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After commissioning and polishing Elaine May's screenplay, Beatty got to work on casting. Possibly the hardest role to fill was that of Mr. Jordan, a heavenly bureaucrat played by Claude Rains in 1941: both Cary Grant and former Senator Eugene McCarthy were talked about for the part before it went to James Mason. Only at the last minute did Beatty decide to try directing for the first time. "I asked Mike [Nichols] and Arthur [Penn], but they were busy," he says. "Then I thought the next best thing would be to do it myself." But Beatty, who becomes deadly serious when working, decided he needed a co-director to keep the movie from becoming ponderous. Buck Henry got the job, as well as the on-screen role of Mr. Jordan's celestial assistant. It was not an easy experience. "We had plenty of disagreements, but they weren't violent," says Henry. "When Warren wants to do something his way, he has it all figured out. So you goddamn well better be prepared to argue your case if you differ with him."
What began as a throwaway film became, for Beatty, an exhausting effort. As he told TIME West Coast Bureau Chief William Rademaekers in his reporting on Beatty: "I was looking for fun, but it took more time and work than I thought. The essence of producing is to get a good collaborative mix of talent. Yet, no matter what you do, a film is still a film—a couple of hours of moments, some good, some bad, and you have to replace the bad with the good." Only days before its opening, Beatty was in New York City refining the details of his movie's release. "Anyone who would make films and ignore the final phase—how it's projected on the screen, the speakers in the theater—is not realistic," he says. "You can put in years and have the entire thing erased by a light bulb. As the producer, I have nobody to blame but myself if the movie doesn't come off."
There is unlikely to be much blame in the case of Heaven Can Wait. Besides contributing a likable and funny performance as the movie's hero, Beatty has brought out the best in lis collaborators. May's work on the script is her wittiest since A New Leaf: she has spiked a sentimental story with misanthropic jokes about money, marriage and adultery that are not in the old film. Grodin and Cannon, who have May's sharpest lines, give impeccable, dry comic performances. Some of the humor—involving batty butlers and rough football players—is knockabout, but the gags never go on too long.
Nor do the co-directors ignore the poignancy of their tale. Though the film is set almost entirely in modern Los Angeles, it never gives the audience time to question its fantastic premise or its hopelessly romantic conviction that love can triumph over class differences, physical metamorphoses and even death. It is the first film Beatty has produced with a happy ending, and, as he says, "Let's face it, what makes you feel good about the movie is that it says you're not going to die."