The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (54 page)

Beyond Elaine's, the marriage failed to fly with the public. On the contrary, it stimulated fifty-seven varieties of incest and pedophilia jokes. In comparison to the sick, racist jokes that were posted on the Internet ("What do Woody Allen and Kodak Film have in common?"), the gags of late-night television monologists sounded tame. Jay Leno cracked that Soon-Yi married her father, which made Woody his own son-in-law: "He's 62 and she's 27—sounds like halftime at a Clippers game," he joked. David Letterman kidded that he knew of "few pleasures in life greater than having your ex-girlfriend as your mother-in-law."

With a straight face, Leslee Dart swore to the press that Woody did not ask Soon-Yi to sign a prenuptial agreement, which elicited shrieks of laughter in some quarters and a professional snicker from lawyer Raoul Felder. If that was truly the case, he smiled, "he needs a psychiatrist more than an attorney." Those persons least surprised by the nuptials were Mia’s friends, some of whom had been expecting the couple to wed. "She's his ball and chain. If he betrays her—or if she leaves him, which is unlikely because she has no family—she has a good three- or four-million-dollar book in her. He can't cut her loose," said one of Mia’s confidants. That viewpoint pretty much echoed Felder's prediction of their future life together. He compared them to "the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. They're basically trapped with each other, and they'll forever be drifting through time."

In hi* sixties, Woody seemed determined to overhaul his lire. Apart from a third marriage, he took other surprising measures

After thirty-six years in psychotherapy, the world's oldest living anafysand kicked the habit of a lifetime and terminated treatment. Like brushing his teeth twice a day, analysis was pan of his personal regimen and had helped an unfocused, floundering twenty-four-year-old to thrive and exploit his extraordinary gifts to their fullest. The habit of withholding praise remained strong, however, because he seemed reluctant to offer any endorsements of the analytic profession. To be sure, psychotherapy could be helpful "to get past a little crisis" but long-term treatment was not "user-friendly," he said. "People expect a really dramatic result, but legitimate growth is not that dramatic."

In an interview in London with
Radio Times,
he confided to Andrew Duncan that his marriage to Soon-Yi had made therapy unnecessary. "Did you need it in the first place?" Duncan asked. "Probably not," Woody replied.

Friends heard a different story, however. In a burst of candor, he admitted quitting analysis after his most recent therapist complained about his tendency to hold back feelings.

Still, nobody in America had done more to popularize psychotherapy than Woody Allen. He cheerfully had spent a fortune on analysts, even though he loved to complain about their exorbitant fees—-unlike the old days of therapy, when, he once wrote, you could be treated by Freud himself and he would also press your pants.

In
Annie Hall
Alvy Singer swore that after fifteen years he was giving his doctor "one more year and then I'm goin' to Lourdcs." And in
Hannah and Hrr Sisters.
Mickey Sachs's analyst supposedly became frustrated over his patient's lack of progress. "The guy finally put in a salad bar," said Mickey.

In reality, Woody's shrinks earned so much from him they had no need of salad bars; most likely they were able to take early retirement.

Meanwhile, perhaps the most dramatic changes were taking place in his career.

In 1992, when the sex scandal and custody battle had adversely affected his box office, falling profits seemed a temporary response to a barrage of unusually negative publicity. According to Woody, the scandal was "a neutral factor," which sold newspapers but had nothing to do with him. "It's come and it's gone. It was nothing either way. It didn't help me. It didn't hurt me." The truth was the opposite. By the end of the nineties, the scandal continued to hurt him, and professionally he was basically treading water.

Desperate for a hit, he began to robot]cally recycle and cannibalize his old movies while competing in an increasingly sex-oriented film marketplace.

Being regarded by a new generation of filmmakers as a dusty old museum piece petrified him. ("If e didn't need a scandal to bring him down," believes Andrew Sarris. "Comedy is definitely a young man's racket, and when you get older, you lose the capacity to make people laugh. Some of his recent films have been unfunny.")

Beginning with
Mighty Aphrodite
in 1995 and continuing through
Deconstructing Harry
and
Celebrity,
he made a series of films that are best described as his Hooker-Fellatio Trilogy. These three pictures present a parade of female characters who are whores (professional or amateur), nymphomaniacs, or psychotics. The roles (played by Mira Sorvino, Hazelle Goodman, Bebe Neuwirth, Judy Davis, Julia Louis-Dreyfus) appeared to have been the creation of an embittered, misogynistic writer consumed by primitive hatred of the female sex and fixated on the kind of passive sex that permits no conversation.

As Harry Block remarks, hookers arc wonderful because you needn't discuss Proust.

Deconstructing Harry
turned out to be Woody's most controversial film since
Stardust Memories,
primarily owing to the number of film critics and moviegoers it managed to offend. The unpleasant Harry Block was an older version of Sandy Bates, on his hundredth god-awful relationship and his third shrink, a man who still expected the women he mistreated to love him because he was an artist.

In the
New York Times,
Molly Haskell described the picture as "one long diatribe against women, wives, and Jews." Female audiences in particular tended to recoil from Woody's new screen persona, namely the horny senior citizen who becomes involved with pretty young women played by Elisabeth Shue and Julia Roberts.

A disgusted
Los Angeles Times
columnist wondered how many people would want to sec Joan Rivers write, direct, and star in movie after movie in which she indulged in sexual liaisons with sexy young men? "Joan in a heavy make-out session with Johnny Depp? Joan lounging in bed, basking in the afterglow with Leonardo DeCaprio?" the writer mused. But Woody, on screen and off, preferred his women very young.

Equally jolting to film goers was a new dirty-talking Woody, whose Harry Block declares: "Beth Kramers an aggressive, tight-ass, busybody cunt, and it's none of her fucking business how I speak to my son." This extraordinary departure from his neurotic bur engaging screen persona was calculated to draw a younger, hippcr generation of moviegoers, who, in Jean Doumanians words, finally "got a film out of Woody they can identify with." That remained to be seen, but some of the younger critics did praise Woody's nerve. "Here's a guy who had been blasted in the press for sexual deviancy," said Neil Rosen. "He's

"Instead of defending himself, he said 'Look, I pay hookers, I'm everything they said I was” He's not an idiot, he knew parallels would be drawn between Harry and himself. But he didn't back away. That was very courageous."

Woody's next picture, his twenty-eighth, was
Celebrity,
about the cult of celebrity and the public's obsession with famous people, a subject with which he could identify. Like his biggest moneymaker,
Manhattan,
it was filmed in black and white, this time by Sven Nykvist, who had last worked for Woody on
Crimes and Misdemeanors,
and featured an all-star cast with Leonardo DiCaprio, Judy Davis, Winona Ryder, and Melanie Griffith. Woody's anti-hero is Lee Simon, a lecherous freelance journalist who suffers a mid-thirties crisis, divorces his wife (Davis), and embarks on a quest for life's meaning and a book contract. This time Woody stayed behind the camera and assigned his character to young British actor-director Kenneth Branagh, who is best known for his stellar Shakespearean roles. Rather than creating a character, Branagh did a Woody Allen impersonation, nervous stutters and all, and the director seemed unable to stop him. He recalled taking Branagh aside. "You know," he said, "it seems to me you're doing me."

"Don't worry," Branagh replied.

Eventually, Woody recalled, "I just sort of threw in the towel." For some moviegoers, it seemed appropriate that
Celebrity
began and ended with a plane writing the single word
HELP
across the Manhattan skyline.

Miramax Films elected to market
Celebrity
as an all-star vehicle. In ads, Woody's name appeared in small type, as if the Weinsteins wanted the public not to be aware of his participation. Woody expressed wry amusement. "They're probably ashamed of me," he said. As with most of Woody's pictures,
Celebrity
had a few flashes of sublime hilarity, but was otherwise a clunky, painfully thin film, a twenty-minute screenplay strung out to two hours. Stanley Kauffmann imagined Woody switching on his word processor and pecking along "hoping that the tapping would lead somewhere. It didn't, but he discovered that he had enough pages for a film anyway" (In reality, Woody still writes on his antique Olympia typewriter.) Dismal reviews lamented
Celebrity's
lack of wit and inspiration; despite a glittering cast, especially Leonardo DiCaprio, and aggressive marketing by Miramax, profits would be disappointing.

The March of Time:

"I grew up with Woody. I got old with Woody. He's getting on, not so much making films but simply being in the chase."

—Andrew Sarris, 1998

It had been five years since Sweetland Films took charge of Woody's business. To wring a profit from his movies, Jean Doumanian pledged to cut fat, not muscle, but the numbers did not move in the right direction, and finally there was nothing left but skin and bones. Despite the Los Alamos-type secrecy that surrounded his productions, news leaked out in the spring of 1998 that he had lost virtually every member of his remaining creative team. Those who decamped, presumably unwilling to accept substantial pay reductions, included Sandy Morse, Woody's film editor for twenty-two years; cinematographer Carlo Di Palma; and the set photographer, Brian Hamill. They were replaced by less-expensive personnel. Even the A-list stars who had once happily appeared in Woody's films for cut rates would in the future be working for half of their customary $10,000 a week fee. The only two of Woody s regulars exempt from the pay cuts were his casting director, Juliet Taylor, and Santo Loquasto, the production designer.

A
New York Times
article about Woody's financial predicament contained chilly quotes from some of his former associates, who privately blamed the troubles on his affair with Soon-Yi. After the scandal, one of them said off the record, his value was "diluted" and "people weren't knocking down the doors to do business with him." Woody ridiculed the article. "Completely irresponsible journalism," he fumed, adding that it was a hatchet job cooked up by a reporter with "an agenda" to give the impression he was using minor-league people. "But of course that's absurd. We're using top people."

Increasingly, he seemed insulated from reality, and when unpleasant events intruded, he fell back on denial. With costs averaging $18 to $20 million per feature (and profits in the neighborhood of $6 to $10 million), his pictures regularly lost money, but he pretended not to care. "In today’s American film market," he declared stubbornly to
Newsweeks
Jack Kroll, "if my films don't make a profit, I know I'm doing something right." Although the exact amount of his compensation was a secret, he continued to take home millions of dollars for each film. He was no spendthrift. "I don't have a boat," he told Kroll. "I don't have a country house. I don't go on elaborate vacations." He was "rich cumulatively because I've done so many films over the years."

The disintegration of his professional circle continued when he parted company with Sam Cohn, his agent for more than thirty years. In a business of quickie professional marriages, his defection seemed the worst sort of betrayal. "Working with Woody is like holding a puppy," remarked a disgusted film executive. "It's warm and nice, but you know if you hold on too long he's going to piss all over you." Encouraged by Jean, Letty, and Soon-Yi, his personal think tank, he transferred his representation to John Burnham, Diane Keaton’s agent at the William Morris Agency in Los Angeles, whom he hoped would effectively rebuild his business image in Hollywood and find him more acting jobs in mainstream pictures.

In fact, Woody's recent successes have come from plying his trade as an actor. In 1998 he took the Lead in
Ana,
the story of a heroic misfit ant, which was the first animated feature from the Dreamworks studio of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg.
Ants
was an attempt to do a computer cartoon version of
Sleeper,
Woody's 1973 hit about a totalitarian society in the twenty-first century. In
Ana,
Sharon Stone is the voice of the slighdy woolly-brained character once played by Diane Keaton, and Woody is Z, a nervous worker ant who has a personality disorder: he minks too much. The middle child in a family of five million insects, Z's life is spent roiling in an ant colony in the middle of Central Park. Like Miles Monroe in
Sleeper,
Z resists regimentation. On the shrinks couch, he complains of feeling insignificant, but his psychiatrist reminds him that he is. As a disembodied voice, Woody was completely endearing. Unlike hu own pictures in recent years.
Ana
was clever entertainment, which raked in $16.8 million at the box office on opening weekend, more than one of his own films usually earned in several years.

If he had finally discovered the secret door back into public favor, it was sad but predictable. Time and again, for many in the netherworld of film auceurs, their declining yean were spent in precisely such endeavors. For instance, Orson Welles, who was forced to scrounge for work after failing to obtain funding for his film projects, was cursed with having to narrate
Bugs Bunny Superstar,
and Buster Keaton in his later years made Alka-Seltzer television commercials. That modern audiences liked Woody better as a bug than as a human being on the screen must have given even Woody Allen pause for reflection.