The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader
by Woody Allen
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Woody Allen - accomplished film actor and director, brilliant monologist and gifted prose stylist. In this book, selections from his best, wittiest, and most profound work in every area have been gathered together for the first time. The excerpts from the published and never-before-published work range from one-liners to memorable on-screen exchanges to essays, and are drawn from Woody's stand-up routines (which have never appeared in print before), his classic New. Yorker pieces, his show more screenplays, film outtakes, magazine articles, plays, and interviews. Here is vintage Woody Allen on the topics that have dominated his work for more than thirty years: Intellectuals ("They're like the Mafia, they only kill their own"); Analysts ("My poor analyst got so frustrated. The guy finally put in a salad bar"); Love ("Should I marry W.? Not if she won't tell me the other letters in her name"); Work ("Show business is dog eat dog. It's worse. Than dog eat dog. It's dog doesn't return dog's phone calls"); Death ("I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying"); and much more. Here is marvelous dialogue from twenty-six original screenplays, including Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Bananas, Take the Money and Run, Play It Again, Sam, Broadway Danny Rose, Zelig, Radio Days, Manhattan, Husbands and Wives, and all the others. Here are highlights from monologues. Includes the first one he ever recorded in March, 1964; Woody discussing his grandfather ("On his deathbed he sold me this pocket watch"); remembering a moth who ate his sports jacket; and telling the now-classic tale of the time he shot a moose. Also included are excerpts from more than sixty essays: "No Kaddish for Weinstein," "Confessions of a Burglar," "The UFO Menace," "The Discovery and Use of the Fake Ink Blot," "A Guide to Some of the Lesser Ballets," and "If the. Impressionists Had Been Dentists," in which a distraught Dutch dentist named Vincent writes in anguish to his brother, Theo. Hilarious, nostalgic, poignant prose; stunning photographs by Brian Hamill, Mary Ellen Mark, Philippe Halsman, Jill Freedman, and others; color reproductions of paintings by Van Gogh, Picasso, Klee, Chagall, Ernst, Magritte, Pollock, Lichtenstein, Munch - all evoked in Woody's work. The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader is a demonstration and. Celebration of a great talent. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Must one be a reader to be a writer? Film director Woody Allen would answer in the negative. Once in a Newsweek interview, Allen said he read very little for the first 15 years of his life. He was too interested in playing ball. Then he added, "Even when I was reading nothing but ‘Donald Duck’ and ‘Batman’ I could write real prose in school compositions. There was never a week when the composition I wrote was not the one that was read to the class."
To experience Allen's skill as a writer one could read one of his books, such as the humor classics “Without Feathers” and “Side Effects,” or watch any of his movies, which he wrote as well as directed (and in most cases starred in). There is a third alternative, and that is show more “The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader,” edited by Linda Sunshine.
The book was published in the United Kingdom in 1993, so all his work from the past two and a half decades is unrepresented. Still there are nearly 300 pages of choice material here, excerpts from his movies, books, monologues (he was a standup comic back in the 1960s), essays and interviews. Sunshine organizes the material according to the major themes of his work: his own life, love, analysis, New York City, religion and death, for instance.
Here are a couple of brief samples:
In “Shadows and Fog,” he has one character say, "Oh, now there's only one kind of love that lasts. That's unrequited love. It stays with you forever."
He writes in “Without Feathers,” "What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet."
The book has a generous amount of illustrations, mostly stills from his movies.
Not everyone likes Woody Allen or approves of his moral character, but for those who can separate the work from the man, this book offers a great deal of pleasure. show less
To experience Allen's skill as a writer one could read one of his books, such as the humor classics “Without Feathers” and “Side Effects,” or watch any of his movies, which he wrote as well as directed (and in most cases starred in). There is a third alternative, and that is show more “The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader,” edited by Linda Sunshine.
The book was published in the United Kingdom in 1993, so all his work from the past two and a half decades is unrepresented. Still there are nearly 300 pages of choice material here, excerpts from his movies, books, monologues (he was a standup comic back in the 1960s), essays and interviews. Sunshine organizes the material according to the major themes of his work: his own life, love, analysis, New York City, religion and death, for instance.
Here are a couple of brief samples:
In “Shadows and Fog,” he has one character say, "Oh, now there's only one kind of love that lasts. That's unrequited love. It stays with you forever."
He writes in “Without Feathers,” "What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet."
The book has a generous amount of illustrations, mostly stills from his movies.
Not everyone likes Woody Allen or approves of his moral character, but for those who can separate the work from the man, this book offers a great deal of pleasure. show less
A treasury of Allen's brilliance - excerpted entirely from his own writings - across numerous media. It's only a shame we don't have an updated version of this to cover the second half of his startlingly varied career.
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Allen's favorite personality-the bemused neurotic, the perpetual worrywart, the born loser-dominates his plays, his movies, and his essays. A native New Yorker, Allen attended local schools and despised them, turning early to essay writing as a way to cope with his Since his apprenticeship, writing gags for comedians such as Sid Caesar and Garry show more Moore, the image he projects-of a "nebbish from Brooklyn"-has developed into a personal metaphor of life as a concentration camp from which no one escapes alive. Allen wants to be funny, but isn't afraid to be serious either-even at the same time. His film Annie Hall, co-written with Marshall Brickman and winner of four Academy Awards, was a subtle, dramatic development of the contemporary fears and insecurities of American life. In her review of Love and Death, Judith Christ wrote that Allen was more interested in the character rather than the cartoon, the situation rather than the set-up, and the underlying madness rather than the surface craziness. Later Allen films, such as Crimes and Misdemeanors or Husbands and Wives, take on a far more somber and philosophic tone, which has delighted some critics and appalled others. In Allen's essays and fiction reprinted from the New Yorker, Getting Even New Yorker, (1971), Without Feathers (1975), and Side Effects (1980), the situations and characters don't just speak to us, they are us. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- The Illustrated Woody Allen Reader
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