woody allen

it also wasn't even in top 25 grossing movies of 1987

I... said it was Eddie Murphy? and Murphy cites Pryor's response to him as part of the story.

xp yeah not trying to dunk on you or anyone specifically, just had a mo to look up the bit, then checked the date relative to Fatherhood out of curiosity, and saw that coincidental stat.

xp
"... of a live performance"

(if "tell him to have a Coke and a smile and shut up" is a Pryor line outside of this anecdote I'm unaware. always assumed in context that it referred to a Cosby campaign, since Americans in '80s/'90s pop culture mainly talked about him as an advertising spokesman.)

yeah but I just watched it on YouTube, Eddie is just reinforcing and riffing on Cosby's image as America's Dad, he's acting like he's Theo getting lectured.

that was his image, I really don't understand the point you're making at all

he did commercials but he was known for the Cosby Show!


The Cosby Show (1984-1992) was one of a rare, and probably now extinct, breed of American television series that captured and held the attention of vast audiences from nearly every walk of life for year after year of its prime-time run. The show attracted more viewers than any series in television history, reaching more than 63 millions Americans in the 1986-1987 season and posting Nielsen ratings that had not been seen since Bonanza’s 1964-1965 season. The Cosby Show also made more money than any previous series, netting over $1 billion in domestic syndication sales and close to $1 billion in ad revenues for NBC during its eight years in prime-time.

Sorry to change the subject/ pull something from much earlier in the thread, but there's something that's been bothering me about the way the Moses Farrow essay gets discussed/ not discussed, and I wanted to go back to it.

the moses farrow piece everyone shares is weird too. not to blame moses -- who is a victim too in some ways, if nothing else of having a father who refuses to acknowledge boundaries -- but what kind of person thinks it's ok for their father to marry their sister?

Maybe someone who grew up in an abusive household where healthy relationships were never modeled for him, who has one parent who abused him directly and one parent who didn't, and is therefore eager to find justifications for everything Parent B does?

I think it's important to be specific about what's in his essay. What Moses is a victim of, according to Moses, is years of emotional, psychological and physical abuse, which he alleges was also directed at his older siblings and led to their unhappy lives and early deaths. I'm not suggesting that this makes Moses right about what happened to Dylan; he was a kid at the time, and he obviously has a lot invested in believing Woody Allen. He's not a particularly useful or unbiased source when it comes to what happened to Dylan. But he is, imo, still the primary source on what happened to him, and I don't think we should dismiss or diminish anyone's testimony about the abuse they suffered as a child.

Basically, I'd like it if we could find a way to take Dylan's testimony seriously that also involves taking Moses's testimony seriously.

i agree. i take moses seriously with regard to his abuse at the hands of mia. that's why i said "not to blame moses" but i should have been stronger on this point.

but his defense of allen isn't compelling

The thing I’ve always loathed about WA is his self-deprecation— it’s profoundly aggravating and a huge smokescreen

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Wednesday, March 3, 2021 12:17 AM (forty-nine minutes ago)

orson welles had a pretty amazing rant about how much he hated allen's "combination of arrogance and timidity"

yeah he really saw through him

Welles said that Allen had the “Chaplin disease” and that his dislike for Allen was physical. When Jaglom suggested that Allen was not arrogant but shy, Welles went into a monologue about how much he hated the man, as cited by Vulture: “He is arrogant. Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It’s people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. To me, it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world—a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic.”

yes that's exactly right. in his movies his self-deprecation is often immediately followed by a nasty cutting down of someone else.

xp

i hadn't read Moses Farrow's account of his upbringing until just now--it's very sad, and i believe the stuff about being a transracial adoptee of a white parent.

"Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant.

this is true of allen but idk about in general

annoyingly like a quarter of my mental landscape was formed by woody allen movies; i will say i think he's a good actor. annoyingly.

that Welles quote is a little over the top

I suspect the meaning is more “Anyone [with success in entertainment and the adulation of peers, critics, and the public] who etc.” not any miscellaneous shy person

i think Welles, being the more overtly arrogant type, probably had a self-serving irritation with retiring types, but he certainly had Allen's number.

yeah i agree with that.

Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic

get his ass, orson

No truly shy person makes that many movies or wants a stage that badly, bottom line. I feel the same about Louis CK.

I also think “shyness” can be a smokescreen for ppl who do bad stuff to other people — obviously?

"The Chaplin disease" is quite telling. In more ways than one, apparently.

weirdly i think this is acknowledged in the films. annie hall is the story of a young woman who gets into a relationship with an older man who condescends to her -- and who is drawn to her because of his own insecurities, and his sense that she isn't his true peer. and then she outgrows him. by the end she realizes that his "intellectualism" is shallow bitterness, a way for him to feel superior to people who he, deep down, feels inferior to. and he is just left spouting the same pseudo-cynical platitudes that he opened the movie with.

annie is the only character who experiences real growth in the film. she is the actual protagonist. he might be the narrator but he is ultimately a static character, going nowhere, doomed to repeat the same miserable cycle over and over again.

Woody's stand-up persona was very confident in its portrayal of his ostensible weaknessess (if nothing else, he knows how good he is in front of an audience); this was calibrated into much more of the neurotic nebbish by the 1980s films.

--

tl:dr 2 matt

that was his image, I really don't understand the point you're making at all

just saying it was possible for human beings on planet earth born between 1940 and 1980 to encounter his work or existence outside of a 1980s sitcom.

like, the famous Americans who are in movies that you've actually seen* frame his IRL behaviour as wildly inappropriate & controlling overreach, so if that was his image, you can presumably take it as representative. (I took it as exposing the image as a mask for the other behaviour, but either way works.)

If you've leafed through Fatherhood in your own father's hospital room, a copy that someone gave him for his birthday, and it seems like some decent light gags and a bunch of smug fake bullshit telling other ppl how to behave, is it worth reading the whole thing and trying to take it sincerely?

* tbf I did see Leonard Part 6 in the cinema, which didn't sell him as a comedic mastermind



he did commercials but he was known for the Cosby Show!

yeah but if you encounter an American making reference to him on television or standup or sketch comedy or a radio interview or a magazine prose piece through the '90s and '00s, are they recounting the plot of a Cosby Show episode*, or are they saying "THEO, sweaters, PUDDING POP"? (or referring to his standup being influential)

*Soto's post upthread was fascinating because "sweaters / scolding paterfamilias" is pretty much the entire cultural context for ppl who didn't see the programme, ime

xp What does "truly shy" mean, though? I'm shy and I feel like there are all these weird conditions and gradations to my shyness, where you can barely see it in some contexts and then in others it suddenly kicks in and seriously interferes with my life.

If you wanted to put Welles's argument in a less sweepingly negative way, you could say that shyness in company can both mask and trigger a need to be heard and taken seriously in other contexts. Is that always/entirely about being arrogant and egocentric? I doubt it; sometimes people just have something to say. Though I'm sure it's one of those things that's partially true for lots of people. Shyness is very self-focused, after all; you end up thinking a lot about how other people see you.

I think there's room for welles to have been right about allen while being an asshole about it too

weirdly i think this is acknowledged in the films. annie hall is the story of a young woman who gets into a relationship with an older man who condescends to her -- and who is drawn to her because of his own insecurities, and his sense that she isn't his true peer. and then she outgrows him. by the end she realizes that his "intellectualism" is shallow bitterness, a way for him to feel superior to people who he, deep down, feels inferior to. and he is just left spouting the same pseudo-cynical platitudes that he opened the movie with.
― treeship., Tuesday, March 2, 2021

think this is otm

haven't seen Manhattan in forever but my memory of it is that Mariel Hemingway in the end decides what was best for herself and shrugs him off

xp yeah, that's about what I was trying to get at I think

it's definitely a great summation of Allen

xpost sic I get what you're saying but also like the article I posted more people watched the Cosby Show in the US in 86 than lived in the entire UK at the time

I just don't think you can understate how ubiquitous that show was

Dan S at 7:21 2 Mar 21

that Welles quote is a little over the top

haha well it's a quote by Orson Welles so it goes with the territory

Yes there are many facets to shyness (I think there are usually more precise words and shyness is an umbrella term)
That’s why I don’t trust people who use the shyness defense. If you’re only shy when you’re defending your awful behavior, are you shy? No you are slithering out of a tough spot

never got the feeling that Allen was pretending to be shy in any of his films tbh, just insecure

was woody the original fuccboi?

" just don't think you can understate how ubiquitous that show was"

yah and again im not saying anyone *should* have read red flags into it, just that it was possible to build an image of him, *based entirely on American pop culture,* that cast the kindly dad character as somewhere on the spectrum from hypocrite to sinister

like, Allen and CK were pretty open about their creepitude in their work (and only saw the very last straw of creepitude as bad). Cosby seems to have lucked into the sitcom as a cover, and leaned into it once it arrived, but he was also drugging and raping women in the previous 20 years while he was (briefly) doing spoken comedy about drugging and raping women, or starring in a film about an ambulance driver "who drinks alcohol on duty, harasses nuns, behaves brazenly towards practically everybody he meets... (and names co-worker Raquel Welch) "Jugs" for her ample bosom."

None of them really *had* to make up a fake empathetic character to smuggle their behaviour through; fame and power and being male did most of the work already.

Like 80% of Harvey Weinstein's public persona / reported anecdotage was being an intrusive, controlling, destructive creep, trying to take over people's life's work and make it worse with his unwanted intrusions, 19% was being a screaming bully towards people he didn't work with, and 1% people saying what a pleasant relief it was to drink champagne with him if you managed to get your work past him unmolested and it won an award. Then it came out that he acted the same way (but horribly worse) toward women when nobody was around. idk. when you're a star, they let you do it.

I think the two most blatant examples of Allen projecting his insecurities onto others are found in Manhattan: where Keaton's ex- turns out to be Wallace Shawn, whom Allen, when they run into him, instantaneously gets to feel superior to and make jokes about, and then all the carping about other people's pretensions throughout the film, while he gets to swoon over Flaubert and Cezanne and Bergman ("Swedish movies") in his makes-life-worth-living list at the end (making sure to mix in other stuff we recognize as not pretentious).

In his autobio (which I didn't finish, don't worry) Schwarzenegger says that when he moved to NYC in the 1970's his two role models were Woody Allen and Andy Warhol, which is obviously p lol but he also talks about how Allen could dominate a room, how he was immensely secure despite his nebbish persona. So Arnie has his number too, but in an aspirational way.

i don't think the insecurity was fake, just that it wasn't something that made him harmless. to the contrary, it seems to have driven his need to domineer over young women.

in a shocking revelation that upends everything we thought we knew about patriarchy, it turns out nerds can be misogynists too

Whodathought? Now, where's that Frank Zappa thread?

i don't think the insecurity was fake

― treeship., Wednesday, March 3, 2021 7:11 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Allen's entire life has been built around making stories. If there is a person who could pull that kind of stunt is an actor/director.

upfront, I'm going to be clear that I've seen I think 10 of his films…and so I am seeking informed views…

what other artists full stop are there whose entire oeuvre revolves around presenting rewritten iterations of their own lives, and thus defenses of their behavior IRL ? I believe the majority of his films represent his public persona i.e. the way he sees himself, typically involved some other professional pursuit that he considers to be part of the Manhattan/UES milieu to which he is tethered to an obsessive degree… a college professor, a novelist… in these films, he's a neurotic, anxious nerd… but in that he is always the moral victor; the women (or teenage girls) who he seeks see the error of their ways and realize that this little nerd fucks them better than anyone else and is so smart and funny……and the men he is intimidated by initially always realize that he is their superior…and of course, like it is said in the doc, he is grooming the audience re: his preying on teenagers by presenting cute charming versions of such behavior in his films…

are any of these Mary Sues ever shown to have acted in bad faith? Do any ever get their comeuppance? I don't think so but let me know…and seriously, are there tons of other filmmakers or novelists who are so childish that the overwhelming majority of their work is devoted to presenting idealized, heavily defended versions their own lives and behaviors (I guess the Seinfeld was like this)? how many of his films are about something other than his need to compliment himself? It seems that no one has ever been in a position to say to him "this is not a good idea…" his sister must have been the closest but evidently never did…of course he thought he could get away with this shit in 1992…he had encountered very little other than profound ass kissing for the entirety of his adult life…

I also find his version of New York —which is the UES that he as a child wanted to escape to from Coney Island — deeply annoying, as does the impression I have that his cultural interests have not budged since he was fucking, what, 20, 15? Dixieland jazz, european art film, New York sports and the western literary and philosophic canon, mixed and matched over and over…does he ever express interest in anything newer than that, other than fucking females who are decades his junior?

Blue Jasmine is especially annoying because it's supposed to be set in San Francisco but Allen just transplanted NYC to the West Coast, with Bobby Cannavale pretty much doing a 'fuggetaboutit!' kinda thing the whole time

I think the autofiction element of most of his movies is a shitty ripoff of philip roth, who was also a misogynist and a cruel partner and hudband, but one who, to his credit, wasn’t really complimenting himself in these portrayals either. I see allen as a very unsophisticared reader of roth and the movies are like that sensibility shoehorned into the simplistic form of romantic comedies.

It’s like if someone tried to make a version of the brothers karamazov starring mickey mouse and friends, attempting to adapt the themes to that audience

I think you’re right that woody tries to make himself lovable in these films and normalizes his own desire doe young women to boss around. But it is worth noting—maybe—that he doesn’t get the girl in the end of most of these. He is like a stop on their road to self-actualization.

I think the autofiction element of most of his movies is a shitty ripoff of philip roth, who was also a misogynist and a cruel partner and hudband, but one who, to his credit, wasn’t really complimenting himself in these portrayals either.

hence why Deconstructing Harry ranks among his best.

He knew enough about storytelling to disguise the wish-fulfillment aspect, at least a little, add some ambiguity. But that doesn’t discount the way in which the films romanticize himself and the type of heterosexual relationships he preferred.

xps appropo of nothing to trees: i own the english translation of this and it's fun

http://static.wikia.nocookie.net/scrooge-mcduck/images/0/01/Papercutz%27s_First_Page_of_Mickey%27s_Inferno.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000

https://bookriot.com/reading-mickeys-inferno/

uh, here:
http://i.imgur.com/gY2zMhv.png