By Ray Bennett
As Woody Allen turns 90 today, I’m reminded of his remarkably candid comments at a New York junket for ‘Annie Hall’ in the Spring of 1977. He hated having to publicise his films, he said, ‘I don’t think it’s helpful, for one thing. I don’t think anyone comes to see a picture because of reviews. Movie companies think it helps but I don’t. I don’t go on network television and up until this movie I’ve never permitted film clips to be shown on television. I have a real dim view of television. I didn’t find it a good medium for me to work in. Television is soul-deadening. Not TV itself but the content today in general is moronic.’
Allen clearly was pleased with ‘Annie Hall’ and he had every reason to be. It was a critical and commercial hit and went on to win Academy Awards and BAFTA Film Awards for best picture, best director, best original screenplay by Allen and Marshall Brickman and best actress for Diane Keaton. He said that while the story of a comedian in love with a free-spirited young woman might seem autobiographical given that he and Keaton had been lovers for five years, he insisted that it was not.
‘None of the details are true,’ he said. ‘We made it up as we went along. There were gags we left out because they were not true to the characters and there is some relationship stuff that just doesn’t seem to be funny. I just had to hope that it would work in the framework of the film because it is not manifestly funny but I didn’t want it to get too pathetic.’
Allen insisted, as he always did, that he wanted to be taken seriously as a filmmaker. ‘I prefer the work of serious filmmakers rather than comedy artists,’ he said. ‘I find them more interesting, more meaningful. It’s harder to do comedy but it’s not better. “Sleeper” and “Bananas” were cartoons – strictly for laughs. “Annie Hall” is not that. It’s not a satirical film at all, it’s more human.’
For one scene in “Annie Hall” in which he punctured the pomposity of some filmgoers, he brought on Canadian philosopher Marshal McLuhan although he said he had tried to get Federico Fellini and Lina Wertmuller. McLuhan was in town and available but ‘in my opinion he’s no actor; that was about the 16th take’. He said he chose singer Paul Simon to be the one who wins Annie in the film because ‘I wanted to lose the girl to someone shorter than I am.’
He shot the picture on grey, overcast days or at sunset so the film is very moody. ‘You can achieve states of anxiety almost anywhere but in New York it’s right out in the open,’ he said. ‘I would never more to Los Angeles because I don’t like sunshine; the kind of relentless blue-white sunshine they have there. All my friends have moved out there and perhaps I have an over-idealised view of New York but it’s very useful for “Annie Hall”.’The books he read were much the same. ‘When I read, I like heavy stuff – Flaubert, the Russian writers … Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov,’ he said. ‘To me, reading should be a real workout. In movies, I think “City Lights” was one of the best films ever made … “Gold Rush”, “Modern Times”, “Duck Soup” were all good. I find Bob Hope hysterically funny in some of his earlier films but he is politically unsound and he doesn’t done anything in years. Myself, I am a moderate depressive who is basically apolitical save for basic middle-class liberalism.’
Allen scoffed when someone suggested he was a comic genius. ‘To be called that is hilarious to me,’ he said. ‘It’s a show business word like marvellous. They mean nothing. My films do not have an enormous audience. My own feeling is that my films have limited appeal. I do films to please myself and a half-dozen friends. It’s just a great deal of luck that a decent number of people want to hear what I have to say.’
The filmmaker said he was always surprised by the amount of people who went to see his movies. ‘I’ve never gotten anything close to satisfaction from my films,’ he said. ‘All of them were personal failures. There is something to enjoy in them, I believe, but not for me. I don’t want to see them again. Nothing I’ve ever done stands up to scrutiny or analysis on a deep level but, then, even with the more serious filmmakers you can only analyse to a limited level. I’d much rather have been Marlon Brando, Louis Armstrong or Willie Mays. I’d happily trade anything I’ve done or could do to have been one of them.’
Meeting Rob Reiner a second time showed me a different man
By Ray Bennett
Fame and popularity can so easily go to the head of entertainers and so it seemed the first time I met Rob Reiner when he was still in his 20s and starring in the smash hit TV sitcom ‘All in the Family’. Just shy of ten years later, I was pleased to discover that he had changed completely.
Reiner was with a bunch of other celebrities at the Hiram-Walker distilling facility in Windsor, Canada, in 1976 in connection with a charity tennis tournament across the river in Detroit sponsored by the liquor firm’s Lauder’s Scotch brand. Funds raised on the tour went to the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Charlton Heston, Lloyd Bridges, Chad Everett (‘Medical Centre’), Chris Connelly (‘Peyton Place’) and Desi Arnaz Jr. were among the group and, covering the event for The Windsor Star, I chatted to several of them over lunch in the plant’s reception centre.
Afterwards, we all toured the bottling plant where I was in for a surprise. A mugshot ran on my column in the newspaper and I had made quite a few radio and television appearances. For a time, I participated in a current affairs programme with our editorial writers on Detroit’s PBS-TV station. All of which meant that, locally, I was reasonably well-known.
Still, I didn’t expect it when a couple of girls in the bottling plant asked me for my autograph. ‘No, no, I’m just with the paper,’ I said as Reiner and Arnaz Jr. looked on. ‘We know,’ the girls said, ‘and we’d still like your autograph.’ I signed and Reiner, with a disgusted expression on his face, said to Arnaz Jr. ‘Makes you wonder what the fuck we’re doing here.’
One of five children of Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Richard Cusack, John Cusack was 18 at the time but with a lot of screen work in industrial films, commercials and three features behind him he was confident and engaging.
In ‘The Sure Thing’, he plays a high school graduate whose attitude to girls is changed when he meets two opposites, one studious and standoffish (played by Daphne Zuniga) and the other gorgeous and available (Nicolette Sheridan). Cusack said he could identify with the role: ‘High school girls get a little annoying after a while. There’s a lot of girls out there who are beautiful but don’t have a lot upstairs. Guys still look for those girls who just kind of put out without giving you a headache. I got the chance to go out with some beautiful stupid girls in high school and I got bored with them too.’
He said he hated high school because of the social aspects and concentrated on acting. Switching back and forth from Hollywood soundstages to suburban Chicago classrooms didn’t help: ‘I would go and do a film and meet just beautiful older women. I would start something off but then the film’s over and it’s back to Chicago. That was frustrating.’ He already had a wise head on young shoulders. ‘The Sure Thing’ might be a hit or not – it was – but he said, ‘That’s all right because it’s a good film. If I’m good in it then I was good in a good film. If you’re good in a bad film, that’s something else.’
Cusack appeared so unaffected by his success that my memory of Reiner’s youthful boorishness made me apprehensive about interviewing the director. Maybe it was the learning curve he had gone through collaborating with three other talented comedic creators – Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer – but he had become the man all his friends and coworkers have described. In fact, he reminded me very much of his father, Carl Reiner, who had been gracious and candid when I interviewed him about his film ‘All of Me’ a few months earlier during the Toronto International Film Festival. Years later, when I chatted with Rob Reiner in London at the U.K. launch of his film ‘Bucket List’, he was just as relaxed and open.
Back in 1985, the filmmaker welcomed me to his office and gave me as much time as I needed. He spoke enthusiastically about Cusack and admitted that he cast him in ‘The Sure Thing’ because ‘he reminded me of me’. Zuniga, he said, was the girl he would have been in love with at college.
The title role had to be the epitome of a Southern California fantasy girl, a blonde on the beach with a great tanned body in a string bikini and Reiner was hilarious speaking of casting Nicolette Sheridan. ‘When she walked into my office,’ he said, ‘I acted like Jerry Lewis for about ten minutes’.
Sheridan read well but Reiner said he knew she was the right girl for the part when he explained that he would have to ask to see her in a bikini. Sheridan smiled at him and said, ‘I don’t think you can handle it.’ I thought of that years later when I saw Reiner’s film ‘A Few Good Men’ and heard Jack Nicholson’s iconic unscripted line ‘You can’t handle the truth!’