Jonathan Poritsky

 
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From the back cover

I have ben spend­ing much of my time study­ing the works of Woody Allen. It’s not n easy task as his direct­ing tally creeps closer to 50 and his writ­ing cred­its have become innu­mer­able. Once upon a time come­di­ans wrote for a liv­ing. Perhaps it would be more accu­rate to say that peo­ple devoured what it was that come­di­ans scrawled across mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers, short com­pi­la­tions, and of course, the great American novel. Woody Allen fit into this mix back in the days of yore, and he hasn’t really ever taken a break. He remains an hilar­i­ous thinker and quick tongued funny-man, with an end­less grab bag of one lin­ers that keep the chuck­les coming.

I made the fool­ish mis­take of read­ing this lat­est com­pendium in (prac­ti­cally) one sit­ting. I found it at B&N yes­ter­day after­noon and decided to tear through it in time to read “Deathly Hallows”. Each short story was enjoy­able, but I found myself trudg­ing through some of them, leaf­ing to the next break to see how much longer until a new face appears. That being said, I thor­oughly enjoy most of the sto­ries. The first five or so had me rolling on the floor. As I said, mov­ing through became a lit­tle less fun, but there are cer­tainly worse things out there to peruse.

In Sidney Lumet’s “Making Movies”, the film­maker posits the ques­tion to Arthur Miller why he would pre­fer the the­ater if his first novel, “Focus”, which pre­dates his sub­se­quent suc­cesses, had every bit of strength as his stage sto­ries. The writer replied some­thing to the tune of lov­ing the col­lab­o­ra­tive process. If for Miller it was cama­raderie that kept him under the lime-lights, then it seems to be the pres­sures of films that keep Allen on the sil­ver screen and off the bound page. When one is cut­ting checks in the mil­lions for bagels and knishes on an over­seas shoot, one damn well bet­ter hope to hell the script is in order.

Here, Allen lets loose and sets him­self up to fail. And I promise, some of these shorts are fail­ures. But it’s so won­der­ful to see the vision­ary branch out to ter­ri­tory he is not ready to do on the big screen. He is fairly detached from some things he writes about, but you can see he has done research enough to keep the facts straight. One of the book’s biggest mistake’s is a seg­ment called Surprise Rocks Disney Trial. As we are all well aware, Mr. Allen is an east coast New Yorker no mat­ter what locale he may find him­self liv­ing in. This is an LA story he’s try­ing to tell, mock­ing the pol­i­tics of the big bad Mouse House. Written as matter-of-factly as a stenog­ra­pher would likely have taken the exchange down, a big mouthed Mickey Mouse takes the stand and quips about his ani­mated friends. This is the stuff of adult swim wannabe kids who got a copy of Flash for Christmas. Where it does suc­ceed is in see­ing the mas­ter film­maker try out some­thing he is not known to do.

The novel really flies in seg­ments that have hard boiled detec­tives or down on their luck actors. The names in the book are almost all hilar­i­ous in them­selves. Names like Mealworm and Fleshpot. It is in the hard boiled tales like Tandoori Ransom and This Nib for Hire that he really flies. One must keep a the­saurus close to keep up with his wit­ti­cisms, which at times feel like overblown intel­lec­tu­alisms, but in actu­al­ity, as one may find in his films, are a mile-a-minute pas­tiche of obser­va­tions of this thing we have called pop cul­ture all this time. While “Family Guy” rises in pop­u­lar­ity for Dallas ref­er­ences or Margot Kidder appear­ances, Allen under­stands the inter­con­nect­ed­ness of all things art. That is why he can write a rare cook­book in the style of Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Ate Zarathustra(“Man is the only crea­ture who ever stiffs a waiter.”), or call upon Dostoevsky to quip of the doomed future of a three-year old denied a decent pre-school in The Rejection. He rec­og­nizes that we all share one com­mu­nity, and what is pop now is sim­ply an old trick taught to a new dog.

I’ve long said that I love Allen’s films because even when I see a bad one, I leave the the­ater happy. The same rings true for this book. While he may not be chang­ing the indus­try or mak­ing it on any best­seller lists, he’s writ­ing bet­ter than many oth­ers out there. He writes like frog sit on lily pads, it’s just in his nature. I’ve heard peo­ple accuse him of still work­ing sim­ply for the sake of it, rather than actu­ally mak­ing a great film or novel every time out. To them I say piss off. There is no deny­ing that Woody will con­tinue cre­at­ing until he is taken from us. We must sim­ply enjoy it while can, for there will never be another like him.