On View : Keaton in the Cockpit : THE LIFE AND DREAM OF AMELIA EARHART ON TNT

With her hair cropped short and attired in a gray business suit, Diane Keaton is a far sight from Annie Hall as she stands on stage at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles.

Keaton’s dramatic new look is for her dramatic new role as famed aviator Amelia Earhart in “Amelia Earhart: Her Final Flight,” premiering Sunday on TNT.

This brisk morning, the Oscar-winning actress is shooting a scene in which Earhart gives a speech at Purdue University in hopes of obtaining additional financing for her flight around the world. Sharing the stage and scene with Keaton is Bruce Dern, who plays Earhart’s controversial husband, manager and press agent, publisher George Palmer Putnam.

“Her Final Flight” dramatizes Earhart’s luckless last voyage in which the famed “Lady Lindy” and her hard-drinking navigator Fred Noonan (Rutger Hauer) attempted to circumnavigate the globe along the Equator in a state-of-the-art Lockheed Electra. After departing New Guinea on July 2, 1937, though, Earhart and Noonan slipped out of radio contact and never reached their destination, a small atoll in the South Pacific called Howland Island.

Despite an exhaustive search then and in expeditions throughout the years, Earhart, Noonan and the plane were never found. Her disappearance is still one of the great mysteries of this century.

After completing the scene at the Wilshire Ebell, Keaton offers a strong handshake and a smile to the set’s visitor. With the hectic shooting schedule, Keaton begs off doing interviews until months after the filming is complete.

But Dern, father of actress Laura, is more than willing to discuss the project during a break. The actor says he perceives “Her Final Flight” primarily to be a beautiful love story. He recalls that when he first read Anna Sandor’s script, “I had to put it down four times because I simply couldn’t go on for a minute because you know what happens.

“He (Putnam) loved her desperately, and as they grew in those eight years of marriage, I think she grew to love him.”

As far as Dern is concerned, Putnam was the “first man behind the woman. He was a guy who was willing to give up an active part of his life and business in which he was a star to let his wife achieve her dreams. The fact he realized that it was important for her to do it, and do it in that day and age, was remarkable. He saw the light and backed off and said, ‘It’s your stage. I want to do something for you.’ I find that enormously touching.”

Keaton, though, doesn’t quite share Dern’s views. “That’s where she is an interesting character,” she explains over the phone later. “Everybody disagrees (about the marriage). They agree to disagree. I believe any time you make a commitment to a person for that long a time and that intense a situation, everything is attached to it. I think there was a love. It isn’t a perfect thing, but I think that’s a big commitment. I don’t think you can write it off.”

It was Keaton’s producing partner, Joe Kelly, who brought the idea of doing a movie on Earhart to TNT. And Keaton relished the opportunity to play the woman who won the hearts of the world in the ‘30s and became the most famous female flyer in history. To prepare, Keaton watched newsreel footage of Earhart.

“I would spend a half-hour every day with Amelia. I fell even more in love with her because she was such a little puzzle. She was such a little mysterious girl to me and beautiful and very compelling. On the one hand, she was extremely willful and, on the other hand, she was very self-conscious and kind of shy.”

She also returned to acting class before the cameras rolled last fall. “I take acting lessons before I do any show,” Keaton explains. “So I spent a month going back and working with the acting teacher just to get to know it more and work on it and figure out what I was going to do with her.”

What was so challenging for Keaton was the fact that Earhart never exposed much of herself in newsreel footage or photographs. “There isn’t much about her on film where she is confessing or revealing,” Keaton says. “I feel in that sense you can take a license. Probably we are all off the mark, but so are a lot of other people. In essence, she had a dream, a big dream and she followed her dream and she almost fulfilled it. In a sense, she almost did. She didn’t get all the way around the world. But she’s a great character and a great person to take on her vision.”

Keaton acknowledges--and the film also illustrates--the fact that Earhart may have been the most famous female flyer, but she was far from the best. Keaton points out, though, that Earhart had the right combination for success: “She had a powerful man behind her. She had a great personality, those winning American looks. She was the darling. I think it takes everything to become a legend and a heroine and somebody who accomplished what she accomplished.”

Filming the highly emotional, claustrophobic conclusion, in which Earhart and Noonan realize they are out of gas and lost over the Pacific, was harrowing for Keaton. She spent a lot of time preparing it.

“One of the ways I do it is I have to sit there with headphones and listen to music. I have to get very upset and that is hard for me. It was pretty horrible being in that cockpit. It was so tight and we had to sit up there for hours and just live with it and live with the discomfort of this. It was like we were lost in this little world. Ugh. But it was good for making that scene more uncomfortable, which is what it should have been.”

“Amelia Earhart: Her Final Flight” premieres Sunday at 5, 7 and 9 p.m. on TNT; it repeats Wednesday at 7 p.m. and June 19, 20, 24 and 26.