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Cloud In the Silver Lining
Behind the kiss-off is either (1) the aforementioned sense that at some point in the mid-'90s, he lost it. Or (2) the thing with Soon-Yi. (In 1992, for those in need a refresher, Allen started dating Soon-Yi Previn, the 21-year-old adopted daughter of former girlfriend Mia Farrow, a relationship that led to a bitter custody battle over the children Farrow and Allen had jointly adopted, a battle that Allen lost.) For some, the choice of Soon-Yi, to whom he's been married for nearly a decade, was evidence that Allen and reality had parted company, or that he was just too creepy to find entertaining any longer.
There is also (3) some combination of 1 and 2. "Match Point" won back many of those fans, but Allen didn't appear in that movie, which made it more palatable to the Woody-doubters. "Scoop" will test whether Allen and the relatively modest audience he had in the '80s will truly hug and make up. He hopes the answer is yes, but unlike a lot of jilted paramours, he isn't pining.
  "I never wanted movies to be an end," Woody Allen says. "I wanted them to be a means so that I could have a decent life." (By Cary Conover For The Washington Post) |
"I do a movie and I put it out there," he says. "I hope everybody likes it, that's my fondest wish. If they don't like it, I'm disappointed, but I'm not going to change my style of work. I'm not going to do something to curry favor."
For Allen, the point isn't really popularity or immortality. The point is therapy. For months at a time, the craft of moviemaking submerges him in the highly diverting business of writing a script, casting actors, picking out costumes and creating a realm over which he has total control. It turns the mind away from the gloom. It's also a pretty sweet lifestyle.
"I never wanted movies to be an end. I wanted them to be a means so that I could have a decent life -- meet attractive women, go out on dates, live decently. Not opulently, but with some security. I feel the same way now. A guy like Spielberg will go live in the desert to make a movie, or Scorsese will make a picture in India and set up camp and live there for four months. I mean, for me, if I'm not shooting in my neighborhood, it's annoying. I have no commitment to my work in that sense. No dedication."
You'd need a good shrink or two to explain how someone so prolific -- he's also written lots of comic pieces for the New Yorker, plus the occasional play -- could consider himself a slacker. But he isn't kidding.
"Look, it takes a couple of months to write a script. This isn't 'Finnegans Wake,' " he says. "I pull it out of the typewriter, bring it in, three days later I have a budget. Then we do pre-production, which is about 10 weeks. I mean, I'm not doing a $100 million budget. I'm working with $15 million or so. I shoot for about 10 weeks maximum."
When the cameras are rolling, he knows what he wants, but unless there is a joke in there, he isn't wedded to the script. Improvisation is encouraged. If an actor can't deliver a line, Allen reads it aloud, and hopes that he or she will catch on. If that doesn't work -- and the problem persists -- the actor is occasionally fired. One of them is Annabelle Gurwitch, canned from a play Allen was directing. She later parlayed the experience into an anthology, which she edited, called "Fired!" What she remembers most is Allen's succinct appraisal: "You look retarded."
"People come worried that they'll be fired," Aronson says. "But it's very rare, because he chooses people for their acting ability instead of their celebrity. And it happens only in those cases when he really thinks it's not going to work out."
Perfectionism is not his style. Asked why he doesn't try the Stanley Kubrick approach to filmmaking, which involved fine-tuning for years, Allen plaintively says he doesn't have it in him.
"Kubrick was a great artist. I say this all the time and people think I'm being facetious. I'm not. Kubrick was a guy who obsessed over details and did 100 takes, and you know, I don't feel that way. If I'm shooting a film and it's 6 o'clock at night and I've got a take, and I think I might be able to get a better take if I stayed, but the Knicks tipoff is at 7:30, then that's it. The crews love working on my movies because they know they'll be home by 6."
Reflections
All of this started with a joke and an envelope. Woody Allen was then Allan Stewart Konigsberg, the son of a cabdriver in Brooklyn, and this is back in the late 1940s, when newspapers printed one-liners just for fun. After a bunch of his were published, a PR firm tracked down their author and offered him a job, writing jokes for celebrities to plant in columns like Walter Winchell's. He'd get on the subway after school, sit at a typewriter and crank out 50 a day.
