vassar College, where she studies to be a blacksmith.” (As a Vassar alum, I’m pretty fond of this joke.)
 

 
Richard Nixon had a knack for annoying liberal elites that was very similar to that of George W. Bush. Woody Allen was never the most political of artists; even when dealing with politics, such as in “Men of Crisis” or Bananas, the essentially surrealist nature of his humor tends to run roughshod over any particular satire. One gets the feeling, watching “Men of Crisis,” that Woody has contempt for Nixon mainly because he’s not highbrow enough (witness the gag about Nixon and Agnew knowing “almost” all of the numbers from 1 to 10).

PBS was worried about running the program, they were right to be. After all, the Nixon administration was so famously thin-skinned that Nixon personally exerted pressure on Jack L. Warner to remove the song “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men” from the movie 1776 because it seemed to poke fun at conservatives. (You can watch the musical number on recent reissues of the movie; it seems pretty harmless.)
 

 
If nothing else, the cancellation of “Men of Crisis” had the effect of cementing Woody’s determination to work in feature movies, where outside interference could be minimized. He said afterwards that the incident had reinforced his preference to “stick to movies.” According to The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television by James Day, the cancellation of “Men of Crisis” went down as follows:
 

The politically charged atmosphere of the early seventies should have warned those of us at NET that the times were hardly propitious for political satire—and certainly not on the public medium. But so eager were we to bring an element of lightness, a laugh or two, to public television’s overarching solemnity that we unhesitatingly accepted Woody Allen’s offer in late 1971 to produce a special. We didn’t even pull back after learning that he intended to use the show to satirize the Nixon White House. Allen approached us after having produced two prime-time specials for the commercial networks, fully expecting the public medium to give him greater artistic license to write and perform the kind of humor for which he is justly celebrated. He was wrong.

…. In the opinion of the PBS legal staff, the Woody Allen show “presents fairness problems … personal attack, equal time and taste problems,” a solid guarantee that no public station in the country would risk airing it. Except, of course, our own WNET.

What I and a brace of our attorneys screened with nervous interest was a mock documentary, Men of Crisis, that mimicked the style of the old March of Time, in which authentic news footage was combined with dramatic elements, a technique Allen later perfected in his feature film Zelig. The original hour-long script had been trimmed to the twenty-five-minute “documentary,” and the balance of the hour had been filled by an interview with Allen on the nature of comedy. Men of Crisis managed not only to lampoon the Nixon White House but to needle both the president’s foes (Humphrey and Wallace) as well as his friends (Agnew, Hoover, Laird, and Mitchell). Allen himself played the fictional Harvey Wallinger, high-living confidant and counselor to the president, whose resemblance to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was more than coincidental. As might be expected, the show included moments of questionable taste. Allen explained that “it is hard to do anything about the Administration that wouldn’t be in bad taste.”

I withdrew the show after the screening, hoping to find a broader context to make Men of Crisis acceptable to the system, perhaps by marrying it with other satiricial pieces that took aim with prudent impartiality at a broader range of political icons.