1/31/24
Newsletter #554
The Crack of Dawn
I have heard on a number of occasions that we are presently living in the “Post Ironic” era. Man, is that wishful thinking. This term has to have been conceived by someone younger than me because I can’t believe that anyone my age would say something that stupid. It’s exactly the same thing as saying, “We’re in the Post-Unlucky Era.”
For quite a long time – although not anymore – family and friends had sort of a quiet view of me that I was just plain old unlucky. If ten people were smoking weed, I’d get caught. I believe the fact that my movie Running Time, which took two years to make, was booked months in advance to premiere at a theater in L.A., then coincidentally opened the same day as Titanic – which killed all six films at the same theater, including Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry – didn’t surprise my family and friends.
I was arrested for my second DUI, and found myself having to go back in front of the same judge I had faced seven years earlier for the first DUI. My girlfriend at the time, Lisa, who is a contract and tax lawyer, very kindly agreed to defend me. In court, the case right before ours was also a drunk driving charge, but the white, male, 40-year-old defendant had previously killed somebody in an earlier drunk driving incident. The judge sentenced him to 99 days in jail for his new offense. In my case, it had been seven years since the first conviction (for which she had sentenced me to 10 days in jail) and nobody had gotten hurt either time. I got 100 days.
Lisa and I went out to the court parking lot for a cigarette. I asked, “Why did that other guy, the one who had killed somebody, get 99 days and I got 100?” Lisa said, “Josh’s luck.”
Well, I don’t believe in that bullshit. Or, more accurately, I don’t want to believe in that bullshit. However, were it true, and maybe it even was, it ended when I got sober. Now I’m lucky every day (knock wood).
One of my favorite TV shows is American Masters, which is in its 38th season. They are the best at producing documentaries about one specific American person and have produced 280 or more of them. Very few people – meaning less than five – ever got two episodes, back-to-back, because their story was so big; so important it needed more time. If I recall correctly, Barbra Streisand got one of these, as did Steven Spielberg. And in 2011 so did Woody Allen. He seemed like he was at the top of his kind of late game. He was 76 years old.
After three-and-a-half hours of the show, Woody Allen’s final statement floored me. Paraphrasing, it went something like this, “I’m extremely lucky and I’ve always gotten everything I ever wanted. I started writing jokes in high school, sent them to big newspaper columnists who immediately bought them. I came out of high school, wanted to work in TV, got a job as a writer on the biggest TV show, Your Show of Shows, working with Mel Brooks and Neil Simon, I said I wanted to make movies, I always got the financing I needed, nobody ever made me change a word of my scripts, I had complete autonomy. I’ve always personally had as much money as I’ve ever needed. I’ve made love to beautiful women all over the world. Yet, somehow, I feel screwed.”
My gut feeling at the time was, and history has borne me out, “If all of this shit adds up and you feel screwed, then I guess you’re still waiting to be screwed.”
And he hadn’t been screwed yet. That was to come. As he himself put it in a much later interview, “I’m the poster boy for #MeToo.” I’d personally give that award to Harvey Weinstein. For Woody, since several years before the HBO documentary Allen v. Farrow in 2021, all of his financing and distribution dried up. His film career officially ended in 2022 when he announced his retirement from directing movies. He wrote and directed 50 movies. It’s enough. He’s 88 years old.
Here's how I see it: Woody went out with a kind of cute, completely crazy, Hollywood girl, Mia Farrow, daughter of Maureen O’Sullivan and director John (Hondo) Farrow, for a long time – she lived just across the park. Mia has a slew of adopted, multi-ethnic kids, three of which have committed suicide. All signs point to her being crazy as shit. Woody may very well have not done a thing to the little girl; but he certainly did do something to Mia, his longtime girlfriend. He first screwed around on her with her own 18-year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, then went and married her in 1997 – 27 years ago. Woody was lucky in that, too. That’s a long Hollywood marriage.
When Woody found himself as the #MeToo poster boy, with his financing and distribution having vanished, finished films waiting to come out – Rifkin’s Festival (2020) and Coup de chance (2023) – stuck in his prolific pipeline, I think that was the universe giving Woody Allen the screwing he hadn’t previously, properly received. Like he said, he’s a lucky guy, he’s gotten everything he’s ever wanted, including a sex scandal and complete cancellation. Since this scandal erupted in the early 1990s — that didn’t truly blow up in his face until 2019, when he was already in his 80s — he was lucky in that, too.
Who has sex scandals in their 80s?
I agree
Those of us raised and indoctrinated with the Values of Americana, have view of 'Life's Balance Sheet' that is different from most of the Rest Of World. Woody Allen, for example is not want for Food, Water, Shelter, or Clothing. 'Probably doing better on the World Scale than 7.X Billion of we humans
in spite of the Horrific and Intolerable "Cancellation".... It Could Be Worse, No?