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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466847620 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 11/03/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 397 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
DAVID EVANIER is the bestselling author of nine books, including Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin and Making The Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Rosselli Story. He received the Aga Khan Fiction Prize and the McGinniss-Ritchie Short Fiction Award, and is a former fiction editor of The Paris Review. He is married and lives in Brooklyn.
David Evanier is the author of seven books. His work includes novels, story collections, and biographies of entertainment legends. Evanier’s work has been published in Best American Short Stories and has been honored with the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for short fiction. He is a former fiction editor of the Paris Review and a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, as well as a fellow of Yaddo and of the Wurlitzer Foundation. He has taught creative writing at UCLA and Douglas College. He lives in Brooklyn and is currently writing a biography of Woody Allen.
Read an Excerpt
Woody
The Biography
By David Evanier
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 David EvanierAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-4762-0
CHAPTER 1
Enchantment Was the Reason
This is not a blow-by-blow or a standard critical biography. Other writers have connected all the dots of Woody Allen's personal life and his work. Allen has been explored, dissected, and analyzed, and has eluded the grasp of biographers who have explored him that way. I want to add what has been missed about his work while sketching in some essential brushstrokes of his life and career. There is a great deal that is new. I hope that these discoveries and insights will make Allen known and understood in a deeper way.
Allen was one of a select group of men enormously rich by their thirties, used to getting what he wanted, doing whatever he wanted, and getting away with it. But what did he want? Apart from artistic freedom and independence, it has never been clear. He was never beholden to normal moral boundaries. There were no boundaries, no remorse. Yet he has proceeded morally. He was withdrawn and brooding, and he has stayed that way. "I think he's essentially the same person he was when he started out," Richard Schickel told me. "I don't think his essential sensibility has changed much over the years. He really will do what he wants to do. And he doesn't really care what other people think. He simply lives his life by his own lights. It's a completely moral life. I've known him since the sixties. He's never disappointed me. I have the highest regard for him.
"When he finishes one movie, I don't think he really takes any time off," Schickel continued. "He's probably thinking about the next one when he's making the one he is making. He just goes ahead. I don't think, health issues aside, I can't imagine him stopping. I think he'll go forever. Those who are really unstoppable as artists, I think, like Woody, are a little bit taken for granted. People don't really appreciate the consistent high quality of what he does. So many people falter quite early and fall into their various funks. But he does not. It's an amazing body of work."
But Allen remains painfully shy. "The most difficult aspect of filmmaking for Woody is people," Ralph Rosenblum wrote. "Meeting them, dealing with them, managing them. ... Socializing, schmoozing, kibitzing are anathema to him. He'd prefer not to be introduced to the sound editor's new assistant, and he will do almost anything to avoid a handshake. Those he gives — watery handshakes, no grip in them at all — seem to be moments of torture during which he won't know what to do with his eyes." The concentration is always on his work.
And Allen seems to disappoint himself even in that. He has always walked away from what he has succeeded at. It's never good enough, in his own estimation. He didn't let himself be swayed by the passion for acceptance and money. He has turned his back on success in a way that no other major filmmaker has. They would be both unwilling and unable to do it. In terms of early white-hot mainstream successes — What's New Pussycat? Casino Royale, What's Up, Tiger Lily?, Love and Death, Annie Hall, Manhattan — his career can be compared to Alfred Hitchcock's. But Hitchcock loved the hits. It mattered to him to have an audience. In the Truffaut-Hitchcock interviews in Hitchcock (1967), he shrugged off Vertigo because it was not a big hit. He had success as a producer and director in filmmaking and TV for decades, and he was somewhat addicted to that. Allen's addiction is to the work alone. Allen has constantly segued from commercial hits (Manhattan) to Bergmanesque esoterica (Interiors) to beautiful and heartfelt personal films (Broadway Danny Rose) without batting an eyelash, just as he has constantly experimented with new types and styles of films so that he would not sacrifice his freedom to invent and create something new. He has been aesthetically and thematically groundbreaking in ways that we have tended to forget or take for granted. There's no linear arc to Annie Hall: Allen uses animation in it; he plays with time; he uses a split screen. He breaks the fourth wall. Annie moves outside her body to observe her lovemaking with Alvy.
Walking away has been a recurring motif in Allen's career — and life. "Woody had developed over the years an absolutely killing stand-up act," Mark Evanier recalled. "He gave it up. There are other guys with that kind of material who would have lived the rest of their lives off that act. Woody was opening at one point in Las Vegas for someone else. He didn't care about the billing. Very few people in his position would not say, 'I'm not going to take second position on the marquee; it's bad for my career.' But for Woody, stand-up didn't matter; he wasn't going to do stand-up for the rest of his life. At that point it was clear he was moving toward movies and stage. There was a moment in his career when he was on everything. He was on game shows. He was guest host for Johnny Carson. He was on I've Got a Secret, What's My Line? And there seemed to be nothing he wouldn't do. He was turning up in Playboy all the time. And that all stopped. One day he was not available anymore."
Allen was a hit in Las Vegas, extremely popular with audiences, and he walked away from it. No other film artist has walked away from the mainstream in this way. Allen has always walked away. He walked away from being a hugely successful TV writer. Harlene, his first wife, urged him to persevere and keep building on his success in television, but he turned his back on that to do stand-up, where there was initially no money at all. That was part of the tension between them. He was very popular on the talk-show circuit. He walked away from that. Then from stand-up he segued to become a very successful Hollywood writer. When he wanted to become a writer-director, there wasn't real support for that; his budget was only a million and a half dollars for Take the Money and Run. That wasn't his salary; that was the total budget. They wouldn't pay him a fee, and people were asking him, Why are you doing this? Go cash your checks and be a Hollywood rewrite guy.
"There's some self-loathing in Woody," according to Gary Terracino. "Groucho Marx's 'I would never want to join a club that would have me as a member.' It's there in what he's walked away from. It's there in the way he doubts his own work. It's there in terms of how he blew up his personal life. But he has always known how to fan the flames of his own celebrity but not be a fame-chasing whore.
"While there's that aspect of Woody, it's not quite self-destructive because he's always done things the same way," Terracino continued. "There's something contemptuous, a need to upend things without upending things — shake things up, let people know he can walk away. You don't think I can walk away from Hollywood? I can walk away. You don't think I can walk away from Vegas? Yes I can. You don't think I can abandon the working-class and middle-class shtick of Take the Money and Run and Sleeper? Watch me. He walked away from Mia even with the kids. I can be nominated for the Academy Awards every other year. I won't go. He can do it. And most people can't. Most artists hold on to everything. Everyone else chased the hits. There's no other mainstream writer or producer who has not been intoxicated by the mainstream. Orson Welles, of all people, was in love with his celebrity. With other artists, self-loathing manifests itself as a more desperate need for success and adulation. Scorsese cares about success. Hitchcock lived and died by temporary success. People like Coppola or Hal Ashby spun out of control in more drugs and alcohol or more blatantly self-destructive behavior chasing the hits."
"And Woody doesn't pander to easy money," Mark Evanier said. "Think what Woody could make tomorrow if he suddenly decided to endorse a product or do a TV special. Or make a really commercial movie. Even if it's not money, sometimes there's a desire for activity and notoriety. Not Woody. He must be constantly approached by people who want to break into his lifestyle, have him appear in their movie, direct their movie, be on their specials. I don't know if he's ever done a talk show since the early days on Carson and Cavett. There was a period when the staff that worked for David Letterman were determined to get Woody on the show. David had made it clear that he wanted no guest more than Woody Allen. People had the attitude, I'll be the hero; Dave will love me if I get Woody. And I'd guess they probably made some pretty rude, harassing approaches. I would guess when they called Woody's office it's like, Thanks very much; Woody is very appreciative of the honor but he just doesn't do that. There are only a handful of people who are ungettable. There aren't too many people who ever place limitations on their own careers. Who just say, I'm going to do this. I don't care if I do anything else."
I will mention in passing but not dwell on Allen's lesser films (good as many of them are), and I will focus on some of his best: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Husbands and Wives, Radio Days, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Bullets over Broadway, Alice, Deconstructing Harry, Anything Else, Match Point, You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger, Everyone Says I Love You, and Midnight in Paris. Critics I respect have — incomprehensibly, from my point of view — mined his "Bergman" films and his German-Jewish expressionist experiment, Shadows and Fog, for depth and significance, but they just aren't there. "Watching those films is like having a stone on your chest," the film critic Phillip Lopate told me. The critics who take those films seriously are among the ones to whom Allen often grants his most confiding and open interviews: Richard Schickel, Stig Björkman, and Eric Lax, his first biographer. Yet Allen clearly admires and respects writers critical of his work, John Simon and Pauline Kael among them.
"Any kind of dependence is dangerous," John Simon related. "And to be too over dependent is certainly dangerous. I think that admiration for Bergman and a kind of conscious, or even unconscious, imitation is a perilous position. Because you can't imitate a genius. You can imitate lesser men. But with a genius either you become too subservient or you try very hard not to show that you're imitating. That pushes you in a questionable direction." Woody nailed it himself, perhaps unwittingly, when he was asked by Eric Lax about the reaction of some critics that the dialogue of Interiors was too stiff, and he made the startling admission that he may inadvertently have been writing subtitles instead of live dialogue:
After Interiors, months later, I was sitting home and suddenly thought to myself, Gee, did I make this mistake? Because of my exposure to foreign films, in my ear for dialogue, was I really writing subtitles to foreign films? When you see, say, a Bergman film, you're reading it because you're following the subtitles. And when you read it, the dialogue has a certain cadence. My ear was picking up on subtitle-style dialogue and I was creating that for my characters. I worried about that. It's something I never really resolved clearly. I don't know.
What is clear is that Allen is often hung up on doom and gloom, on the lugubrious, when he tackles serious work that does not reflect his own life experience. Not only has he not experienced it but he may not have even read the work of writers he name-drops, impressing the legions of people who haven't read them either. This is hot stuff to him, this is what the big guys are into — and he feels like a lonely outsider with his paltry jokes. The absence of his sense of humor harms those films irretrievably.
But don't be surprised if Allen brings it all together yet in a successful merging of drama and comedy, that the influences of Bergman and Fellini do not drown him but somehow conjoin and blend with his magical touch. For Woody never ceases to surprise.
This is what even his critics say about him — John Simon commented: "How can you debate whether the Eiffel Tower adds to or detracts from Paris? He's part of the landscape, and we would be poorer without him. His productivity is admirable. It proves he has energy, ideas, creative spirit. I'm fascinated by these women he picks up the moment they are good-looking and a little bit famous. He lobs them into his next movie.
"When you come to think of it," Simon continued, "he's really the only independent filmmaker who worked for decades, made some very good movies, some not so good movies, some bad movies — like Interiors, which is terrible. But he kept going. And he became internationally loved. It's amazing that this Jewish schlemiel became the most universally loved figure in film. Now, who else did that? I can't think of anyone else. Warren Beatty to some extent perhaps. So that's something right there. He is not ashamed to be himself, including his looks. And the fact that he does appeal to foreign markets and that he's not a curiosity like the French being in love with Jerry Lewis. He's not that kind of celebrity. And he has survived his comical looks fairly well. Especially since he casts these comical figures as lovers, which is daring. And he manages to get away with it. He was witty. He still is.
"There's no independent filmmaker in America who has his fame. His humor is always not exactly black, but kind of dark gray. Which gives it a kind of profundity it wouldn't have otherwise. There's always the sense of the fragility of relationships, unpredictability of life. Which is not a cheerful thing, but he makes something out of it. And he doesn't go too far with his magic realism. He knows where to stop. That's a good thing to know.
"Makes fun of himself. Makes fun of other people. That works. In the thirties there was a period when American movies had wit. But that's about it. Preston Sturges, Groucho. A few directors. His Gal Friday. But not anymore. There's very little cleverness around. Woody still has it in his films to some extent, which is commendable. He does manage to amuse people, and yet at the same time it's not total frivolity either. He is aware of the world. He does pay attention to what's going on in the world.
"He is someone to reckon with. I hope Woody makes one great film before he quits. It's always been sort of on the verge of something wonderful. But not quite. But that's still better than what most people do."
A harsher critic, the late Stanley Kauffmann, said, "Like Jules Feiffer, he dramatized modern urban Jewish neuroses. One of the reasons for his critical success is that people recognize his contribution to America's understanding of itself. That's an achievement. Probably the future will think more highly of him than we do."
* * *
In Manhattan, following in the footsteps of Annie Hall, he continued to emerge as a real artist. The film not only had artistry; it had audacity. What was it about? A man in love with a girl twenty-five years his junior — and underage as well. A man dating a girl "who did homework." He won an Academy Award for it, and world renown. This was in 1979. He went on to other works in which the theme of a man's love for a much younger woman was prominent, and he's still doing them. And he acted out that theme in real life, and got away with it. He has had a stable, enduring marriage that has already lasted more than eighteen years. He has spent a lifetime writing for himself and about himself — despite his denials. And he has arguably made some of the best American movies of our time — and at least five that are terrible. In the process he has become the most influential filmmaker in American life.
Enchantment was the reason.
In his memoir Final Cut, Steven Bach, an executive at United Artists, which produced Allen's films for many years, seemed to regard Manhattan as justification for three difficult years at the company. Bach, who hailed from Montana, saw the film at a private screening and wrote of his epiphanic feelings with a Thomas Wolfe–like intensity. He saw the film on a beautiful April day in Manhattan, "one of those spring days songs are written about, the sky a perfect blue, the air balmy, soothing my jet-lagged nerves and smoothing the edges of an often-jangled city." He wrote that "if there are two hours in my three years and three days at United Artists that remain in memory as pure, unambiguous pleasure, they are these two. ... What I found in those two hours seemed something I'd grown too cynical to expect anymore: some kind of enchantment. ... I left the screening room ... and walked slowly, glowing in the continuing spell of the movie. The sky-scraping piles of steel and glass that in daylight seemed so forbidding and faceless now glinted with city lights. I could hear Gershwin playing somewhere — or thought I could — and as I grinned at my own pleasure and at the empty street and at the purple sky, I remembered all the reasons I had always wanted to live in New York and all the reasons I had wanted to be in the movie business."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Woody by David Evanier. Copyright © 2015 David Evanier. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction: How I Got to Woody,
1. Enchantment Was the Reason,
2. "Writing Saved His Life",
3. The Real Broadway Danny Rose,
4. "Woody, C'est Moi",
5. Bathing in Honey,
6. "As Tough and Romantic as the City He Loved",
7. The Woman Who Saves Leonard Zelig,
8. Dick and Woody,
9. "Startling Intimations of Greatness",
10. Sex, Lies, and Videotapes,
11. Woody Pulls the Rabbit Out of the Hat — Again,
12. Balls of Steel,
Epilogue: Touching the Entire World,
Filmography,
Bibliography,
List of Illustrations,
Index,
About the Author,
Also by David Evanier,
Praise for the Author,
Copyright,