When The Shooting Stops Read online

  At times I caught myself in a reverie in which I studied his life for clues to my own. How could I fail to be captivated by the courage and willpower it must have taken a man of his makeup to come out from behind the comedians and TV personalities and start performing himself the jokes he once wrote for them? Our choices had been different: despite my gloominess and insularity, I had married and had the emotional security of a family; whereas Woody, more consumed by his alienation, had spent more time living alone and had turned his absorbing introspection into the raw material of his work. Did he look at my life, see in it his own abandoned options, and similarly wonder? I don’t know, for we never discussed such things.

  Although our similarities remained unspoken, they were the hidden cement of our relationship. Our silent bearing, so threatening to other people, had the familiar quality of home to us. It was certainly rewarding for me to contribute to the films of a man whose struggles I identified with and whose material I liked and respected. And I believe it was comforting for Woody, who feels so out of step with the world, to work with someone who understood his references, values, tastes, and anxieties.

  It should be obvious by now that, as a filmmaker, Woody has very little in common with the characters he portrays in his films. The insecurity and fears are truly his own, but the behavior is not. He is not a bumbler. He is not ingratiating. He rarely makes an effort to be affable to strangers. He is not particularly “Jewish” in his mannerisms, speech, or personal habits. Despite his scuffed shoes, ill-fitting chinos, army fatigues, and dilapidated felt hat, he is, when working, much more the style and image of the detached corporation executive. And interwoven with this are the shyness and the ambivalence about stardom. For despite his power, Woody has a fade-into-the-woodwork manner that becomes more and more incongruous the more famous he becomes. He is like an elephant in midtown, who, secretly believing he’s a cockroach, pretends not to be there.

  None of the popular accounts I’ve read come near to capturing the man I know—cerebral, cautious, judgmental, shrewd at covering his tracks, with a gentle but very mindful, even calculating, interpersonal style. He is smart, very smart, frighteningly smart. Often he knows where the interviewer from The New Yorker, Newsweek, or The New York Times is heading before the interviewer himself knows; and, thus, he is in almost as much control of his public persona as he is of his film persona. The public reports stress his unhappiness (“My one regret in life is that I am not someone else”), but despite all the words that have been written about his two decades of psychoanalysis, only a few intimates know the particulars of his pain. In the ten years we’ve worked together, including the occasional times we’ve socialized, we’ve never shared a heartfelt concern, an uninhibited laugh, an open display of despair or anger. Neither of us is spontaneous about feelings, and Woody is one of the few people I know who is substantially less spontaneous than I.

  From what I have seen, Woody prefers to operate in a stoic professional manner, unencumbered by allegiances and obligations. On the other hand, he is exceedingly generous with the people he values. Ex-wives and girl friends star in his films, and actors with walk-on parts get title credits. My lead credits in Annie Hall and Interiors are, to my knowledge, the only instances in which an editor has been so honored. Marshall Brickman, the co-author of Sleeper and Annie Hall, said, when we interviewed him, “I want to repay my debt to Woody.” He has helped make or advance the careers of many associates, and they love and respect him for it, and probably in many cases regret that they cannot quite touch him with their gratitude.

  As a director, Woody is not free of egotism and all its attendant problems. These are givens in show business. But it is here that all his awareness and self-control have paid off most handsomely. For unlike so many directors I have known, Woody simply has not allowed the ego issues to get in the way. He’s kept focused on his main concern, which is the work, and has refused to fall into playing The Director. Repelled by anything resembling authoritarian posturing, he’s gone overboard at times to avoid it, appearing on the set in the frowsiest outfits and speaking in the softest, most uncommanding voice.

  For several years the opportunity to work with Woody was the only thing that kept me cutting. He never behaved as if I was there merely to service him or to follow orders. He never expected me to cater to him or to second his every thought. He never saw my independent judgment, my disagreements, or my challenges as anything but assets to his films. And thus, though he maintained complete control of every project, it was always a free association when we worked.

  Woody seemed to understand that as long as he had the ultimate authority, he didn’t have to fear the opinions of others. He was always ready to try it your way, and if your way succeeded, so much the better. Above all, he wanted to learn from the people with whom he worked, people with decades of experience in areas that were foreign to him—and he has learned, so that now, if need be, he could easily edit a picture on his own.

  The growth in Woody’s expertise and his natural desire to use it reactivated all my old self-hatreds about having remained an editor. My unhappiness about having to be a secondary creative force and about being too cowardly to seek the primary spot could no longer be shunted aside, blamed on the nature of the industry, or attributed to unpleasant experiences with directors. If I failed to take the steps that my ambition and desire for fulfillment demanded of me, I had only myself to blame. By the time we finished Interiors, during which Woody was also going through great anxieties as a result of the dangerous new terrain he was treading, we both sensed that our decade-long collaboration was nearing an end.

  Although Woody works harder than anyone I know, he does not find much pleasure in it. He is in his best spirits when writing his scripts, because then, as he says, “You don’t have to meet the test of reality.” Otherwise, by Woody’s own account, he does not enjoy filmmaking, and he does not think highly of his own work (“I see his films,” says Woody of Ingmar Bergman, “and I wonder what I’m doing”). At no matter what stage of production, Woody manages to focus on the negative.

  On filming: “I don’t enjoy the process. You have locations in freezing weather, or night shooting, and you’re constantly worrying about cutting down on expenses. It’s no fun to live in a hotel room in a foreign country or a different state and get up at six every morning. It’s no fun at all.”

  On editing: “When you’re editing, you have the anxiety of making the film come out. You cut one scene maybe twenty times, you see it over and over—it loses its punch. . . . The cutting-room reality wraps itself around you like a wet blanket.”

  On finishing: “You can never seem to get the color the way you want it. When it comes time to take out the records you were working with and put in the real music, it’s always a disappointment. When you’re dead positive that this is the end, that it’s finished, the distributors call up and say the first weekend’s business is not what it should be. There’s never a time when it’s just a fait accompli, when the thing opens and everybody loves it, and audiences flock to see it—never.”

  But the most difficult aspect of filmmaking for Woody is people— meeting them, dealing with them, managing them. When he arrives at 8:58 a.m. in a room full of sound engineers, sound editors, and assistants at the mix, he does not join in the morning ritual of coffee and conversation, does not pause to receive their greetings, but rather moves double-time in the direction of his chair, keenly hoping to avoid the small talk. Unlike almost everyone else, Woody never eases gradually into work. If he had his way, work would begin the moment he arrived and continue for twelve hours a day, seven days a week with nothing but short, carefully timed meal breaks until the job was done. Socializing, schmoozing, kibitzing are anathema to him. He’d prefer not to have to be introduced to the sound editor’s new assistant, and he will do almost anything to avoid a handshake. Those he gives—watery handshakes, no grip in them at all—seem to be moments of torture during which he won’t know what to do with his eyes. He wil
l either look away, or he will stare steadily into his opposite’s eyes. Either way, the recipient will probably feel ill at ease.

  All told, the impact of Woody’s entrance will be to dampen whatever spirit existed in the room. Some, especially those who are working with Woody for the first time and are perhaps hoping to prove that they are capable of acting natural around a celebrity, will try to keep the spirit aloft, keep tossing cheerful morning words, for to fall silent now, they believe, would admit a degree of uptightness that can only make matters worse. But at 9:02 Woody’s soft, flat, unreassuring voice—“Jack, can we begin now?”—unexpectedly pierces the awkward banter, sinking any hopes for a relaxed, fraternal atmosphere. Work begins at once, and for the next four hours no one will dare suggest so much as a coffee break.

  Although he manages to have things his way, Woody appears none the happier for the experience. By and large, the more people he has to come in contact with, the more taxing he finds the production. Woody seemed particularly miserable during the making of Love and Death, much of which was shot in Hungary with the assistance of the Russian army. He found Budapest windy and cold, the Hungarian staff undependable, and the battle spectacles—with hundreds of extras and teams of special-effects men flown in from London—an ordeal. To make matters worse, his long stays in Paris, a city he loves, were compromised by the aggressive attention of the Parisian press.

  About halfway into the filming I came to France and spent ten days screening the dailies and conferring with Woody about future photography. One night Diane Keaton, Woody, Davida, and I went out for dinner to a restaurant off the Champs Elyses. The moment we left the hotel the paparazzi burst out from behind parked cars, where they’d been awaiting Woody’s exit. Walking backward, flashes constantly popping, the^ led us the full eight blocks to our destination, jamming themselves right through the restaurant’s revolving door to get their final shots. An awful price to pay for fame, I thought, especially for someone as shy as Woody, who doesn’t know how to handle praise, let alone adulation, and is nervous coming to dinner if any of the other guests are strangers.

  “I always had difficulty with people, men and women, on a social level,” Woody told Frank Rich for an Esquire magazine profile in 1977. “Before, when I was shy and unknown, I thought that if I could only make it in some way, it would really help relieve me socially and I could relax and go to parties and do things. But then, as soon as I did become known, that became the problem—I thought, ’My God, I’m well known—I can’t go out.’ There are times when I feel like—though it isn’t true—but I feel like a prisoner in my own home, when I feel like, oh, I don’t want to go down and get the papers because some people will say hello to me. So I stay in.

  “I was telling my analyst just a while ago that I had a certain admiration for Howard Hughes—I mean, I’m sure he was a terrible man—but what I was referring to was that he was living out a certain reclusive quality that I liked. Like Bergman living on that island, until all that mess happened. My idea of a good time is to take a walk from my house to the office and not for the entire walk have to worry about hearing my name being called from a passing car or being spoken to at all. That would be perfect.”

  Woody refers to his misery in public places in a scene near the beginning of Annie Hall. A hoody-looking character recognizes him outside a movie theater where he is waiting to meet Diane Keaton. As Woody squirms intensely, the man calls to his friends, “Hey, dis is Alvy Singer!” and presses him for his autograph. “Jesus!” Woody says when Keaton finally arrives. “What’d you do, come by way of the Panama Canal? . . . I’m standing with the cast from The Godfather.” Except for the jokes, the discomfort is true to life.

  People find it impossible to accept that a public man can be so shy, that the lovable comic character of Bananas, Play It Again Sam, The Front, and Annie Hall is not open to their most outrageous advances. I have in mind a lunch break during the editing of Sleeper. Woody and I were eating at a Horn and Hardart cafeteria on Eighth Avenue near Fifty-seventh Street when two middle-aged women passed our table and stopped about ten feet down the aisle. After exchanging a few words with her companion, one began retracing her steps until she was standing alongside the movie star. “Are you Woody Allen?” she demanded. Quietly, without looking up from his food, he said, “Yes.” At that she walked away, rejoining her friend, who was standing with her arms folded a few tables away. As Woody and I resumed our conversation, I noticed that the first woman, having conferred with her friend, was on her way back. “Are you sure you’re Woody Allen?” she said, looking down at the top of his head. “Yes,” he mumbled. Again she left, and I assumed his agony was over. But to my amazement, the second woman now loomed over us, staring boldly at the trapped man. “Can you identify yourself?” she said, whereupon I rose and made shooing motions, and the two of them left.

  During the cutting of Interiors, Woody and I occasionally ate lunch at an obscure Hunan restaurant on Broadway in the Eighties, a few blocks from the brownstone where I now live and work. As we neared the restaurant, I saw a teenage girl across the avenue who, I knew by the shock of recognition on her face, had spotted him. Wild with adolescent glee, she started running, charged right through the restaurant doors, and arrived at our table, ecstatic and out of breath, just as we were sitting. She wanted his autograph. Woody said no without ever looking up, and she went away crushed. “Why don’t you give her the autograph?” I asked, feeling sorry for the girl. Woody just shook his head, as if to indicate the plethora of demands his public makes on him. They run up to him, they shout from buses, they accost him in countless lobbies, and they have no idea what he’s like, that he’s not the delightful bundle of uncertainty he portrays in his films, that he prefers to be left alone. As I waited on line to buy our tickets for That’s Entertainment outside the Ziegfeld, Woody hiding in a nearby doorway, as I asked the sound editor’s assistant to let us work alone while we made some changes during the mixing of Interiors, as I moved reflexively in innumerable ways to shield him from the impact of his fame, I’ve wondered if his distress wasn’t the other side of the looking glass. Was this the kind of anxiety I would feel if I had chosen a less anonymous career? If I had chosen to act on my desire for recognition instead of my fear of it? If, indeed, I were yet to take the path that had opened before me since A Thousand Clowns and begin directing films?

  Love and Death represented the climax of Woody’s love affair with esoteric humor. It was something that was always apparent in his other films. In Bananas a baby carriage flies out of control down the steps of the capital as the rebels take the city. The dictator, seeking American aid, misses the CIA offices and walks into the UJA office instead. In Sleeper someone tells the awakened Woody two hundred years after he was put into frozen suspension that World War III was started when someone named Albert Shanker got hold of the atom bomb. How many viewers know that the baby carriage is a reference to Potemkin? That UJA stands for United Jewish Appeal? That Albert Shanker is the aggressive and much publicized president of the New York teachers’ union? These jokes are like a special reward for people who share Woody’s background and tastes. Love and Death is brimming with these esoteric references, mostly to Russian literature, and because of my love for the originals, it is one of my favorite Allen films.

  The picture is special to me also because of the score. Woody proposed the music for Love and Death during my expedition to Paris, suggesting that we back the film entirely with Stravinsky, a choice that seemed appropriate considering the Russian setting and themes. When we started cutting, I listened to a lot of Stravinsky and found him too overpowering for the film. He was like a tidal wave, drowning every part of the picture he came in contact with. As an alternative, I introduced Woody to three compositions by Sergei Prokofieff. Prokofieff was a great composer of ballet, opera, and orchestral works, but, unlike Stravinsky, he had written film scores, too. Love and Death was scored with two pieces of music I had known and loved since my OWI years—“Lieutenant Kije
,” from an old Soviet film of that name, “Alexander Nevsky,” composed for the Eisenstein film— as well as a third piece, the “Scythian Suite.” It was a heartwarming moment for me, the first time I sat through the screen credits and saw “Score by S. ProkofiefF’—in part because of my fondness for the composer, but more because of my fondness for the director and the freedom he had given me to contribute to his work.

  A pensive moment on ANNIE HALL.

  (Photo: Brian Hamill)

  19 ■ Annie Hall

  It Wasn’t the Film He Set Out to Make

  The cliché about sculpture, that the sculptor finds the statue which is waiting in the stone, applies equally to editing; the editor finds the film which is waiting hidden in the material.

  —TOM PRIESTLY, British film editor

  If anyone had predicted in the fall of 1976, when I first started cutting Annie Hall, that the picture would win the New York and the National Film Critics Awards, four top Academy Awards, the Directors Guild Award, and four British Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Editing. I would have dismissed the idea as uneducated speculation. Annie Hall was at that time an untitled and chaotic collection of bits and pieces that seemed to defy continuity, bewilder its creators, and, of all Allen’s films, hold the least promise for popular success.