(This letter is an excerpt from the new memoir Public Apology, out today!)
Sorry for choosing Hannah and Her Sisters when you asked me to go out and rent some movies for our family to watch to get our minds off the fact that Dad had been diagnosed with cancer.
You remember, I'm sure, that this was just a couple weeks before I graduated from high school. It must have been a weekend, because we were all at home in the afternoon. Dad walked in to the TV room with his friend David Landy. You could tell that David Landy had been crying.
Hey, it's April 20th, or "4/20." So you know what that means. That's right, Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill and the Columbine massacre and the first pitch thrown at Fenway Park in Boston and also at Wrigley Field in Chicago and the sadly shuttered Tiger's Stadium in Detroit. And also of Billie Holiday recording "Strange Fruit." And the Bay of Pigs fiasco and of Russia's mistaken downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 902. And lots of other crazy stuff, most of which is entirely coincidental. Also, of course, it's Pot Day. So I'm sure all you potheads are so stoned right now that [...]
"You don't gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you'd trade all of that for being 35 again." -Way to BRING ME DOWN, Woody Allen! If I live long enough some day I will be nostalgic for now? DO NOT WANT. I'm gonna have to increase my nonfitness regimen.
Woody Allen has reached a $5 million settlement with American Apparel. Allen sued the company for $10 million after they used his image without permission; AA's lawyers argued for a settlement, either because they realized that they were unlikely to prevail in court or they decided they'd milked enough publicity out of the case already.
This is the best way to understand Woody Allen, from the man himself, in the first interview with Woody and Larry David about the upcoming Whatever Works: "I think my philosophy has been consistent over the years, and it appears either persuasive or idiotic depending on how good the film is."
"It is not true that my book Guns, Germs and Steel, as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, 'basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.' That is so different from what my book actually says that I have to doubt whether Mr. Romney read it. My focus was mostly on biological features, like plant and animal species, and among physical characteristics, the ones I mentioned were continents’ sizes and shapes and relative isolation. I said nothing about iron ore, which is so [...]
The problem with having a website where you only write about things that interest you is that a lot of things will not be of interest to you. For instance, today I am completely uninterested in reading or writing about: Miss California, Ayelet Waldman, Michael Savage, Jimmy Fallon winning a Webby, Webbys in general, Jimmy Fallon in general, whether Obama threatened recalcitrant Chrysler bondholders (but if he did, you know, good for him), and still Jimmy Fallon. Just not interested.
“It’s no use, Philo,” I said. “It just won’t play.”
“But why?” he asked, crestfallen.
“The idea has originality,” I said, searching for a way to sweeten the rejection. “But there’s no part in it for Carla Bruni, and we have an agreement.”
"Nobody wants to see a guy who's 74 hitting on a woman of any age. But I don't want to make geriatric movies about old people because they bore me too." -Woody Allen is having a hard time with getting older.
