![]() I found innocence, curiosity, intensity, total responsiveness, and deep emotion in him. I finally visited Allen at his cozy, very lived-in, dark-hued office with its rust and brown couches. There are certain crimes that are simply unforgivable.” “Since the Holocaust was such an immense event in my life,” he wrote me, “it couldn’t help but wind up as a sporadic or even frequent issue in my work. Arthur Krim and Eric Pleskow, heads of United Artists, gave Allen a blank check and he returned the favor by giving the company enormous prestige and highly successful films.īut the Holocaust was never far from Allen’s mind. By 1967 films with Jewish content and Jewish stars had emerged in The Graduate (Dustin Hoffman) Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, Lumet’s comedy, Bye Bye Braverman, starring a new Jewish leading man, George Segal Mel Brooks’s The Producers, and many more, culminating with Barbra Streisand in 1973 in The Way We Were. But times were changing, with the ascendency of comics Mort Sahl, Lennie Bruce, Shelley Bergman, and Nichols and May. Maurice Schwartz of the Yiddish Art Theater was cast as the Native American Geronimo John Garfield and Paul Muni played Italians. Jewish Hollywood, with many of its moguls refugees from Hitler, had been reluctant to place Jewish actors in leading roles. He is the most identifiable, brazen, and forthright Jewish artist in the world, insistently reminding his viewers about the Holocaust in many of his films. He was uncertain in his personal life, but he was not shy or uncertain about his art. So we are talking about enormous inner strength and self-belief. He walked away from standup comedy, from TV writing, from talk show, game shows, nightclubs, concert halls, variety shows and mainstream success. And he has always walked away from what became stale for him. Right from the beginning he had total artistic control of his work. “But Woody wanted to be Number One,” Epstein said.Īllen was never tempted to sell out or to try to outdo himself, and he didn’t care to ingratiate himself with the mainstream. Here’s the kind of discovery that biographers love: Woody Allen’s boyhood pal Jerry Epstein, now a psychiatrist and author, told me that Woody’s birthday is not really December 1 it is November 30. ![]() He is blogging here all week as part of the Visiting Scribe series on The Prose nPeople. Earlier this week, David Evanier shared what he learned about Woody Allen while writing an unofficial biography of the comedian and director. ![]()
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