The Unruly Life of Woody Allen by Marion Meade

Author:Marion Meade
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non Fiction, Biography, Film
Published: 2011-03-23T13:00:00+00:00

Year

Domestic Grosses

1977

Annie Hall

39.2m

1979

Manhattan

45.7m

1983

Zelig

11.8m

1984

Broadway Danny Rose

10.6m

1985

The Purple Rose of Cairo

10.6m

'Not adjusted for inflation.

Woody had always preferred dreams to real life. By the time he was ten, he discovered his two ideal refuges from reality: the gloomy Konigsberg cellar, where he could thumb through his comic books in peace, and dark movie houses, where he doted on romantic comedies about people whose lives were lived in penthouses and nightclubs. In November of 1983, he began shooting a film in which he used some of this autobiographical material.

The Purple Rose of Cairo is about a waitress living in a small town during the Depression. She is an ardent movie fan who has managed to break through the wall between flesh and fantasy. Cecilia peels a fictional character ofT the screen and pulls him into the nonfictional audience at the Jewel theater. Of course, film buffs could not help recognizing the plots similiarity to a previous movie. In 1924 Buster Keaton filmed Sherlock, Jr., about a movie projectionist who, after dozing off, climbs through the screen and is drawn into the celluloid action of the picture. The very mention of Keaton’s silent comedy made Woody huffy. Sherlock, Jr. was "in no remote way an inspiration," he said a bit testily, and besides, Keaton had never been a favorite of his. Favorite or not, he might well have been copying Keaton’s classic, just as he borrowed from Ingmar Bergman and George S. Kaufman, among others. On the other hand, he may have simply been massaging Woody Allen. In his 1977 New Yorker story, "The Kugelmass Episode," a college professor achieves a similar type of fantasy when he enters a magicians literary cabinet and finds himself a character in Madame Bovary.

Although the movie-fan story seemed to be truly about himself as a kid, Woody decided not to play the starry Cecilia. Emphatically distancing himself—"there was just no part for me," he insisted—he gave the role to Mia.

Principal photography began in Piermont, New York, a small town on the Hudson River that had the correct gritty look of a thirties factory area. (Some interiors were filmed in Midwood, at the Kent theater, where Woody went as a boy.) Shooting got off to a bad start. For his hero, Tom Baxter, Woody hired Michael Keaton at $250,000, a quarter of his normal fee. But after ten days he had second thoughts and abruptly replaced him, which involved scrapping the footage and buying him out. (Woody said Keaton didn't look like a 1935 person after all, but word leaked out from the location that Woody was not pleased with his scenes.) After approaching Kevin Kline, he hastily signed Jeff Daniels, who had been acclaimed for his performance in Terms of Endearment

Never completely satisfied with any of his films, Woody would nevertheless rank The Purple Rose of Cairo as his best picture, at least the one that came closest to his original concept. Later on, he also admitted that Cecilia, of all his created characters, was the one with whom he most closely identified.

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