By Ray Bennett
LONDON – Lynda Carter, in her ‘Wonder Woman’ prime, stepped naked and wet from the shower as I said ‘hello’ to begin our interview about life after three seasons as TV’s top female superhero.
Disappointingly for me, we were more than 2,000 miles apart; she at her ranch just north of Malibu in California, me in Toronto, Canada. She chuckled as she explained why it had taken her so long to come to the phone. We were live on the radio but I dined out for a long time on my yarn about the time I interviewed Wonder Woman when she was in the nude and it’s a fond memory on the 50th anniversary of the launch of her series.
It was Saturday Oct. 16, 1982, and I was on my regular weekly spot on the topic of television on Radio CJCL in Toronto with popular broadcaster Tom Fulton. He was the pro and I was the TV ‘expert’ and since the radio station was owned by Telemedia, which also owned TV Guide Canada, where I worked, it was a good fit. Not least because I was able to get Hollywood stars live on the phone on a Saturday morning, most of them not in their birthday suit.
Carter had moved on from ‘Wonder Woman’ after 60 episodes in 1979 and was busy making music specials and TV-movies about social issues such as ‘The Last Song’ (1980), about pollution, and ‘Born to be Wild’ (1981), about illicit adoptions. Her latest at the time, though, was a straightforward thriller called ‘Hotline’ (right), which was to air the night we spoke. She played a troubled woman convinced she is being stalked by a deranged murder suspect. I suggested that she’d done it for the fun of it.
‘That’s exactly right,’ she said. ‘It was very hard to do but it was a lot of fun because it was really the first chance I’ve had with something like this. It’s also the first time that I’ve ever
had a romantic interest on television in my entire career.’ On ‘Wonder Woman’, as Diana Prince she performed her derring do with Col. Steve Trevor Jr., played by Lyle Waggoner. He didn’t count? She chuckled down the line and said: ‘Well, no. Not really.’
Her career has continued to flourish with TV-movies, including the title role in ‘Rita Hayworth: The Love Goddess’ (1983, left) and TV series such as the private detective show ‘Partners in Crime’ (1984) with Loni Anderson (‘WKRP in Cincinnati’) and period drama “Hawkeye” (1994) with Lee Horsley. She played the U.S. President in the 2015 TV series ‘Supergirl’ and she remains a very popular singer on the concert circuit with gigs at major venues (below left). She would perform at Hollywood’s Catalina Jazz Club and the Apple Room, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, that November.
Some stars who become so closely associated with a TV series on the order of ‘Wonder Woman’ come to regret it later, but that’s not been true of Carter. She said, ‘It’s never been a problem with me. I’ve never felt like it was a problem. I think that actors generally can fall into stereotypes no matter what series they’ve been on. People see you every week as one particular person 
and they sometimes have a hard time readjusting. But they haven’t done that so far. They’ve been tuning in to see pretty much everything I’ve done and I’m thrilled with that.’
Was she concerned that whenever Wonder Woman was mentioned in the media there would be a picture of her in costume?
‘It doesn’t bother me at all,’ she said. ‘It is something that I did and I certainly can’t control the way that people remember me. I think it will be with my name probably for the rest of my life and afterwards. It’ll be in reruns for a long time. It sold well overseas too, in more than 100 countries. There’s really no place I can go in the world that hasn’t seen it. It’s been very good for me, though, because I have a diversified career so it has provided me with an opportunity to be very well known around the world.’
Woody Allen on ‘Annie Hall’ and why he disliked his other films
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.’