The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (62 page)

1. “An Interview with Woody,” p. 67.

2. Allen described the intensification of his relationship with Soon-Yi Farrow Previn in similar terms. “But you fell in love with her?” Walter Isaacson asked. “Yes, yes,” Allen responded. “My flair for drama. What can I say?” Isaacson, p. 60.

3. As the
Everyone Says I Love You
chapter suggests, the overhearing of psychoanalytic sessions is a central plot element in both
Another Woman,
in which it functions dramatically, and
Everyone Says I Love You,
where the device serves the comic purposes of Joe Berlin’s psychically invasive courtship of Von.

4. Pauline Kael: “The movie is so lucidly constructed it’s like a diagram of all the characters’ relationships to each other” (
The New Yorker
.; October 31, 1988, p. 81). In his interview with Michiko Kakutani, Allen defended such plots in acknowledging his debt to drama and the novel. “I love the classic narrative form in a play. I love it in the novel. I don’t enjoy novels that aren’t basically clear stories…. when I watch Chekhov or O’Neill, where it’s men and women in human, classic crises—that I like.” “The Art of Humor,” p. 207.

5. At the end of the film, Marion suggests that Lewis’s character Helinka is “rumored to be” based on her. This revision may reflect Allen’s signal that Marion hasn’t merely dreamed the connection between herself and Helinka. And yet, the fact that Marion reads the scene as a reproduction of her and Lewis’s most romantic moment together may suggest how badly she wants this work of fiction to confirm her passionate nature.

6. Tim Pulleine,
Monthly Film Bulletin
, August, 1989, p. 232, lauded the movie; David Sterritt,
Christian Science Monitor,
October 17, 1988, p. 23, slammed it.

7. Richard A Blake, (review of
Another Woman), America
159 (December 17,1988), p. 517.

8. Lax, p. 179.

9. Ibid., p. 28.

10. The soundtrack song repeatedly elicited by Charlize Theron’s appearances is Billie Holiday’s “Did I Remember,” whose refrain—”did I remember to tell you I adore you?”—takes on an aura of Hollywood insincerity when associated with this quintessential media creation. Lest the viewer miss the fact in Allen’s assessment of this character, he has the supermodel—like Sam in
Husbands and Wives
babbling mindlessly about the zodiac—express an interest in horoscopes.

11. “You see, I was lucky,” Allen told William Geist. “I was lucky in that I had a talent to be amusing. If I didn’t have that talent, I’d have been in great peril. You can only be independent that way if you luck out. But you can’t count on it.” Geist, p. 218.

12. Providing his writer/protagonists with personal computers would have cost Allen central elements of two plots: the single copy of a novel manuscript figures in both
Husbands and Wives
(Rain leaves Gabe’s novel in a taxi) and in
Celebrity
. Harry Block is depicted in the last scene of
Deconstructing Harry
pounding away at a portable typewriter, his reliance on early twentieth-century technology replicating his creator’s preferences.

13. Roger Ebert, review of
Celebrity Chicago Sun-Times,
November 11, 1998.

20. Allen and His Audience:
Sweet and Lowdown

1. Bjorkman, p. 47.

2. Shales, “Woody: The First Fifty Years,” p. 90. Twenty years of Allen’s objections to the confusion of Sandy Bates with himself notwithstanding, the critical tendency to read Woody through Sandy survives. In
The Unruly Life of Woody Allen
(New York: Scribner, 2000), a biography published too late to contribute to this study, Marion Meade speculated, “As for his feelings about us [the audience], the question appeared to be curiously answered in
Stardust Memories,
in which he painted his affectionate fans as ghouls. That didn’t mean we abandoned him. Instead, we automatically struggled to understand the wretchedness which drove him” (p. 18).

3. Gopnick, “The Outsider,” p. 91.

4. Shales, p. 90.

5. DeCurtis, “The
Rolling Stone
Interview: Woody Allen,” p. 50.

6. Lax, pp. 370–71.

7. Shales, p. 94.

8. Bjorkman, p. 103.

9. Ibid., p. 96.

10. Allen has obviously enjoyed the mildly masochistic process of self-scurrilization which has generated post-scandal protagonists Harry Block, Lee Simon in
Celebrity,
and Emmet Ray, these characters representing a manifest improvement over the bland condo dwellers Allen scripted and portrayed in
Manhattan Murder Mystery
and
Mighty Aphrodite
in what some interpreted as an attempt on Allen’s part to recuperate his public image. In “Scuzzballs Like Us,” Jonathan Romney offers a less positive estimation of
Deconstructing Harrys
protagonist, which Romney describes as being “as close to dammit to being
explicitly
the dark side of Woody”
(Sight and Sound,
April 1999, p. 12).

11. Woody Allen,
Sweet and Lowdown,
Sony Pictures Classics, 1999.

12. Jazz guitarist Howard Alden contributed to Penn’s creation of Emmet not only through performing “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” and the other 1930s standards which constitute Emmet’s early repertoire, but also by coaching Penn in reproducing the fingerings of a master guitarist so that he might offer a passable imitation of a musician capable of Reinharddike fretboard virtuosity. Alden is accompanied by Bucky Pizzarelli, rhythm guitar, Kelly Friesen, bass, Ken Peplowski, clarinet, and Ted Sommer, drums. The film’s music was conducted and arranged by Dick Hyman, who provided Allen’s films with original songs and updated renditions of American popular standards from
Zelig
forward.

13. Elizabeth Gleick, “Her Silence Is Golden,”
Time,
December 6, 1999.

14. Amy Taubin (“Sean Penn’s High Wire Act: Wisconsin Gothic,”
The Village Voice,
December 1–7, 1999, p. 89) argues that “Though [Samantha] Morton never cloys, Allen’s misogyny vis-à-vis this character is so blatant that it almost defies mention.” Lisa Schwarzbaum
(EW
Online, December 3, 1999) makes her review an occasion for sending Soon-Yi Allen a warning: “And may I repeat, the woman Ray loves truest is an enthralled MUTE who’s as simply satisfied as an adopted child, demanding nothing more than a sandwich and a shred of attention? Soon-Yi, honey, Morton carries off the premise because she’s capable of wordless eloquence, but for pity’s sake, don’t let your husband get away with all that jazz.”

15. Stephanie Zacharek’s
Salon
review of the
Sweet and Lowdown
(December 3, 1999) similarly identified Hattie with the artist’s audience: “She’s a metaphor for the idea that even for the most brilliant musician, it’s the listener who completes the equation.”

16. “I would never do anything to curry favor with the audience. When I put out a film, if you asked me, I would say I much prefer that people like it, and that they laugh at it and enjoy it. If they don’t, they don’t, but I’m certainly not going to change the film or do anything to make them like it. Or reject an idea because I know up front it’s too dark or inaccessible or something. But I always prefer them to like it between the two choices.” Pamela Harland and Jenny Peters, “The Sweet and Lowdown from Woody Allen on his New Film …,” /fmagazine 10.3 (December 23, 1999).

17. F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Tender is the Night
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), p. 315.

18.
Salon,
n.p.

19. Harland and Peters, n.p.

20. Michael Wood, “A Kind of Slither” (review of
The Unruly Life of Woody Allen
by Marion Meade),
London Review of Books,
27 April 2000, p. 3.

21. “‘Sweet and Lowdown’: Jazz, Out of the Shadows and Into the Spotlight,
”New York Times,
December 3, 1999.

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