The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (48 page)

Among the public, Felder s pithy, widely quoted remark contributed to the mistaken perception that Soon-Yi was underage. But in the picture business, Felder's quip simply called attention to the question uppermost in most film executives' minds: How would Woody's Chappaquiddick affect his gross? Common wisdom had it that his personal problems would have "legs" and interfere with the public’s ability to watch his films. Woody laughed off the eulogies because, he said, nobody could prevent him from continuing to write screenplays. On the other hand, racked with self-pity, sometimes he felt like quitting the film industry. "I seriously considered whether I still wanted to entertain, to work hard at whatever gift I had to offer these people," he commented. But these despairing moods never lasted. Movies were his bread and butter, his "therapy." Besides, what would an impassioned workaholic do without activity?

During his years with Arthur Krim, Woody ruled as a nabob of a semi-independent kingdom that was akin to an Italian ministate with its own customs, climate, religion, and history. When his pictures lost money, the Medici financed him anyway, like a beloved old charity. The demise of Orion, however, ushered in the dawn of a new age, in which the kingdom that never deigned to deal with the Hollywood power structure had to grovel for Hollywood money.

Under Woody's three-picture deal, TriStar put up $20 million for
Husbands and Wives
and spent another $5 million to promote it, but the studio lost money with domestic box-office sales of only $10.5 million.
Manhattan Murder Mystery
also failed to cover its cost of $13.5 million. With one film remaining on his contract, the studio quietly pulled out from the arrangement but insisted that it was Woody himself who requested premature release from the contract. "Our deal with Woody was basically finished," said Mike Medavoy. He was backed up by the head of Sony Pictures (TriStar s parent), Jonathan Dolgen, who also emphatically denied that Sony played any part in the breakup. Nevertheless, nobody at TriStar seemed upset to bid Woody farewell, nor did they offer to distribute his future films. For the first time in twenty-five years, he was forced to address an unpleasant reality: Filmmaking is like any other business.

That summer, when it seemed nobody wanted to make movies with Woody anymore, Jean Doumanian was continuing to brood about the media's treatment of her friend. The only way to treat the hogwash printed in newspapers was to "wrap fish in it the next day," she said. In 1991 she had formed her own film production company and released
The Ox,
a Swedish film featuring Max von Sydow that was written and directed by Sven Nykvist. Although
The Ox
received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, it did poorly at the box office and several years later the production company bearing Doumanian's name still lacked a track record. Nevertheless, she was committed to the idea that Woody must continue making films.

Shortly after the release of
Husbands and Wives,
a mysterious new player suddenly appeared on Woody's horizon. Called Sweetland Films, it was a company that would bankroll Jean Doumanian Productions, which in turn would take over the financing of all future Woody Allen pictures. Doumanian declined to publicly identify her backers, except to say Sweetland Films was an independent company of European investors. But Hollywood savants soon concluded that the principal investor in her European consortium was none other than her boyfriend, Jaqui Safra, a wealthy member of a Swiss-Lebanese banking family.

A beefy, swarthy man with a taste for the highlife, Safra owned a glamorous East Side apartment, where he neither lived nor worked, but used exclusively for parties. He was related to Edmond Safra, a principal shareholder in the Republic New York Corporation, a holding company of nationwide commercial and savings banks. Reputed to be something of a dilettante playboy and a self-described "international financier," Safra had been an executive at American Express, as well as executive producer of
The Ox,
and a collector of movie posters. He found it amusing to take an occasional small acting role in Woody's movies: In
Stardust Memories,
he was Sandy Bates's brother-in-law on the stationary bike who keeps having heart attacks, and in
Radio Days,
the diction student with the French accent. More significant, he had been Jean Doumanians live-in boyfriend for the better part of twenty years, which automatically made him a dear friend of Woody's. Doumanian, terrified of the press ever since the
Saturday Night Live
debacle, did not care to advertise her relationship with Safra. She was always careful to describe her financial sources in terms of euphemisms: private backers, good contacts, and her favorite, a consortium of European investors.

On July 21, 1993, Woody announced that he would be leaving TriStar because Sweedand had offered him a deal he couldn't refuse: a 25 percent larger production budget, a generous director's fee consisting of a cash fee in the low seven figures, and a cut of the profits after Sweetland has recouped its investment. "I love the idea of an isolated, controllable mom-and-pop store for my movies," he said. The news that he was leaving a behemoth such as TriStar for Jean's bodega made people in the movie industry wonder aloud. "Nobody wants to be involved with him," declared a senior studio executive. If his new deal was so wonderful, as another put it, "how come he doesn't have distribution?" An insider who worked on many of Woody's films felt he was becoming "more and more insulated. This linking with his best friend and his sister tells me that." And who was going to distribute the mom-and-pop films, even if pop was Woody Allen? To those in the know, his joining forces with Sweedand had less to do with creative independence than saving face.

Woody's sister, Letty Aronson, who was now a vice president of Sweetland, scoffed at the West Coast cynics. "The story is what the story is," she explained in her best fractured Brooklynese, as if nothing had changed in her brother's life. "Any other story—other than you know of as quoted by representatives of Sony, TriStar, Allen, and Sweetland—is garbage."

If corporate Hollywood didn't buy the story of Sweedand's deal, neither did Woody's uneasy production staff. Remembering Doumanians calamitous management of
Saturday Night Live,
some wondered if Jean could be trusted anywhere near a film production company. They did not have to wait long to get their answers. According to Doumanian, Sweedand's foreign investors would retain international rights and allow her to sell American rights to whatever distributor she could rustle up. More important, she planned to concentrate on controlling costs. As it turned out, her idea of trimming the production budget was to decree sizable pay cuts for Woody's loyal staff.

Over the next two years Sweetland would be responsible for the exodus of almost the entire production team Woody had assembled since
Annie Hall,
all the familiar names that rolled at the end of each picture. The gentlemanly Robert Greenhut, for example, had produced Woody Aliens films beginning with
The Front
in 1976. "Conceivably," a satisfied Woody said in 1978, "I can see myself working with Greenhut forever." Forever ended in 1995.

Hearing Jean pontificate about cutting fat angered Greenhut. "I put together this great team," he said. "We made twenty movies and they were all very thrifty. For somebody to come in and say we were doing it improperly and we have to pay the editor $ 1,000 less—that gets my dander up."

Around this time, coproducer Helen Robin departed, likewise associate producer Thomas Reilly and costume designer Jeffrey Kurland, propmasters and sound mixers, boom men and camera operators. "I'd be thrilled if everyone would continue," Woody said. "These are my friends."

But he clearly felt no responsibility for his friends, who were replaced with cheaper help, or with professional number crunchers such as the new producer, Richard Brick, who had been commissioner of the Mayors Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcasting. Prior to his job as film czar, Brick served an extensive apprenticeship as a production and location manager
(Silkwood, Ragtime)
before producing, in 1991, an independent art film about inner city youths,
Hangin With the Homeboys.
Brick's new job was to make sure the consortium's money was used for what went on the screen, not for what went into the employees' pockets—or stomachs. One of his first policy changes was to ban free coffee for the crew after lunch. To keep up morale during long, tedious workdays, movie companies have traditionally provided all the free coffee you can drink. When it looked as if the crew might tar and feather him, Brick restored the coffee wagon.

It was not as if Woody had run out of alternatives. He could have retained his staff, very likely at their usual salaries, by alternating personal films with an occasional commercial film, just as Martin Scorsese once in a while would make a
Cape Fear
followed by an
Age of Innocence,
If he had wished to, Woody probably could have made another hit like
Annie Hall.
But he resisted suggestions of compromise. Instead he took the moral high road by involving himself as little as possible in such pedestrian matters as money. Since firing people personally would have been too messy, he left these jobs to Jean and her bean counters. Ix>yal associates forced to walk the plank preferred to curse her and Letty, "those Sweetland women," rather than hold Woody responsible. "Of course he allowed it," a departed technician admitted. "Because the only thing he cares about is making his movies."

The new emphasis on the bottom line exasperated some ex-staffers because Woody was never known for generosity. "He was cheap," said a former member of his team. "He never picked up a meal tab. There was never a Christmas party or a card or a gift—never!—and he didn't like people to take off holidays because they meant nothing to him. There were no wrap gifts which are standard in the industry. And yet people didn't care about his chintziness because he was so generous in other ways, like credits. He made us feel we were part of something."

Those who remained wiih Woody and agreed to work tor scale, sometimes ai half their regular compensation, usually had personal reasons: Either they were nearing retirement age, or they were foreign residents who wanted to continue living in the United Stales

Circumspect in public, they grumbled among themselves. Unwilling to place the blame on Woody himself, his associates reserved their hostility tor jean Doumanian and Letty Arunson Jean was smart but abrasive; Letty was known for her temper. While both women were privy to Woody's private life, they had never been involved in his business, and, among his associates, were not considered 61m professionals.

On location in Europe for
Everyone Says . 'eve Yarn
in 1995, the stingy behavior of the penny-pinching Sweedand ckcl rives antagonized people. In the late afternoons, Aronson and Doumanian would arrive at the location, as one participant reported, "dressed to the teeth and stand around yapping. 'Where are we having dinner tonight? We have to get finished soon.' Every night it was where they were going to eat." Arriving in Paris, they did not hesitate 10 stay at the Ritz with round-the-clock can and driven, while the rest of the crew had to content themselves with the local version of Motel 6, scraping by on a minuscule per diem, "the lowest any American crew has ever got in Europe." It was the same story in Venice, where, recalled a crew member, "we slept at crummy hotels and they were at the Gritti Palace on the Grand Canal."

On the surface, Woody's life returned to normal, and for the first time in several yean, his creative energy rebounded. No longer in need of collaborators, he seemed like the legendary Woody of old, who was bunting with ideas for ten writers. As if to prove he had not mailed his career to Roman Polanski, he branched out to tackle new projects in addition to producing his annual feature.

One of his cherished whipping boys was television, or "elevator music," as he called it. In the late sixties, when he earned more than a million dollars a year as a comic, a sizable portion of his income had come from television, particularly the hosting of high-rated specials such as
Kraft Music Hail
Bur having abandoned stand-up for filmmaking, he had slammed the medium. In the seventies, asked whether television had improved his mind, he replied "a lot"—it raised his level of taste to the point where he no longer watched it. (In reality, he watched sports and old movies.)

By 1994, however, when TV standards had dumbed down to an all-time low, he had a sudden change of heart and decided that "television had improved tremendously."

By 1994, however, when TV standards had dumbed down to an all-time low, he had a sudden change of heart and decided that "television had improved tremendously." At the urging of Jean Doumanian, her rich boyfriend, and his sister, Letty, Woody agreed to revive
Don't Drink the Water,
his first produced play that he had written when he was thirty-one. Now that he was fifty-eight, he was the correct age to play the father, originally acted by Lou Jacobi, and he also cast Michael J. Fox as the son and one of his favorite actresses, Julie Kavner, as the mother. The rationale for recycling a nearly thirty-year-old work was supplied by Jean Doumanian. "I thought he owes it to his public to give them some quality TV," she told the
Hollywood Reporter.
Woody was in Europe when
Don't Drink the Water
aired on ABC in December 1994. Reviewers noted that he had made no effort to modernize hopelessly stale material, the characters were cartoons, and the depiction of Arab characters was grossly insensitive. A reviewer from
Variety
suggested that he should have left the play in a shoe box under his bed. Apparently viewers agreed because about half of them flipped channels before the teleplay's conclusion. Undeterred, Woody took another plunge into television the following year when he starred with Peter Falk, with even less success, in a remake of Neil Simons
The Sunshine Boys.