What falls away : a memoir (25 page)

On workdays Woody frequently brought Fletcher along to his editing room or, if we were shooting, to the set. There he was given a walkie-talkie and a "job" as a production assistant. In 1986, when Fletcher was twelve. Woody cast him in Radio Days (he's the blond kid: there's a great close-up of him on the rooftop watching the teacher undress).

For the first years of our relationship, I never stopped

hoping he would finally find my kids irresistible. Everyone who ever met them said how wonderful they were. They were special. But although he saw them just about every day, and although they tried, some more obviously than others, to win his heart, he barely acknowleged them, and one by one, they gave up. One of my greatest regrets is that I permitted this to continue through twelve irreplaceable years of their childhoods.

But then he was king in our midst: the one who knew everything, whose concerns were greater than most, a superior person. His opinions were the final word. And he could cut I you quicker than you could open your mouth. We admired him and we were afraid of him, each in our own way.

Andre still traveled most of the time, but he loved his children and they loved being with him. It was a treat for us all when he came to visit. The piano resounded throughout the house and the children couldn't wait to bring him up-to-date on all their activities and accomplishments. There were many times when Andre and Woody were there together, making small talk. How very Noel Coward of us, someone remarked.

Only Moses did not have a father, and although Andre was particularly kind to him and always included him in whatever was going on, as Moses grew from babyhood mto childhood, he wished for a father of his own. During his toddler years, not surprisingly, he viewed my boyfriend as an interloper, especially since Woody's infrequent attempts to interact with him were jarringly out of tune with this fragile little boy, and roughly aggressive. Because Woody said Misha was "a wimp's name," we changed it to Moses after the basketball star Moses Malone. I hoped the fact that we had named my son together might arouse some paternal feelings in him. But "feelings" in Woody were subtle, and could easily escape detection.

By the time Moses was seven Woody had been my partner for five years—for as long as Moses could remember. One evenmg while Woody and I were lounging on my bed watching 60 Minutes, Moses, who had been quietly standing there for some time, whispered to him, "Are you my father?"

"Sure, kid," Woody replied lightly, and he seemed amused by the awkwardness of the request, or the predicament he unexpectedly found himself in.

After that, when Woody came to Frog Hollow, he sometimes played chess with Moses, or basketball, or catch, but never for longer than five or ten minutes. Fifteen tops, fie didn't want to break a sweat, he said. Nobody cares about that, I told him. But he did, and he still wouldn't take a shower at our house, not even with the new bathroom, and his own shower mat, and his special shower shoes.

The whole family was playing chess by then. Woody hired a grand master to come to his apartment once a week and give us lessons. As a gift to those of my children that were interested, Woody had him give them lessons too, over at my apartment.

Since 1977 Woody had made a picture in New York City every year, with more or less the same crew. By the time I came along, everyone knew one another and the way Woody liked to work. Each film was budgeted to include reshoots, which he considered an essential part of the creative process. We reshot most films scene by scene as we went along, the following day; then we reshot again after the film had been edited. Fully half of Purpk Rose was rewritten and reshot after editing; so was a substantial portion of Hannah and Her Sisters, and about a third of Crimes and Misdemeanors. September was entirely rewritten, and then reshot with a different cast.

WAFP—"Woody Allen Fall Project"—was the perennial

working title for his films. He seldom decided upon a title before shooting, and in any case he insisted that everything about the film, includmg its title, be kept secret until its release. At any given moment he had at least two ideas for the next movie. Since his personal life was not separate from his professional life, a great portion of our time was spent discussing whatever we were working on, or, even more, the fijture project. An ideal time to talk was durmg our long walks around his neighborhood, the East Side. He would say, "You mind if I bounce some ideas off you?" And I was happy that my reactions meant something to him.

On one early tour of the East Side Woody pointed out William Buckley's house. This was a point of interest for him since the Buckleys, their family, and their friends are in essence what drew him to the East Side. But the precise location of the Buckley house failed to lodge in my mind, and some months later, when again we were walking in that vicinity, I asked in passing whether a familiar-looking house might be William Buckley's. To this day I don't know what prompted the attack that followed, which was more stunningly awful than I had ever weathered in my life, and it did not cease until I was sobbing on the sidewalk, vaporized in front of a house that presumably was not William Buckley's.

The WAFP was an unquestioned fact of life for the many men and women who were employed year after year. As sure as the swallows return to Capistrano, Woody Allen would come up with a screenplay to shoot each fall. He led a disciplined life. While we were making a movie, he edited on the weekends, and was all the while making decisions about the next project. He thrashed out plots while pacing back and forth on his terrace, and he wrote his scripts m longhand on a yellow legal pad, while lying on his side, on

the bed in the back bedroom, where the kids slept on weekends. He then t)'ped out his pages on the same typewriter he had used for twenty years. It was always a great day when we walked over to studio duplicating to deliver the completed screenplay, so that they could print out the first neat stack of copies. Even when he was writing we tried to meet at some point during the day for a walk, and of course for dinner. Without fail, no matter what else was happening, he called me four or five times a day, minimum.

As shooting schedules go, our working hours were unusually civilized. We never started before eight in the morning, and rarely worked past six in the evening. At that point Woody would go to his editing room to see dailies, while I hurried home for dinner with the children. It was an ideal job for a mom. Whichever kids were not in school came with me to work. I turned dressing rooms and campers into playrooms with colorful posters on the walls, a little table and chairs, pots of clay, stacks of paper, glue, blocks, pens, scissors, puzzles, books, and cassettes. During the breaks I played with the children, read, or knit. I made elaborate samplers and cross-stitched the names of each child, and Woody. Sometimes he and I played chess. But mostly he made phone calls. Lots of phone calls. He had a California lawyer on retainer and it seemed that he was always trying to sue somebody. I once told him he was "suit-happy" but he corrected me—it's called "litigious."

In 1983, when my mother moved out of the apartment to marry James Gushing, I gained a wonderful stepfather and an extra bedroom, which, for a large family in New York City, IS nothing to scoff at. That was the year of Zelig, our second film together. In contrast to A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, Zelig was a happy experience for me: I had few lines to speak, and the character came easily. Of all the films we made, the atmosphere on this set was the most relaxed.

The next year, 1984, was the year of the Roses. Broadway Danny Rose and Purpk Rose of Cairo were artistic triumphs for Woody and for me. The very disparate characters of Tma in Danny Rose and Cecilia m Purpk Rose were two of the best and most rewarding roles I had ever been given. Of the movies I have been in, Purple Rose remains one of my favorites.

After Danny Rose, our producer, Jack Rollins, told me he had initially protested Woody's casting me in the role of Tina, a tough Brooklyn-Italian "broad." That I was not Mr. Rollins's first (or fiftieth) choice was understandable. In order to play Tma, I had to change everything about myself. I took the look and attitude from two women: "Honey," the former wife of Frank Sinatra's buddy Jilly Rizzo, and Mrs. Rao, owner of Rao's restaurant. I drank milk shakes all day to gain ten pounds, and I worked to lower my voice. I taped hours of conversations with Brooklyn women, and listened to them day and night. I watched Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull on video countless times.

Rehearsals, apart from a couple of perfunctory, disjointed camera run-throughs during which Woody paid little or no attention to the actors, were nonexistent. I knew I wouldn't have the chance to try out being Tina, so I had to be well prepared. I found a "Tina voice" and attitude, and my new weight was assisted by large (removable) breasts, tight sexy clothes, stiletto heels, and big hair. But my eyes kept giving me away. We discovered that even with a ton of makeup they undermined the toughness I needed (unless I squinted, which I couldn't do for the whole movie). So I wore sunglasses throughout, except for one scene that lasted only a few seconds, without dialogue—just a glimpse of my head in a bathroom mirror. That moment was jarring when I saw the movie: as if, in spite of me, a different character had suddenly intruded, or an unintended dimension of the same character.

In our real lives, Woody and I had settled into a steady, secure, and satisfying relationship. I got used to his triumvirate incarnations as partner, director, and actor, and he had, I think, become used to me. In Danny Rose we played opposite each other for the third time (after Midsummer Night's and Zeii£). Woody the actor had long ago invented his screen persona: a lovable nebbish, endlessly and hilariously whining and quacking, questioning moral and philosophical issues great and small. He was a guy with his heart and his conscience on his sleeve, whose talk was peppered with quotes of Kierkegaard and Kant: an insightful and un-threatening mascot of the intelligentsia. A guy who is nothing like the real Woody Allen.

With the two of us connected in so many complex ways to each other and to the everyday life we shared, it was difficult for me as an actor to build another, separate reality and to feel free within it. Furthermore, whenever Woody the actor and I were doing a scene. Woody the director would be standmg outside it, appraising the performances. Especially at first, working this way took every ounce of my concentration and resolve.

Following the year of the Roses, although outright compliments were rare, I felt Woody was pleased with my work and that he trusted me. "Mia is an extraordinary actress," he told his biographer. "She shows up and can always do it. If you ask her to play that shrinking character in The Purple Rose of Cairo, or the silly cigarette girl in Radio Days, she does It. If you ask her to play nasty, she does it. If you ask her to play something sexy, she does it . . . And she's real sweet. She'll come to the set and quietly do her needlepoint, and then put on her wig and dark glasses, or whatever, and just scream out the lines and stick a knife in your nose—and then go back to sewing with her little orphan children around her."

Most directors shoot a scene from many angles: at a minimum there is the master shot, providing "coverage" of the whole scene, then the "over-the-shoulder" shots onto each actor, and finally all the close-ups. When an actor moves within the scene, the camera follows, and then the other actors are "covered" from the new perspective. It can be a tedious process. Woody worked very differently. He always found a way to shoot a scene in one or at most two setups. Commonly, we filmed six- and seven-minute scenes; the longest (in Husbands and Wives^ was nine and a half minutes, when we shot until we ran out of film. By skillfully moving both actors and the camera, he eliminated the need for coverage. Over thirteen movies I can count my close-ups on the fingers of one hand. For the actors and the camera crew this approach was both terrifying and exhilarating, like opening in a play without rehearsals. Walking onto the soundstage, that first glimpse of the set with the lights pouring down on it, knowing as you approached that everything was ready to go—that moment was electrifying.

The way most films are shot, if a scene doesn't work, there are plenty of options in the editing room: it can be tightened; lines can be dropped or lifted from different takes; when an actor is weak, the scene can be played on another actor—there are alternatives. But Woody's method of working left no margin for error. That is one reason that so many reshoots were necessary. The other reason is because, as we shot scenes, problems with the script were revealed, or Woody simply saw ways to rewrite and improve it.

Whenever I had a scene with actors I hadn't met, I would find them in the makeup room or I'd knock on their dressing-room door to say hello. People were always nervous, not knowing what to expect. Nobody ever told them anything. Most often they had only read the pages of the scene they were in, not the whole script, so they didn't know what the story was about. I'd ask them if they wanted

to run lines or anything. They almost always did. I did too, because it was all the rehearsal we were likely to get. We knew that i^ they didn't get it right they'd get fired, like Michael Keaton, Christopher Walken, Sam Shepard, and my own mother.

Whether it was a comedy or a drama, the atmosphere on the set was mtense, hushed. Woody never raised his voice. Actors knew not to expect discussions, explanations, encouragement, enthusiasm, or compliments. Criticism was quiet, quick, and cutting. I told people that if he said "okay" or "fine" after a scene, that meant it went really well. As long as he didn't interrupt the scene, or say anything negative, it meant that he was pleased.

Since there was no coverage, the editing went quickly. Once the movie was assembled, he put in music, usually from his own record collection. Then he screened the film for more or less the same group of eight or ten people. When the lights came on he asked questions and from the reactions he got a sense of the problems and strengths of the film. He then rewrote for a few weeks, and recalled everyone for reshoots. Scenes were often reshot four or five times—throughout the year. We were doing reshots on Danny Rose for more than a year, right up until the month it was released.