Robert Weide's film
"Woody Allen -- A Documentary," to be
released in the fall as part of the "American Masters" series
By Jim Emerson
Special to MSN Movies
In case you don't remember, there was a time when Woody Allen was kind of a
big deal. From the late 1970s through the early 1990s -- roughly from "Annie Hall" to "Bullets Over Broadway" (the last time
he received an Oscar nomination for Best Director) -- Allen was considered by
many to be one of the most vital and interesting American auteurs. His
reputation as a serious (though often comedic) filmmaker seemed all the more
impressive coming from a former TV gag writer and stand-up comic.
If his achievements seem less significant from the viewpoint of the 21st
century, there are likely several reasons. Few directors continue to make vital
works into their 70s (Luis Buñuel, Robert Altman and Roman Polanski come
to mind as conspicuous exceptions), and Allen's latter-day pictures have seemed
limp, lazy and indistinct -- trifles made just because he could, not because he
had anything he particularly wanted to communicate or accomplish with them.
And then there's the whole Soon-Yi thing, the 1992 sex scandal involving the
adopted daughter of his longtime romantic partner and leading lady, Mia Farrow, who was also mother to
three of his children, one biological and two adopted. The sordid stories -- of
Farrow discovering nude photos the 56-year-old had taken of the 22-year-old and
charging him with molesting another daughter -- shattered his public image and
ruined his reputation as a popular entertainer, even though his modestly
budgeted niche films had never been broadly popular to begin
with.
