Fin: Ten thoughts on Bill Maher’s interview with Woody Allen
Plus: Larry Charles’ fantastic memoir, life imitates Clear and Present Danger, Eddington and Angela Davis, and more this week’s notes column.
This week, Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast had a surprising guest: Woody Allen. While it was not Woody’s first-ever podcast appearance — he appeared on an MTV News show 11 years ago, back when MTV News still existed — but this one made a lot more news, I get the sense.
I watched all 90 minutes of the interview, and as someone who normally can’t stomach Bill Maher for more than five minutes, that was something. A few thoughts on what was discussed:
Right out of the gate, the two compared notes about the New York comedy scene and which clubs they performed in and who they knew, although those two things didn’t have much in common. That’s because, while Maher turns 70 next year, Allen is about to turn 90, and came along two decades earlier. Maher is old, but Allen is much older.
Even more notably than that, Maher has cultivated a persona in the last decade or so as a cranky old man and cultural reactionary, a man with bottomless contempt for the passage of time, changes in the culture, and, more than anything else, those awful kids these days. But Allen, who is 20 years older than Maher and is even more notoriously set in his ways, isn’t nearly as bitter about any of those things.
When I heard about his interview, I was sort of afraid it would entirely be about cancel culture, but Maher only raised the subject near the end. And Allen… doesn’t seem to be all that upset about his own cancellation! Woody acknowledges that he didn’t suffer career consequences until he was in his 80s and about ready to retire anyway. He’s not wrong- the early-’90s one-two punch of Allen running off with Soon-Yi, and also being accused of abusing his daughter, didn’t interrupt his career in any significant way. And Allen is not even all that upset about the actors who disavowed working with him. Maher seems way angrier than Allen is, for instance, at Timothee Chalamet.
Woody Allen comes across, throughout the interview, as the less repulsive and off-putting of the two of them, by far.
I was amused by Maher admitting that he hadn’t seen The Bicycle Thieves, Woody describing the plot, and Maher saying “isn’t that Pee Wee’s Big Adventure?,’ which is a joke that film students have now been making for about 40 years.
As is typically the case, the one thing that got most aggregated from the interview was Allen briefly mentioning Donald Trump, in the context of the future president making a cameo in his movie Celebrity, and Allen mostly having positive interactions with him. However, immediately afterward, Woody was very clear that he doesn’t support Trump and that he voted for Kamala Harris. He did not, however, make the joke from Annie Hall about “I was trying to do to her what [Trump] has been doing the country for the last four years.”
The New York Times did report, back in 2020, that Woody had attended a New Years’ celebration at Mar-a-Lago. I’m trying to imagine a more incongruous sight than Woody Allen in Palm Beach. The Maher interview also required him to travel to Los Angeles, long Woody’s least favorite thing to do.
I recommend Patrick McGilligan’s biography from earlier this year, “Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham.” The sprawling book, while going film by film and relationship by relationship, leans mostly in the direction of him not being guilty of having abused his daughter, although it does show Woody did lots of unsavory stuff with women throughout his life.
That book revealed that Allen, on a couple of occasions, attended “salons” at the home of Jeffrey Epstein, and even signed a birthday book (though not THE birthday book) for Epstein in 2016. Maher, for who knows what reason, didn’t ask about that.
The Maher podcast wasn’t Woody’s only recent media appearance. Last month, Allen appeared virtually at a film festival in Moscow, where he praised Russian cinema. This drew rebukes from supporters of Ukraine — the Ukrainian Embassy in the U.S. called it “a disgrace and an insult to the sacrifice of Ukrainian actors and filmmakers who have been killed or injured by Russian war criminals” —
although Allen later issued a statement to CNN that he supports the Ukrainian cause. When a canceled Hollywood figure appears at a film festival abroad, it’s almost an upset when it’s someone besides Kevin Spacey.
Confessions of a “Samurai”
Speaking of Brooklyn-native Jews who have excelled in the world of comedy, I just finished reading one of the best showbiz memoirs in memory, “Comedy Samurai: Forty Years of Blood, Guts, and Laughter,” by Larry Charles.
