City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination

Woody Allen’s New York

65 Woody Allen’s New York william rothman Making his first and probably his last appearance at the Oscars in Hollywood in , Woody Allen introduced a montage of New York films and made a plea for producers to continue filming their movies in New York after the / tragedy. Who more fitting? Nearly all of Woody Allen’s films are set in New York City. Manhattan is the place where Woody Allen lives and works, as do the characters he plays in his films. It’s the only place where we—and he—can imagine Woody thriving, or, perhaps, even surviving, at least on his own recognizance. Our sense that Woody Allen feels at home only in New York is reinforced by his character’s disastrous trip to Los Angeles in Annie Hall (). It seems confirmed by Wild Man Blues (), Barbara Kopple’s subtle and ultimately quite moving cinema-verité chronicle of his concert tour of Europe. Despite traveling in the company of his jazz band and his sister Letty, and with wife-to-be Soon-Yi Previn adroitly and tactfully helping him negotiate his interactions with strangers, he can’t help feeling like a fish out of water. (“Hey, you’ve got a hell of a town here,” he says in Bologna. “I know with a couple of Valium I could really learn to love it.”) Only when he’s onstage, playing Dixieland jazz with his friends, can he relieve his homesickness or give it satisfying expression. So often, in his films, we see him walking, and talking, on Central Park West, Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and other bustling Manhattan streets. Invariably, in those shots, those streets look strikingly handsome. Woody Allen’s Manhattan isn’t a grimy urban jungle. It’s the most photogenic city on earth, boasting buildings and trees that even Paris would die for. (As if we needed more proof that cameras can lie!) New York is Woody’s kind of town. But does that mean that Woody is New York’s kind of man? To paraphrase his favorite Groucho Marx line, surely Woody Allen wouldn’t want to live in a town that would have someone like him as its representative. If Woody Allen is a representative New Yorker, what does that say about New York? Woody is also a native New Yorker, of course—at least if we count Brooklyn as part of New York City. The man we know as Woody Allen was born Allen Konigsberg, and it was in Brooklyn, not Manhattan, that he spent his childhood Chap-04.qxd 1/12/07 12:13 PM Page 65 and adolescence. Brooklyn is an “outer borough” firmly within Manhattan’s orbit. Until , though, it was autonomous—a great city separate from, and almost equal to, New York City itself, which was already dominated by Manhattan. In Hollywood movies of the classical era, Brooklyn retained something of its own identity, although Brooklynites were generally reduced to comic stereotypes (and, in war movies, rarely survived to the end of the film). In the real world in which Woody Allen grew up, what Brooklyn retained of its identity was a sense of separateness. Even for me, growing up in Flatbush a decade or so after Woody, “going to the city” meant crossing the river into Manhattan. Brooklyn was the place outside what it was inside. That Woody spent his formative years in Brooklyn, not Manhattan, helps explain the doubleness of Manhattan in his films. It is the real place in which— onscreen and off—he lives his everyday life. And within Woody Allen’s Manhattan there are also special places, apart from the bustle of the city, that Woody loves to seek out. One of his favorites is the pocket park off Sutton Place, in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge—a spot so lovely that one doesn’t have to be Fred Astaire—one can even be a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn—to imagine one’s romantic dreams magically coming true there. Such places, in Woody’s films, seem filtered through his imagination and memory, vestiges of the romantic yearnings of that clever, scrawny boy, growing into manhood, who made forays into “the city,” but lived across the river. And yet, there he was that evening back in Los Angeles, the city New Yorkers most love to mock, speaking on behalf of New York to the countless millions around the globe for whom the Academy Awards are a sacrament, not show business as usual...