Вуди Аллен: Apropos of Nothing

I say, “Louis, I can’t play this.” “Why not?” he says. “Because I’m always fighting this false accusation and people are always writing things and making remarks and this just plays right into the hands of the yahoos.” “It’ll be good for you,” he tells me. What is he thinking? “It’ll help your image.” Now I like Louis a lot and I know he thinks he means to help me, but what is he smoking? I wished him luck and passed. I would never say, Don’t do this, it’s going to hurt me, because the guy spent months writing it and has a chance to direct it, and who am I to try and torpedo another guy’s project because of personal discomfort? Naturally when the film is seen by the press prior to the opening, my situation with Dylan is the main focus of everything, and it’s used as fodder to malign me left and right. Then, as fate would have it, poor Louis suddenly has real harassment problems of his own, and his film is pulled from release. He’s taking flack and dealing with an onslaught of problems. The mind boggles at what O. Henry could’ve done with a twist like that, and if not O. Henry, certainly Monty Python.

Despite all the smears and terrible PR, there are a few actual upsides to being a pariah. For one thing, you’re not always asked to sit on some dais, blurb a book, save any whales, or give a commencement speech—not that a guy whose knowledge of the Constitution is limited to the Twenty-First Amendment is a good choice to inspire students. Hillary Clinton wouldn’t even accept Soon-Yi’s and my donation to her campaign for president, and we couldn’t help wondering if another fifty-four hundred to spend would’ve enabled her to carry Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Ohio.

The great Moss Hart in his enchanting autobiography, Act One , writes of the difference between a playwright having first-act trouble versus last-act problems. First-act problems are much easier to deal with. Last-act problems, endings, wrap-ups, and climaxes are what separate the men from the prepubescents. And so it is, having scribbled down the trivia that has sketched in my life, I find myself with last-act trouble. My golden years. The Roach in Winter.

As usual, I continue to work. I made a movie called A Rainy Day in New York . I always wanted to shoot Manhattan in the rain, do a whole story that takes place on one rainy day. I don’t know what it is with me and rain. When I wake up in the morning and open the blinds and it’s raining or gray and drizzly or at least overcast, I get a good feeling. When it’s sunny I feel depressed. And the city is so beautiful in the rain, under cloudy skies. Don’t know why. It’s been suggested that it’s the objective correlative of my inner state. My soul is overcast.

So I hired Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Timothée Chalamet, Liev Schreiber, Diego Luna, Jude Law, and the fabulous Cherry Jones and made this romantic improbable tale. It’s about two college seniors in New York on a weekend and the romance between them.

Naturally since the movie is A Rainy Day in New York , the sun was out every day when we needed gray skies and rain, and all the rain in the movie was supplied by our own rain towers and water tanks. Seeing that this is all coordinated falls to Helen Robin, who makes the whole picture happen from budgeting it to getting a crew, negotiating deals for locations, making nice with the unions, getting everybody fed, and attending to all the postproduction work that needs to get done: the editing, music, prints, rating. She even types my scripts and has been doing it for forty years. It’s truly a 24/7/365-days-a-year job filled with nothing but crises and aggravation, but if she didn’t have aggravation, she couldn’t worry. And if she couldn’t worry, her enjoyment of life would vanish. Before her, for years Bobby Greenhut did it and also did it well, and I recall he was always riddled with anxiety about the budget and about going over schedule and about reshoots. If it wasn’t for his anxiety, he’d get no aerobics at all.

All the three leads in Rainy Day were excellent and a pleasure to work with. Timothée afterward publicly stated he regretted working with me and was giving the money to charity, but he swore to my sister he needed to do that as he was up for an Oscar for Call Me by Your Name , and he and his agent felt he had a better chance of winning if he denounced me, so he did. Anyhow, I didn’t regret working with him and I’m not giving any of my money back. Selena was adorable. She had all the hard stuff to do, and she knocked it off beautifully. Elle is simply a great natural talent like Keaton. When reporters pressured her, trying hard to get her to say she regretted working with me, she told them she wasn’t even born when the allegation was made and has no opinion. An honest reply. More people should have said, I really don’t know all the facts so I have to withhold my judgment. God forbid anyone should say, “This accusation has been thoroughly investigated and found to be untrue.” Although I’m told Joy Behar did make that point on TV. I should mention others who I’ve been made aware had come out publicly in my defense. Ray Liotta, Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Rampling, Jude Law, Isabelle Huppert, Pedro Almodóvar, Alan Alda, and I’m sure there are more that I just don’t know of. At least I hope. But thanks to all, because it was very nice of them to speak out, and I assure them it’s not something they will ever be embarrassed having done.

As of now, unless some American distributor puts it out here, A Rainy Day in New York will not be seen in the USA. Fortunately, the rest of the world remains sane, and it has opened all over and is quite successful. It’s funny to think of me doing films that are shown in every country but not America. Look at it this way: If the film I make is a bad one the public cannot be suckered into blowing their hard-earned cash on a turkey. On the other hand, if the film is one they’d enjoy, they miss it. Either way, they’ll live. I can’t deny that it plays into my poetic fantasies to be an artist whose work isn’t seen in his own country and is forced, because of injustice, to have his public abroad. Henry Miller comes to mind. D.H. Lawrence. James Joyce. I see myself standing amongst them defiantly. It’s about at that point my wife wakes me up and says, You’re snoring.

After Rainy Day , I embarked on my next film and I found it was hard to cast. One after the other, actors and actresses refused to work with me. Some I’m sure sincerely believed I was a predator. (I still can’t figure out how they could be so utterly convinced.) Clearly, a number of actors thought they were doing a noble thing rejecting offers to appear in my film. Their gesture might’ve been meaningful if indeed I were guilty of something, but since I was not, they were just persecuting an innocent man and helping to confirm Dylan’s implanted memory. Unwittingly, they had become Mia’s enablers. Then there were a number of actors who assured me privately they had followed the case more closely and said they realized I was getting a very raw deal. They railed against a criminal blood libel, invoking Medea, the McMartin school, Sacco and Vanzetti—all that was missing were the Moscow show trials. Yet as unconscionable as they said my pickle was, they could not work with me, as the backlash would cause them to wind up on line E at the unemployment office. A few said, “I waited my whole life for this phone call and now I can’t take the job.” I felt for them, as they sincerely believed they risked blacklisting. In reality, as those who did speak out could tell them, they risked nothing. Off the record, I had envisioned a little more peer support, nothing overwhelming, perhaps a few organized protests, maybe some irate colleagues marching arms linked, a little rioting, perhaps a few burned cars. After all, I had been a member in good standing of the creative community and was certain my predicament would infuriate my union brethren and fellow artists. A carefully planned demonstration on my behalf by hundreds of individual citizens failed to materialize due to the day’s fine beach weather. When Juliet Taylor mentioned the name Wally Shawn a bell went off. I always loved Wally as an actor, found him very real and funny, poignant, and with just the right intellectual vibe for the lead character in the movie I was preparing in Spain.