The Melbourne Review

Eighty percent of success is showing up

June 2012

Writer/director/producer/co-editor Robert Weide (pronounced ‘Widey’) is curious about which version of his Woody Allen: A Documentary I watched, and when he hears that it was the two-hour feature to be screened in Melbourne he explains, “I went into the editing room and emerged with a two-hour version, but it wasn’t until I was there that I realised what I was up against.

This guy has been so prolific, and there’s so much story to tell, that I had to call PBS and say, ‘I think this is turning into a two-parter, as it’s going to be three or four hours’, and they said, ‘Fine.’ The original version that aired here was in two parts, but I was contractually obligated to do a version that was a two-hour version too, as no theatre’s ever going to run a three-and-a-half-hour film.”

What distinguishes Weide’s film in either form is its unrestricted access to Allen, and while there has been another doco upon the auteur (Wild Man Blues) this is, without a doubt, the key cinematic study. “Wild Man Blues mainly focussed on his jazz band, and while there was interesting footage with him and Soon-Yi, it was mainly a concert film… I was 22 years old when I made my first film, a Marx Brothers documentary, and Woody appeared in that and we showed a lot of his comedy heroes, like W.C. Fields and Mort Sahl. He had seen my other films since, and we had stayed in touch, and I had also worked for his producers (Jack Rollins and Charles H Joffe) and saw him occasionally in their offices. He had always turned down this sort of documentary, which was all about his modesty…

In October 2008 I wrote him a very strong letter saying that it was time to do this and I was the guy to do it, and I heard back from his assistant saying that he was willing to talk about it. The biggest hurdle was getting him to agree: once he did that, he was very co-operative and never turned down any request.”

The same goes for when Weide suggested that they walk through Brooklyn and film Allen outside his childhood home and school: “He asked why anyone would be interested in that, and I replied that anyone interested in watching the film would be interested in those things. He’s not the best judge of his own value.” Absolutely: this is the man who hated his own Manhattan and offered to remake it at his own expense, and Robert agrees. “Sometimes you just shake your head. Maybe it’s the anhedonia.”

Some of the footage of Allen in the film is amazing: instead of sitting-on-a-chair-in-his-living-room stuff, we instead have moments such as when he shows his ratty typewriter, or when he lies on his bed and reveals a stash of scraps of paper covered in ideas. “Once he got going, he was happy to do things like that. That note thing was a surprise, as I knew I wanted to film him at his house, and I had made arrangements to come by. And when I saw his typewriter and asked him if he could talk about it, he said sure… And we were filming that and he just said, ‘Come here and I’ll show you my ‘ideas drawer’.” Robert laughs and adds, “There were some personal things he did that were totally unexpected.”

Weide also assembled an army of friends and colleagues as interview subjects, including Woody’s sister/producer Letty Aronson, talk-show legend Dick Cavett, and stars from Josh Brolin and Scarlett Johansson to Martin Landau and Larry David (Weide’s pal, as they were key players in Curb Your Enthusiasm). “It was a mix: some of them I knew beforehand, while others I knew from their managers. The fact that Woody had authorised it made the difference… Everyone was eager to participate – except for Diane Keaton. She always declines interviews and doesn’t like talking personally, and she’s always been protective of her relationship with Woody. I said to him that I thought I wasn’t going to get to talk to her, and he said that she simply had to, and to leave it with him. And he called me back later and said that he was going to be having dinner with her that week and was going to read her the riot act – although maybe his terminology wasn’t that strong!” Anyway, she granted an interview, and Weide’s is that rare film in which she talks about herself, Woody, their relationship and what it was to be Annie Hall.

Weide finishes by mentioning that he hopes, at some point, to complete a longtime-coming documentary upon another of his “cultural heroes”: the great Kurt Vonnegut. “That’s the film that I’ve been working on for years. I first approached him in 1982, started filming him in 1988 and filmed him, on and off, until his death in 2007… But I also might be doing a BBC series, or maybe another film. It’s all chance: you sling them all against the wall and see what sticks.” Or Whatever Works, you could say.

Woody Allen: A Documentary screens at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI) as part of its ‘Long Play’ program, from June 1 to June 18.

acmi.net.au

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