Over at Vanity Fair's website, Julian Sancton makes the inevitable Funny People/Annie Hall comparison. Which is all well and good as far as it goes (and for a lot of Allen fans who think that Apatow's not fit to be Woody's chauffeur, it has to be said that it doesn't go very far at all), except Sancton makes some unfortunate know-something-ish assumptions as he pours in the analogy extenders. "And just as Allen did with such goofy farces as Sleeper, Bananas and Love and Death, Apatow amassed enough political capital in Hollywood to convince studios to allow him to spend it all on a more serious passion project."
Well, not to nitpick overmuch, but that "studios" ought to be singular. In either case. Apatow's feature directorial career has always been with Universal, and at the time of
Annie Hall, Allen had an exclusive relationship with United Artists. (He had made his genuine directorial debut,
Take The Money And Run, and his sort-of directorial debut, the Japanese-thriller mash-up
What's Up Tiger Lily, for indie producers.) But Sancton's real distortions (which, I should point out now, are not nearly as egregious as, say, that bow-tied twit Roger Kimball's persistent
slanders against Buñuel's
L'age d'or, and which I do not bring up out of a desire to condemn Sancton, but merely because I think the differences between his suppositions and actual fact are kind of historically interesting) consist of the strong implication that Allen's comic work of the early '70s was a way of amassing "political capital" that he could cash in to do more ambitious work.
This was never the case. Yes, Apatow's stupendous box office returns on
The 40 Year Old Virgin and
Knocked Up did help get
Funny People made, but Allen's early, funny films, while all critically praised, were never box-office blockbusters. Allen negotiated his nascent film career in a way that no contemporary filmmaker could possibly emulate, for myriad reasons. But amassing "political capital" was never how he did it. Instead, he concentrated on gathering trusted collaborators on both the business and artistic ends—producers Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe, editor Ralph Rosenblum, who famously advised him to take the
Bonnie and Clyde style massacre of hero Virgil Starkwell out of
Money, and so on. And,

most importantly—and this, really, was what made it thoroughly unnecessary for him to amass "political capital"—he found himself a genuine corporate patron in the person of Arthur Krim (left), the head of United Artists from 1951 to 1978, a run that looks very impressive indeed in the executive revolving door era we're in today. Krim took Allen under his wing at the studio, and let him do pretty much as he pleased. One of the more amusing ironies of that early sequence of 1980's
Stardust Memories in which Sandy Bates is tormented by the suggestions of young hotshot studio execs is that Allen himself hadn't been subjected to such humiliation in years, thanks to Krim.
"There were no readers' reports, no creative meetings, no casting approvals (unless informal, from Krim), no dailies, nothing but Woody and his script and his budget and Arthur Krim's blessing," writes former UA exec Stephen Bach in his ever-useful book Final Cut. Not that it was a blank-check deal. "One reason this worked as well as it did was that Woody's pictures always came in on budget, on schedule, and were what he said they would be." The filmmaker, Bach says, "had an old-fashioned, deeply ingrained sense of honor about his commitments," and Krim, it seems, matched it. It was Bach who was deputized with trying to keep Allen at UA after Krim went over to Orion in 1978. Allen followed Krim there, and retained a freedom few filmmakers ever enjoy—reshooting an entire film, September, in the late '80s when he was dissatisfied with the initial result.
You don't see too many idiosyncratic film artists enjoying such protective, productive relationships with execs and/or studios today, do you? A few years back there was somebody at Warners who said, off the record, that they were gonna make Darren Aronofsky into their new Stanley Kubrick. And that idea kinda fizzled...not when The Fountain bombed, but when Brad Pitt left the project. Which should give you some inkling of the idea of commitment as it exists in today's Hollywood. It's worth remembering, then, remember that Woody Allen's emergence as an auteur owed as much to his alliance with an old-school Medici prince as it did to his own shrewdness.
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