Woody’s Wish

Woody Allen is trying to think of a film comedian who pulled off life’s endgame successfully, who managed to keep connecting with audiences at his age and beyond.

He’s having difficulty.

“You know, I don’t think Chaplin did,” he says finally. “I would have thought he could.”

Buster Keaton wound up collecting paychecks for “Beach Blanket Bingo” and “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.”

W.C. Fields? He maintained a funny persona, but “in not very good films.”

Bob Hope? People today remember the master of repartee as an old man standing beside Brooke Shields “reading off cue cards on the end of the battleship.”

The Marx Brothers? They were dazzling, then “their movies fell off.” Bad scripts were part of it, Allen is convinced, but even with good ones, “audiences would have said, ‘All right, we’ve seen these tricks already in a half-dozen films. Enough already.’

“They’re not going to come and see you if you don’t develop or change in some way. And none of those comics developed or changed. The only one was Chaplin, and it wasn’t for the better,” Allen says, recalling how the genius of silent film ended his career writing and directing “The Countess From Hong Kong” in 1967. “Terrible.”

He has his answer, then. “Nobody.”

“Everybody ran out. I can’t think of anybody who didn’t run out.”

*

Woody Allen was pondering the trajectory of comic genius during a quiet moment before he had to face yet another group of film and drama students attending a screening of his latest film, “Hollywood Ending.” He’s been out and about a lot lately, venturing far beyond his safe Manhattan haunts. At the behest of his domestic distributor, DreamWorks, he’d made his first trips ever to Canada and Texas before ending his promotional tour here, in Georgia, another place he’d never been. And today he makes his first appearance at Cannes, where his movie will kick off the famous film festival.

In March, he made a surprise first appearance at the Academy Awards after turning down 13 past invites. That’s where he brought up his age.

“I’m 66,” he quipped. “A third of my life is over now.”

The Oscar crowd laughed on cue at Allen’s optimistic calculation of his life span--198 years by his count--and that was the whole idea, he insists here. He simply wanted to “say something amusing,” just as he did with the “random” gags he concocted for his stand-up comedy routines decades ago.

Yet even if Woody Allen has stopped seeing his shrink, it seems fair to wonder whether any remark about age could be entirely random coming from a filmmaker who could well be feeling his own after a lifetime of obsessing over death, the unconscious and other terrifying absurdities of human existence.

He just got the math a little wrong.

Allen’s father, Martin, a onetime jewelry engraver, died last year, at 100. His mother, Netty, died this January, at 95.

If his parents are a guide, two-thirds of his life is past, not ahead of him. But that still gives him 30 to 35 years, three more decades to distract himself and see if he can defy the cruel reality that caught up with Charlie Chaplin and the rest.

*

In “Hollywood Ending,” he plays an Oscar-winning director who’s sunk so low he’s doing deodorant commercials in the Canadian tundra. When his gorgeous ex-wife wrangles him a last chance to direct a feature, the hypochondriac goes blind. “At least you won’t be able to read the reviews,” his agent says.

No one would confuse Allen’s real-life status with that, however weak his box office of late. That means little to him, anyway, or so he says, time and again. What counts is that he’s had loyal foreign distributors and a series of domestic ones who back him on his terms. In recent years, he’s gone from Miramax to Fine Line to Sony Pictures Classics, and now to DreamWorks.

His terms are total freedom, except for budget. He churns out his one-a-year movies on a shoestring by today’s standards, for little more than $15 million. In return, he writes the scripts he wants, casts the actors he wants and gets “final cut.” There’s no meddling from the sort of studio executives he skewers in “Hollywood Ending,” guys who have great tans but can’t pronounce “auteur” and lecture him on how “Hitchcock was an artist, but he was commercial.”

Allen’s freedom means he can mock their vintage car collections, having his character say, “If I drove around in a 1939 Mercedes, people would think I was Himmler,” and no real-life studio honcho can grumble about how most moviegoers today probably never have heard of the Nazi SS chief.

Allen doesn’t hear how the line plays with the Atlanta college students who fill a theater in an upscale mall multiplex--he refuses to watch his movies. Only after the credits roll does a public relations aide take his arm and lead him down the aisle to the stage. The students ask questions into a microphone, but the moderator sometimes has to repeat them. The guest is hard of hearing.

He’s been saying for years that he’s basically “lazy” and does so again this evening, advising the students to study films of “the really great” directors such as Bergman and Kurosawa. He writes his scripts in “a couple of weeks,” he tells them, and is not big on rehearsing or endless reshooting. “If it’s 6 o’clock at night and I’ve done two takes of something and they’re decent takes and there’s a basketball game on television ... that’s it for me.”

The kids laugh at the notion that he is, in their parlance, a slacker. Yet Allen seems serious as he goes on: “ ... And I’m sure it shows in the films.... I don’t get perhaps the maximum out of my work, but I get the bare minimum to have sustained a career, you know, amidst many financial failures.”

It will be 10 years this summer that he became less funny to many people when it was revealed that he was having an affair with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his then-girlfriend, Mia Farrow. But he and Soon-Yi are married now, with two children, and that’s not an issue with this crowd, which clearly came to the theater wanting his film to work.

The students laugh again at his quip about his failures, then stand and applaud as an aide takes his arm once more and leads him up the aisle.

*

Two days later, he’s back in New York, talking about how gorgeous Savannah was. After Atlanta, he took Soon-Yi and the kids to see the coastal city’s famous squares ringed with historic homes and moss-draped trees, like any tourist family. He also sampled “real Southern cooking,” including fried chicken and cheese biscuits, “stuff which I later learned is fried in Crisco and sticks of butter,” he says.

Back in Texas, he’d sampled the barbecue ribs, which leads into a bit about why he won’t live as long as his father. Dad ate food like that every day it seems--eggs for breakfast, ice cream at night, etc.--and never gave it a thought. Woody doesn’t dare risk such deadly fare, except he had just tried those juicy ribs, “the first time I would say in 30 years,” and now he’s imagining the fat oozing into his veins, “and all that thinking will probably cost me more time on my life than my father’s eating all that stuff.”

You can’t help hoping that he has indeed relished such moments, and this whole getting-out-in-the-world business. You want to think it’s an act, largely shtick, how fragile he seems off the set, hunching in his slight shoulders as if expecting a battering from who-knows-what.

“I never have a comfortable moment,” he says.

We’re in his screening room off Park Avenue. Cabinets along one wall are filled with old jazz albums. The brown sofa in the back of the room is frayed, feathers pushing out of the seams.

I’ve brought a caricature of him done a decade ago by a psychiatrist friend, playing off the graveyard scene in Hamlet. Here the skeleton is contemplating his skull, declaring, “Alas, poor Woody.”

America’s best-known shrink-goer before Tony Soprano stopped his therapy a few years back. “Talking things out” took way too long, he says. Now they can give you “these little low-dosage pills,” before a trip to overcome apprehension about flying, say. “Some people feel antidepressants should be taken by everyone over the age of 65,” he adds.

He can make a routine out of that too, of course, wondering what such chemistry might have done for fictional characters, like “if you had given Blanche DuBois some Prozac.”

Allen says, “I have a low level of depression my whole life. That depression has given me a kind of apathy that gets mistaken over the years for either reclusiveness or arrogance. But it’s not. Like I’ll say I don’t care if my film does well at the box office, I don’t care what the reviews say. But I mean it ... from a kind of ‘What does it all mean in the end anyhow?’ point of view.”

Since he was in Atlanta, the reviews have started coming out for his film. He’s gotten a few three-star notices and advertising blurb quotes--”the laughs are guaranteed”--but others are merciless. The New York Times compares his picture to the “sweaty flops” that ended the career of six-time Oscar winner Billy Wilder, who died in March at 95, having not made a film in 20 years.

Allen swears he doesn’t care. He cites the discovery of ruins of ancient Aztec stadiums, “and you think of thousands of people filling these ... cheering and rooting for their generation’s Michael Jordan. And it’s of zero consequence to us. I mean, less than zero. And to them--I could see guys, you know, rooting and being thrilled and coming out, ‘Hey, are you bringing your wife over Thursday night?’ And what did it mean? It’s just such a powerful potent nothing.”

One of the children of writer-director Preston Sturges once sent him a copy of Sturges’ classic “Sullivan’s Travels,” about a filmmaker who sets out to make a statement about the sad state of the world but winds up learning the power of laughter when he sees convicts on a chain gang howl at a cartoon.

“I don’t really believe laughter redeems anything,” Allen says now. “I feel it’s a distraction. It can be a pleasant distraction ... just as music is.”

He wakes up in the middle of the night with “terrifying thoughts,” he says. That’s when he concocts his lists: of baseball all-star teams, picking singles hitters only perhaps; or film lists, maybe the 10 best silent comedies. He draws up lists until he falls asleep again.

“I’ve tried to think of all the women that I’ve gone to bed with in my life,” Allen says, flirting with another bit. “There’s not that many. It’s not that taxing.”

The talk of best comedies brings us back to Wilder, the writer-director behind “Some Like It Hot” and of great dramas also. Wilder continued coming up with ideas for films in later years but complained he couldn’t “make a deal.”

“He got trapped,” Allen says. “He worked in the Hollywood system

Allen’s role models for longevity come from the art-house cinema--Bergman, Kurosawa and Spain’s Luis Bunuel, who produced one of his best works, “That Obscure Object of Desire,” when he was 77.

Allen says, “As long as my health holds out ... I see no reason why I couldn’t ... write and direct films, you know, my whole life, providing I had something amusing to say, or something interesting to say. Because I feel there’s someone always around to fund me at the low level that I’m required. I could always go to Europe or someplace, there’s always somebody willing to put up a certain amount of money.”

That’s certainly true at the moment. DreamWorks seems to have no qualms about the deal calling for the studio to distribute three Allen comedies, one to go. It’s “low risk,” notes co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg. And the potential upside is obvious: the possibility that Allen could yet turn out another gem.

For all his disclaimers about nothing mattering, Allen wouldn’t mind doing that. He speaks often of his luck at having been born with what Noel Coward called “the talent to amuse,” but also of his hope to produce a film that could be shown with those of his idols.

When audiences hear that, they gush about some work of his--a student in Texas went on for two minutes on why “Manhattan” was a masterpiece. “I happen not to agree,” Allen said.

But much as he recoils at such praise, he resists criticism he perhaps ought to hear. How will anyone convince him it may be time to scrap those screen romances with women 30 years younger? Even his loyal fans may have found his latest, with Tea Leoni, hard to believe.

“Not to me,” Allen says. “I can picture it in a shot.”

He bristles again when asked how he’d know if he is losing touch. “It’s hard to imagine that phenomenon exists,” he says, “except in kind of the drama of journalism.”

*

His film opens the next day and takes in $2.2 million its first weekend, $112 million less than “Spider-Man.” “Hollywood Ending” just makes the box-office Top 10, tied for the last spot.

Paul Dergarabedian, the Los Angeles-based box-office tracker, wonders whether Allen’s “older audience” may have been “afraid to go to the theater because of the ‘Spider-Man’ crowds.” But this past weekend, even as Allen headed to Cannes, it dropped off the list.

Back in his studio, Allen had recalled what others might call his glory days, when Marshall Brickman, his writing collaborator on films such as “Annie Hall” and “Sleeper,” suggested they drive by a theater to see the line outside. “And there was a line,” Allen said. “Then we dispersed to our separate dwellings and my life didn’t change. I began to think, ‘Now what?’ ‘What do I do?’ ‘How do I fill the hours?’”

His answer was, and remains: “I start writing something else.”

Next month, he begins filming his next diversion, “a comedy of high paranoia,” with Glenn Close and Danny DeVito, trying once again to amuse the rest of us.