The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (54 page)

25. Stig Bjorkman,
Woody Allen on Woody Allen
(New York: Grove Press, 1993), p. 235.

26. Allen,
Broadway Danny Rose
, p. 175.

27. Mark Shechner, “Jewish Writers,” in
Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 239.

28. Julian Fox,
Woody: Movies from Manhattan
(Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1996), p. 278.

29. Guthrie, p. 138.

30. Woody Allen, “Through a Life Darkly” (review of Ingmar Bergman’s
The Magic Lantern), The New York Times Book Review
September 18, 1988, pp. 30–31.

31. William E. Geist, “The
Rolling Stone
Interview: Woody Allen,” p. 213.

32. Among the longest serving of Allen’s senior production staff are Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, executive producers; Robert Greenhut, producer; Gordon Willis, Carlo Di Palma and Sven Nykvist, cinematography; Susan E. Morse, editor; Juliet Taylor, casting; Mel Bourne and Santo Loquasto, production design, Jeffrey Kurland, costume design; Kay Chapin, script supervisor, Jimmy Sabat, sound engineer, and Dick Hyman, musical direction.

33. Bjorkman, pp. 77, 96.

34. Bjorkman, p. 127.

35. Geist, p. 213.

36. Guthrie, p. 144.

2. Strictly the Movies:
Play it Again, Sam

1. Lax,
Woody Allen: A Biography
pp. 26–27.

2. Jay Martins discussion of
Zelig
in the context of his treatment of the postmodern annulment of the self effectively foregrounds this aspect of Allen’s film.
Who Am I This Time?
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), pp. 88–90.

3. Although
Play It Again, Sam
isn’t technically a Woody Allen film—it was directed by Herbert Ross—two facts argue for treating it as if it were: Allen wrote both the original play and the screenplay based on it, and Ross’s cinematic style anticipates Allen’s largely transparent use of filmic conventions. Ross, Allen said, “had seen the play and wanted to retain in the movie that which worked in the play; he wasn’t looking for radical changes.” Fox,
Woody: Movies from Manhattan,
p. 59.

4. Maurice Yacowar points up one of the film’s central emblems of Felix’s misordered psychic realities. When he first images up his ex-wife, “Felix takes a spatula and scrapes two fried eggs back from his plate into the frying pan. He seems to be living backwards. Indeed, he is, inasmuch as he regresses into fantasies and attempts to model his life after art, instead of taking art as an illumination of life.”
Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen
(New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979), p. 58.

5. In
Radio Days,
the narrator’s Aunt Bea displays a similar tendency toward holding potential mates to “too high a standard,” though she seems to be finding the men she dates insufficient not in relation to movie stars but as compared to the relationships evoked in popular songs.

6. In
Everyone Says I Love You,
Allen’s Joe Berlin character, sans tails, gets to play the Astaire part in a
pas de deux
with Goldie Hawn on the Seine, the scene effectively poised on the borderline between champagne comedy sentimentality and parody.

7. Douglas Brode,
The Films of Woody Allen
(New York: Citadel Press, 1992), p. 256.

8. Lee Guthrie,
Woody Allen,
pp. 80–81.

9. Fox, p. 63.

10. Woody Allen, “My Secret Life with Bogart,”
Life,
March 21, 1969, p. 66.

11. Fox, p. 63.

12. Guthrie, p. 92.

13. Tim Carroll,
Woody and His Women
(London: Warner Books, 1994), p. 92.

3. Getting Serious: The Antimimetic Emblems of
Annie Hall

1. Judging
Love and Death
“one of [Allen’s] best films,” Douglas Brode perceives the film’s central tension as its dramatization of the conflict in Allen between “the expert popular entertainer” and the “closet-intellectual existentialist who would, in
Interiors
, loudly come out”
(The Films of Woody Allen,
p. 135). Only through the benefit of a retrospective view of the evolution of Allen’s career would a viewer be likely to discern in the prevailing caricature of
Love and Death
a serious concern with existentialism or Russian literature.

2.
Annie Hall,
p. 6.

3.
Play It Again, Sam
(Paramount Home Video, 1980).

4. Woody Allen,
Bullets Over Broadway
(Miramax Pictures, 1995).

5. Woody Allen, “Through a Life Darkly” (review of
The Magic Lantern), The New York Times Book Review,
September 18, 1988, p. 29.

6. Peter Cowie,
BFI Film Classics: Annie Hall
(London: British Film Institute, 1996), p. 46.

7. Annette Wernblad,
Brooklyn is Not Expanding,
p. 69.

8. This scene closely resembles Donald Barthelme’s short story, “Me and Miss Mandible,” in which the 35-year-old narrator is returned to fifth grade as an adult, ostensibly because of the failure of his initial education to give him “confidence in [his] ability to take the right steps and to obtain correct answers”
(Come Back, Dr. Caligari
[New York: Little, Brown, 1964], p. 110).

9. Graham McCann,
Woody Allen: New Yorker
(Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1990),p. 198.

10. Were Brooks to have made a film like
Manhattan
—which he wouldn’t have—he might have had his characters getting mugged and doing pratfalls in garbage-strewn streets to the tunes of George Gershwin; Allen presents the disparity between the ideal mental reality of New York City embodied in Gershwin standards and the corrupt hearts of New Yorkers through constant dramatic juxtaposition.

11. Compare the markedly divergent view of Mary P. Nichols, whose
Reconstructing Woody: Art, Love and Life in the Films of Woody Allen
(Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) discovers in Allen’s films a consistent affirmation of art. Playing off the scene in which Annie’s need to smoke grass before lovemaking prompts her soul to leave her body and begin drawing, Nichols asserts,”Allen’s art captures the spirit. He is a better drawer. He draws human beings whole—thinking, loving, desiring, even if their objects are in part elusive because they too are capable of thinking, loving, and desiring. The illusory wholeness from grass that Annie seeks gives way to the more elusive wholeness of life that Allen’s art intimates” (p. 44).

12. A similar scene, which Allen filmed but rejected, had Alvy in Times Square wondering what to do about Annie’s move to L.A. He looks up at the
New York Times
headlines scrolling across the Allied Chemical Building, which reads, “What are you doing, Alvy? Go to California. It’s okay. She loves you.” “Viewing the scene in dailies,” Eric Lax explained, “Woody hated it so much he went to the nearest reservoir and threw the reels in.” Quoted in Julian Fox,
Woody: Movies from Manhattan,
p. 96. Allen returns to this joke in “Oedipus Wrecks,” Sheldon Millstein’s mother’s garrulous appearance in the skies of New York ensuring that everyone in the city streets knows his most personal conflicts and problems.

13. Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen,
When the Shooting Stops… the Cutting Begins
(New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 283.

14. Never one to let a good joke go to waste, Allen has Harry Block descending into Hell in an elevator in
Deconstructing Harry
as the intercom system informs him which sinners have been consigned to which levels of Hell.

15. The deletion of this surreal scene left behind a truncated echo: in the released film, Alvy and his second wife, Robin (Janet Margolin), attend a party of prestigious writers and publishers, Alvy irritating Robin by fleeing the living room literary chitchat and finding a bedroom in which to watch a Knicks’ game on television.

16. Rosenblum and Karen, pp. 279–80.

17. Bjorkman,
Woody Allen on Woody Allen,
p. 37.

18. Ralph Rosenblum’s account of the process of skit deletion by which
Annie Hall
came into being (in a chapter tendentiously titled “Annie Hall: It Wasn’t the Film He Set Out to Make”) attributes more of the script’s metamorphosis to his efforts as editor than it does to Allen’s intention to make a deeper movie, but it is nonetheless clear that Allen agreed, at times reluctantly, to the deletion of “all that surrealistic stuff” he and/or Brickman had written. Rosenblum and Karen, pp. 273–90.

19. Even here, Alvy’s selective memory is at work, inflecting the montage. Instead of kissing him immediately after opening the box containing the negligee as the montage depicts the scene, Annie had turned to him and said, “This [the negligee] is for you!” The kiss is his reward for the watch she opened next.

20. Rosenblum, film editor on Allen’s movies through
Interiors,
discusses the endings Allen scripted or shot for
Bananas, Take the Money and Run,
and
Sleeper,
which bear little relation to the theatrical release endings, explaining that the experience of reconfiguring the endings of these films during production inspired Allen to omit completely a conclusion to the
Annie Halls
cript, writing on the last page “Ending to be shot.” Rosenblum and Karen, p. 262. Allen’s “God (A Play),” in
Without Feathers,
dramatizes the problems of WRITER and ACTOR in devising an ending for the play they’re in.

21. Nancy Pogel,
Woody Allen
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), p. 149. Mark Siegal reads
Stardust Memories
as a parody of
8½
in “Ozymandias Melancholia: The Nature of Parody in Woody Allen’s
Stardust Memories,” Literature/Film Quarterly
13, 2 (1985), pp. 76–83.

22. Guthrie,
Woody Allen,
p. 144.

4. Art and Idealization: I’ll Fake
Manhattan

Epigraph quoted in Anthony DeCurtis, “The
Rolling Stone
Interview: Woody Allen.”
Rolling Stone,
September 16, 1993, p. 50.

1. John Irving,
The World According to Garp
(New York: Dutton, 1978), p. 328.

2. In their gender-focused study of
Manhattan,
Terry L. Allison and Renee R. Curry contend that the film’s early dramatization of a mature and remarkably expressive relationship between males ultimately dwindles to a contest for the female—Mary—between Yale and Isaac best characterized by Isaac’s question to Yale, “What are you, six years old?” “Frame Breaking and Code Breaking in Woody Allen’s Relationship Films,” in Renee R Curry, ed.,
Perspectives on Woody Allen
(New York: G.K. Hall, 1996), p. 127.

3. Pauline Kael, Allen’s most sagacious and probing reviewer and far from his most sympathetic critic, objected to the ethical antinomy at the heart of
Manhattan:
Allen, she argued, “contrasted [Mary’s, Yale’s and Isaac’s] lack of faith with the trusting, understanding heart of a loyal child… What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?”
For Keeps
(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1994), p. 868.

4. The same basic disjunction between interior human corruption and musical/aesthetic wholeness is epitomized by Hannahs parents in
Hannah and Her Sisters
. In private, they wrangle bitterly with each other, he charging her with drunkenness and infidelity, she accusing him of failing to support the family and of being a non-person; in public, the solidity of their union is dramatized at parties by the romantic standards they jointly perform at the piano together such as “You Are Too Beautiful” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” the contents of the songs bearing no resemblance to the deeply conflicted emotional realities of their marriage.

5. Schickel, “Woody Allen Comes of Age,”
Time,
April 30, 1979, p. 65.

6. “From now on Lady, I insist/ For me no other girls exist”; “Embrace me, my irreplaceable you”; “I’m a little lamb who’s lost in the wood/ I know I could always be good to someone who’ll watch over me,”
The Great Songs of George Gershwin
(Secaucus, N.J.: Warner Brothers Publications, n.d.), pp. 95, 164, 137.

7. Allen confirmed to Stig Bjorkman that Isaac’s view that “people should mate for life like pigeons and Catholics” is close to his own: “that is what everybody tries to achieve, a deep, lasting relationship with a single other person” (p. 110).

8. “The original idea for the picture,” Allen told Silvio Bizio, actually “evolved from the music. I was listening to a record album of overtures from famous George Gershwin shows, and I thought, ‘This would be a beautiful thing to make a movie in black-and-white, you know, and make a romantic movie.’” Quoted in Julian Fox,
Woody: Movies from Manhattan,
p. 109. The plots of
Radio Days
and
Everyone Says I Love You
are similarly soundtrack-influenced. In both films, Allen accommodated narrative to the inclusion—even performance—of songs he recalled from his childhood.

9. Stanley Elkin,
The Living End
(New York: Dutton, 1979), p. 92.

10. Sam B. Girgus,
The Films of Woody Allen
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 45.

11. Tom Shales summarized the significance of Alvy’s forthright vulnerability: “Woody Allen as much as any other public male made it all right to be anxious and nervous and scared, particularly about sexual performance, and still be masculine.” “Woody Allen: The First 50 Years,”
Esquire,
April, 1987, p. 95.

12. Richard Freadman suggests that Alvy, like other Allen protagonists, is actually exploited by his love and then rejected. “If the man’s aura of painful vulnerability and enchanting idiosyncrasy has a certain sexual magnetism, these features seem to harbor a kind of built-in affective obsolescence which virtually guarantees that, having ‘loved’ him, the Beloved will ultimately become restless for precisely what ‘Woody’ lacks: virility, confidence, good humor, and a certain prepossessing swagger of conventionality.” Mary’s rejection of Isaac in favor of Yale follows the same pattern Freadman explicates. “Love Among the Stereotypes, or Why Woody’s Women Leave,” in Avvner Ziv and Anat Zajdman, eds.,
Semites and Stereotypes:
Characteristics of Jewish Humor (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993), p. 110.