Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  Once again, he collaborated with Marshall Brickman. "The first draft," remembered Brickman, "was the story of a guy who lived in New York and was forty years old and was examining his life." The guy is Alvy Singer, a comic by trade, a whiner by nature, who can always find something to fuss about. To keep up his morale, he reminds himself that being unhappy isn't so terrible because life is a mixture of troubles too horrible for words (blindness, terminal illness) and garden-variety misery (everything else), and so all of us should feel lucky to be merely miserable. Woody and his collaborator worked together almost effortlessly. Their routine was to trudge down Lexington Avenue, discussing ideas, sometimes crossing over to Madison, sometimes stopping for Haagen-Dazs, Woody writing down dialogue, then more brainstorming. Among the various strands in Alvy's life were a love relationship gone wrong, the meaninglessness of life, and "an obsession with proving himself and testing himself to find out what kind of character he had," recalled Brickman. What resulted finally was a long opening soliloquy that repeatedly cut away to a series of more or less disconnected events that explicated his discontent and self-loathing, and also showed him trolling for women.

  With an initial operating budget of $3 million (rising to $4 million), Woody's "picture about me" went into production in the spring of 1976. After five pictures, filmed in California, Colorado, Puerto Rico, Paris, and Budapest, he finally got to live at home and shoot his first movie in New York City—become, in fact, a completely New York-based filmmaker. Drawing from the pool of local production people, he gathered a select circle of crew members who would stay on as regulars for the next twenty years. Working with a creative casting director, Juliet Taylor, he was able to make good use of New York's stage actors, people such as Colleen Dewhurst, Christopher Walken, Sigourney Weaver, and Danny Aiello. His new cinematographer was the New York-born Gordon Willis, a brilliant forty-seven-year-old who filmed, among others, The Godfather and was known in the business as "The Prince of Darkness" for his underlit films.

  To play Alvy Singer's two ex-wives, Woody cast Janet Margolin (who actually resembled Harlene) and Carol Kane. For Alvy’s current girlfriend, Annie, Woody gave the part to Diane Keaton, on whom, of course, the character happened to be based. This girlfriend, referred to in Alvy’s opening monologue, did not actually appear on-screen for fifteen minutes. No matter. Annie Hall was not the main character.

  Diane Keaton was living in a stark white apartment, in an Art Deco building on East Sixty-eighth Street. It boasted a white-on-white living room, which contained a white-on-white painting. The kitchen was also white: not only its walls and floors and Braun and Osterizer appliances, its crisp white telephone and white watering can, but even the Keri lotion was in a white container perched on a white shelf. "White is very cleansing for me," she explained. Except for her two cats, Buster and Whitey, she lived alone.

  Keaton, now thirty, could look back on a film career that had run hot and cold. Her drab role as Kay Corleone, the downtrodden wife in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II, did not suggest any great acting range. "She was abysmal in the Godfather films," Stanley Kauffmann said. "Obviously Woody was crazy about her. Sometimes that can be detrimental. When a director is infatuated with his leading actress, he can go mad in licking her with the camera. But Woody managed to transform his feelings into good evocative use of her talent." Still, in Play It Again, Sam; Sleeper; and Love and Death, Woody was the star who got all the good lines, and she remained in his shadow, at times little more than ornamental window dressing. During long periods of unemployment, she kept busy taking classes—singing, acting, dancing—and working out at the gym every other day. She supported herself by doing the "Hour after Hour" underarm deodorant commercial on television and acting in TV series such as Mannix and The FBI, and she also made two films that were less than stellar.

  In the first cut of Woody s new movie, Alvy Singer meets Annie Hall after a doubles match at a tennis club. Dressed in street clothes, they stand around talking. Annie is wearing men's clothing: a white men's shirt tucked into baggy tan trousers, a black vest, and a long polka-dot tie (all of which came out of Diane's own closet). On her head is a floppy black hat. Within thirty seconds of her appearance, she laughs, shakes her head, throws up her hands, looks bewildered, giggles, reproaches herself, then calms down. "Oh, well, la-de-dah," she trills. "La-de-dah." Like Alvy, who lerves her, lo-oves her, luffs her, who has to invent words because love is too weak to express his feelings, the audience likewise lerves her immediately.

  The end of Woody's real affair with Keaton was protracted and painful. If he resented her therapist and teachers, she disliked his condescension, pecadilloes, and zombie moods. Repeatedly separating and reuniting, they finally went their own ways and settled into a companionable friendship, catching foreign movies and Knicks games together. Once they were at his apartment after a game, and she was hungry, even though she had just dined on steak and potatoes and marble cheesecake at Frankie and Johnnie's. She went to the freezer and took out frozen waffles and heated up three or four. Then, no sooner did she finish the waffles than she was back in the kitchen, fixing tacos. Woody decided that she had "the largest appetite of anyone I've ever known."

  Woody continued to look back nostalgically on their romance, even though he treated her in a manner expressly designed to sabotage the relationship. Still, there were times when he missed her terribly. Nobody had really taken her place.

  That September, Ralph Rosenblum found himself running smack into the same sort of problems that had confronted him on Woody's first picture. When he started sifting through the 100,000 feet of footage, he smelled big trouble. In his opinion, it was "an untitled and chaotic collection of bits and pieces that seemed to defy continuity," and he held little hope for popular success. The film opens in Woody's old Brooklyn neighborhood and shows his mother's consternation when a black family moves in. Among other scenes there is a guided tour through the nine layers of Hell with the Devil (Level Five: organized crime, fascist dictators, and people who disapprove of oral sex), an idea that would resurface twenty years later in Deconstructing Harry when Billy Crystal gives Harry the very same tour. An admittedly disheartened Marshall Brickman could see that the film was "running off in nine different directions" and the first twenty-five minutes didn't work at all.

  By the end of October, however, Rosenblum had a bloated first cut, which ran about two hours and twenty minutes. Yet, in spite of dozens of brilliant skits and laughs galore, there was no plot. In a stream-of-consciousness monologue, reminiscent of Take the Money and Run, Woody skidded from one vignette to another—from the absence of God to fear of the void to his fascination with nymphets to his fear of impotence. "The thing was supposedly to take place in my mind." Like a dying man watching a mosaic of his life float by, he tried to cover every base.

  To find a story that worked, Rosenblum began trimming Alvy's relationships with his first two wives, and as he did so, Diane Keaton began to dominate the footage, so he "kept cutting in the direction of that relationship." Before long, the whole concept of the picture began to change, moving steadily from a story of Alvy complaining about his difficulty with relationships in general to his love affair with Annie in particular. What remained was a tidy love story about a neurotic New York comedian and his equally neurotic girlfriend, and how they met and fell in love, and how, eventually, they drift apart. Relationships, like life, Alvy muses afterward, are full of loneliness and misery but unfortunately "it’s all over much too quickly." Because Alvy knows that his craving for love will assure another relationship, and another, he tells the old joke about the man who goes to a shrink because his crazy brother thinks he's a chicken.

  Turn him in, advises the doctor.

  "I would, but I need the eggs."

  Annie, after living in Los Angeles for a while, returns to New York. Alvy and his date bump into her and her date outside the Thalia theater, which is showing The Sorrow and the Pity. They get together for a nostalgic lunch at a restauran
t opposite Lincoln Center, and afterward Alvy watches Annie cutting across the trafffic on Columbus Avenue. She was "a terrific person," he thinks to himself. It's never clear how Annie, at the end, feels about Alvy. Diane Keaton would later observe that Annie, possibly the best women's role Woody ever wrote, is "basically stupid," in her estimation. Perhaps, but Annie is too smart, too ambitious, to waste her life with Alvy.

  All that remained to do, finally, was choosing a title. Woody favored calling the picture Anhedonia, while Marshall Brickman countered with equally silly titles (It Had to Be Jew, Me and My Goy). Woody, however, could not have been more serious about Anhedonia. Brickman recalled that when Arthur Krim first heard the title, he "walked over to the window and threatened to jump." Eric Pleskow remembered getting a phone call from Gabe Sumner, vice president in charge of advertising and promotion at UA.

  "Listen, I have Woody here," Sumner said. "Did you hear the title of the movie? Anhedonia."

  "You can't be serious," replied Pleskow. He hung up the phone, looked up the word in the dictionary, then sped down to Sumner's office on the floor below, where the discussion became more heated. Woody refused to budge. Finally, Pleskow politely put his foot down. "For you and me, it will be Anhedonia, but for the rest of the people we need to find a title." He wasn't joking.

  During a series of test audience screenings, Woody diligently tried out a different name each night. Anhedonia got blank stares; Anxiety produced a few chuckles. Finally it was a toss-up between Annie and Alvy and Annie Hall (which Eric Pleskow never considered "a catchy title" either). Even so, Annie Hall is not really about Annie, but about Alvy and his inability to relate to her or any other woman. The title could just as easily have been Alvy Singer, or Allan Konigsberg.

  Despite editing problems, the movie had already begun generating heat, and word of mouth said the picture was simply marvelous. In their enthusiasm for what they figured would be a box-office breadwinner, the studio wasted no time making plans. But Woody began to give them a hard time. In the UA offices on Seventh Avenue, there was plenty of griping over his inflexibility. Some people grumbled that advertising a Woody Allen picture was like committing suicide with a smile on your face. Contractually, Woody did not have advertising approval, only the right of consultation, but "he actually did have approval because he took it," observed a UA executive. Woody had no use for the Hollywood system of marketing films, including common strategies such as promotional tours. (When he met with the Toronto press, asked if he enjoyed the filming, he answered, "No, it was a boring movie to make.") According to another UA veteran, "He figured people would decide on the basis of reviews. I don't think he cared if his pictures made money or not. Sometimes I thought he would have preferred to publicize his pictures by installing billboards in front of theaters." He remembered hearing Woody once say, "Either people will come or they won't."

  They did.

  Out of Woody's inner despair, kept carefully masked from public view by quick-witted banter, emerged a motion picture that would bring cheer to millions of moviegoers. Annie Hall gave people permission to feel good about themselves, even when they were feeling like failures. In the "picture about me," Woody appeared in every scene, almost every frame, parading his insecurities, phobias, and deep self-deprecation. Then, unexpectedly, he came even closer by directly addressing the audience, mulling over the troubles besetting his relationships, the ordinary hang-ups that all of them could identify with. By sharing his most intimate experiences in this way, he endeared himself to audiences of the seventies. Stanley Kauffmann, remembering Annie Hall twenty years later, said, "There was accuracy and flavor, along with a sense of rightness and fulfillment. It was as if he had sunk a taproot into an era and its people."

  When Penelope Gilliatt saw Annie Hall, she bestowed her highest compliment and compared Woody with the genius of Buster Keaton (her all-time cinema hero) and Annie Hall with The Navigator; Woody "technically pushes far ahead of anything he has done in the cinema before, playing with ideas in film which he has been experimenting with in prose." This time the enthusiastic Gilliatt was joined by the great majority of critics busily dragging out their superlatives. One of the few exceptions was John Simon, the crusty National Review critic, who refused to consider the movie as a fable for his times. Instead, he wrote, Annie Hall told him "everything we never wanted to know about Woody's sex life and were afraid he'd tell us anyway." Later, he admitted his difficulties watching any film in which Woody played a romantic role. "I'm obsessed with looks. Some people like to eat and I happen to like good-looking people, female or male. Even children. Even dogs. Woody has a good face for a comedian but not for a romantic film. Looking at his face depresses me."

  Annie Hall would become a classic that measured against the best films in history, ranking Number 31 on the American Film Institute's 1998 list of the best one hundred movies ever made. It established Woody's reputation as an important artist, catapulting him into the pantheon of great film comedians, where Chaplin, Keaton, Fields, and the Marx brothers dwelled virtually alone. In that spring of 1977, he went from a cerebral neurotic appreciated primarily by sophisticated urban audiences to a new star embraced by the middle class throughout the country. Women in particular seemed to be crazy about the film, and for the first time Woody began to attract a devoted female audience. Even before the movie was released, women's service magazines began hopping on the bandwagon, unaware of his contempt for their typical readers, who "just junk their lives being a housewife raising kids," he thought. Redbook arranged for one of its editors to share a tete-a-tete dinner at his penthouse. After martinis, mixed by Woody himself, they adjourned to the dining room, where his housekeeper served a delicious meal, which the editor would describe as "a subtle first course with an egg on top; lovely encircled-with-vegetables fish; hot apple souffle." But in spite of the candles and the classical music, she departed four and a half hours later without asking many questions at all. Apparently reluctant to disturb his Zen-like reverie, she seemed to know little more than when she arrived; indeed, Woody said so little worth quoting that Redbook found it necessary to dig up a few humorous quotes from his New Yorker pieces. There was "an almost moatlike space" around him, the magazine lamely observed.

  Probably no celebrity of the seventies was more socially autistic than Woody. But the media presented him as a lovable eccentric, giving no hint of his disturbing side. As a result, he developed a pristine image in the popular imagination. The feminists were the only group he was unable to charm. Sensing his hostility toward women, both as a filmmaker and a man, they were beginning to view him as something more than a charming oddball. Shortly after his fortieth birthday, in preparation for an article in the Village Voice, Vivian Gornick paid a visit to Woody's penthouse. The writer, who is exactly the same age as Woody, came from the same background. The child of working-class Jews, she grew up in the Bronx. Gornick supposed the offscreen and on-screen Woody would be the same man. "I expected to find him living in one room and eating tuna fish out of a can," she said. "I was shocked when I saw how he was living." They sat in his Fifth Avenue lair and sipped chilled white wine and argued about women and men. A long time ago, one night in 1964, she and her friends had seen him perform at the Bitter End. He was, she felt back then, nothing less than "us." His humor, his anguish over growing up smart and anxious were "great stuff. He's a fantastic mimic and he did our lives to a T. It was wild." But over the years his perfect pitch made her laugh less and less. "I began to see the arrested quality of his movies. The shocking thing was that he was forty and still chasing girls, still a schlep who was obviously stuck in his adolescent pursuit of sex."

  "Tell me," she said over the wine. "You create out of a woman a foil who ultimately is the object of ridicule. Don't you see that?" He did not.

  "Don't you get enough flack from enough women so that you can see that?"

  "Listen," he said, "when you're a comic, you're always offending someone. Jews are offended by my rabbi jokes." And besides,
he was no chauvinist. He loved women. He couldn't understand why she found his pictures sexist.

  She had been watching him trying to get laid for fifteen years, as she struggled to explain, and didn't want to see it portrayed on film one more time. When she viewed Annie Hall a few months later, she thought to herself that "Alvy is not much brighter than Annie but he comes out on top. In Jewish comedy, the wild street comics like Berle and King and Brooks would make fun of Jewish women—their wives and their mother-in-laws; Woody Allen made a fool of the shiksa."

  After publication of the Voice article ("You're Not a Schlep Anymore"), Gornick felt guilty about giving him such a hard time. He could not have been more hospitable, "sweet-tempered, utterly forthcoming." Sometime later, when he called to ask her for a date, she refused to go out with him because "it was one-up-manship. I was sure he wanted to bring me down."

  On the Couch:

  "When you do comedy, you're not sitting at the grownups' table, you're sitting at the children's table."

  —Woody Allen, 1978

  Annie Hall was in postproduction when Woody was ready to move on to the next project. In early 1977 Eric Pleskow received a call from Sam Cohn, Woody's agent at International Creative Management (and an addition to Woody's personal managers, Rollins and Joffe). A crusty, middle-aged, chainsmoking man fond of dressing in sweaters and loafers, Cohn was one of the most powerful talent agents in the business. Operating almost independently as an agency within an agency, he handled actors as well as directors, producers, and writers. Speaking to Pleskow, Cohn cautiously explained that Woody had some material that was not a typical Woody Allen script. Reading the atypical script, Pleskow and Arthur Krim understood immediately what he meant. Several days later, the UA officers met with Cohn, Charles Joffe, and Jack Rollins. According to Pleskow, "I'm sure they were all set for a knock-down, drag-out fight. But we simply said 'Cool,' or the 1977 equivalent of 'Cool.' We felt that all the great work done by Woody entitled him to do Interiors. We cherished the association." So Woody's new project received the green light.