Excerpts

Chapter 1 The Script Woody Allen lay fully clothed on the queen-sized bed in his bedroom that doubles as his workroom on the third floor of his Manhattan townhouse, writing a film script in longhand on a legal pad. A bed has been his routine writing spot for decades, even when he is staying in a hotel. What was not routine this day in February 2013 was that he was alternately working on two scripts: one a contemporary drama about a burned-out philosophy professor who unexpectedly finds renewed purpose by deciding to kill a judge he believes is about to ruin the lives of an innocent woman and her children; the other a romantic comedy set in the 1920s about a curmudgeonly magician enlisted to unmask a young woman with apparent powers as a spiritualist. Unsure of which to film that summer to follow Blue Jasmine, for which Cate Blanchett won a Best Actress Oscar and his script a Best Original Screenplay nomination, he worked several days on the comedy until his enthusiasm waned and then switched to the drama--until his zest for that one flagged and he returned to the comedy. He might stay with one idea for fifteen minutes or three days before being distracted by the other. Though far from normal, there have been several occasions when he has written simultaneously on two ideas and at least one when he wrote three successive separate scripts in twelve weeks before he had the one he wanted. "I lose confidence," he said while switching between these two, "and I sometimes panic and think, 'Don't try and fix this. Jump ship.' " But in this instance when he liked both ideas he temporarily fell victim to "obsessional indecision." He picked one and plunged in because he could "see everything falling in place so beautifully--the magician vanishes the elephant and they call him in to help expose the spiritualist and he meets the beautiful girl with the pre-Raphaelite hair." But the idea quickly went "from idealization in my mind to actuality on the printed page and from the Platonic ideal of perfection to all the warts," so he moved back to the murder. He calls this the "automatic anxiety of second-guessing," manifesting his concern that anything he writes will not be the best follow-on to the last film insofar as variety of subject. He says he "could be sitting with Gone with the Wind or A Day at the Races" and still be anxious that he'd made the wrong choice. While he remains hostage to his uncertainty, his aim is to tell a tale that draws in the audience: "I'm offering up story all the time. That to me is what the movies are."  When Woody finished the handscript of the comedy about the magician in March, he sat at the small table in the corner of his room and used the same Olympia portable typewriter he has had for his entire career to type on yellow foolscap what was on the legal pages, now covered with cross-outs and overwriting in his cramped script.  He then made more changes with a ballpoint pen on what he typed, cut and stapled portions of these further edited pages together, and sent them to Helen Robin, his longtime associate producer, who has typed clean versions of his screenplays for nearly thirty years. He is the sole arbiter of his work. There is no outside authority who can make changes. "His script is almost prose," she says. A character's "name may be on the left side. As I'm typing it I use a script program that formats on the page but I decide to make a scene cut based on where he's written. My typed version goes back to him with his copy, and after a few days I get back a combination of the original yellow typed pages with cutouts of some of what I've typed stapled and mixed in with handwritten changes. Then I do the next revision and send it to him. That generally goes on until we shoot, usually two to four revisions." When she returned the first version of the script three days later, he sent her the drama about the professor. Both scripts were soon sent to a few trusted readers, including his sister, Letty Aronson, a producer of his films, and Juliet Taylor, who cast them for more than forty years until her retirement in 2016.  No matter the choice, it would be the forty-fourth film written and directed by him in as many years. Such a regular schedule of filming requires nearly metronomic timing, and it allows him to live largely in a world of his own manufacture. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s, he "used to run into the cinema to escape--twelve or fourteen pictures a week sometimes," and cinema is still his refuge: "I get to make the films I want to make, and so for a year while I make a picture I get to live in that unreal world of beautiful women and witty men and dramatic situations and costumes and sets and I can manipulate reality. I've escaped into a life in the cinema on the other side of the camera rather than the audience side of it."  Because his alternate life in the movies is so complete, by temperament he cannot begin working on the idea--or ideas--for the next film until the current one is far enough along for him to uncouple emotionally, which usually occurs immediately after he finishes editing and decides on the music.  He does not lack for choices. He told his friend Dick Cavett in the 1960s, "I can't imagine that life could be long enough for me to do the number of projects I have in mind." In a drawer in his workroom is a bag full of scraps of paper with possibilities jotted on them, usually no longer than a sentence or two. Always among them is a constantly updated snippet that reads, "Best three ideas currently." Some notes in the drawer are new additions, others have been there for years--concepts he likes but that have stalled. The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which a movie character walks off the screen and into the audience, fermented for years until Woody realized that both the escaped character and the actor who plays him would become involved in the life of a woman who watches the movie every day to escape her dreary Depression-era life.  "The world is strewn with very good ideas that don't go anyplace," he said after completing both new scripts. "It happens all the time, to me and everybody. They get a great idea: A guy walks down the street and finds a wallet and he goes to a house and there's a dead body on the floor. Then what?" He laughed. "It's the then what? that kills you." The comedy about the magician and the spiritualist was another idea he had stored for years, unable to answer what followed after he had established the premise: A world-renowned magician is asked by his lifelong friend, an illusionist of lesser stature, to expose the suspected chicanery of a young woman who seemingly can discern the most private information about people and communicate in séances with their dead relatives. She and her mother, who travels with her, have been embraced by the matron of a wealthy family in gratitude for "connecting her" with her departed husband. The friend explains that the matron is about to give the pair a large donation to establish a foundation for psychic research and that the matron's son has fallen desperately in love with the clairvoyant. There is concern that she will filch the family fortune.  The script had its genesis ten or fifteen years earlier, when Woody and Marshall Brickman--with whom he wrote Sleeper (1973), Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)--discussed writing a film about a fake medium and a magician set in the early twentieth century, when spiritualism was at the peak of its popularity. The magician, who is also an escape artist, begins to lose his nerve; he becomes increasingly reluctant to be chained up in a milk can and thrown into the sea and soon ends up in psychoanalysis. Called on to debunk a spiritualist, he accepts the task with brio but soon falls for her. (Woody once read that the great magician and escape artist Harry Houdini was asked to debunk a medium and she fell for him.) Woody liked that the picture could be easily and inexpensively filmed, mostly in a house, but despite many attempts over the years to advance the story, "it never went anyplace until finally it hit me that the friend who enlists his help is in on the deal." He would make sure in writing the film that viewers would not suspect the friend's duplicity. "Once I had that, I had the whole thing. But for years I didn't have that." In the script, the magician, supremely confident that he will be able to expose the necromancer in no time, instead is confounded by her arcane knowledge about him and his family. His cockiness is replaced first by irritated confusion, then wonder, then hope that after a lifetime of doubt and disbelief in a spiritual world there may actually be one--until finally he realizes that the friend he has trusted and therefore not suspected has given her the detailed personal information.  He enjoyed writing the script so much that he "wasn't sure if it was good enough to do" because such pleasure might have blinded him to problems. He alternately worked on the tale of the murderous philosophy professor, which, because he thought the place to make it would be at a college in Boston, became The Boston Story. It also had rested some years in the drawer after being sparked by a dinner conversation with an acquaintance of his wife, Soon-Yi Previn. The friend was in a protracted court battle with her contractor. She complained that the judge was biased toward the contractor's lawyer: they smiled at each other in the courtroom and the judge consistently ruled in his favor, even though she felt she had clearly shown that the promised work hadn't been finished and what had been completed leaked.  "I was thinking at the table," he said after finishing the script, "if I kill the judge, she'd get a shot at another judge--couldn't be worse than this one, probably would be better--and no one in the world will dream I was involved. I have no connection, no motivation, nothing to do with it. No one will suspect me for a second. It seemed like an interesting idea."  As he always does, he toyed with it comically to see if that would be more effective than a drama, but a drama it became. The professor poisons the judge by surreptitiously switching an identical container of toxic orange juice for the unadulterated one the judge has just bought. Because the men have no known connection, he gets away with it and finds himself transformed from passively suicidal to aggressively life affirming. Then weeks later an innocent man is charged with the crime and the moral dilemma is whether the professor will follow his high philosophical ideals and turn himself in or, feeling alive for the first time in ages, try to kill a friend, the one person who knows what he has done, making that death seem accidental and thus avoid prosecution for either murder. Woody considered the mitigating argument that although the judge is corrupt he could well be a decent and loving father and therefore should be spared, but he felt, as a character in the film says, "That's like those Mafia bosses who do horrible things . . . we're supposed to cut them slack because they're wonderful to their wives and children?" To him, it was, "Too bad, it's not enough." To sidestep that concern, he wrote the judge as a man without a family. As for the professor, he wanted him "to be seen as a psychopath," and to make the point "that murder is not a solution" but rather "leads you down a slippery slope to where you might have to kill somebody else to keep going. If I haven't ruined it in the writing, I think it will be an interesting movie. If you saw this in black and white done by a French or Italian writer and director in the golden age of foreign films"--along the lines, say, of Claude Chabrol's 1958 thriller Le beau Serge, which drew on Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 Shadow of a Doubt, in which the protagonist tries to commit the perfect murder--"you'd think, 'Hey, this is a great film.' I'm not saying that's so on my end, but it has inherent in it a mature idea. It's a bread-and-butter, meat-and-potatoes adult story."  There are two distinct phases to a Woody Allen script, best summed up by Marshall Brickman: there is the writing, and then there is the writing it down. The writing, during which nothing is actually written, consists of Woody working out in his head every detail of the characters and the plot. Dialogue comes later. What the characters will say is unknowable until it is determined what they will do. Once that is clear, their words will be almost self-evident. "This is the worst part," Woody says, referring to a period of several weeks during which he alternately lies on his bed, paces the room, and, for "a refreshing change of environment," takes long showers to unlock his thoughts. It is a time of "obsessive thinking" and constant discomfort, during which his hypochondria is in full bloom, his acid reflux is on high burn, and he is in a state of physical exhaustion. The story is constantly at the forefront of his mind, although it has a use-by date. If after a month the way through it remains unseen, the idea is abandoned or thrown back in the drawer and replaced with a new one.  "In a chess game," he adds, "I can't see one move ahead. But when I'm writing a script--and it can be a fairly complicated one with lots of characters--I can see far ahead and work out my problems." He likens the process to writing a symphony. "The theme begins here but it's going to resonate three movements later, and if this is wrong, that is going to be terrible."  He makes no notes or an outline. Early in his career he read Playwright at Work by John Van Druten (I Remember Mama; Bell, Book and Candle; The Voice of the Turtle) and was persuaded by Van Druten's insistence that a writer should know his story so well that an outline is unnecessary. So he lets it play through his mind in its various possibilities. Excerpted from Start to Finish: Woody Allen, Moviemaker by Eric Lax All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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