Paths Crossed: Rebecca Keegan

The Hollywood journalist and host of a new podcast on The Godfather dishes on 50 years of the Corleones and 25 years of covering the film industry.

I first met Rebecca Keegan on the trail, a beautiful one high above Malibu in the Santa Monica Mountains. It’s fair to say we were in step with each other, curious to trade stories about our relatively new outdoor pursuits, both intrepid in our evolution as 40 somethings with roots in city-centered careers. An award-winning journalist, Rebecca is the senior film editor at The Hollywood Reporter. Call to mind your favorite actor or director and she’s likely interviewed them. Her role at THR includes booking and moderating the Oscar roundtables, attending film festivals, and writing cover stories related to film.

On occasion, you might also find her dispatched to a courtroom in Santa Fe to cover an involuntary manslaughter trial—Alec Baldwin's in the Rust case this past summer. To me, her coexisting norms are fascinating, as this came on the heels of a backpacking trip through Alaska’s Brooks Range, one of the most remote areas in the Arctic region. And in the last weeks, sandwiched between interviewing Angelina Jolie and heading to Telluride to talk to Hillary Clinton, I saw Rebecca in New York for the launch of her new podcast titled The Godfather: A Film We Can’t Refuse. As the host, she unpacks the enduring cultural phenomenon that is The Godfather 50 years in, interviewing cast and crew like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall and Talia Shire; film critics and historians; real-life mobsters; chefs; and even a political scientist who created an entire theory around applying The Godfather’s characters to geopolitical issues. There is something for everyone in its 12 episodes, from film nerds to those who haven’t seen it yet (I won’t tell).

Rebecca was recently named print journalist of the year by the LA Press Club, and was also awarded best culture/arts feature for her piece on a film program for incarcerated people within San Quentin prison, a place that took her more than a year to gain access to. She is the author of books on James Cameron and Young Frankenstein. Here, I turn the tables on my friend to learn all about The Godfather podcast, her 25-year career as a journalist, and how she started a hiking club in LA, the one I first dipped into with my cousin in 2021 that has since led to more adventures together. Did I mention Rebecca also finds time to bake the best summit donuts?

---

ON THE GODFATHER

Congrats on the launch of the podcast. How did this project find you?

I was contacted by a production company called Spoke Media that had been contracted to create this Godfather podcast for Paramount Pictures, and they were looking for a host. I’m a film journalist, and I know how to interview people and talk about the medium of film, but I didn't see myself as an obvious host for it. I am not the person who knows everything about The Godfather by any means. But in the course of going through the interviews, it became clear that they wanted the podcast to appeal not just to die-hard fans, but to people who were just discovering The Godfather. And I think it ended up being a good fit, coming to it with a bit of a beginner's perspective. I could hold the hand of the listener in a way that was a bit more informal.

I joined you for the launch of the podcast in New York a couple weeks back, where I was also introduced to the work of Andrea Kalas, the SVP of Archives at Paramount, during your Q&A with her. It blew my mind to think about the level of detail involved in restoring all three Godfather films frame by frame, as she and her team did for its 50th anniversary celebration.

Yes, she's really a remarkable person who is responsible for keeping Paramount's extraordinary film library in shape, and for restoring films when they decide to do that.

It was a fun fact to learn that the original Godfather print is stored at 27 degrees Fahrenheit and 35 percent humidity in the Paramount vault.

Wasn’t that incredible? And how she has a camera that's trained on it that she can check on at any time. It's kind of amazing and speaks to what a precious object this film is culturally and certainly to that studio.

As the enduring cultural object that The Godfather is, she praised your “amazing job” on the podcast in exploring how people think about this movie in so many different ways. One of the things you asked everyone you interviewed is to finish the sentence: “The Godfather is really about _.” Can you talk about that?

Yes, I think we did more than 50 interviews and what was really striking was the enormous range of answers. There are some that are pretty obvious, like family or power. And then there’s the one that I really believe it is about, which is the American dream. And then for some people, the movie is a lot about food, and we do have an episode where we talk to chefs about The Godfather and the way the food is shown in it.

You screened the movie with Al Pacino. To witness him revisiting his younger self before then interviewing him is something I’m curious to hear more about.

We sat in this lovely screening room in Hollywood along with some of his friends, and there was something incredibly poignant about watching him see his young self on screen in the role that changed the entire arc of his life. And the entire arc of movie acting and cinema. And hearing from him about how he really didn't see this coming, the way The Godfather changed his life from one day to the next. He was caught very much by surprise going from being this completely unknown New York theater actor who had a vision for his life—he told me he thought he was going to marry a seamstress and do regional theater and have a bunch of kids. That was the plan. And in the days shortly after The Godfather came out, he told me the story of standing on a street corner in New York City and catching the eye of an attractive young woman, her looking at him, him looking at her, him thinking, Well, I'm going to say hello. But she says to him, Hi, Michael. And he realizes to her, he's Michael Corleone. He's not just a guy on the street she's interested in. That was a moment of realization that, oh, wow, everything is about to change. And to me, there's a sort of melancholy in that. On one hand, he’s had this extraordinary life full of opportunity and great work, but there was another life he was intending to have, and this was a pretty big left turn.

Pacino became an anti-hero, though from what I understand Coppola really did not intend for people to idealize him, correct?

Yes, one of the great ironies of The Godfather is that a whole lot of people seem to have taken it as an aspirational model for life, when in fact, it's meant to be a cautionary tale. But I guess by casting someone who was as charismatic as a young Al Pacino was, by shooting him so beautifully, Coppola created this character that people then ended up aspiring to be like. One of the amazing innovations of The Godfather as a big studio gangster movie was to get a lot more into the gray of who is a good guy and who is a bad guy. And that's a tradition that we saw later in television like The Sopranos or with Walter White in Breaking Bad. But certainly in 1972 when The Godfather came out, it was pretty innovative and a different way of looking at a big studio movie lead character.

After being immersed in all of these conversations, what specifically do you think keeps The Godfather so resonant?

The thing that is amazing about this movie is that more than 50 years after it came out, you can watch it over and over again and find something new every time. There's a scene I only noticed later that we talk about in the podcast with chefs and our writer Sam Dingman, where Michael Corleone has not yet committed murder. He's still a sort of innocent college boy, and he's being taught how to fry meatballs by Clemenza, one of the older men who is part of the mob family. It’s a surprisingly sweet moment of bonding with this uncle-type figure. These little moments of tenderness throughout are the moments that endure.

During the Q&A, there was a detail about tomatoes I found interesting in discussing how universality is actually tethered to specificity.

Yes, that’s right. Part of why the movie is so universal is in its specificity. Coppola was deliberately telling a story with a lot of details from his own upbringing, and one of them was that he cared about what kind of tomatoes are in the scene. They had to be a particular type of tomato that would have been around his family's kitchen growing up. So it might seem small, but it's part of what gives the movie a feeling of authenticity and texture. It feels like a real Italian American family.

What’s one new or surprising thing you learned about The Godfather in working on this?

There are a couple of interviews that were fascinating to me. One was when I interviewed a man who had been a member of the Colombo crime family. His name is Michael Franzese, and he talked about how, when The Godfather came out, it actually influenced the mafia. How men saw it and started changing the way they carried themselves in order to be more like the mobsters in the film. Which I thought was a wild case of life imitating art.

ON JOURNALISM AND HOLLYWOOD

How did you get your start as a journalist?

I went to journalism school at Northwestern, and I was one of those people who knew what they wanted to do when they were 14. I saw the movie All the President's Men, and I was like, Okay, that is the coolest job I've ever seen in the whole world. Robert Redford, whatever you're doing, I want to do that.

Wait, full circle, did you ever interview him?

I have interviewed him, and I've never told him.

Why not?

I was interviewing him at the Telluride Film Festival in the locker room of this converted hockey rink about a movie that he had at the festival. Sissy Spacek and Casey Affleck were there too. It just didn't seem like the time to say, Hey, Robert Redford, my whole career is because I watched you play Bob Woodward when I was 14.

Okay, please continue.

When I was a senior at Northwestern I got an internship at Time magazine in New York, and after I graduated they offered me a job. I was there in a remarkable era. 9/11 was one of the stories I covered in that era. And the Bush v. Gore presidential election. One of my tasks was to fact check the “Gore Wins” cover story that never ended up running because of the way that election unfolded.

My next job was at the Los Angeles Times as a staff film writer. It was a big, boisterous newsroom, and again, a job where I absolutely was a sponge to learn from other more experienced journalists. One of the stories that I was proud of getting to work on there was a team reporting project on the film Academy. Their membership had been secret historically, and we dug and reported to get some demographic information. It was the first time that anyone reported just exactly how white the Academy was and how male it was. And it ended up being a precursor to a big change in the composition of the film Academy, an awareness that that group needed to better reflect the community of people who love movies.

Is that how you fell into film? Did you see yourself covering Hollywood or is that just something that happened?

That was very much by accident. When I was still in New York, after a couple of years of really intense reporting for Time on things like 9/11, I was starting to worry about burnout. I thought, how do people do this for decades? This is really heavy stuff. And so I asked to work a little bit in arts and entertainment. I ended up working on what was then called “the people page,” and I found that I really liked it. I liked interviewing these creative people. So I started to transition a bit, and then I moved to LA, and certainly in Los Angeles, writing about the entertainment industry is a way to stay employed as a journalist.

What's it like being a journalist these days in its current state? What has changed most drastically?

Honestly, it is really, really hard. The industry has been so decimated by big tech. The advertising dollars that used to go to news organizations now go to Google. So the financial burden of paying to have reporters in places around the world—to do not the kind of work that I do, but the difficult, dangerous work of covering conflicts or elections—that's expensive. And it's increasingly a really difficult business model for people to make work. It’s a very pressured time to be a journalist of any kind.

What is your favorite part of the job?

It’s definitely that I get to be curious. I get to ask people kind of whatever I want, and that's just an incredible privilege. To talk to really smart, creative, interesting people, who oftentimes will answer stuff that I'll toss out, thinking, I wonder if they’ll answer this.

What makes a good interview?

Well hopefully you can actually connect with someone as a human being. It's really hard now, at least with celebrities, because they are so worried about something they say being taken out of context, being reframed on social media in a way that isn't what they meant. So it's hard to break through that. And oftentimes if you're an entertainment reporter, you're expected to do it in a pretty short period of time and then get out of the room. And so I try to prepare, prepare, prepare but then once I'm in the room, set all that aside and be present and listen. And not be too focused on the 800 questions I wrote down. They're there if I need them, but primarily I’m just listening to the person and asking follow-ups.

What has been a really inspired interview and for what reason?

I loved interviewing Ben Affleck because he was so no bullshit. He's just himself, and he's a very funny, smart, verbal person who is entirely aware of the way the world perceives him. This was when he was launching his production company with the movie Air. There are some interviews where you just hit record and get out of the way. And that was one of those interviews. Jane Fonda was also one of those interviews. She’s so smart and also really comfortable with herself. One thing you realize is when you interview people who are comfortable with themselves, it's just so much easier because they're not worried about it. Jane Fonda doesn't give a shit. She knows what she cares about. She knows what's important to her. She's not going to call you when the interview is over and say, Oh, I think I said this wrong.

You moderate the Hollywood Roundtables during awards season with legendary actors and directors. They are just awesome to watch, hearing these creative, intelligent people converse. Do you love doing them?

Yes, they long proceed me coming to The Hollywood Reporter. They're phenomenally popular. And I think it's partly because it's so unusual to see these people together talking about their work. Usually they are interviewed in isolation about their own projects, or they’re doing a junket. And at the roundtables they are collectively reflecting on challenges, difficulties, tricks and tips, making each other laugh. They're incredibly difficult to book; it's like 3D chess to get these people in the same place at the same time. But some of these conversations are the ones that have left a strong imprint on me. During last year’s directors roundtable it was fun to be a fly on the wall, to be not that important as it flowed, but the person urging the conversation forward.

Funny, I’d actually noted this past year’s directors roundtable striking me, because, correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't everyone telling Michael Mann what he meant to them?

Yes! You’re sweet to remember that. Michael Mann, who is sort of an elder statesman in the industry, was there promoting his movie Ferrari. And it came out in the course of the interview that other people around the table had had really significant experiences with him early in their careers, including Bradley Cooper, who had auditioned for him as a young actor and gotten a very polite rejection note that he saved. And Ava DuVernay had worked on one of his sets when she was a publicist, long before she was a director. He was working in a neighborhood in Los Angeles that was her neighborhood, and she took note of how he worked and the fact that it could be done. It’s these moments of interconnection between people where you realize that this industry is actually a small town. So when these conversations go right, it feels like you’re around a dinner table with a bunch of neighbors.

Do you have a favorite director to interview?

I would have to go back to my man Jim Cameron. He's another one who is really comfortable with who he is. And he gives you his time if he thinks you’re a serious person. I have a lot of respect for the way he has conducted his life from a creative standpoint, and his environmentalism. And he's fun. Again, someone where I hit record and just get out of the way.

How did you come to write a book on him?

I did a set visit to the first Avatar movie and while I was on the set, my jaw was on the floor at how different it was from any movie I had ever seen. It was just Cameron on a black stage, but if you looked in the lens of the camera he was holding, you saw the whole world of Pandora, this alien planet. All of it existed digitally. It did not exist in real life. And that was a groundbreaking way to make a movie at that time. I came away from that very interested in what he was doing, and ended up kicking around a couple different ideas for a book before finally deciding he should be the subject. Then it took me a long time to convince him to participate in it. I think it was about a year of me calling every few weeks and saying, Hey, I want to do this. He was really generous with his time, and I spent a lot of time on the Avatar set. After the book came out he said to me, That's the least inaccurate thing that's ever been written about me. Which is the closest thing you get to a compliment.

Your job is all about dealing with people. Is there something you’ve distilled or a lesson you’ve learned across countless hours with countless personalities?

I've noticed that people who do really good work are very selective. Part of what successful people are good at is shot selection. They don't try to be everything. It matters as much, I find, what they've said no to as what they've said yes to. That was actually an interesting thing that came from my conversation with Ben Affleck. When he was coming up in the industry he just said yes to everything because he couldn't even fathom the amount of money that was being thrown at him. And as he got older, he learned how and when to say no. And that’s an eye-opening thing if you're somebody who works in a field where you do a job that a lot of people would like to have. So you feel like you're grateful for it, which journalism is too. The temptation is to say, I'll do this, and I'll do this, and I'll do this. So one thing I've learned from talking to really successful people is they don’t do that; they pick a couple things that are really meaningful to them and they do a great job.

After interviewing comes delivering on the writing deadlines. Do you have a set writing routine?

One of the great things about journalism is it cures you of the notion that you have to have some perfect setup to write, because you're so often doing it under horrible conditions. One thing that I do if I really have to focus is I set a timer for 30 minutes. I turn off all notifications and I just sit my butt in a chair and work until the timer goes off. And then if I want to look at Instagram or go for a walk or have a snack, I can. But a couple of these 30-minute blocks are usually enough for me to push through that part of the story you get to where you don't know what you're supposed to do, when the temptation is to go scroll because you hate not knowing what to do.

You and I have these weekly accountability calls that I’ve really come to value, where we talk about our creative goals for the week. It was born out of a chat over dinner when I was in LA in January, when I shared with you how setting up these structures in a few different ways had been making all the difference. We haven’t missed one in 8 months and it’s great, as writing and my freelance work can become isolating in the day to day.

I really value our calls too because they help me think about what’s important to me when it comes to my writing and my work. The world is so full of distractions—people and algorithms competing for my attention. Having a weekly check-in where I focus on my priorities and bounce them off you helps me be more intentional about my time. I also like how different we are. I’m so structured and you’re so intuitive. It’s a nice balance.

ON NATURE

We met on the trail when I joined my cousin Jeremy on one of your hikes. I can weirdly tell you the day—April 24, 2021—because it was the one-year anniversary of my mom’s death. Enough was enough of being alone; I wanted to do something beautiful that day and I think we were all starting to get vaccinated, so I flew down to LA to see my cousin and some friends. Can you share a bit about this hiking group that has continued into the present day, even after ticking off the first 50 hikes?

It was a pandemic life raft for me. The LA Times had published a list of the 50 best hikes in Southern California. And I just decided what I needed was exercise and community. It was safer to be outside at the time, and maybe this was a way to get some of those things. So I started trying to tackle this list, and I would send out this email to an ever increasing list of people saying, I'm going to be here at 7 a.m. on Sunday. It ensured that I had to get my ass there. There were a few times I showed up and nobody was there. Probably because I was starting at 5:30 a.m. when they were incredibly hard, crazy ones. But it became a really fun, cohesive group at that time we met, when your cousin became part of it.

Like everything I see you do, you went all in and have since hiked Mt. Whitney, done solo backpacking trips in many places, and really integrated it into your life regularly. What hooked you?

I loved how natural walking was for me, and how I had this endurance. It just brings me enormous amounts of happiness and calm to walk for hours and hours and hours. One of the things that happened was I was enjoying the day hikes so much, and I thought to myself, I don't want to have to wake up at 5 a.m. and drive for two hours to get to this beautiful place. I just want to wake up in this beautiful place. How do I do that? And so I started thinking about backpacking. And because at the time I didn't know anybody else who was into backpacking, I was doing it alone and it became incredibly cool to realize I was actually capable. I could filter my water. I could put up my tent. I could find my way. I could sleep through the night in nature and not be scared. It was a really positive thing for me, to feel that sense of competence and independence at a time when I needed it.

That’s beautiful. You and I went backpacking in the Angeles National Forest in April, happily filtering river water to make tea before tucking into our tents as it neared freezing. And then I love that we were just in Tribeca for a night out. I am always wanting to bring to the world by example the fact that we can forever grow and change and discover and do new things if we feel compelled. I think you’re another model of life not being patently one thing decade to decade.

Yes, I took my first solo backpacking trip when I was 46 and it was mostly white guys in their twenties on the trail. And so I felt a bit like, do I belong here? But people have been incredibly welcoming to me, and I've learned a ton, and met the nicest people outdoors. I found it to be a great place to be a beginner.

I agree with that. Has the outdoor interest bled into your work in any new ways? I always imagine it to be whiplash to go from something like that guided trip in Alaska to Alec Baldwin’s courtroom trial.

So true, that was such an abrupt shift to go from sleeping outside above the Arctic Circle with no other evidence of people—no trails, no roads, no signs, no footsteps, just wolves and plants and caribou—to covering the trial within the space of a week. That was a lot for my poor little pea brain. But yes, I do feel that the biggest story of my lifetime as a journalist is climate change, and the more I learn, the more I want to be part of telling that story. I think there are ways to do that within the job I have now as an entertainment journalist. It affects every aspect of the world including art and creative people. The Hollywood Reporter did a sustainability issue and so that was an opportunity to write some stories that are at the nexus of the entertainment industry and the environment.

What are you most proud of right now?

I'm proud of creating a life for myself that's really rich and full. I think in some ways if you are a 47-year-old woman who is not married and doesn't have kids, people make a lot of assumptions about your life. And I'm proud of having built this really full, adventuresome life that was not in any way what I was told I was supposed to want when I was a young woman. I'm proud of making a professional life as a writer, and how I’ve now put energy into finding other parts of my identity—and the outdoors has been a big part of that.

Beautiful. And how does it feel to be interviewed?

It's weird. It's harder than I thought it would be. You're very easy to talk to though.