Woody Allen

[groucho070]

Of all Woody's gals, Diane is definitely the best. She plays off him very well, can really absorb his eccentricity and come out real herself. She is the "straight man" to Woody's giddy stammering gag man. My favourite of both is Love & Death, great verbal sparring.

[thilak4life]

The finest stand-up comedian of his generation .

[P_R]

The finest stand-up comedian of his generation .

Chris Rock

He just struggles to describe him enough

[thilak4life]

Chris Rock saying he didn't want to be one of the fans bothering Woody reminds me of Stardust memories. The reservoir of jokes could also be seen in . His romantic scene with Charlotte Rampling (there is a joke right there, the last time you cooked, the kitchen looked like hiroshima.. ) is the first scene in the video, in fact her character is quite poignant (that wall poster with Charlotte in a deep reflective thought..around 6.24 in the video.. is brilliant again. I like the way Woody lits his scenes to capture the facial.). Also Woody's fans (all kinds of them) bothering him in this scene is probably what Chris is hitting at. Although Woody himself had said it is not criticism, but just the way Sandy Bates had visualized them. Eerything that happens after the rabbit's carcass is his figment of imagination, says Woody.

[P_R]

Genious !

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[complicateur]

Genious !

Woohoooo!

[groucho070]

New York Stories

Scorcese may be one of my favourite directors, but more often than not I question his casting choices. Plus he has been becoming uninteresting the last 13 years. When I decided to revisit this movie, it was not for him, it was also not the for possible has-been Coppola (another favourite, now uninteresting), but for the prolific Woodster.

Woody's offering, Oedipus Wreck, is definitely the best number of the three (over Scorcese's pretentious Life Lesson and Coppola's boring Life Without Zoe) 40 minutes films. It's about him and his on-screen mother and the name Oedipus says it all. Wonderful comedy about mama's boy trying to break out, and finally gets a chance when she disappears, literally during a magic show, and appears (in what form is a delightful secret, don't want to spoil for those who have not seen it).

Woody takes a break from telling stories about realistic relationship between man and woman, and tells a surealistic story about a man and a woman, his mom. The whole film feels like one of his short stories (I read them all, and I don't think he adapted any). Ah, Woody, who else can make a scene about "making love with a chicken drumstick" and get away with it. Oh, and watch out for Marge Simpson.

[groucho070]

Conversation between giants that I dug up. There are treasures in NY Times archive, I tell ya.


http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/16/ma...gewanted=print



The Two Hollywoods: The Directors; Woody Allen; Martin Scorsese

By Lynn Hirschberg
While both Woody Allen, who is 61, and Martin Scorsese, who is 55, work within the studio system, neither is of it. They might best be thought of as proto-independents, taking their cues from European auteurs of the 1960's while continuing to take the Hollywood money. ''Kundun,'' Scorsese's new film, which tells the story of the Dalai Lama's early life, and Allen's ''Deconstructing Harry,'' which he wrote, directed and stars in, are examples of American cinema at its most audacious. (Both open in December.) On a Saturday afternoon last month, which happened to be Yom Kippur, Allen and Scorsese met in Scorsese's plush, poster-lined offices on Park Avenue in Manhattan. Fellow New Yorkers and contemporaries, they hardly knew each other -- maybe that's how insider-outsiders are. Allen spent most of the conversation curled up with a pillow on the couch while Scorsese, dressed all in black, sat bolt upright in a chair and sparked the dialogue.

Allen: We did ''New York Stories'' together.

Scorsese: We met then, and then we met a couple of times, I think, inadvertently.

Allen: I remember years ago meeting you at a video store on Broadway.

Scorsese: That was very funny. I was behind the counter looking for ''It's in the Bag'' -- Jack Benny and Fred Allen.

Allen: I remember that. Why were you looking for ''It's in the Bag''?

Scorsese: Oh, I love that film. I like Fred Allen a lot. And, of course, Jack Benny.

Allen: But it was not a successful movie, I don't think.

Scorsese: No, no.

Allen: It was a chance to see Jack Benny and Fred Allen.

Scorsese: You were looking for a Bunuel film. I think ''Los Olvidados.''

Allen: Right, very possibly.

On Other People's Films

Scorsese: I go through periods, usually when I'm editing and shooting, of seeing only old films.

Allen: Do you get discouraged if you look at something that's great while you're editing?

Scorsese: Not discouraged, but it makes me re-evaluate what I'm trying to do. Sometimes it's a little hard while you're shooting when that happens. If it's a new young director. You think: Where does this stand compared to me? Have the times changed? What the hell am I doing?

Allen: I have heard that expressed exactly by Ingmar Bergman, who said that he couldn't look at a film, any good film, while he was making a film because he lost all confidence. And I understand that completely. It's so hard to maintain your confidence for the 10 months or the year that you're working on a film.

Scorsese: Yup. And even sometimes great old ones will do it to you. Last weekend I said, Let's do it, and we got my old Technicolor print of ''Vertigo.'' Oh, oh, oh, it's sublime.

Allen: It does shatter your confidence to look at somebody else's wonderful work. Because their work is completed, edited, mixed, color corrected. And you're sitting there with a pile of unpromising dailies or something. [laughter] And it's hard to keep your hand on the wheel. Older movies don't make me as nervous. These things are part of your childhood. They're like grown-ups or something. But with the work of contemporaries, you re-evaluate yourself. And if you have any integrity at all, it's always negatively.

Scorsese: I was shooting ''Goodfellas,'' and I was in the middle of shooting -- it turned out to be another one of those 90-day shoots. It just never ends. The torture never ends. I was very, very tired. And I bought a print of ''Man With a Movie Camera.'' It's a Dziga Vertov. Russian. And I said, Well, I never saw a Vertov thing. It was a Sunday. I said, So let's just do homework. And I'd never seen anything like it. And I couldn't wait to get back to work in the morning.

Allen: That's very inspiring.

Scorsese: Yeah, but that's an older film. With new ones you feel you're almost from another century. The young people today are the 21st century. I'm 20th century, I can't help it. It's hard to let new stuff in. And whether that admits a weakness, I don't know.

Allen: But I certainly feel better now than when I started. I'm, what, 25, 26 films down the line. And I find that all the films and directors that I always liked my whole life are the ones that I still like to see. It's hard to develop new tastes.

Scorsese: Right now seems to be a very good period for American cinema. Spike Lee, David Lynch, the Coen brothers. Altman's still working. And all these independent films coming out in the past 10 years.

Allen: It's great.

Scorsese: Fascinating. Kids will put together a movie if it costs $60,000. The danger is that you spoil the talent. They make a good picture for under a million, and then, good or bad, they're picked up by a studio and given $30 million. It's too soon. Young film makers should learn how to deal with the money and learn how to deal with the power structure. Because it is like a battle.

Allen: I've never had to deal with the Hollywood structure. That's the only reason. I don't know if I could have survived it if I had to do it. You know, if I had to use my ingenuity to do it. But I just lucked out and didn't have to.

On Hollywood

Scorsese: I went out to Hollywood to edit ''Woodstock.'' I was not a hippie. When I went to Woodstock, I had french cuffs and cuff links. I lost one of them there. And then I went out to L.A., and I wore the cowboy shirts from Nudie's. I became a Los Angeles person. I just struggled out there. Finally I got this first film to do with Roger Corman. And then ''Mean Streets.'' I felt that I had to stay out there. But it got to me. It was the 70's, and there was George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and John Milius, and Francis Coppola was sort of the godfather of it all, and Brian De Palma, who was very helpful, introduced me to everybody. It took me a while, but I moved back to New York when I was doing ''King of Comedy.'' That was in '81 or '82.

Allen: You were out there for a while.

Scorsese: They insisted that I was not a Los Angeles person, though. Every time I was at a party, they'd say, How long are you here for? I'd say, No, I live here. They'd say, No, it can't be.

Allen: Well, you have manipulated that thing brilliantly because you have been able to raise significant sums of money to make movies and make them the way you want to make them, which is a feat in itself. That's as hard as making the movie. To raise that kind of money and still keep artistic and personal control over a film.

Scorsese: I've been very lucky. And part of that in the 70's was because of the combination with Bob De Niro. The studios went with him as the actor, and coming off of ''Mean Streets'' -- myself, Harvey Keitel and De Niro -- they figured, well sure, as long as you have Bob in a part. De Niro was the one behind ''Raging Bull.'' He wanted to make that. It took us four years of gestating until finally I slipped into it. That took me to the beginning of the 80's, and then I sort of had to start all over again.

Allen: What happened?

Scorsese: Everything changed, I think. The end of the 70's was the last golden period of cinema in America. The power of the director ended with the ''Heaven's Gate'' opening. Which is a picture that actually has some extraordinary things in it. And the next thing you knew, ''E. T.'' made so much money, and it only cost $10 million. It made, I think, what, $700 million? The plug was kind of pulled. And it got pretty rough. I had to start all over again. I was trying to do ''Last Temptation of Christ'' at Paramount. The climate just wasn't right, and the plug was pulled. I came back to New York and I made this low-budget film, ''After Hours,'' where I was trying to learn if I could do a film again in 40 days, rather than 100 days.

Allen: I've been blessed. It's like fool's luck. From the day I made my first film, nobody at United Artists and then Orion expected anything. I've had nothing but support, freedom, final cut, nobody tells me who to cast. It's nothing that I did to earn it. It was given to me by magnanimous people.

Scorsese: U.A. was great. That's where I was too. They did ''Raging Bull,'' ''Last Waltz'' and ''New York, New York,'' which went way over budget, and they still kept going.

Allen: They were a wonderful company. But for me it's all been wonderful. No one ever sees any of the dailies, nor do they get to read a script or comment.

Scorsese: I've shown studios scripts. There's a process to go through with their notes, but I try to filter it out because as well meaning as studios are, they are in the business of making films for a marketplace, and if this is what they feel is right for the marketplace, I can't listen to that. I have to be able to feel what I think is right and hope that somebody's going to see it. I can think back to ''Goodfellas,'' where, although Warner Brothers was very supportive, we had a certain amount of dates for shooting, and I went over and squeezed in this sprawling kind of movie. When they saw it, they appreciated it, but they did ask to go through the preview process. And we did have a couple of problems at previews.

Allen: People walked out?

Scorsese: Oh, God, yes. I said, ''Don't preview this thing.'' After the first scene with the knifing in the trunk, it was like a mini-exodus. People have to know what kind of film it is. But I learned a lot from the previews, and I felt that what I should do is just be firm, throw it up there on the screen and weather it. Just see if you can learn anything from it. I learned, for example, in the sequence where he's driving and paranoid on cocaine, I could go faster. Whereas ''Age of Innocence'' was another process. And again, it's a very delicate process. With ''Age of Innocence,'' if you canvass the right group, it might be O.K. If you get the wrong group, you're in big trouble. And we even tested ''Kundun.''

Allen: I've never previewed a film. There have been times when the company has previewed films, without telling me, for their advertising. But by then the film is completely finished. But you could say universally make it a little faster here, you know what I mean? And you can't go wrong.

Scorsese: Always, yes.

Allen: That's one thing I think never hurts a film; I mean, if you can do it faster, do it. It's a godsend. When stuff comes out, it's a mercy killing.

Scorsese: We just did that with ''Kundun.'' But it's a little difficult in a picture like this because their world is a world where they had no roads, and they walked from place to place. That's the pace. It's not New York. So you have to say, How do you show that pace without boring an audience to death?

Allen: Well, when you take something out, it gives the film such an exhilarating pace. Once you see it out, the joy of the speed is so exhilarating that I can never bring myself to put the material back. I have the problem of getting my movies up to the minimum requirement of length. I've put out films that don't fulfill my contractual obligations, with regard to running time.

Scorsese: My problem is going the other way. They're all over two hours.

Allen: You work at that length. But for many people, without that intensity, they wouldn't be able to sustain that kind of length in a film. I always worry that it's going to be boring. And particularly if you're working with comedy, which is 99 percent of the time with me, you know. You really have to keep moving, or it just lies there.

On New York

Scorsese: Your New York is alien to me. When Barbara Hershey in ''Hannah and Her Sisters'' says, ''I have to go get my teeth cleaned,'' I mean, I also go. But it was, like, What are you talking about? She's going to get her teeth cleaned, O.K., that's an everyday thing. And it's on the corner of Madison and somewhere, and wow, it's a whole other world. And it's a very interesting thing for me, it's a little journey each time. I come from way downtown, in the Italian-American area, which is no longer. They have boutiques there now, artists and stuff.

Allen: I never think of depicting New York. If I didn't live in New York and wanted all the convenience of living at home and working near my home and all of that, I could make a movie elsewhere. That wouldn't bother me.

Scorsese: I made ''Age of Innocence'' because I wanted to learn more about old New York. I don't think I could have done an E. M. Forster novel.

Allen: I'm sure the fact that it was New York put you at ease.

Scorsese: It was very interesting to see if I could actually direct a different world. I grew up watching films by John Ford and by Orson Welles and by Preston Sturges, and I wanted to be more like them, but I came out of a different world. When I went to L.A. in the beginning, I wanted to make a western, a musical. And I made a musical, ''New York, New York,'' and it was so grim. What I probably had in mind to do was not ''The Band Wagon'' by Vincente Minnelli but ''The Man I Love'' by Raoul Walsh. And I crashed the two together. On top of that, the fascination I have with the improvisations, the way Cassavetes was doing films. And it was like a car crash.

Allen: But interesting. It turns out not to be a grim musical, really, it's an interesting musical because of those two disparate strains that are driving you forward.

Scorsese: It was a way, I thought, of reinventing the musical genre. We were doing that a lot in the 70's. I mean ''McCabe and Mrs. Miller'' is a western, but it evolves into something else. I remember Coppola telling us that you can't be that way, that the genre has a certain form and that you have to stick to that form. And I think, ultimately, he was right to a certain extent. But the things we were doing reflected a different time.

On the Importance of Film History

Allen: Whenever people ask me about comic directors, I think that I would have to say Ernst Lubitsch is the best one I've ever seen. And not many people know Lubitsch. I was talking to some college kids the other day, and they were bright kids who were going to a good college, and they had no idea about great directors. These bright college kids have no knowledge whatsoever of Truffaut's films or Fellini's films. And yet the universities do encourage them to read Mark Twain and Flaubert and Melville. But not to see the great films for some reason. And I feel that has to be made accessible to them.

Scorsese: Films are national treasures.

Allen: Well, when we grew up, on any given night, you could just go see a John Ford film or a Fellini film. Now Fellini couldn't get distribution of his last film.

Scorsese: Yes. Harvey Weinstein said he would distribute it, the Film Forum would show it, but Fellini's people decided not to. And that was it. It's a very serious situation.

Allen: So many film students are film illiterate. They're not unsophisticated. They probably know more about steady cams and special effects than the average audience. The guy who drives your cab will use those terms when talking about a film, but they're illiterate in terms of --

Scorsese: The lineage.

Allen: They've never seen any of these films. I think they have a different attention span. I think if you make a good movie there will be an audience for it, and they will like it. It's just a shame that if I put out a movie or if you put out a movie, and the audience likes it, that those same people could be enjoying a dozen Truffaut movies.

On Watching Their Own Movies

Allen: I made my first films in the late 60's, and I've never seen them since.

Scorsese: Me too.

Allen: You won't look at ''Raging Bull''?

Scorsese: Are you kidding? No way.

Allen: If you saw it now, would you be sitting there thinking, Oh, God, I wish I could change that, and Can I do that better?

Scorsese: No, no, not that. I get upset with the emotions of it.

Allen: So it touches other feelings and other memories?

Scorsese: And also the emotions of the people in the film, the actors.

Allen: But that goes for all your films, right?

Scorsese: Yes, so I have a great deal of difficulty looking at them. I won't look at them.

Allen: See, with me, it's the sheer brutality of seeing my work and feeling that, if I could only get that film and start over on it now, I could make it better. Or at least change 10 scenes that are embarrassing to me now. So I'd rather not watch it and go home depressed for weeks.

Scorsese: Sometimes I will see one on television, sometimes I see images from the pictures, and I allow myself to look at them without sound. See the pictures go by.

On Their Place in the Scheme of Things

Allen: I hope you see you've had an enormous impact on all these young film makers. You can't miss it. It's in the style of shooting. It's in the content and the style of directing. It's just all over the place. I don't feel I've influenced anybody. And I'm not saying this out of any kind of false modesty. I just don't see it at all. I don't see it in anybody's work, and I don't hear it.

Scorsese: Well, you have. There's no doubt. It's also opened the way for a certain style of comedy. There's nothing like it.

Allen: Well, I'm blind to the influence, but I do feel lucky that I've been able to work as freely as I have. I've worked with comparatively low budgets. I mean, not low like these kids work. They make these knockout films, you know, those black kids in California?

Scorsese: Oh, the Hughes brothers? ''Menace II Society.'' That's a great picture.

Allen: Your influence was all over that. Just all over it. But it is amazing how these kids can, on no budgets at all, make these enormous films. I've worked on comparatively low budgets, but nothing like what they're doing.

Scorsese: I don't even think about how much ''Menace II Society'' cost, because it works. They've got to do it that way. And that's why I went back to do ''After Hours'' on a tighter budget. Five-million- point-five all in, including my salary. I had to stop living a certain way. ''After Hours'' was a scary thing. It was coming off of the plug being pulled on ''Last Temptation of Christ.'' Boy, I was out there. A couple of friends visited me on the set of ''After Hours,'' and one of them told me, ''Don't you want to come do a real movie back in L.A.?'' But after that, I was able to finesse it in such a way that I could do a studio picture, ''The Color of Money,'' and do it with Paul Newman, Tom Cruise, big stars.

Allen: And to control it?

Scorsese: To control it and also come right under budget, which was great. And after that I did ''Last Temptation of Christ'' for $7 million only. And in a sense I was back on track with the kind of film I wanted to make.

Allen: The studios run quick. When you give them the film, their tendency, whether truthfully or not, is to be enormously supportive. They want to carry you around in a sedan chair. But the minute that they sense some obstacles, that the public is not going to come, then it all vanishes very quickly. The distribution goes. It's hard to get the movie booked any place.

And I would prefer my films to be popular. But I would never do anything to make them popular. You hit it on the head earlier when you said you do what you do, and you just pray they like it. And if they like it, great. And if they don't, you still do what you do.

Scorsese: It's nice if you can have a wide audience, that's great. But I learned right away. ''Mean Streets'' was picked up at the New York Film Festival. And we had the bright idea at the time to release it wide. Warner Brothers didn't want to do it, but I told them they should. ''Five Easy Pieces,'' which opened at the festival, got great reviews, opened wide across the country and did very well. So they released ''Mean Streets'' wide. And it died. Because ''Mean Streets'' wasn't American. It wasn't ''Five Easy Pieces'' -- that was American. People would complain to me that in places in ''Mean Streets'' they needed subtitles. It didn't go over in Waco.

Allen: I can't get my films distributed in those places. They won't put them in the theaters, because it costs more to take the ad and to get the print than what they'll take in. ''Annie Hall'' was more mainstream and got fairly wide distribution, but it was only after it won an Academy Award. ''Annie Hall'' made, I don't know, $6, $7 million or something. That's all.

I find that reviews can hurt but not help. If you put out a film, and everything they write about it is negative, it kills you. And if they write great things, it doesn't necessarily help you.

Scorsese: ''King of Comedy'' got very good reviews. But it was one of the big failures, it just didn't play at the box office at all. But my career was made, particularly in the early days, by the critics, by Pauline Kael. That was the key thing.

I kind of depend on the critics. They make it possible for certain people at certain studios at a given time to give me money for the next picture. That's the key thing. And that varies a lot because that's like a shell game. You don't know who's going to be at a studio who will want to do a film with you. ''Kundun'' went from Universal to Warner Brothers to Disney. With me, it takes a few years before I get to finally do a picture on a certain script. We did this picture for $28 million, which is a pretty good price.

Allen: My career is less eventful. Because of the nature of how I like to work, I've tried to make my films into nonevents. So I like to just make the film, not read the reviews, not follow the box office, put it away and make another film. And then make another film. I find that if you don't like the actual making of the film, you're lost, because that's all there is. The rest of it is too mercurial, and you don't get the pleasure you think you're going to get from the success.

And the failure is not as terrible as you think it would be. So you just keep your nose to the grindstone and just keep working. I make a film, put it out and those who want to see it, see it. People have asked me for years, Who is your audience? I've never known who it is.

Scorsese: You have this incredible way of making films. One a year. It's like one long body of work, uninterrupted. Bergman was like that.

Allen: Yes. He would make these little films he wanted to make, with not a shred of compromise on a frame. And if someone liked it, they liked it. If they didn't like it, it didn't matter at all.

On Casting

Scorsese: Casting is one of the hardest things you have to do because it's so awful for the poor actors too. The people who come in and want the parts and everything. It's sad. It's terrible.

Allen: But it is survival. You have your script, and you know who you want ideally for the part. Someone comes in, and they can either do it or not. And you pick the person who can do it the best. I mean, it's really no more mysterious than that.

Scorsese: It's a little harder if you're making the kind of film where you need the box-office star. Then it's mixing the movie star with the character, and how do you do that?

Allen: Some ideas get away. The only one that I ever had that I thought about, that I can think of in my lifetime, and this was many years ago, was Julia Child. [laughter] I never got the chance to use her. But I thought if I had a comedy, she could be the mom type.

Scorsese: Exactly.

Allen: It was the one inspiration I had, everything else has been just sort of like common-sense casting. And God, there are so many great actors. I like the ones you probably like, right? I've never worked with Dustin Hoffman, but he's a wonderful actor.

Scorsese: He's great. Al Pacino I never worked with.

Allen: Yes, Pacino's great. De Niro's great. The ones that everybody thinks are great are great. But given the budgets I work with, stars have to cut their price to work with me, or I can't afford them.

Scorsese: For me, it depends on the project. In ''Age of Innocence,'' Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer cut their prices, and Sharon Stone did on ''Casino.''

Allen: You are dependent on the goodness of their hearts, their conscience and their availability. They are willing to do it, but not for one second if somebody is offering them their regular salary. If they are between things, I can get them for a pittance, but if somebody wants them for something legitimate, no way.

Scorsese: I've had actors tell me, Look, I can't, I'm getting more money on other pictures. Or, The part isn't big enough, I'm sorry, when I work with you, I want to work on something bigger. Each film is a different situation, and when you are dealing with movie stars, they, too, have to be brave. Usually in the pictures I make, the characters are not the most likable people.

Allen: With my latest movie, ''Deconstructing Harry,'' which I wanted to call ''The Meanest Man in the World,'' I wrote it, and I would have hoped someone else would have played the lead role. It's boring for me to play it all the time. It is more fun to direct now and then and not have to shave every day. But I couldn't get anybody else. I was my last choice. Until three weeks before we shot, I was sweating to get somebody else and couldn't do it. I offered it to a half-dozen people and could not work it out for one reason or another with them, and so I finally did it.

And there is no question: they'll think I am the character. But they think that in everything I do. I don't care. That is one of the curses or the blessings of what I do. That is why they come or why they stay away.

On Where It's All Headed

Scorsese: There is a friend of mine who said recently, Do you remember when there were movies where something would happen, it was like a climactic thing, then there would be a pause, there would be something slower, and then there'd be a big moment? It would build. It is not that way anymore. It is climax, climax, climax, you know, and you are being pummeled. It isn't why the bad guy dies now. It is how he dies.

Allen: But that stuff is for kids. That stuff doesn't really hold the interest of serious-minded people. Right? The problem with all these technical advances in film is that many, many film makers don't see them as tools. They are only tools for telling a story of some sort or giving you an effect of some sort that is primary.

Whereas the actual technique itself becomes the end in itself. When you did that hand-held shot in ''Goodfellas.'' The Copa shot. It was completely organic to the story. It was a tool for telling the story, and that is why it is memorable -- because it was not just, you know, the technique as an end in itself. But that is lost sight of 98 percent of the time.

Scorsese: The technique should never lead you. I stopped watching action films about six years ago. I tried looking at a few, but it is all technique. It isn't interesting. I would never go in and say that we're going to make a whole film with digital techniques. It just wouldn't be right. I wouldn't know. I don't have that kind of vision here. Those movies are too punishing after a while. Too much noise.

And then there is sex. In the 70's, sex was tougher, stronger, I think. Certain things were very powerful, and I mean movies like ''Five Easy Pieces'' or ''Drive, He Said.'' They were so strange. Now, to a certain extent, with the exception of ''Crash,'' which I think is an extraordinary movie, and the very powerful way that ''Breaking the Waves'' goes about sexuality -- there is a kind of scrubbed-clean quality that is not even sensual anymore. They are fake images and fake bodies. How do you shoot a sex scene? What would you do? I personally don't know how anymore.

Allen: It's true. If you have no limits, it does become more difficult because there are so many options. Years ago, you had no options, so you had to come up with a few sophisticated ways to show sex. Now you can virtually do what you want to do, and it becomes more of an esthetic decision, and it becomes tougher.

Scorsese: It really is tougher.

Allen: Because you can't hide behind the fact that they'll censor you, and you've got to come up with something that is ingenious or esthetically pleasing, and you really have no limits to what you want to show.

Scorsese: It's like the old story that Lubitsch could do more with a closed door than another director could do with an open fly.

Allen: Yes.


Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

[Nerd]

Manhattan - What a lovely film! Brilliant writing. Would put this slightly ahead of Annie Hall. Keaton was just fantastic as was Streep. The ending was sort of ermm.. allen's wry smile at the last frame.. What does it mean? I think Allen could not possibly wait for six months and would find another *fling*. Let me quote a few scenes.

Allen: I don't understand how could you prefer me to her
Streep: You knew my history!
Allen: Yes. My analyst did warn me but you were so beautiful that I changed the analyst


(While recounting the planetorium episode) You were so beautiful that I had a mad impulse to throw you down on the lunar surface and commit interstellar perversion with you

Keaton: What do you do Tracy?
Tracy: I goto high school
Keaton: Oh Really! Wow! Somewhere Nabokov is smiling if you know what I mean

The whole scene in which Keaton dismisses whatever Allen thinks is great is

[Vivasaayi]

Nerd,

Even I liked Manhattan better than Annie hall - sweet film

and yeah..the scene where all four meet in an art gallery(??) ...