Conversations With Woody Allen - His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking

Zusatztext “Fascinating . . . Readers will find a trove of Woody-on-Woody insight [and] something interesting on nearly every page.” —Baltimore Sun “Lax’s informed questions . . . allow Allen to speak with intelligence and maturity.” — The Washington Post “Mesmerizing.” — Financial Times “Remarkable . . . Fresh with an immediacy often missing in a retrospective.” —Raleigh News & Observer “You feel that you are in the same room! listening to someone asking intelligent! informed questions and hearing the subject giving intelligent! relaxed answers . . . An entertaining book.” — The Washington Times Informationen zum Autor Eric Lax Klappentext In discussions that begin in 1971 and end in 2009! Allen talks about every facet of moviemaking through the prism of his own work as well as the larger world of film! and in so doing reveals an artist's development over the course of his career. He speaks about his influences and about the genesis of his ideas; about writing! casting! acting! shooting! directing! editing! and scoring—and throughout shows himself to be thoughtful! honest! self-deprecating! always witty! and often hilarious. Leseprobe Introduction A book of conversations usually collects interviews done over weeks or months and so, regardless of the time span covered, the result is a snapshot that reflects the attitudes and feelings of the subject at a given point in life. This book, however, is an album assembled over half of Woody Allen’s life, beginning in 1971, and like time-lapse photography, it offers a clear view of his transformation from novice to one of the world’s most acclaimed filmmakers, and what he learned along the way.For thirty-six years I’ve had the pleasure of watching an artist’s evolution from close range, but I wouldn’t have laid money on the chances of that after our first meeting. In the spring of 1971 an editor at the New York Times Magazine sent me to investigate three ideas for a possible story. One of them was a profile of Allen, a thirty-five-year-old comic who had written two Broadway plays ( Don’t Drink the Water and Play It Again, Sam ), whose prose was now often in The New Yorker, and who had recently begun to act in and direct his own screenplays: Take the Money and Run (1969), the purported documentary of a petty criminal so spectacularly inept that he can’t even write a legible holdup note, and the just-released Bananas, a comic turn on Latin American revolutions and U.S. foreign policy. With just enough plot to bind them, the pictures are strung together like a nightclub monologue, with little attention paid to character development or cinematic style. They are one often surreal gag after another, and they are uproarious.The films announced the arrival of an idiosyncratic and original talent, and editors at the Times wanted to know more about him, as did I. I thought he was in a league with my comic heroes, S. J. Perelman, Bob Hope, and the Marx Bothers, and even more varied in his ability to provoke laughter. I telephoned his managers, Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, to ask for an interview, and an appointment was made. I arrived at their duplex office on West Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan with a couple of pages of questions and a brand-new tape recorder and was taken upstairs, where Woody was waiting in a small room furnished with a table and lamp and a couple of nicely stuffed chairs. He looked uncomfortable and seemed shy; I was new to journalism and nervous about meeting someone whose work I admired. We shook hands, said hello, settled into the seats, and I asked my questions like someone reading off a checklist. His answers were succinct. His shortest was “No,” which would not have been so bad had any of his longest been more expressive than “Yes.”So I wrote a piece on one of the other two ideas I looked in...

Report

Fascinating . . . Readers will find a trove of Woody-on-Woody insight [and] something interesting on nearly every page. Baltimore Sun

Lax s informed questions . . . allow Allen to speak with intelligence and maturity.
The Washington Post

Mesmerizing. Financial Times

Remarkable . . . Fresh with an immediacy often missing in a retrospective. Raleigh News & Observer

You feel that you are in the same room, listening to someone asking intelligent, informed questions and hearing the subject giving intelligent, relaxed answers . . . An entertaining book.
The Washington Times

Product details

• Authors: Eric Lax
• Publisher: Knopf
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 18.08.2009
• EAN: 9781400031498
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-3149-8
• No. of pages: 416
• Dimensions: 185 mm x 230 mm x 26 mm
• Series: VINTAGE BOOKS; Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet; Non-fiction book > Music, film, theatre