Trivia / Heaven Can Wait (1978)

• The Cast Showoff: Warren Beatty played football in high school and turned down several college scholarship offers in favor of acting. He was a center and linebacker instead of a quarterback, though. Still, he actually played quarterback in all the game sequences.^note He'd brought in a quarterback from the Canadian Football League as a stand-in, but ran a couple plays just to see what would happen and when they turned out perfect, he decided to keep going.
• Channel Hop: The film was originally pitched to Warner Bros., but studio production chief David Geffen ditched the idea for another film. After Geffen was fired, the project ended up in the hands of Barry Diller, who green-lit the go-ahead for the project. It was Warren Beatty's associate Richard Sylbert, also a studio executive, who recommended pitching the project to Paramount Pictures.
• Copiously Credited Creator: Warren Beatty was the co-director, the producer, co-screenwriter, lead actor and top-billed star.
• Cut Song: Paul McCartney wrote a song for the film called "Did We Meet Somewhere Before?" Warren Beatty wasn't satisfied with it so the song was discarded. It was eventually used in the movie Rock 'n' Roll High School.
• Similarly Named Works:
  • It has the same name as a 1943 film by Ernst Lubitsch. This is actually a plot point in the film Hostage, where the MacGuffin is a DVD with secret information encoded on it in a case for the Lubitsch film, but there's also a copy of this film in the collection.
  • "Heaven Can Wait" is also the name of a Public Service Announcement from the 2000s about wearing seat belts.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Beatty tried and failed to get Muhammad Ali to play Joe Pendleton and Cary Grant (who was married to Dyan Cannon and had been retired since the 1966 film Walk, Don't Run) to play Mr. Jordan.
  • Diane Keaton was offered the role of Betty Logan, but turned it down in favour of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Leslie Caron, Kate Jackson and Mary Steenburgen were also considered.
  • Arthur Lowe was offered a role in the film, but he turned it down, because there wasn't a role for his wife, Joan Cooper.
  • Peter Bogdanovich and Mike Nichols were considered to direct and were invited by Beatty to helm the picture but they all turned down directing the movie allegedly due to Beatty's reputation for being too controlling.

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