Woody's one slip up as Harry

Boy, I’m going to have to go back and review that scene again. I though he said “Proust” as in Marcel Proust, the French writer, not “proofs.”

Two ideas:

1) Maybe his character was at first intended to be a filmmaker. He's had filmmaker main characters before (Crimes and Misdemeanors, for example). Maybe while he was making the movie he decided to change his character to be a novelist, and some original aspects of the filmmaker character slipped by.

2) There would have to be movies made based on Harry's novels. Perhaps he was referring to those.

I love how blatently this film is (perhaps only partially) based on himself, and how he denies it, while - just to keep everyone on their toes - having the character in the film do precisely that. I know many other Woody films have the same autobiographical element, especially, for example, Hannah and Her Sisters, which I hear went down particularly badly with some of the people involved. But the fact in this one that issue is central to the plot iself, and the main character himself is denying what is obvious for everyone to see, adds a layer of mischief to this film.

Has anyone here read Allen's books from back in the '70s?

The humor in RH is a return to the humor in those books and also in his earliest films.






Honour thy parents. They were hip to the groove too once you know.

Watching the film after reading stuff about Allen and watching interviews, I get the sense that it's partially based on things that happened, much the same way Annie Hall and so on and so forth are based on his experiences (oddly enough I've heard his most autobiographical character in a sense was Farrow's character in Purple Rose of Cairo). I think it's easy to say it's practically all Allen, but he also made the film and wrote the script at a time when media buzz still was high on his split with Mia Farrow and Soon-Yi. It's like a crazy satire on the perception of him, though I'm sure some scenes ring truer to life than others (I can picture the Kirstie Alley scene where she confronts him about his infidelity to be like a fight between him and Farrow). But Allen originally wanted someone else to play the character, i.e. Dustin Hoffman or Eliot Gould, so he wasn't that attached to it to play it, he did it cause no one else would.

I also see a lot of the story segments the closest Allen has come to really getting the spirit of his fiction writings, his short stories, into his films. So that's probably part of it too- and the whole message of a character too neurotic to function in life but can only function in art (though Allen denies, perhaps unwisely, that he's even neurotic). So it's a little here and a little there, but I don't think it's easy to try and identify what is what based on his life. It's an amalgam



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Based on everything I have read, both about and by him, I feel certain that much of Harry's lifestyle is out of character for Woody. The addiction to whores, the drug taking, and the vulgarity all ring false to me. That said, I think it was a colossal lapse of judgment to choose to play Harry himself, if he did not want viewers to associate him with the character. Of course, actors play roles all the time that have nothing to do with who they really are. But in most cases they didn't write the script and direct the movie, also, so the line of separation between the actor and the part is clear.

Proust. Not proofs.

proust. proofs would mean photography anyways wouldnt it?


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