The completion of a film makes for an interesting documentary

Finishing Heaven is a smart and thoughtful documentary on fear and inertia starring two ’70s artists who seem anything but fearful.

Director Robert Fienberg and actress Ruby Lynn Reyner once had big dreams; 37 years later, they still do, but Fienberg never finished their breakout film. After its HBO debut and a successful lap around the festival circuit, this appealing doc is a first-round draft pick for distribution.

There’s procrastination, and then there’s perfectionism. Those afflicted with the former will finish a project whenever (or if-ever) they do—whatever, dude, life goes on. Those crippled by the latter realize too late their life has been nothing but pause and rewind. Fienberg is one of those trapped in a second-act artistic prison. At 22, a self-described “boy wonder,” he started filming Heaven, the movie that was going to make him a star. Thirty-seven years later, he’s a cruise-ship greeter, and the footage—16 unedited hours of it—is slumbering in a chicken coop and haunting him around the clock. “I never walked away from the film. I just never finished it,” Fienberg explains to ex-girlfriend Reyner, Heaven’s undisputed star and very much in-dispute co-writer, costume designer and casting director. “It’s the only act of love you ever did,” she replies, still seething over the time he dumped their five-year relationship in Europe for a buxom teenage gypsy.

Here’s where director Mark Mann and sibling producers David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro come in. Offering to transfer the aged reels to DVD in exchange for documenting the film’s completion, they quickly realize that the wildest story isn’t Fienberg’s evocative, but muddled and speed-fueled glam epic—even though it features singing midgets, Warholettes swimming a water ballet, guidance from Fienberg’s NYU professor Martin Scorsese and a knock-down starring turn from Ruby, the strong-jawed, flame-haired, whippet-thin diva of off-off-off Broadway. Fienberg may not be an actual filmmaker or a nice person (like all narcissistic artists, he’s incredibly sensitive and incredibly callous), but he is loud and emotionally naked—traits Ruby shares in full. What matures the doc from a redux of American Movie is the weight of age and regret, counterbalanced by a streak of optimism so bright it should shame everyone who thinks life ends at 30. This isn’t just a story about haplessness; it’s about self-destruction, as Ruby is never more that 60 percent convinced Robert wants to finish the film, despite hiring an editor. “If it’s finished, he can’t be a victim. He’d have to be like everyone else,” she says astutely. Later, he concedes, “You don’t want anything that’s all you’ve got to be anything less than fantastic. They’re not going to say, ‘He made a shitty film.’ They’re going to say, ‘That guy’s an idiot!’” At a post-screening Q&A at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Fienberg jokingly placed the film’s completion in 2012. The audience laughed, then sighed.

This film was reviewed at the Los Angeles Film Festival

Distributor: TBD
Cast: Robert Fienberg and Ruby Lynn Rayner
Director: Mark Mann
Producers: David Shapiro and Laurie Gwen Shapiro
Genre: Documentary
Rating: Not yet rated
Running time: 76 min.
Release date: TBD