The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (18 page)

Would he ever consider a face-lift? "I don't even have my teeth filled," he laughed.

When the conversation turned to his next picture, he disclosed that it would be shot in New York. Otherwise, he couldn't talk about it. "I'm afraid my enemies will come out with the same film," he smiled.

Judging by the
Times
interview, which could not have been more relentlessly upbeat, there was no question that Woody Allen felt pretty good about himself. In fact, despite his success, he did not feel good at all. Reaching forty simply intensified his lifelong terror of death. Getting older, he believed, was "the worst thing that could happen to anyone," rather like "drawing the ace of spades." Other than his demise, he was acutely aware of being short and skinny, and now he was also losing his hair. Moreover, although he would never admit it publicly, he still felt like a failure. His accomplishments as a filmmaker were unsatisfactory, he decided, and his work sophomoric. His personal relationships were especially poor. After two troubled marriages and more women than he could count, he had actually grown weary of the chase. He found himself mourning his affair with Diane Keaton, and looking back, decided that she had been the love of his life after all.

Looking ahead, he felt a sense of foreboding. Surely he should be contented because he had everything a man could want. Yet, there was not a single thing that seemed to give his days any fizz. All was flat. As he had discovered, there was a psychoanalytic term for the I'm-Not-Having-Any-Fun syndrome:
anhedonia,
the inability to experience pleasure.

In the months prior to his birthday, he began working on a screenplay that attempted to penetrate the air of unrelieved gloom hanging over him. Unlike his previous stories—about bumbling bank robbers and health-store proprietors with ulcers—this was like nothing he had ever attempted before. "It was a picture about me," he said later. "My life, my thoughts, my ideas, my background." As much as he disliked the idea of using autobiographical material, he felt the need to take risks and try something different. What he envisioned was a film that would make people take him seriously.

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, peccadilloes, 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 Johnnies. 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 mothers 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 "its 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 1 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 restaurant opposite Lincoln Center, and afterward Alvy watches Annie cutting across the traffic 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 Tightness and fulfillment. It was as if he had sunk a taproot into an era and its people."