Fast Food for Thought
by Ken DuBois
With the release of Scoop, Woody Allen's 36th film as writer and director, comes the annual anticipation of greatness, the hope that this, finally, is the masterpiece we've always known was in him. But at least one person is content that greatness will never emerge, and that's Allen himself. He keeps telling us this is all he's got, but it's a plea mistaken for modesty, rather than the statement of a self-reflective realist who knows his limits. "I'm going to be 70," he told Vanity Fair in the fall of 2005, "and maybe I'll get lucky, maybe something will come up that's really extraordinary. But I feel that level of greatness is just not in me. Because I see no evidence of it, after a very, very fair try."
Allen's "fair try" is a volume of work unrivaled by any major American director in the last four decades—roughly a film per year, every year, since 1969. And this productivity is central to his reputation as a nearly brilliant artist. He's made 10 good movies, hitting the mark more times than even the most versatile filmmakers, like Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, or the Coen brothers. But to get those 10, he had to make another dozen that were mediocre, and 14 more that are just plain bad. Allen would be the first to admit that it's a game of odds, and that if he slowed down and produced half as much, the work would not improve. He's operating in a self-invented cafeteria style of filmmaking, where the offerings don't change, and the only difference is how they're combined on the tray. Sometimes he puts together something salty, other times something sweet, but in the end we're left with a familiar feeling: Everything from this joint tastes pretty much the same.
The edge-of-greatness mantel thrust upon Allen is due in part to his homage films, in which he copies the styles of great directors, like whipping up "specials" that look different even if they're really just standard fare. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, for example, was a typically pleasant little romp, but embarrassingly thin when held up as a tribute to the films of Jean Renoir. He likewise fell short when copying Federico Fellini (with Stardust Memories), F.W. Murnau (Shadows and Fog), Ingmar Bergman (Interiors), and Ernst Lubitsch (Curse of the Jade Scorpion). Allen recognizes that his films pale by comparison to these masters, but it seems he just can't resist. "It's self-indulgent by me," he admitted during a 2001 on-stage interview at London's National Film Theatre. "I feel, when I'm home alone in the apartment, that I have limitless scope as a dramatist and I could write a film that's like a Eugene O'Neill or a Chekhov play or a Bergman film or something, and once in a while I try and do it, and, you know, I can't do it so well, I find out later."
Allen returns to the same material because that's what he was trained to do. He began his career as a writer for television comedies in the 1950s, at a time when comedy/variety shows aired live on Saturday nights, and the process of writing them began anew every Monday morning, not unlike the process for Saturday Night Live today. Allen spent years on that sketch-writing treadmill, working on "The Colgate Comedy Hour" and three different Sid Caesar shows, and there's hardly a better training ground in his profession; Caesar's "Your Show of Shows" program, for which Allen was a writer, stands as one of the best-written comedy television shows in the history of the medium. But the experience showed Allen where his skills lay, and he took it to heart. He learned he could come up with ideas quickly, write at a lightning pace, and rapidly move on to the next thing, without worrying too much about how last week's show turned out. He learned the essential modus operandi for deadline comedy writing: If something works, try it again. Consider these bedroom scenes from two Woody Allen films:
He: What? What's going on? We used to make love all the time, and now there's always an excuse.
She: I told you, I'm going through an emotionally difficult time creatively.
He: You feel like we don't communicate anymore?
She: Of course we communicate. Now can we not talk about it anymore?
and.
He: What? What's the matter? It's not natural. We're sleeping in a bed together. You know, it's been a long time.
She: Well, it's just that, you know, I gotta sing tomorrow night, so I have to rest my voice.
He: It's always some kind of an excuse. When we first started going out, we had sex constantly. We're probably listed in The Guinness Book of World Records.
They could easily be from the same movie, but these scenes were written 27 years apart. One is from Melinda and Melinda (2004) and the other from Annie Hall (1977), and it doesn't really matter which is from which. The same is true of many other Allen comedy subjects and jokes that return, interchangeably, in film after film: psychoanalysis, masturbation, jazz, and the Marx Brothers; fear of automobiles, drugs, nature, death, and the boroughs beyond Manhattan. In his 1975 story collection Without Feathers, he introduced the premise of a magician's magic-box stunt gone awry, then used the bit again in 1989's "Oedipus Wrecks" (part of the trilogy film New York Stories). And in Allen's latest, Scoop, yet another volunteer from the audience has yet another unexpected adventure in the same old magic box that won't work right.
"When I pull the script out of the typewriter—say it takes me two months to write: you know, I'm a fast writer, I'm not a perfectionist; I'm careless—and then I go right into production..So it takes a few months' doing, a few months to shoot it, and..it takes me six days to edit the whole picture." Allen offered that explanation during his on-stage interview in London, and went on to say that he never bothers to see the completed film, likening it to "a chef who works on a meal all day in the kitchen—you don't want to eat the meal..So it's better that I put it out and move on to the next thing.." In a 2005 interview with Premiere magazine, Allen said, "When I finished Scoop, I stood around my apartment, walked the streets, and then started writing. I mean, what do you do?"
What most people do is get out once in a while and have a few new experiences, but Allen clearly has no interest in that kind of thing. The days when he got a live audience response to his comedy (his TV and stand-up days) are now four decades behind him, and in the years since, he's built systems to insulate himself from any negative response, or any response at all. He works with the same crew and actors as much as possible, hasn't read reviews of his films in decades, and sometimes shows his actors only the script pages in which their character appears. When asked how his fans will react to his new movie, Allen told Premiere, "I've never thought of them," and "I'm going to do the films I want to do." In recent years, he has limited himself to working only with financiers who will give him a free hand to do as he pleases, without asking to see his script. His 2005 film Match Point appeared to be a departure because it was set in London and featured a mostly British cast, but Allen says those were choices he made to get the money; his British backers insisted on it. He filmed Scoop in London for the same reason, and announced plans to shoot his next film abroad as well.
But whatever his limitations, it took a lot of talent to make his 10 good films: Take the Money and Run (1969), Play it Again, Sam (1972), Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Everyone Says I Love You (1997), and Match Point (2005). And at the rate he's going, he's certain to make a few more gems. He won't achieve greatness, but every once in a while—about every third film—that sameness puts a smile on your face.
"I've tried to keep my films different over the years," Allen told Vanity Fair. "But it's like they complain, 'We've eaten Chinese food every day this week.' I want to say, 'Well, yes, but you had a shrimp meal and you had a pork meal and you had a chicken meal.' They say, 'Yes, yes, but it's all Chinese food.' That's the way I feel about myself. I have a certain amount of obsessive themes and a certain amount of things that I'm interested in, and no matter how different the film is.you find in the end that it's Chinese food."