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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, December 22nd, 2005 - Comments Off on Woody Allen, 'Defector'
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Woody Allen, 'Defector'


My westward journey also allowed me the opportunity to find the good film news way in the back of this week’s issue of New York Magazine–it is not all NYU film school implosions and Ken Tucker going out with kind of an attenuated whimper. Logan Hill’s essay about Woody Allen and Match Point is one of the more grounded we have seen about the filmmaker’s supposed return to form. Let Peter Biskind, Entertainment Weekly and the others have their hagiography, Hill seems to write; Allen and New Yorkers have an honest-to-goodness relationship to salvage here:

I fear we’re less likely to end up remembering Match Point as Woody’s comeback than honoring it as his last well-made film. He himself has admitted that he has learned nothing … no wisdom, and perhaps we should take him at his word. The plot of his film hinges on how luck can ruin your life or save it—and pure dumb luck is how he ended up in London. …

Woody’s London sojourn allows us to love him again, at least for a while. It’s given him new actors to play with, and the excuse to write—finally—a male lead who doesn’t sound just like him, if only because he has a British accent. What a relief it is, for the first time in years, to be able to relax and enjoy a Woody Allen film. Maybe we both just needed some time apart.

Also, do not construe Hill’s early acknowledgement that “we dumped him first” as too much of a mea culpa. If Allen never returns to make another movie in New York, Hill says, we have plenty of evidence to determine why:

Allen created his own quirky patina that he layered over the seventies recession and Wall Street eighties, and it was so alluring that we began wearing tweed vests to look like Diane Keaton, or mimicking the neurotic cadences of Woody because we aspired to the life he’d dreamed up–until Mia Farrow found that naked Polaroid of Soon-Yi. It was only around the time that Allen became an embarrassment to himself that he started embarrassing us. And it was shortly after that we began to notice how his vision of New York–sunny cafés, townhouses, and bistros–had become a kind of cinematic gentrification. By the mid-nineties, Alvy Singer had been priced out.

I love it: Filmmaker expatriation as not just socioeconomic phenomenon (a la Hal Hartley), but also as sociocultural benchmark. This would help explain Match Point‘s more cynical reprise of Crimes and Misdemeanors‘ class drama; it is obviously no accident that Allen stayed behind the camera when he reimagined the story in 2005. Or maybe he just did not want to fuck up with the BBC’s money. Anything is possible–anything, that is, except Woody Allen ever again being all ours.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon