He met Diane Keaton, but his sideburns kept him out of ‘The Godfather’

Imet Diane Keaton, and the rest of The Godfather cast and crew, when Francis Ford Coppola filmed parts of the iconic film on Staten Island in 1971.

Bob Popp, the city editor, sent me as a local Staten Island Advance reporter to see what was going on at the shoot on Longfellow Avenue on Emerson Hill.

(An aside, of which there will be many: Bob Popp had a nose for news. He once sent me to the Paramount Theater on Bay Street in Stapleton to hear East Germany’s world-famous Gewandhaus symphony orchestra, which had been banned from playing anywhere else by Cold War politics.)

But back to Miss Keaton, who recently died. The first scene in which she appears in the movie was of her sitting at a table with Al Pacino. She is on record saying she never thought she was right for the part of Kay