A Brief History of Bad Diane Keaton Movie Posters

Who's she looking at? T. Bloom pays tribute to the queen of the cringey 'shop jobs

It’s possible I’m not the first person to yank at this particular thread, but the subject of Diane Keaton’s awful presence in movie posters (for movies which are also awful) has proven tragically evergreen.

For whatever reason, the marketing rollout for Mack & Rita finally broke me. Someone really ought to do something about this, I thought, grinding my teeth into a fine mist of bone powder. And so, reader, action was taken. I opened a tab, pressed the “New post” button on the Substack sidebar, and… well, that brings us up to date.

This phenomenon first came to my attention via subway posters for Because I Said So in 2007. There’s nothing like a long wait for the Downtown Express 6 train to get you looking a little too long, thinking a little too hard — longer and harder than anyone associated with the creation of this poster, I’ll bet what’s left of my teeth on that.

Sit with it a moment. Dust off a little high school geometry to locate the point where Keaton’s sightline meets the area her finger is gesturing toward. Perhaps there’s a psychological implication we’re meant to consider in the visual symbolism here, in which the overbearing mom doesn’t really “see” her daughter. Or perhaps “over the top” is meant literally, referring to Mandy Moore’s head?

This wasn’t the beginning of the phenomenon, it was merely my point of entry. As best I can tell, Diane Keaton lost the ability or inclination to pose for photographs with other actors sometime in 2003, circa Something’s Gotta Give. While the original poster featured KeKe and her costar Jack Nicholson separately — him at the top, her on the bottom — the landscape-oriented version smushed these portraits together in a way that lazily suggested their presence in the same physical location, although her eyes tell a different story.

What happened next? Something called Mad Money, which the New York City transit system insisted was a real movie, in which these three actresses appear simultaneously (can’t confirm, have never seen).

What is Our Lady of Ctrl+V even looking at here? Surely neither the wad of cash in her own hand, nor at Holmes, her ostensible costar. This was in 2008, when Because I Said So was still fresh in my mind (and god knows it can take years for the MTA to take these posters down, so their reign may have overlapped) and from that time onward I had Keaton pegged as a chop n’ shop poster gal.

Reader, history has borne this out. Check out Smother (2008):

And then here’s this:

So close, yet so far away. The strategically-placed glasses foil Keaton’s usual sightline tell, but trying to figure out how these bodies are oriented in three-dimensional space hurls the viewer into mental Möbius strip.

But it’s got this one beat by miles:

I can practically hear that hand on his shoulder. When 2014’s And So It Goes came along, I actually began wondering if the title itself alluded to some conspiracy surrounding these godawful images, taunting those of us who’d been keeping tabs on the situation from below ground. But that wasn’t a particularly great year for me, mental health-wise, so I did my best to just let it go.

I’m omitting lots of incidental examples, partly because Diane Keaton’s more recent filmography includes lots of ensemble casts who end up crudely photo-puked together onto one poster. While this is Just As Bad and also arguably Part Of The Same Problem, Keaton herself doesn’t stick out as egregiously in them, making it appear less like she’s causing this, somehow.

The poster for Book Club even kind of lucked out, because someone in the marketing department cracked the code, realizing how much easier it was to make other actresses seem like they were looking at Keaton than it was to make her appear to be looking at anything.

Like, she could just be gazing into middle distance while trying to articulate a particularly piquant observation about… *checks notes* 50 Shades of Grey. Or is she a ghostly apparition? I literally haven’t seen any of these movies.

Whereas someone stuck promoting the execrable Poms tried to split the difference in another way, creating a scenario in which each of the film’s actresses seem completely unaware of the others within their shared eight-foot diameter. That’s no small feat! Pam Grier seems to be the only one actively looking for an exit.

So in closing, I should probably concede that Diane Keaton isn’t the only person this happens to. Bad movie posters are so miserably common, poking fun at them has become a time-honored tradition. Most people understand that the actors themselves have no control over how they’ll be depicted, or how that image will end up being sliced and diced into thumbnail images, DVD covers, or subliminal messages flashed during EDM sets at music festivals (my latest crackpot conspiracy).

Perhaps Keaton has stuck out to me because she’s just a sticky-outty kind of actress, and always has been. It shouldn’t be surprising that marketing teams simply can’t figure out how to “package” her, perhaps cursing at the Casting Director through what’s left of their own gritted tooth-stumps as they try to blend the reality of this human person into their unreal, inhuman product.

But Reader, Mack & Rita is still a bridge too far.

The promo image cements this as an Uncanny Valley production through and through, which the trailer below will verify. No story is told. No one is connected, no one is looking at anything. Younger actress Elizabeth Lail has been starved of the defining under-chin shadow afforded to Keaton — if anything, Lail’s chin appears to be backlit, creating the effect of a cylindrical face-and-neck combo if you squint a little. IMDB tells me that Keaton is playing the “Rita” character, which is subtly suggested by matching the text color to her background. Otherwise, what is meant to be communicated by any of it?

Who cares? you may be already be screaming. And dear reader, that is precisely the point. I needed to feel that from you. The 2007 version of myself has spent fifteen years waiting for that sympathetic Who cares, and just didn’t know how to ask for it until now. Perhaps I’ll even watch Mack & Rita as a form of closure. Except… whoops, IMDB has informed me that Diane Keaton currently has five different film projects in various stages of production, so buckle in.

I’ve always heard that misery enjoys company, but as long as movies keep advertising on public transportation, I ask you: what other choice does it have?

✤

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