Woody, p.1
Woody, page 1
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About the Author
Copyright Page
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To Dini Evanier, Andrew Blauner, Gary Terracino, and Mark Evanier
Acknowledgments
With deep appreciation to Javier Aguirresarobe, Harlene Rosen Allen, Peter Bart, Elizabeth Beier, Jennifer Belle, Dr. Maria Bergmann, Dr. Michael Bergmann, Walter Bernstein, Andrew Blauner, Donna Brodie, Brad Burgess, Frank Buxton, Dick Cavett, Jerome Chanes, Lynn Cohen, Stephen Dixon, Dr. Gerald Epstein, Dini Evanier, Mark Evanier, Elaine Evans, Linda Fairstein, Michael Fiorito, Eva Fogelman, Jason Fraley, Dorothy Friedman, Vincent Giordano, Shelly Goldstein, Elliott Gould, Charles Graeber, Robert Greenwald, Eamon Hickey, J. Hoberman, Ilana Howe, Annette Insdorf, Neal Jesuele, Carol Joffe, Jerome Kogan, Andrew Krents, Judith Liss, Phillip Lopate, George Lore, David Lowe, Judith Malina, Ric Menello, Marilyn Michaels, Elliott Mills, Barry Mitchell, Theodore Mitrani, Craig Modderno, Micah Morrison, Bill Mullins, Mel Neuhaus, Diane O’Leary, Eric Pleskow, Norman Podhoretz, Craig Pomranz, Richard Powers, Tim Pratt, Dorothy Rabinowitz, Hugh Raffles, Kathleen Rogers, Francesca Rollins, Hillary Rollins, Jack Rollins, Susan Rollins, Cynthia Sayer, Jimmy Scalia, Richard Schickel, Stephen Schrader, John Simon, Sharon Simpson, Steve Stoliar, Heather Stone, Howard Storm, Juliet Taylor, Gary Terracino, Vicky Tiel, Lennie Triola, Paul Ventura, Jack Victor, Jeff Weatherford, Sid Weedman, Robert Weide, Alan Zweibel.
Special thanks to the brilliant executive director of the Writers Room, Donna Brodie.
Introduction
How I Got to Woody
I RANG HIS DOORBELL.
I’d been told by a friend of his that he never looked at his mail. Whether that was true or not, I wanted to be sure he knew I was writing a biography of him and that I had some questions for him. So I wrote him a letter and took it to his house.
A pleasant-looking fellow peered down and checked me out from an upper story. “I have a letter for Mr. Allen,” I said. “Hold on,” he said, and a moment later opened the door. He smiled, took the letter from my hand, and said, “Perfect.”
I was in. Well, not really. I got to Allen and I didn’t get to him.
In my letter I had introduced myself and told Allen that I had already interviewed Jack Rollins, his longtime manager; as well as the film critics John Simon, Annette Insdorf, and Richard Schickel; the former banjoist in his band, Cynthia Sayer; and Sid Weedman, who had seen Woody in his early days when he wrote and performed at the Tamiment resort in the Poconos. I also said that I considered Crimes and Misdemeanors and Zelig to be his masterpieces.
I received an e-mail from Woody the following day. (He allegedly does not use e-mail, so I assume he dictated his letter to his assistant, Gini.)
Since then I have had a limited back-and-forth correspondence with Allen. He has picked the questions he chooses to answer, but he has been unfailingly courteous.
After writing five biographies I have learned at least one essential thing: The iconic image for which we know such a figure has little to do with what he or she actually is. No one has struggled with the problem of being really known more than Woody Allen, whose public persona is instantly and eternally assumed to be his real personality. I will never forget undertaking the biography of Tony Bennett, the sweetest and most lovable of personalities, and being told by Lennie Triola, a New York concert producer and music manager, “There’s an ogre behind that door.” True or not, I gave that observation a lot of thought. Woody Allen has compounded the problem by being the most confessional of writers-directors-actors, borrowing from his life in so many of his films while insisting that although a few details might be true, he has exaggerated and embellished most of it. He is also the only comedian in Hollywood history to insert the same unchanging comedic persona into every genre of filmmaking—comedy, romantic comedy, satire, drama—and yet have it effectively blend in. It is always the same character/persona. No one else has ever succeeded at this. It is remarkable, and it makes him liminal.
Groucho was always Groucho, doing Groucho stand-up within a film. Jack Benny was always Jack Benny, doing Benny stand-up. Every Bob Hope film is built around Hope’s comedic shtick. According to the screenwriter-director Gary Terracino, “Today’s comedians (Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler) go in the other direction. They give us their tried-and-true comedic shtick within comedies, but ditch that persona altogether in dramas to demonstrate that they are ‘real actors.’”
Woody is Woody in all of his films, he is the same unchanging comic persona, yet each film works in its own way. Unlike Groucho, Bob Hope, and Jack Benny, in addition to being an actor Allen was also a writer and director. He knew exactly how his persona could blend in. Zelig can be seen as a sly commentary on his own career and acting.
Allen has carved out exactly what he wants to do and has total control of his films. “I have control of everything, and I mean everything,” he told John Lahr. “I can make any film I want to make. Any subject—comic, serious. I can cast who I want to cast. I can reshoot anything I want to as long as I stay in the budget. I control the ads, the trailers, the music.” Lahr asked him what would happen if he wasn’t able to completely control his films. “I’d be gone,” he said. There is no doubt that he meant it.
As an artist, Allen was never tempted to sell out or to try to outdo himself; nor did he care to ingratiate himself with the powers that be. He cares only to express himself without apology. He has managed to be current without being trendy and to be a genuine artist who almost always embraces classic storytelling over cerebration and abstraction.
He is the most amazing phenomenon in the history of American show business. John Ford, William Wyler, Charles Chaplin, all had a major output. No one has covered the gamut as Allen has, from downright laugh-aloud funny to poignantly, startlingly moving.
“Sometimes it seems as if Allen has explored every shade of longing in Western man,” Kent Jones wrote in Film Comment, “for deliverance from the disappointments of the present, for transport to another more fulfilling realm, for solace from the drudgeries of shared existence, for recovery of the past, for consummation of love, for a little bit of luck.”
“Only Chaplin comes close,” Gary Terracino said, “and Chaplin, too, endures. He also had an astounding almost thirty-year run of global popularity. But even Chaplin ditched the Tramp in later years, only to see his popularity wane. Woody never ditches Woody.”
Allen, like Chaplin, was “self-educated, reclusive, melancholy and meticulous,” wrote John Lahr. “Both are comic geniuses who give life without actually loving it.”
Allen defined the difference between Chaplin’s screen persona and his own in his interview with Lahr. “I came along after Freud,” he said, “when the playing field had shifted to the psyche. It was interior. What was interesting to people suddenly was the psyche. They wanted to know what was going on in the mind.”
“It’s almost Shakespearean in terms of volume,” Alan Zweibel, a comedy writer for Saturday Night Live, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, and Curb Your Enthusiasm, says about Allen’s body of work. “Look at the number of movies, the books, the plays, the albums. The breadth of the whole career: writing, directing, performing, and everything else.”
Everything about Allen is unique, not only in cinema but in pop and celebrity culture. There is no one like him. He portrays the kind of man that was never seen in film before. “Woody Allen helped to make people feel more relaxed about how they looked,” Pauline Kael wrote, “and how they really felt about using their fists, and about their sexual terrors and everything else that made them anxious. He became a new national hero. College kids looked up to him and wanted to be like him.”
The richness of his films, their layered texture, bears watching again and again. There is always more to glean. And there is the matter of integrity in his business dealings and in his relationships to actors. He doesn’t care if an actress is over forty. He doesn’t care if an actor hasn’t worked in years, as was the case with Andrew Dice Clay in Blue Jasmine. An actor does not have to be hot to be in an Allen film. Allen doesn’t care who the actors’ agent is. All he cares about is quality. This does not make him soft and fuzzy. He never will be that. He is saying, in effect, I’m an artist; deal with me on that level.
Allen’s work presages so many things that came after it: Borat and Bruno could not exist without Zelig and Stardust Memories, nor could the work of Albert Brooks, Larry David, or Garry Shandling. Allen became the new, the template for a generation. “The old comics were funny,” Alan Zweibel told me, “but then came Woody. And wow! A page had been turned. A new reality, totally, that somebody can live in and talk about from within. He created his own world, and given his persona, you bought into it, the illogical fantasy.”
According to Zweibel, “You just let him take you for a ride, that it was possible for it to start to rain in his apartment. You look at this guy, and of course it could happen to him. And it was hysterical. And he is the thinking man’s comedian. So when he alludes to the Holocaust, to anything philosophical, to life’s big questions, you know that a point is made, that something is being debated. So there’s an honest intelligence that the subject itself is being treated—in and around the jokes. Even when I was writing for Saturday Night Live, even when I created the Garry Shandling Show, Garry and I idolized Woody. So it was, What would Woody do in a case like this?”
No one has ranged in his work so consistently from the sublime to the wretched. He is willing to gamble with failure, to extend and deepen the formal and substantive elements of his films.
“You look at the body of work,” Zweibel says, “and you can see how he had to make this movie or that movie in order to get to make the great movie. His growth as a writer, as a director, as a filmmaker, as a human being. The fact is that part of the creative process is that sometimes you have to fail. Sometimes there are foul hits, in baseball terms, or he wouldn’t hit the next home run. You have to do certain things in order to get to that big thing, that great thing. Some years ago I heard Rob Reiner say, ‘Look, we all do what we do. We all write, we make movies, this and that. And then there’s Woody.’ And he’s right. Woody’s in a class by himself.
“I look at Carl Reiner, Woody, Buck Henry, Larry Gelbart,” Zweibel relates. “They didn’t just write for one medium. They wrote for everything. They were writers. They wrote something and then decided what form will this idea be best expressed in: books, plays, TV shows, magazine pieces. And so Woody is among those guys: You’re a writer, write! Let the piece tell you what it wants to be, as opposed to trying to shoehorn it into being something else. This is the best way this certain story can be told. It should only be a three-page story in The New Yorker. Or this should definitely be a play, for whatever reason. And Woody told us all of that. In ‘The Kugelmass Episode,’ his timeless story, here’s a guy who’s unhappily married for the third time. He’s got this shitty life, he’s a professor, he reads Madame Bovary, and he falls into the book because it’s a better place for him to be! Woody has the uncanny knack of knowing when you should use your imagination, as in ‘Kugelmass,’ or when it’s best for him to visualize it, make it appear on the screen, like the Jewish mother floating over him in Oedipus Wrecks. Doesn’t that speak volumes?”
Allen is of the moment, but his subject matter is timeless: the recurrent insolubility and sorrow—and momentary glories—of the human experience: “The same things come up time after time,” Allen has said. “They’re the things that are on my mind, and one is always feeling for new ways to express them. What sort of things recur? For me, certainly the seductiveness of fantasy and the cruelty of reality.… What interests me are always the unsolvable problems: the finiteness of life and the sense of meaninglessness and despair and the inability to communicate. The difficulty [of] falling in love and maintaining it. These things are much more interesting to me than … I don’t know, the Voting Rights Act.”
He was part of what author and film critic J. Hoberman dubbed the Jewish “new wave” between 1967 and 1973, starting with Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl and continuing to The Way We Were, during which “Jewish humor reigned confidently supreme.… This presupposition of a new Jewish-American cultural visibility informs the dozen or so movies—all characterized by their insolent black humor and social satire—that featured (mainly) young, (sometimes) neurotic, and (by and large) not altogether admirable Jewish male protagonists cut off from their roots but disdainful of a white-bread America. Self-hatred merged with self-absorption, narcissism seemed indistinguishable from personal liberation, and alienation was a function of identity.” Hoberman was referring to The Producers, The Graduate, Take the Money and Run, Goodbye, Columbus, The Angel Levine, Portnoy’s Complaint, Where’s Poppa?, I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, The Heartbreak Kid, and Bye Bye Braverman. Hoberman contended that The Heartbreak Kid marked the twilight of this golden age, “Ethnic Jewish characters lost their prominence, although ethnic characterizations did not.” Blaxploitation films and Italian-American films followed. He wrote, “With the end of the Jewish new wave, the urban neurotic anti-hero disappeared as well. Or, rather, this figure was subsumed into the person of Woody Allen—at least until he resurfaced, a less abrasive wise guy, in the TV sitcoms of the 1990s.”
Allen was—and remains—forthrightly Jewish, and he did so at a time when Jews were only then coming to the forefront of matinee-idol status. Jews had been shticky, almost parodistic comedians (Groucho Marx) or made to seem like WASPs (Lauren Bacall, John Garfield). Allen was an unapologetically Jewish movie star, and in so doing represented a new emerging multicultural America.
As early as 1969, Allen was unashamedly apolitical, although his followers ascribed to him whatever they believed in at the moment. In an interview that preceded Zelig by many years, he expressed his contempt for rock and roll, Woodstock, and the mass herd mentality of utopian political movements that lead to fascism, and held out for the solitary independent vision of the artist. “When I was in Play It Again, Sam,” he told writer Robert B. Greenfield, “I didn’t work on Moratorium Day [an anti–Vietnam War event], for my own reasons. Kids came to me and said, ‘That’s great, man.’ It seems so easy now, to salt things with relevant themes. The kids are exploitable. They’ve made a lot of millionaires in the last ten years, what with drugs and records and clothes. Music is just too easy. I like it, but their excuse for not reading, for not thinking … and then they hang it on McLuhan’s global electric thing. I went to see Woodstock. The kid in front of me kept saying, ‘Beautiful, beautiful,’ as though he were trying to convince himself. John Sebastian sings a song about kids, and everyone shouts. There’s no discrimination or real art involved in it at all. The truth is, there have never been very many remarkable people around at any one time. Most are always leaning on the guy next to them, asking him what to do.”
“Woody managed to be groundbreaking as a comedian and a filmmaker yet was never out to overturn the old order,” Gary Terracino said. “He did his own thing and was thoroughly new and modern—yet was no hippie or revolutionary or even Hollywood lefty. He was new and fresh without being dangerous; he was a great artist, yet totally accessible; he was cutting-edge, yet safe.”
* * *
Pauline Kael was the most entertaining of film critics; her enthusiasm for film, which seemed to be her life, communicated itself to the readers of The New Yorker. Who else could title a book with semi-innuendo I Lost It at the Movies and provoke no surprise whatsoever in the public? (After all, her writing often sounded almost orgasmic.) “You have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies,” she wrote in 1990. “Our emotions rise to meet the force coming from the screen, and they go on rising throughout our movie-going lives.” She was that rare critic who was capable of great acuity but also of writing captivating sentences even when she was completely wrong; she was so swept up in her feelings she could sweep the reader away with her. (Allen told director Peter Bogdanovich that “Kael has everything that a great critic needs except judgment.”) She was so good she sounded at times more like a novelist than a critic; when she was wrong one could forgive her, since she was creating her own universe. She called Take the Money and Run “a limply good-natured little nothing of a comedy, soft as sneakers.” Dead wrong, but what a great sentence! More judiciously, she wrote in 1980 that
Woody Allen, who used to play a walking inferiority complex, made the whole country more aware of the feelings of those who knew they could never match the images of Wasp perfection that saturated their lives. He played the brainy, insecure little guy, the urban misfit who quaked at the thought of a fight because physically he could never measure up to the big strong silent men of the myth—the genuine beefcake. Big strong men knew that they can’t live up to the myths, either. Allen, by bringing his neurotic terror of just about everything out front, seemed to speak for them, too. In the forties and fifties, when Bob Hope played coward heroes the cowardice didn’t have any political or sexual resonance, but in the late sixties and the seventies, when Woody Allen displayed his panic he seemed to incarnate the whole anti-macho mood of the time. In the sloppy, hairy counterculture era, Americans no longer tried to conform to a look that only a minority of them could ever hope to approximate. Woody Allen helped to make people feel more relaxed about how they looked and how they really felt about using their fists, and about their sexual terrors and everything else that made them anxious. He became a new national hero. College kids looked up to him and wanted to be like him.
