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"I worked for a p.r. co. in the late 1980s where we had the Hemdale account. I screened a film with no release date called RIVER'S EDGE, and I was the only person who loved it. (Everyone else thought it was vile -- so it was dumped on me, and I was glad to take it on). Eventually Hemdale dropped it and another independent company took it up.

"I thought the entire cast was excellent, but there was a scruffy young actor I'd never heard of who provided the heart of this bleak, despairing film -- Keanu Reeves.

"I next encountered him a year later when I changed jobs to DDL (Dino DeLaurentis's disastrous folly) and saw a rough cut (of his next venture, BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (for which thee special effects had not been completed, a nervous producer warned us).

"One more year passed (as did DDL) and I was offered the unit publicist job by New Line on another Reeves film, the low-budget THE PRINCE OF PENNSYLVANIA. I met and spoke with Keanu during the six weeks the film shot in Pittsburgh. He insisted we had met before, though he couldn't remember where or when. I told him he was mistaken. But I was also impressed with his fierce intelligence, sweet-natured good humor, modesty, and kindness.

"Years later my sister gave me her issue of Premiere Magazine with a cover story of Keanu, who was by now a major star. For the first time, he talked a bit about his parents, and then I realized he and his sister were the 3 and 4 year old children of a lovely girl I met when I first moved to N.Y. in 1966.

"I was a grad student, and Patrick Reeves (a British model) was divorced from her Hawaiian husband, and was raising her two kids from that disastrous marriage. I remember her son & daughter both had Hawaiian first-names, and were extremely sweet but quiet young children who rarely smiled. When Patrick moved to Toronto in the mid-70s, we kept in touch but after awhile I stopped hearing from her.

"So Keanu did indeed remember me from his childhood, but I didn't remember him because, during the intervening years, a four year-old child had grown into a handsome young man." -- Scott MacDonough

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