Cannot wait to buy it.
Thanks eunoia for pin-pointing Lional Shriver’s delivery on Allen in my link above. There’s also more boisterous support for him from Taki in The Spectator;
'… Which brings me to Woody Allen. It used to be called being railroaded, now it’s called justice. Justice for whom, I ask you. Mia Farrow is a fabulist who has a Medea-like revenge in mind because Woody dropped her and went for a young South Korean whom Farrow had long ignored and maltreated after having adopted her for the publicity. The two Farrows, Ronan and Dylan, I think of as egregious liars and publicity freaks. Woody was twice judged innocent of Dylan’s charges in the ’90s, yet the cancel culture prevails and kills Woody’s memoir. In other words, how dare he publish something that Mia and Ronan and Dylan don’t agree with? The trio would have fitted in nicely back in the ’30s in Berlin. Woody Allen, as good an artist as there is nowadays, is canceled by three of the biggest phonies on the planet, and Hachette plays along, as outrageous an injustice as there is, but par for the course. Cowardice is not new, especially in movies and publishing.
Taki in the Spectator is a right-wing nutjob, or the British equivalent. He doesn’t have any credibility.
I see that you carefully removed what he said immediately before the paragraph you quoted. Here it is:
And what he said immediately after:
Quoting Taki in support of Woody Allen doesn’t do him any favours.
GreenWyvern; Taki’s views on the USA, Polanski or anything else are not the subject of this thread, he has views on many things like we all do, perhaps you don’t agree with them, but quoting them as if they in some way nullify what he has to say about the Allen family does not remove their validity. Woody has been stitched-up & anything said by anybody in his support *does *do him a favour in my opinion.
On the contrary, the fact that Taki is opposed to feminism in general, opposed to #MeToo, friendly with Polanski, boasts of his sexual conquests, etc. is highly relevant.
Taki knows nothing more about Allen than anyone else does, but he will support him on general principles regardless. He knows what his readers want to hear. He is not a person whose opinion carries any weight. It means nothing.
GreenWyvern; I see you are a person of the, “shoot the messenger” type, preferring to dismiss someone entirely because their views on ‘A’ don’t chime with your views on ‘B’, which is easier than countering what has actually been said by reasoned argument.
In such a narrow-minded outlook, it appears that one must either agree with someone’s position on everything they uphold, or dismiss any utterance they make on any subject, which is like saying, either one has to agree with everything, say, Nietzsche has said, or nothing at all? am I correct?
:rolleyes:
Back in 2003 he had deals for an autobiography for a total of nearly $5 million dollars–but reportedly wanted more so didn’t do the book:
With only a 75,000 first printing from a minor publisher it is clear he is going to make only a small fraction of what he could have made in 2003.
75,000 hard cover at $27. No paperback edition yet.
But a LOT of people buy ebooks by preference today. It’s currently #1 in Movie History & Criticism on Amazon’s Kindle store, and rated 4.6/5.
And how are sales in countries other than the USA?
I’ve read the book. It was entertaining, quite funny in places. It didn’t change my mind about anything. I still think Woody’s icky but short of being a sex criminal. I still think Mia’s a monster, hiding behind her “saint who adopts crippled children” persona. I wasn’t aware that Woody’s movies lost as much money as they apparently do, or that Tony Roberts and Michael Murphy are not, in fact, the same person.
He doesn’t mention Babi Christina Engelhardt, the teenage (at the time) model he is alleged to have dated in the 70s. I find his explanation of the Mariel Hemingway flirtation unconvincing. I compiled the budgets and grosses as estimated by the IMDB* to get a context for the lawsuit against producer Jean Doumanian and her business partner / boyfriend Jacqui Safra. Those movies lost a metric shit-ton of money, possibly because Doumanian and Safra forgot to distribute them in Europe.
If you believe Mia, this won’t change your mind. If you believe Moses, this won’t add much in the way of information. Woody has some glaring moral blind spots, but he doesn’t slap his kids or throw telephones at them. Mia scares me way more and always has.
*These involve a lot of guesswork and “Hollywood accounting,” but when the domestic gross and worldwide gross are the same number, you just know someone was asleep at the switch.
So, I’ve finished it and it was fine. He comes off as someone I would like to meet, but not to know, if that makes sense. I got tired of his aw, shucks, I’m just a Jewish kid from Brooklyn” act pretty fast- he’s been an industry insider since high school, and he drops names every paragraph, he can’t have it both ways.
His constant asides about how attractive this or that woman was make it clear that he’s a letcher.
I found the bits about the molestation accusations a slog, and his justifications for his relationship with Soon-yi are thin and unconvincing. I would have respected him more if he simply said he was wrong but he loves his wife too much to regret it; alas, we get pages and pages of evil Mia and poor abused
Soon-yi.
Despite all that, he’s smart and funny and it’s interesting to hear the origins of his films and his opinions of them. The story of his rise through the show business ranks is worth reading, though I would have liked more details about the nuts and bolts writing and moviemaking process.
Sounds good. The wife and I will be making an Amazon order this week, and I’m definitely going to include this book if it’s there.
I ordered Apropos of Nothing from Barnes & Noble last week, and it arrived yesterday. Will start reading it this week. Looking forward to it. I hope I catch some old biddy giving me the evil eye for reading it so I can start running my tongue around my lips suggestively.
LOL!
Finished Apropos of Nothing. Loved, loved, loved it. I would not change a single word. My thanks to every poster in this thread, because I did not know beforehand that his autobiography was ready to come out, and you helped bring it to my attention. Woody is one of only a handful of writers from whom I’ll buy a hard-cover copy. Every single poster in this thread is responsible for my putting money straight into in Woody’s pocket. I thank you, and Woody thanks you.
Bumping this thread for a good article in the Guardian today, ahead of the release of A Rainy Day in New York in the UK:
‘Do I really care?’ Woody Allen comes out fighting
The article is balanced and generally supportive of Allen, but not uncritical.
Great excerpt, thanks. I really want to see A Rainy Day in New York, but I live in the U.S. 
Indeed. My wife is arguably Woody’s biggest Thai fan. We both would love to see Rainy Day.
I bought and read Allen’s book. I’ve mentioned from time to time that I have a huge humor collection, which includes virtually every book by every comic and comedian in the 20th century. So there was no possible way I wasn’t going to get this book.
It was a disappointment. Not actively bad, but certainly not very good. The timeline is odd, skipping from point to point in his career without laying the proper foundations. That makes it repetitious when he circles back to talk yet again about something he already covered. He’s an annoying narrator. A drinking game that has you chug every time he tells you he’s not good at what he does would destroy a St. Patrick’s Day parade. He’s an unreliable narrator, namedropping incessantly while insisting that he doesn’t socialize with celebrities.
Those tales typify what’s really wrong with the book. Every time he’s eating at Elaine’s with Aristotle, Spinoza, Bergman, and Henny Youngman he makes a point to mention what great, funny stories they told. And then never repeats them.
That’s really all we want from a celebrity autobiography. Great anecdotes. Funny stories. Insights into other stars. People they’ve slept with. We get only the last bit. Louise Lasser was seriously insane, but he still loved her. Mia Farrow was seriously insane, but he’s careful not to singe her personally but only through the damaging effect he claims she had on her children. Soon-Yi had a childhood that Dickens would have rejected but became a sane, intelligent, wonderful love of his life. (Remember the childhood invented for Angela Abar in The Watchmen tv series? That’s Soon-Yi.)
What we get instead are pages and pages of “I filmed X, Y, and Z with a great cast and then I never watched it again. Never. I kept no papers or mementos. I never talk to anybody while I’m not filming. I have nothing to say on any subject despite the obsessions that occur repeatedly in my films.”
Apropos of Nothing is the perfect title. Nothing is at the book’s core.
Since he’s 84 maybe he cannot remember those funny stories others told him .