On September 11th a young teacher watched events in New York City unfold on a television in her Tehran apartment. Like many in Iran, she was appalled and felt tremendous sympathy for the victims of the attacks. She was gripped by another perhaps more surprising emotion too as recounted in a recent New Yorker piece by Joe Klein. “Do you want to know what I was really worried about?”, she asked the author. “Woody Allen. I didn’t want him to die. I wanted to know that he was all right. I love his films.”
Reading that remarkable statement started me thinking about the low profile the filmmaker has maintained in the years since his acrimonious divorce from Mia Farrow and the scandal surrounding their custody battles as well as his relationship with Farrow’s adopted daughter, whom he’s since married. Throughout the years, Allen has continued to work prolifically. His movie-a-year regimen hasn’t changed. At the same time, things have never been quite the same in terms of the way his audience thinks about him. Stain, dark cloud — call it what you will — most Americans who’d held him in high regard found themselves reacting with something between disappointment and disgust as they read the daily headlines or watched the nightly tabloid news. A virtual recluse to begin with, Allen for all practical purposes went into hiding.
And it took the crumbling of the World Trade Center to bring him out…
Get the rest of the story in part two of RECONSTRUCTING WOODY>>>
