The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (13 page)

Actually, he was flying by the seat of his pants. Not only did he require the help of Mickey Rose, his high-school friend from Midwood, to complete a shooting script, but he also felt shaky about most aspects of film production— rudimentary decisions like where to put the camera and how many takes. Insecure, but brimming with chutzpah, he wired Carlo Di Palma, the Italian director of photography for Michaelangelo Antonioni, and one of the most well-known cinematographers in the world at that time. "Can you come and shoot my first movie?" he inquired. (He had to settle for a television photographer whose biggest credit was
Bonanza.)
As for directing a movie, he was better equipped to direct traffic. In fact, he dreaded the thought of daily contact with a bunch of people he barely knew. "That's the worst problem of movie directing for me," he said, "the fact that I loathe group activity," which by its very nature was the heart and soul of film production. To avoid directing, he first asked a British director, Val Guest, whom he knew from
Casino Royale,
then approached an American icon, Jerry Lewis.

Lewis was diplomatic. It was "a great honor" and he was "thrilled to be asked." Unfortunately, he had "other commitments."

But it wouldn't take much time at all, Woody wheedled. Only eight weeks.

Lewis just laughed. "Woody, I spend twenty-eight weeks in prep. Shooting in eight weeks? We're talking thirty-six weeks." Do it yourself, he suggested.

Take the Money and Run
is a pseudodocumentary that traces the career of a neurotic petty criminal, Virgil Starkwell, and his ambition to make the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, an unlikely fantasy because Virgil is hopelessly incompetent when it comes to planning and executing crimes. In one memorable scene, he waits in line to rob a bank and finally hands the teller a note: "Please put $50,000 into this bag and act natural." But the teller can't read his handwriting.

Virgil courteously proceeds to read the holdup note to him. "Because," he continues, "I am pointing a gun at you."

Meanwhile, the teller is continuing to examine the note. "That looks like gun,' " he replies. "That doesn't look like gun.' " What happens next is that Virgil is sent to the bank managers office because none of the tellers can dispense $50,000 without proper authorization.

By means of interviews with his friends and family, the picture describes Virgil's early childhood, his failed music career, and his relationship with a pretty girl (Janet Margolin) he meets on a park bench. After fifteen minutes he wants to marry her; after thirty minutes he has forgotten about stealing her purse. Despite his marriage, the bumbling Virgil eventually ends up in prison again, this time serving an eight-hundred-year sentence.

The idea for the stickup scene might have originated in 1965 during an interview with
The Realist.
Editor Paul Krassner mentioned having seen a recent news item about a botched robbery in Painesville, Ohio. The teller, smiling politely at the gunman, announced, "I'm sorry but my window is now closed. You'll have to take this to another teller." According to the interview, Woody replied, "I can empathize with the robber."

Moving Pictures:

Virgil Starkwell
: In prison the psychiatrist asked me if I had a girl and did I think sex was dirty. I said, "It is if you do it right."

—Take the Money and Run, 1969

The main lesson Woody learned from Charles Feldman, who died in 1968, was that functioning inside the Hollywood system was impossible for him. In his heart he knew that the whole "body rhythm of the place," the time-wasting lunches with ten different writers, the mandatory negotiations with actors who weren't available for six months, would surely drive him crazy. "I don't like the way studios make films," he said in 1998. Instead, he wanted nothing less than total independence.

He was not the only one. By 1968 a clutch of rebellious young filmmakers was becoming known to the public—Dennis Hopper, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Steven Spielberg, Warren Beatty, George Lucas—all of them talented newcomers who identified with Woody's mistrust of the studios and his determination to control his work. Recognizing that the studio system was collapsing, the new generation of directors resembled fuzzy chicks just poked from their shells, scurrying around to figure out how to play the power game, how to push aside the old boys' club and become Warners and Zanucks themselves. Several months earlier, Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty had released
Bonnie and Clyde,
now Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda made
Easy Rider,
and soon there would be a drove of extraordinary films to herald Hollywood's new golden age:
Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Godfather, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, American Graffiti,
and still later,
Chinatown, Star Wars,
and
Raging Bull.
With a kind of religious fervor, directors like Dennis Hopper proclaimed themselves spiritual innovators, revolutionaries who had overthrown the oppressor and intended to use the Hollywood system to make "little, personal, honest films," a sentiment endorsed by George Lucas with the Marxist cry of "the power is with the people now. The workers have the means of production!" Suddenly nothing seemed impossible for this latest bunch of young movie junkies with their gargantuan ambitions.

Meanwhile, Woody was hoping to carve out a niche for himself, no easy task because of several noticeable handicaps. In spite of intuitive comic talent, he had trouble with the basic techniques of screenwriting. At this time, he remained ignorant of timing and motion, how the great film comedians— Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx brothers—used a plot as a base upon which to build their jokes and keep the comic energy flowing. One analyst of his early work belittled him as "the master of coitus interruptus of cinematic humor," which was harsh but not inaccurate. In
Take the Money and Run,
for example, Woody had no idea how to end the bank-robbing scene; and the prison-breakout sequence in which Virgil is chased by guards also goes nowhere because Woody couldn't figure out the visual comic opportunities (think about Buster Keaton in
Cops
and how he expanded and milked a similar situation for fifteen minutes). At a loss for an ending, Woody shows Virgil being led back to his cell. Challenged to master the craft, Woody lazily fell back on filming his nightclub routines. In
Take the Money and Run,
in fact in every film until
Annie Hall,
his characters tend to be stick figures, the stories verbal cartoons. In time he would improve as a screenwriter—and be nominated for an Academy Award thirteen times (a record) in the category of best original screenplay—but all too often, his early scripts were clumsy.

Another of his weaknesses was his acting. In
What's New, Pussycat?
he squeaked through by presenting himself as a stand-up comic doubling as an actor. But in
Take the Money and Run,
in the leading role, it was hard to overlook his twitchy mannerisms, especially the frenzied gestures that suggested "a bad case of St. Vitus dance" to Stanley Kauffmann, who thirty years later still saw Woody as "a frantic amateur."

Returning from San Francisco in August 1968, after bringing in his first film on schedule and under budget, Woody appeared to be a man without a care in the world. Through the fall of 1968 and early winter of 1969, he worked with an editor to whittle
Take the Money and Run
into a sensible story. By this time, he had a finished print, complete with titles, music, and sound effects, but something had gone terribly wrong, and so he was almost tempted to give up. At no screening did an audience laugh, not even the servicemen they enticed from the USO in Times Square, guys with presumably nothing better to do. Not until Palomar Pictures threatened to shelve the picture did Woody acknowledge the serious trouble he was in.

Ralph Rosenblum was ten years older than Woody, a bearded, burly six-footer with a leonine head. Born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, the film editor had a reputation for being difficult and opinionated, a combative man whose temper had been known to erupt explosively in the cutting room. In January 1969, at a dilapidated screening room on West Forty-third Street, Rosenblum got his first look at
Take the Money and Run.
It was, he thought, primitively shot and yet "very unusual," because it rocketed from the high brilliance of the Marx Brothers all the way down to "a slapped-together home movie." However choppy and uneven, it was nevertheless "packed with funny material," clearly the work of a "very fresh mind." So the situation was not hopeless. As the lights went on, a jittery Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe hurried over to get his reaction. Could he fix it? Joffe asked. Rosenblum made a point of stalling. "He asked to see the script," recalled his widow Davida Rosenblum. "Before deciding, he wanted to know what had been discarded."

At a restaurant on Madison Avenue, Woody and the editor met for the first time. When Rosenblum arrived, Woody was alone at a corner table eating his dinner. While Rosenblum was not exactly anticipating a head-on conflict, he had edited two dozen features and known plenty of first-time prima donna

directors ashamed to show their ignorance but relieved to dump their messes on his doorstep. Woody, however, hiding his mouth behind his napkin as he chewed, did not seem to be a bit arrogant and proceeded to spill out his troubles in the most self-effacing way. Rosenblum could not help being taken with the modest young director.
Take the Money and Run,
Woody said sadly, had turned out to be a "negative experience," and now he was "stuck with a bad picture" just when he was scheduled to go on the road with a play. Several days later, a truck delivered two hundred boxes of film to Rosenblum's office and the next two weeks, a period he would remember as "one of the most pleasurable in all my years of editing," were occupied screening the outtakes. While Woody was away, Rosenblum performed deep surgery in the editing room. He carefully moved scenes around, restored others that had been cut, extended still others, and replaced music. Given Woody's haphazard plotting, it "didn't matter too much where one scene or another ended up." Only the closing shot, a grotesque
Bonnie and Clyde
scene showing Virgil Starkwell's bullet-torn body, offended him, and he suggested shooting a new ending. When Rosenblum finished, Woody had more than a movie. He had a hit.

In his debut as a filmmaker. Woody established a signature cinematic style—a style seemingly inspired by such humorists as Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman—whose most distinctive features were equal amounts of absurd parodies and anarchistic gags, delivered by means of the kind of wild, comic pacing usually associated with Looney Tunes animation. The
Newsweek
reviewer called the movie "a silly symphony that can put the zing back into life." While visually inventive (Virgil plays cello in a marching band) and chock-full of ingenious verbal gags, the shortcomings of
Take the Money and Run
were obvious as well. The picture was choppy, repetitious, and unpolished. What's more, it often came across as a stand-up routine, a problem immediately pointed out by the
New York Times
critic Vincent Canby when he labeled the film "the cinematic equivalent to one of Allen's best night-club monologues." Yet these flaws counted for little in the end. What made the movie special was precisely its rough amateurism, combined with Woody's awkward performance replete with stuttering urns and ahs. Hopefuls longing to make a movie of their own—and there were many—came away inspired. Those content to watch films had the refreshing impression that the filmmaker, a real person for a change, was actually having fun, and it was true. As Woody later told critic Diane Jacobs, he got "more of a personal kick out of just being funny" in movies such as
Take the Money and Run
than he ever would later on.

That summer of 1969, when
Take the Money and Run
opened, Woody had reason to feel encouraged. Of course, reviews were mixed but few critics seemed immune to the freshness of a thrilling new talent. Embracing him as

their new darling, some major magazines were left hungering for more and predicting, as did
Newsweek,
that "the results ought to be brilliant."

In the history of film,
Take the Money and Run
had a special significance: Woody’s first feature marked the introduction of a much loved stock character of the movies, the nebbishy neurotic who would take his place alongside Chaplin's Little Tramp and Keaton's Great Stoneface.

More than fifty actresses came to read for the part. Among the finalists was a pretty twenty-two-year-old girl with long brown hair, blue eyes, and high, round cheekbones. Obviously high-strung, she was a bundle of physical tics: She fiddled with her hair, rubbed her nose, fluttered large hands that seemed barely under control. Inside her cheek bulged a wad of gum, which she kept chawing on like a baseball player with a tobacco habit. At the Broadhurst Theater, Woody climbed up onstage to read with her. The girl was good, he decided, but too tall. To measure her, he stood her up against him, back to back. "It was like being in third grade," he remembered. "But we were just about the same height." Not quite. In her stocking feet she was five feet seven. He was five feet six in shoes. No matter: He was very taken with the big girl.

Not long after returning from San Francisco, he had begun production for his second stage play.
Play It Again, Sam
is a romantic comedy about a daydreaming film reviewer who gets a girl by taking advice from the ghost of Humphrey Bogart. Allan Felix is a twerpy intellectual living in Greenwich Village, a graduate of Midwood High, who writes criticism for
Film Quarterly.
He has just been abandoned by his sexy young wife who finally got fed up with his movie fantasies. Shattered, he begs his best friend, Dick, and his wife, Linda, to fix him up with women but manages to bollix up his dates. Before long, he finds himself attracted to Linda, a woman who is just as neurotic and insecure as he is (her neglectful husband is obsessed by his business deals). When Dick is out of town on business, Allan and Linda sleep together, but the next morning, both of them have second thoughts. Allan feels guilty cuckolding his best friend and—in a parody of the closing scene in
Casablanca
—decides to do the right thing. He gives up Linda for the higher moral value of friendship. As the credits roll, Allan walks into the fog to the strains of "As Time Goes By."