The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (50 page)

Ebert was indignant. "Oh, Gene," he fussed.

Filmgoer apathy for
Everyone Says I Love You
was reflected in the box-office revenue that never managed to hit $ 10 million, in woeful contrast to a dog such as
Beavis and Butt-head Do America,
another new release that took in $20 million during its opening weekend.

It was inevitable. The titillating scandal of Woody, Mia, and Soon-Yi retreated into history, to be replaced by fresher Hollywood scandals: the thirteen-year-old boy who alleged he had been molested by Michael Jackson; the black book of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss; the breakup of Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson; the O. J. Simpson and Menendez brothers murder trials.

Those expecting Woody to join Roman Polanski in the gulag of exiled directors were surprised to encounter a Woody on the defensive. The star-makers who had once convinced him of his own genius were long retired from the playing field, but Woody, as seasonally as the birds migrated south, threw himself into a new project every fall and released a new feature in October or December, in time to be considered for the Oscars.

As the market for his films shrank, he felt terrified that his time as an innovative filmmaker had passed, just as the end had come for Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Dennis Hopper, and Robert Altman, indeed for most of the brash, young filmmakers of the seventies, except for Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. He was keenly aware he could not continue to make the same kind of film, in which he needed only to be "Woody Allen" to sell tickets. (In fact, there was now a generation of young moviegoers who had never seen
Annie Hall
or
Sleeper,
to whom Woody Allen was a scrawny comedian who couldn't act and who had slept with his girlfriend s daughter.) Obviously, staying au courant, retooling his product, was a matter of economic necessity, reluctant as he was to acknowledge it. Fighting to reclaim his reputation and fatten his grosses, he began to woo a broader range of moviegoers, and that meant playing it safe with fluffy, feel-good stories geared to some of those folks who spent their time visiting shopping malls and seeing Bruce Willis pictures, in short, the mass audience he had derided long ago.

Approaching his sixtieth birthday, he was prepared to forego risky films such as
Interiors, Shadows and Fog,
and the ill-considered Chekhovian
September
In his eagerness to please his new audience, he visually dazzled them with Busby Berkeley chorus lines of singing and dancing Grouchos, Peter Pan dance numbers filmed in Paris against a background of the Seine, and twenties costume pictures complete with Art Deco sets and antique road

stem. All of bit recent comedies were sleek and handsome, but they were also popcorn pictures, distressingly devoid of substance or ideas. Auteur filmmaking gave way to a new genre, potboiler auteur. In contrast, a film such as Cr
imes and Misdemeanors
now seemed as weighty as Bergman's
Seventh Seal

More than the cars and costumes, his most conspicuous practice, first seen with
Shadows and Fog,
was to freshen up his pictures with a clever kind of froufrou window dressing that consisted of top stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Demi Moore, Billy Crystal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kenneth Branagh, Julia Roberts, Goldie Hawn, Kirstic Alley, Robin Williams, Helena Bonham Carter, Elisabeth Shue, Winona Ryder, Ed Norton, and Drew Barrymore, among many others. Since he could not possibly match their customary fees, he had to take poduck and hope to catch them between pictures, or not get them at all. (In this way, for example, he managed to get a week of Robin Williams's time for $10,000 when he was between film roles that paid him millions.)

Nothing worked. His consistently pitiful grosses of recent years utterly mystified him, he said. He could understand why so few people wanted to see an esoteric picture such as
Shadows and Fog,
but why hadn't
Husbands and Wives
and
Manhattan Murder Mystery
taken off? He couldn't figure out what had happened with
Bullets over Broadway,
which received good notices and seven Oscar nominations (and in which he did not appear). Wanting to believe that the sex scandal had not cost him his audience, he insisted that his films had never been a huge draw in this country, except in a few big cities, and his grosses "were never any good, and they're not good now."

There was a time, in the seventies, when his grosses were quite respectable. In fact, in the years between 1975 and 1979, his films were among the top ten box-office draws. It was not until
Stardust Memories
that his career peaked commercially and began a downward slide. By the nineties, when he received the biggest box-office response of his entire career, it was for something else— his personal, offscreen drama, which, ironically, played to packed houses in big cities and small.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Getting Even

Year after year, to regain his children, Woody had feverishly poured money and hope into the stew of lawsuits he had kept simmering on the back burner, a kettle that by now had almost burned dry. At the end of 1995, his weekly visits with Satch were suspended after Satch claimed his father physically abused him, an episode Woody vehemently denied. The boy told his therapist that he "hated and feared" his father and was not looking forward to any more visits. Furthermore, the therapist reported to Elliott Wilk, the child "suffered from nightmares and stomach aches."

As defeat followed defeat, it seemed as if Woody could do nothing right against his foes. His efforts to remove Elliott Wilk from the case on the grounds of bias had failed, and even his determination to punish Frank Maco came to naught. After four years, the Connecticut Grievance Committee dismissed his ethics complaint against the prosecutor. Although Macos actions were sharply criticized on the grounds of insensitivity, he was neither dismissed nor disbarred. At the Litchfield Inn, he celebrated with a lunch of softshell crabs and returned to his job. Although these reverses would have discouraged even the most bullheaded person, they had no effect whatsoever on Woody, who, in the spring of 1996, redoubled his fight for more liberal visitation rights and again confronted Elliott Wilk. As if the previous three years never existed, Woody pushed to see Dylan and Satch on alternate weekends without a chaperon and in the presence of Soon-Yi. This repetitive petition was a mistake, not merely because he had lost every previous round, but also because he seemed oblivious to the true situation: Neither Dylan nor Satch had any desire to see him.

In his reply, a testy Wilk said that his making such a request only confirmed how "little understanding or empathy" he had with respect to his children. Again the judge vetoed any contact with eleven-year-old Dylan, her emotional state being still "too fragile and unsettled." The very thought of seeing him made her hysterical and she told her therapist she did not want to lay eyes on Woody Allen ever again because of his "boyfriend-girlfriend relationship" with her sister. Both Satch and Moses, now an eighteen-year-old college student, despised him. The verdict was unanimous: Everyone in the world hated him. In the same decision, however, Wilk said he would permit resumption of supervised visitation with Satchel for a test period of four weeks at die office of his therapist, at which rime fie would reassess (he situation. Smarting, Woody was not about to agree to such restrictive terms. Instead, his legal options exhausted, he dreamed out loud about taking revenge on Elliott Wilk—perhaps by filming a documentary about the judge that he would call
An Error in judgment.

It looked as if the bloody custody battle was finally over. The war, however, continued.

On a Friday night in late February 1996, Woody arrived at Tetcrboro Airport in New Jersey to board a private jet that would rake him to Pahs and fourteen other dries, a grand total of twenty-three days of mostly one-night stands. Accompanying him was Soon-Yi, Letty, and Jean Doumanian with her dog, a silver-gray, sixty-pound slobbering weimaraner named Jasmine that he trusted would stay as far from him as possible. As soon as the seat-belt sign went off, a documentary filmmaker and a crew of three went into action.

His last experience on the road was the stand-up circuit in the seventies, a dismal memory because the monotony of the work practically killed him. The idea of a backbreaking musical road tour, one that paraded his lack of natural musical skill before large audiences in a different city every day, sounded like the last thing he needed. On die contrary, he certainly did not need the money or the aggravation. Usually he warned people he was a "terrible* clarinetist, like Jack Benny on the violin, an amateur who was tolerated by the public and music critics alike because he was a celebrity. But what he needed at the moment was more spectacular ammunition in his continuing public-relations skirmishes with Mia. Like so many of his projects lately, the concert tour was conceived by the head of his brain trust, Jean Doumanian, who was impressed by the enthusiasm of European visitors to Michael's Pub, and decided that Woody and his band should star in a quality musk documentary. The
Citizen Kane
of this genre was a rock documentary.
Don't Look Bock,
D. A. Pennebaker's transfixing backstage classic that followed a baby-faced twenty-three-year-old Bob Dylan on his 1965 tour of England. Anyone who saw the film never forgot the unobtrusive camera capturing Dylan rushed by screaming fans, Dylan teasing reporters backstage, Dylan bantering with Donovan in his hotel suite, always refusing to suffer fools gladly. In Jean's view, an updated
Don't Look Back
might be just what the spin doctor ordered to emphasize Woody's charismatic side. The crucial question was. Who would get behind the camera?

Recently Doumanian had seen a documentary chronicling die life of comics artist Robert Crumb (creator of Fritz the Cat), which was produced by a talented San Francisco filmmaker, Terry Zwigoff, who spent six years studying the counterculture illustrator. The result was an extraordinary film that scooped up a cluster of awards and earned more than $3 million. Doumanian thought that
Crumb
was
^H
an incredible piece of work and I knew he would be right for this." Learning that Zwigoff had filmed the life of blues musician Howard Armstrong
{Louie Bluie,
1985) and also collected old jazz and blues recordings clinched it in her mind. Zwigoff and Allen would be a perfect match.

Everyone was pleased when Terry Zwigoff said he was interested in making the film. Of course, from Zwigoff 's viewpoint, an authorized film would mean loss of independence, but a budget in the neighborhood of $500,000 would make it financially worth his while. Tempted, he cautioned Woody that he "wouldn't take it easy on him," and Woody replied that was precisely what made
Crumb
so special. Only a few weeks before the concert tour was scheduled to begin, Zwigoff, perhaps realizing that he was not going to retain final approval after all, bowed out. Making no secret of his unhappiness, he complained to
Entertainment Weekly,
"They were like, 'Who do you think you are, Orson Welles?'" Insiders speculated that the problem was Jean Doumanian, who evidently was not shy about boasting that Woody didn't get final cut on her projects—"I do." (Zwigoff denied that he left over the issue of final cut, citing personal reasons.) Undaunted, Doumanian quickly hand-picked a replacement for Zwigoff.

Winner of two Academy Awards, Barbara Kopple had been the darling of the documentary film business for almost two decades. Although she possessed a self-effacing manner and a pretty, baby-doll face, she was, in fact, a fearless, highly manipulative filmmaker who had made several outstanding documentaries: one, about the labor struggles of Kentucky coal miners
(Harlan County U.S.A.);
the other, about Minnesota meatpacking plant strikers
(American Dream).
Some thought her greatest film was
Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson,
a 1993 television documentary. From the beginning of her career, by presenting herself as a breathless, helpless little girl, an affect not unlike Mia Farrow's, Kopple learned how to get what she wanted, and that included bursting into tears if the occasion demanded it. Now in her fifties, she still wore her coal-black hair long and straight with a center part, a resolutely seventies hairstyle reminiscent of the one worn by the actress Valerie Bertinelli.