Woody Allen: A Biography [Hardcover]

John Baxter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 28, 1999

He was born Allan Konigsberg in the Bronx, but his personal destiny and some of filmdom's most celebrated comedies - Annie Hall, Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors - have made Woody Allen the quintessential New Yorker.
This telling, new biography - the first since the tabloids headlined his rift with his long-term mistress, Mia Farrow, and his affair with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi - tells how a reclusive, melancholy kid achieved unparalleled success as a screenwriter, director, and star. It also explores the real Woody Allen, the critically acclaimed filmmaker from the Upper East Side, and his amusing movie persona of a neurotic and lovable loser.
Shrewdly and effectively deconstructing Woody, John Baxter's biography illuminates Allen's preoccupation with sex and mortality, his personal quirks and obsessions, his manipulation of celebrity, and his cinematic achievement as chronicler and court jester of Manhattan's intellectual elite.
"A splendidly written, exhaustive account and a major achievement" - The Observer
"Astute and highly entertaining biography" - Daily Telegraph
"A bracing corrective to the usual po-faced, sycophantic studies of the cult of Woody" - Mail on Sunday
"Full of interesting information for cinema enthusiasts" - The Spectator
"The saga [of Woody and Mia] makes compulsive reading" - The Guardian

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Given the maelstrom of Allen's recent life, this engaging new biography is welcome, even if not definitive. Baxter (The Hollywood Exiles) follows Allen's tangled amours and artistic discoveries from his childhood in Brooklyn through his stint as a 1950s comedy writer and onward, exhaustively detailing the making of movie after movie, from What's New, Pussycat? to Deconstructing Harry. Fair-minded but harsher than Eric Lax was in Woody Allen (1991), Baxter has done yeoman work in canvassing the published record (he lacked Lax's access to Allen and his peers). While Baxter unearths eerie tidbits about Allen's relations with two teenage girls, his psychologizing often rests on others' judgments, such as film theorist Maurice Yacowar's views on sex and death, and Allen's ex-partner Mia Farrow's take on the gap between nebbish persona and hard-nosed auteur. He considers Allen's affair with Farrow's adoptive daughter Soon-Yi more a lapse of taste than an indictable offense. Cinephiles will particularly enjoy Baxter's discussions of Allen's influences: he finds an early debt to Jules Feiffer, hears echoes of Fellini in Annie Hall and describes the brief involvement in Stardust Memories of French student radical Daniel Cohn-Bendit. (As a critic, Baxter likes the comedies more than the dramas.) Allen finds real happiness, Baxter concludes, not in his messy private life but in his work. Though the reader might wish for a broader attempt to sum up Allen's prodigious output and place in American culture, this book remains the most detailed look at an AmericanAnay, New YorkAoriginal. Photos not seen by PW. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Woody Allen is one of the few truly independent directors working today. Baxter, who has previously published studies of filmmakers Bu?uel, Fellini, and Kubrick, here weaves a narrative about Allen's life and work. He describes Allen's insecurities, phobias, and melancholy; his ambivalent views toward women, sex, and his Jewish identity; and his general neuroticismAa recurrent motif in his films (Allen originally planned to title Annie Hall "Anhedonia," which means the inability to experience pleasure). He also chronicles the filmmaker's early academic and social failures and his escape to Manhattan (where he wrote for Sid Caesar before turning to stand-up comedy and then film directing). Some new information can be gleaned hereAreaders might be surprised to learn that Allen looked to Bob Hope as a role model, for exampleAbut a fair amount of Baxter's material is marginal, second-hand, or overly familiar, particularly coverage of the Soon-Yi Previn scandal. This likely results from Baxter's being denied access to Allen and most of his colleagues. In the end, Allen comes across as a cold, aloof character who nevertheless helped shape 20th-century filmmaking. Useful mostly for large film collections.AStephen Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., PA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf; 1st Carrol & Graf Ed edition (October 28, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 078670666X
• ISBN-13: 978-0786706662
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #434,694 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #32 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Movie Directors

More About the Author

John Baxter was born in Sydney, Australia, but raised in a small country town called Junee. With little else to do, he went to the movies three times a week for most of his adolescence, which provided an instant education in Hollywood movies with which he was often able to embarrass film celebrities ("You SAW that thing?")
His second interest, however, was science fiction, which he began writing in his late teens. He sold stories to the same British and American magazines as J.G. Ballard and Thomas M. Disch, and in 1966 his first sf novel, THE GOD KILLERS, was published in both the US and Britain. He also edited the first-ever anthologies of Australian science fiction, and wrote the first history of the Australian cinema.
In 1969, he came to Europe, settled in London, and began writing books on the cinema, including a biography of the director Ken Russell, and studies of John Ford, Josef von Sternberg and the gangster and science fiction film genres, and working as an arts journalist for various magazines, and for BBC radio. He also served on the juries of European film festivals.
In 1974 he was invited to become visiting professor at Hollins College in Virginia, USA, where he remained for two years. While in America, he collaborated with Thomas Atkins on THE FIRE CAME BY; THE GREAT SIBERIAN EXPLOSION OF 1908,and wrote a study of director King Vidor, as well as completing two novels, THE HERMES FALL and BIDDING.
Returning to London, he published the technological thriller THE BLACK YACHT. In 1979 he moved to Ireland, and the following year returned to Australia, where he co-scripted the 1988 science fiction film THE TIME GUARDIANS, starring Carrie Fisher and Dean Stockwell. He also wrote and presented three TV series on the cinema, and produced and presented the ABC radio programme BOOKS AND WRITING.
In 1989 he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a screenwriter and film journalist. The following year, he met his present wife, Marie-Dominique Montel, and re-located in Paris.
After moving to France, John published biographies of Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and Robert De Niro, as well as three books of autobiography, A POUND OF PAPER: CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK ADDICT, dealing with his fascination for collecting books, WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS: SEX AND LOVE IN THE CITY OF LIGHT, of which the SUNDAY TIMES of London wrote "it towers above most recent memoirs of life abroad," and IMMOVEABLE FEAST: A PARIS CHRISTMAS. His most recent book is CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, a guide to erotica in the 20th and 21st centuries. His translations of MORPHINE by Dubut de la Forest and FUMEE D'OPIUM of Claude Farrere will be published shortly by HarperCollins.
John is co-director of the annual Paris Writers Workshop and a frequent lecturer and public speaker. His hobbies are cooking and book collecting. He has a major collection of modern first editions. When not writing, he can be found prowling the bouquinistes along the Seine or cruising the Internet in search of new acquisitions.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Sawdust Memories, August 16, 2001

By 

A.J. Joyce (here and there) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Woody Allen: A Biography (Hardcover)

I found this book disappointing, although there are some good things in it. Baxter is interesting on the evolution of the distinctive Woody persona, and on Allen's reluctance to acknowledge some of his artistic influences. The passages on the split with Mia Farrow deftly weave scenes of black comedy and harrowing domestic tragedy. A chapter on the fraught production of 'Casino Royale' is entertaining, and there are a few other good anecdotes I hadn't come across before. I didn't know, for example, that in the 60s Allen was taken to a court by a woman who claimed he was her runaway husband, despite the fact that he would have been 13 at the time of their marriage.

Unfortunately, after a fairly early point I found myself unable to trust Baxter's accuracy. Mistakes in the book range from the sophomoric to the libellous. Hibernia is Ireland, not Scotland as Baxter thinks on page 7. It was not Lenny Bruce's wife who performed the orgiastic act attributed to her on page 77, and it took place in LA, not Greenwich Village as Baxter suggests. Worse, he sometimes garbles Allen film plots and even jokes.

More annoying than the falsehoods are the superfluous facts. There is an excess of filler in the form of irrelevant background information. In 'Take The Money And Run' there's a sequence where the Allen character is sent to jail which consists of a lengthy 'March of Time' style newsreel montage depicting the 1950s, followed by the words, 'Virgil, in jail, misses all of it.' This book is often risibly like that. Baxter spends a page describing social upheavals caused by changes to the NYC transport systems, including a brief synopsis of the career of Robert Moses, and then concludes, 'Little of this impinged on Allen's world.' He notes Allen's appearance at a Eugene McCarthy fundraiser and then spends half a page describing the 1968 Chicago convention. One waits for the revelation that Allen was there, haplessly fleeing riot police like his character in 'Bananas'. But no: unable to attempt even a token connection to Allen's life and work, Baxter simply breaks the text at this point and resumes with something different.

A more serious flaw is that, racing non-stop from film to film (a pattern, admittedly, that much of Allen's life has shared), Baxter does not give enough space to considering the people in Allen's life, in particular the women. A partial exception is Mia Farrow, a character analysis of whom Baxter circles around but ultimately shies away from. Diane Keaton gets unaccountably short shrift and so too does Louise Lasser, arguably Woody's dark lady and the inspiration for several of the more interesting characters in his films. Surprisingly, this is one of the many areas on which Eric Lax's 1991 authorized biography is more interesting.

As for the films, Baxter is often curmudgeonly in his analysis of their merits. By quoting the lukewarm early critical reactions much of Allen's work has received unbalanced by more positive later assessments, or emphasizing that critical plaudits often went hand in hand with domestic box office indifference, Baxter comes close to presenting a picture of Allen as a man who has failed miserably at everything to which he has turned his hand.

Indeed, much of this book is dispiriting work. Baxter does not merely describe Allen's famously bleak outlook but manages to communicate it to the reader. It is de rigeur in modern biography, and a guarantor of sales, to suggest that your subject is either a bit of a heel and a creative magpie, or that they have not had much fun out of life; to suggest both at once is merely depressing.

Besides, all of Allen's fans know in our hearts that, a lot of impressive evidence notwithstanding, the hapless romantic clown of the early funny films is the real Woody. Whether you are a fan or not, I recommend Eric Lax's underrated official biography, or Stig Bjorkman's lengthy interview 'Woody Allen on Woody Allen' (1994), hagiographic though they are at times, as far more entertaining and informative than this book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Woody without feathers, July 19, 2000

By 

Mike Stone - See all my reviews

This review is from: Woody Allen: A Biography (Hardcover)

Having also read Baxter's Kubrick bio, I think that a brief comparison between the two works is necessary, because it will illuminate some of the mistakes that Baxter makes here.

In dealing with Kubrick, the technique of dividing the man's life up into chapters headed by the film he was working on at the time works perfectly, for Kubrick sometimes spent seven years between films. To say a biographical event is part of the "Full Metal Jacket" years actually denotes a grand period in the director's life. For Woody Allen, a man who has directed a film a year for the last thirty-four years, this technique becomes jumbled easily (some chapters need to be grouped by two or three films, which may not otherwise be connected except that the same funny little man wrote and directed them). And Baxter still manages to confuse the reader regarding chronology of events, even though he has such small periods of time to work with.

That being said, he does a fine job explicating the 'Woody' persona (read "mensch") with Woody the man (read "anti-social, calculating genius"). He never panders to paperback Freud wisdom, just giving cold hard truths about the man.

I tended to enjoy the chapters dealing with the films I most enjoyed (late '70's), and felt a constant sense of doom when dealing with the troubled nineties. Surprisingly, Woody doesn't come off as the villain here. That honour goes to Mia, who is portrayed as a manipulative, scheming, materialistic waif-whore. Woody's foibles are justifiably explained, and maybe rightly so. I mean, he's been warning us about his own foibles for years (for a good precursor to the whole Soon-Yin debacle, see Ike and Tracy's relationship in 'Manhattan'). And I think that that's the strength of Baxter's book: he at once is able to separate Woody's art and life, while showing how they are intrinsically related.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A balanced biography, January 29, 2003

By 

Anthony Thompson (Big Lake, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Woody Allen: A Biography (Hardcover)

This is a very fair, even-handed look at the life of Woody Allen and his films. It is NOT critical of him, as several of the negative reviewers below seem to suggest. The author writes with candor and doesn't censor himself. Those are qualities I expect from a biography. Why read a bigraphy if you don't expect to come across a few warts? I've been a fan of Woody's for over 25 years. I like him. And, I like this book.