Woody Allen: A Retrospective by ABRAMS

WOODY ALLEN A RETROSPECTIVE

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”

TOM SHONE U.S. $40.00 CAN. $48.00 ISBN 978-1-4197-1794-9 ISBN 978-1-4197-1794-9 54000

9 781419 717949

z ABRAMS

A RETROSPECTIVE

Tom Shone

Woody

Allen

A RETROSPECTIVE BY TOM SHONE

Abrams, New York

Woody

Allen

A RETROSPECTIVE BY TOM SHONE

Abrams, New York

For Kate TS

Contents Published in 2015 by Abrams, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. Text © 2015 Tom Shone Design and layout © 2015 Palazzo Editions Ltd Cover design by John Gall The moral right of the author has been asserted. Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959569 ISBN: 978-1-4197-1794-9 Created and produced by Palazzo Editions Ltd 2 Wood Street, Bath, BA1 2JQ, United Kingdom www.palazzoeditions.com Publisher: Colin Webb Art Director: Bernard Higton Managing Editor: Joanne Rippin Editor: James Hodgson Photo Editor: Emma O’Neill Printed and bound in China by Imago.

Author’s note I’d like to thank Woody Allen, who graciously agreed to answer some of my questions for the purposes of this book; Leslee Dart for her assistance; the Sunday Times, for sending me to interview Allen in Paris in 1997; Elle magazine for again putting me in contact with the filmmaker in 2011; Rachel McAdams for her insights into the making of Midnight in Paris; and Eric Lax, whose biography and book of interviews with the director proved an invaluable resource. Also helpful were The Complete Prose of Woody Allen by Woody Allen; The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen by Peter J. Bailey; Woody Allen on Woody Allen by Stig Björkman; Woody Allen: Interviews, edited by Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz; Then Again by Diane Keaton; What Falls Away by Mia Farrow; Woody: Movies from Manhattan by Julian Fox; Woody Allen on Location by Thierry de Navacelle; When the Shooting Stops…The Cutting Begins by Ralph Rosenblum; Woody Allen by Richard Schickel; The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays, edited by Charles L. P. Silet; and Critical Mass by James Wolcott. Tom Shone was the film critic of the Sunday Times in London from 1994 until 1999, when he moved to New York. His articles have appeared in many newspapers and periodicals including the New Yorker, the New York Times, the TLS, Intelligent Life, Areté, and Vogue. He is the author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, In the Rooms, and Scorsese: A Retrospective. He currently teaches film history and criticism at New York University.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.

Pages 2–3: Portrait by Nicholas Moore, 2003. Front cover photograph © John Minihan/Evening Standard/Getty Images. See picture credits on page 287 for further image copyright information. Source for quote on the back cover: On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy by Eric Lax (New York: Charterhouse, 1975).

6 Introduction 14 The Early Years 28 Breaking into Hollywood 34 44 50 56 60 68 76 88 94 106 112 116 124 132 138 146 152 154 158 164 168 174

Take the Money and Run Bananas Play It Again, Sam Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) Sleeper Love and Death Annie Hall Interiors Manhattan Stardust Memories A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy Zelig Broadway Danny Rose The Purple Rose of Cairo Hannah and Her Sisters Radio Days September Another Woman Crimes and Misdemeanors Alice Shadows and Fog Husbands and Wives

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Manhattan Murder Mystery Bullets over Broadway Mighty Aphrodite Everyone Says I Love You Deconstructing Harry Celebrity Sweet and Lowdown Small Time Crooks The Curse of the Jade Scorpion Hollywood Ending Anything Else Melinda and Melinda Match Point Scoop Cassandra’s Dream Vicky Cristina Barcelona Whatever Works You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger Midnight in Paris To Rome with Love Blue Jasmine Magic in the Moonlight Irrational Man Woody Allen: Actor Fast Forward Filmography Select Bibliography and Acknowledgments

For Kate TS

6 Introduction 14 The Early Years 28 Breaking into Hollywood 34 44 50 56 60 68 76 88 94 106 112 116 124 132 138 146 152 154 158 164 168 174

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Stardust Memories 1980

“We love your work. My wife has seen all your films.” “I especially like your early, funny ones.” Harassed director Sandy Bates braves the crowd of fans who have come to greet him at an out-of-town film weekend.

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“It’s about a malaise, the malaise of a man with no spiritual center, no spiritual connection,” Allen would say of Stardust Memories. “The whole picture occurs subjectively through the mind of a character who is on the verge of a breakdown, who’s harassed and in doubt and who has a fainting fit at the end from his imaginings about all these dark things. He has a terrifying sense of his own mortality. He’s accomplished things, yet they still don’t mean anything to him.” Allen would swear off autobiographical readings of Sandy Bates until blue in the face, but by 1979, he, like Sandy, had experienced enough of wealth and fame to know they did nothing to buy off his demons. He bought two penthouses on Fifth Avenue, filling them with Picassos and German Expressionist paintings. He purchased a Rolls-Royce and season tickets to the Knicks. He stopped carrying cash, relying on friends for pocket change and came to resent autograph hounds. Stardust Memories drew on one weekend in particular, in April 1973, when he travelled to Tarrytown, New York, about an hour north of Manhattan, to deliver a talk at a film weekend organized by New York magazine critic Judith Crist. Throughout the event Allen was besieged by fans asking for autographs, and requests that he read this or do that. One Yale law student asked if he would come to New Haven and be a karate expert in a mock trial. “I’m up there doing the best I can as a favor to Judith Crist, who I liked very much, and I thought that would make a funny movie,” he said. Through the walls of his room that night he heard a couple arguing about his films, the woman reading his short play Death Knocks aloud, in a comically exaggerated Jewish voice. He was offered another room but declined, too curious to hear what they had to say. Some of this would find its way on screen, including Judith Crist, who shows up in one of the film’s many Felliniesque fantasy sequences. The two

Stardust Memories 1980

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“The backlash really started when I did Stardust Memories. People were outraged. I still think that’s one of the best films I’ve ever made. I was just trying to make what I wanted, not what people wanted me to make.”

Opposite, top: The photomural in Sandy’s apartment is used as a device to reflect his prevailing state of mind. Here Groucho presides over a flashback to a happy time in his relationship with ex-girlfriend Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling). Opposite, bottom: During a surreal outdoor gathering, Sandy demonstrates his magic skills on his neurotic groupie Daisy (Jessica Harper). Above: Sharon Stone made her screen debut in Stardust Memories, as a pretty girl in a lively carriage traveling in the opposite direction from the somber one on which Sandy finds himself at the start of the film.

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movie execs who criticize Sandy’s film would be played by UA exec Andy Albeck and Allen’s co-producer Jack Rollins. Charlotte Rampling’s character, Dorrie, was believed to have been modeled on Allen’s second wife, Louise Lasser. The film’s working title, meanwhile, was “Woody Allen No. 4,” prompting Allen to self-deprecate, “I am not even half of the Fellini of 8½.” The unusually long production, six months, began in September 1979 in the decaying resort town of Ocean Grove, New Jersey, some of whose mansions, warping with age beneath flaking paint, acted as a halfway house for a local population of psychiatric patients whom the nearby mental hospital had deemed safe enough to release back into the community. They could occasionally be seen wandering around, dazed on medication—the perfect ambiance for Sandy Bates’s fictional nervous breakdown. “At the beginning of Stardust I thought we’d never get it right,” said production designer Mel Bourne. “He [Allen] would just sit around and say ‘I don’t think this is going to work.’ My spirits would drop down to zero. In the end that sort of thing is bound to get you down.” Working again with Gordon Willis, Allen was insistent on the light being right, waiting weeks for the right type of sky, while the cast and crew

played stickball or poker, and by early December they were five weeks behind schedule. “It was an extremely complicated film to do because it was extremely well orchestrated,” said Allen. “And there were reshoots on it. Weather problems. It was just a hard film to do.” The finished film threw even the jovial Charles Joffe into a funk. “When I walked out of the first screening I found myself questioning everything,” he said. “I wondered if I had contributed over the last twenty years to this man’s unhappiness. But I talked about it with my ex-wife, my kids, who grew up with Woody, and I talked with Woody himself for hours. He said to me, ‘Does this really seem like the way I feel?’” Even so, the film was excoriated by critics for what they took to be its show of ingratitude—how dare Woody produce this prolonged whine about the various nuisances of fame! In the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris thought the film seemed “to have been shaped by a masochistic desire to alienate Allen’s admirers once and for all.” In the New Yorker, Pauline Kael called it “a horrible betrayal … a whiff of nostalgia gone bad. If Woody found success so painful, Stardust Memories should help him stop worrying.” Allen grew so tired of defending the film that eventually he gave up, “Maybe it worked for no one but me.”

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“So beautiful and so sexy and so interesting. She has an interesting neurotic quality.” WA on Charlotte Rampling

Is Stardust Memories the closest we will come to knowing what the first cut of Annie Hall was like? For here is a streamof-consciousness picture about a man unable to experience pleasure, a comedian who doesn’t want to be funny any more, the remembrance of a failed relationship—this time with Charlotte Rampling—while flashbacks illumine his Brooklyn childhood. It’s the evil twin of the earlier popular picture—its sourpuss doppelgänger. It even ends in a jailhouse, just like Allen wanted Annie Hall to. “I don’t want to make funny movies anymore,” complains Sandy Bates, taking time off from wrangling with studio heads to attend a retrospective of his films in a fading resort town, where Sandy chews over the same $64,000 question that preoccupied Isaac Davis in Manhattan: Should he continue to date beautiful wackadoodles or not? By 1979, Allen could pick them out of the crowd by the rattle of their prescriptions. When Sandy dials his shrink from a phone booth on the pier, only to find his neurotic, beautiful groupie Daisy (Jessica Harper) doing the same in the booth opposite him, it’s his equivalent of the meet-cute in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife where Claudette Colbert and Gary Cooper want to buy different halves of the same set of pajamas. Or should he go with nurturing, maternal Isobel (MarieChristine Barrault)? Not even his memories of the bipolar Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling) seem able to divert Sandy from his old habits. The sequence of close-ups of Rampling running the gamut of emotion, from happiness to hysteria and back, are among the film’s highlights, but she’s a mere ghost of girlfriends past; there’s nobody to pull Allen out of himself, or challenge him, as Diane Keaton did in Annie Hall,

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and the result is one of his most formless pictures, which circles solipsistically back to Sandy, buffeted by the chant of requests that starts up whenever he shows his head in public. “Could I have ten minutes of your time? I’m writing a piece about the shallow indifference of wealthy celebrities,” asks one reporter, never seen again. “Could you just say, ‘To Phyllis Weinstein, you unfaithful, lying bitch’?” asks one

Charlotte Rampling as Dorrie, the ghost of girlfriends past who haunts Sandy throughout the film.

autograph hunter. These doomed petitioners link up and form a constant background hum throughout the picture, like the squawking of the gulls that circle overhead. Much of this has a nicely acidic zing. The idea of celebrity deconstruction is far less shocking to us than it was to the original audience of Stardust Memories. We are more used to the sight of comedians dropping the mask, as Peter Sellers

did in Being There, or Jerry Lewis did in The King of Comedy; we are the children of The Larry Sanders Show, Larry David, and reality TV. From today’s perspective the problem with the picture is not that Allen appears ungrateful about his fame but that he doesn’t go far enough—he doesn’t have the courage of his own rancor. For alongside Allen’s complaints about how oppressive he finds our laughter is a constant contraflow of gags designed to elicit it—“You can’t control life. Only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.” “To you, I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.” Well, should we laugh? Or shouldn’t we? Stardust Memories is a confusing picture, made more so by a knot of self-deception on Allen’s part. The studio philistinism that Sandy complains of in the film is, after all, something Allen had rarely encountered, his experience on What’s New Pussycat? aside. (UA even let him make Interiors!) His control over his own filmmaking process was already the stuff of Hollywood legend. The only person forcing Woody Allen toward happy endings at this point in his career was Woody Allen. The argument in Stardust Memories is not with his critics, or the audience, it is with himself, the crowd-pleaser and the artist fighting for the upper hand. Once Allen recognized this, the result would be an entirely different and much more successful picture about the indignities and absurdities of fame: Zelig. Stardust Memories has a lightness to it but it’s not the lightness of comedy, rather it’s the kind of veiled, half-joking threat a child issues to its parents which, upon being challenged, results in a sulk.

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