Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen

Author:Woody Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Arcade

When I regained my sanity, I made Zelig. I was interested in the documentary style for comedy since Take the Money but now had more experience. With a cinematographer like Gordon Willis and my willingness to shoot in black-and-white, which immediately limited the box office (some countries would not show a black-and-white movie, and even now black-and-white becomes a hard TV sale). Zelig was about how we all want to be accepted, to fit in, to not offend, that we often present a different person to different people knowing which person might best please. With someone who loves Moby Dick, for example, the protagonist will go along and find things to praise about it. With one who dislikes the book, the Zelig character will get with the program and dislike it. In the end this obsession for conformity leads to fascism.

I wrote the script and, waiting to begin preproduction, I wrote A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. The latter was only meant to be a celebration of the country, of the woods with its alleged magic, and to have fun with the love and marital problems of some amusing people.

I told United Artists I’d shoot them both at the same time. They liked the ideas, being gluttons for productivity, and I thought it would be easy. Particularly if you’re a comedy genius—which it turned out I wasn’t, and it was not easy. But the problem was not physical. It was no trouble shooting a few scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and then at the same or a nearby location, switching costumes and doing a scene from Zelig. The problem was mental. It was very hard to get emotionally wound up in one world and to switch to another. I had trouble handling the switching of psychic energy, committed to do one tale, and suddenly having to retool for other characters and plot. I vowed never to try it again.

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy did turn out very beautiful and magical, and nobody liked it or came to see it. Zelig had a much better fate, and the name Zelig has since entered the vocabulary, but is always used to designate a secondary property of the creation. It is frequently employed to denote someone who appears everywhere, at popular events, alongside the rich, the famous, a ubiquitous nonentity. But the primary meaning of “Zelig” should be when one searches for a word to describe one who keeps abandoning his position and adopting the new popular one.

In both movies I had a new leading lady, Mia Farrow. How did that happen? For that I must go back to give some mildly interesting exposition.

A few years earlier I had received a fan letter from Mia, who I’d never met and only read about. I always found her very, very beautiful. Mia reminded me of Louise, a good beginning. Her letter praised my latest movie or my work in general, I forget which. But it ended with a sentence I do remember and it was, “Quite simply, I love you.

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