From "Annie Hall" to "Midnight in Paris", Woody Allen's film creation career spanned more than fifty years, with a new work almost every year, and almost every new work was written by himself. He is one of the most famous American directors in the world, with a unique style, witty humor, romance and deep philosophy, and a sixteen-time Academy Award nomination and three-time winner.
"Meaningless" is Woody Allen's autobiographical work, the first comprehensive review of his creative career and life story, telling how a poor New York boy stepped on the steps of comedy and grew into a humorist worshiped by thousands of literary and artistic young people. Starting from Brooklyn's poor and warm childhood, he looks back on the frivolous days of dropping out of college twice, the youthful years as a variety show screenwriter, the friendship with the older generation of comedy masters, the difficult days of talking about talk shows, and focuses on writing a long and brilliant directorial career, telling the stories behind works such as "Annie Hall" and "Midnight in Paris", and fully sharing his private life and emotional experience for the first time.
Text / Woody Allen
In addition to thinking of me as an intellectual, this is another misconception people have about me: they think that I am small and wear those kinds of glasses, so I can't be an athlete. But they were wrong. I was fast enough to win a track medal, was a very good baseball player, and fantasized about it as a profession until I was suddenly hired to write jokes. I'm a school basketball player who catches a football and throws it a mile. I don't expect you to take my word for it, but if any of you readers come across my old neighbors, ask them.
When I happen to meet one of them, they always talk about my skills and for some reason never talk about my films. A lot of people will also tell you about my abilities at the table. In my thirties, I used to play around 9 p.m. until the sun rose day and night, earning enough money to make a good living, plus buying a watercolor by Nolde and a painting by Kokoschka. I stopped because David Merrick said he was also a gamer, but one day realized what a waste of time. This sounded the alarm, so I stopped playing.
Similarly, I suddenly gave up baseball. When I was older, I also played softball in the Broadway Showbiz League, a game I never enjoyed. One day, as I walked towards the outfield position, a young player said to me, "Mr. Allen, don't worry. If you have something you can't catch, I'll help you. "I looked at him and thought, are you being funny? Anything that hits the outfield, I can catch up, sign it, and catch it. A few minutes later, a flat flying ball passed by me, and if I had been years earlier, I would have been able to catch it behind my back. I put down my gloves, walked off the field, asked to be replaced, and never came near the bat, ball and gloves again. The humiliation was so strong; I feel the shame when I write this story.
I was also humiliated at a celebrity-versus-All-Star game at Dodger Stadium. I was playing against a bunch of dumb actors — I mean great actors, but dumb players — against players like Willie Mays, Willie McCorvey, Bug Powell, Jimmy Pilsol, Roberto Clement. For some reason, odds makers feel like they're hot. I only had one blow against Don Drysdale and my high fly ball was tackled. My ball was really different from the catch-and-kill ball Willie Mays gave me.
A year later, when I met a kid I grew up with and played ball with, he said, "I saw your baseball game on TV." I can't believe you didn't hit Drysdale's ball. "yes, I should have moved my foot a little closer and really hit this log on the ball, God forbid I don't wake up in the middle of the night, the game came back to me, I became remorseful, remorseful, angry, blamed, I should have hit the Drysdale ball. I need to complete another blow. Next time, I'll move my feet a little closer. I'll definitely hit this guy's ball. Soon, I will be overoxygenated and the room will spin. Oh my God, I didn't hit Drysdale's ball that day — I need to finish another blow — I'm eighty-four — will it be too late? Where am I? Where did we go?
Ah – yes – back to the snowdrift. Jerry told me that he had an older brother named Sandy, who was a real comedian in his family. Sandy is a college presenter, and I should meet him. So we went to meet this guy who had a big influence on me early on. Sandy Epstein at J Avenue and Dickinson College. When he performs, he looks and sounds like a professional stand-up comedian. "Sorry guys, I'm a little late, I just got out of my hospital bed. My girlfriend has measles. "Although it wasn't Wilde or George Bernard Shaw, it was almost a professional comedian at the time. He taught me bridges, jokes and jokes, and after graduating from public school, I enrolled in Midwood High School, where the classroom became the only place to use the materials, and I did something that annoyed the teachers.
Soon, my mother became a regular there, embarrassed to hear me try to explain to the dean what I meant by "she has an hourglass-like body, and I just want to play in the sand." At that time, people were cautious, and there were "three views of the police" everywhere. I performed some scenes at a local Jewish club with great success, and by my senior year of high school I had dreamed of becoming a comedian, magician, or baseball player, but by the end I was just a terrible student. I'm a jack of all trades in the cinema, throwing a joke into an intense or romantic moment on the screen, and those who hear it can't help but laugh. I get as much "shut up" as I get laughter. That's when my friend Jerry bought a tape recorder and proudly showed it to me.
"What kind of music is that?" I asked.
"I recorded a jazz concert," he said, "from the radio." "Ted Hussin's Bandstand". ”
"It's so nice." I said, throwing the textbook in the direction of the trash.
"A concert in France."
"Who's playing that?"
"Sidney Becher."
"Who is he?"
"A soprano saxophonist in New Orleans."
It was the first New Orleans jazz I heard. Why it touched me so deeply, I'll never know. I was a Brooklyn Jew who had never left New York, had some kind of metropolitan taste, and admired the very elegant pop composers like Gershwin, Porter, and Kern, who were African-Americans in the Deep South, and had nothing in common with me, but I quickly became fascinated with them. Soon, I wanted to be not only a cartoonist, magician, and baseball player, but also an African-American jazz musician. I bought a clarinet and learned to play. Also bought a Victrola record player. So that I can play without having to go to class. I bought records, books on the origins of jazz and a biography of Louis Armstrong. My three friends, Jack, Jerry, and Elliott, plus I must have looked like a weird foursome. While the other kids were immersed in the commercial pops of the time, like Patti Page, Frankie Lane, and Four Aces, we sat in front of the tape recorder and played jazz day after hour, hour after hour.
We listen to all kinds of jazz, but our favorite is the early New Orleans record. Bunker Johnson, Jerry Rool Morton, Louis Armstrong and, of course, Sidney Bagcher, I adore him and learn from him (if that doesn't make you laugh, then nothing). I sat alone in my bedroom, playing with Bache and later with a recording of George Lewis. He was another of my idols, and with him and Johnny Dodds, another clarinet genius, I felt like I had finally found myself. The pleasure was so intense that I decided to dedicate my whole life to jazz. I barely realized that Bacher, Armstrong, George Lewis, Johnny Dodds, Jerry Raoul Morton, and Jimmy Nunn were all musical geniuses. Their style is primitive, but all within the norms of New Orleans jazz, and there is some real magic in their bodies that flows with every note played. I, naïve fool, didn't understand that I didn't have that talent, and that despite my passion and love for music, I was destined to forever become a nobody in the music industry, and people listened to me and tolerated me based on my film career, not jazz for any value.
However, I did practice and still do. I practiced every day, quite devoted, to make sure I could practice well, I practiced on the cold beach, in the church, my film crew illuminated me, practiced in the hotel room after work, went to bed at midnight and pulled the quilt over my head to practice so as not to wake up other guests. However, despite listening to music like I do, reading inspirational biographies of musicians, blowing and blowing with different mouthpieces and reeds, always looking for the kind of combination that would make the sound better, I was terrible. Between Federer and Nadal, I was still like a tennis player playing tickets for a weekend. I'm sorry, but I just don't have the ability to: connoisseurship, timbre, rhythm, feel. But I still play in public on the stage of clubs and concerts, in opera houses across Europe, and in crowded auditoriums in the United States. I played in parades and bars in New Orleans, at the Jazz Heritage Festival and the Archives Hall, all because I was able to profit from the fame of the film industry. A few years ago, Dosan Reid, a smart man, asked me during a meal, "Aren't you ashamed?" ”
Caught between my love of music and my limitations as a musician, I can't be ashamed if I want to play. I tried to explain to him that I used to only play at home with a few other musicians. Just for fun, it's like playing poker once a week. Then they suggested that we play in a bar or restaurant – so that there would be a small audience. I had years of experience in nightclubs and didn't want to ask for some more audiences, but they wanted to, so I said OK. It started small and performed in a run-down place, but decades later, our performances became a regular show at the Carlisle Hotel in Manhattan, and our performances at the European Concert Hall were always sold out, and the audience was as many as eight thousand people standing in the rain to listen to us. Back now, when I was a Brooklyn boy, I was hooked on jazz and worked hard to play the clarinet. I called the great jazz musician Gene Cedric, the clarinet player who had performed with "Fat Waller," and I said I was the young man who sat at the front table every week and listened to your jazz concert with Conrad Janis. Can you consider teaching me to play the clarinet? I thought I would be rejected, but I heard him say that he wanted to charge you two dollars. So for two small bucks, he drove from Harlem to Vratbush every week, and since I didn't know the score, he arranged the music on the trumpet, blew out a phrase, and said, "Try this." ”
I tried to blow, but because I didn't have any appreciation and no visible talent, I failed. He patiently worked with me week after week and my level improved – but always in the "no real talent" range. We became very good friends and he kept encouraging me until he died; But if you listen to me, you might say he's a connivator.
For many years I only played with records; Playing with others was when I was a comedian at the "Hungry Me" nightclub in San Francisco. In between shows, I would walk to a bar near the block called Earthquake McGunn, where Turk Murphy, the great jazz trombonist, led a band. Night after night, I sat outside and listened until one of the guys in the band said, why don't you come in and listen? Considering myself a shy, poor jazz lover, I said, "It's okay, it's nice in the alley, and I leaned against the exit door, trying to squeeze a little joy out of the music coming out of it." But Turk didn't care what I thought. I was the star comedian of "Hungry Me" and he insisted that I go in and enjoy the band.
When I walked in the door, he opened my chatterbox and learned that I knew a lot about jazz and was a single oboe player. He didn't know what trouble he was going to get in and insisted that I bring an instrument for a cameo. At many requests, one night I went, and I must say that I mastered all the tunes. Turk insisted that I go as often as I could, for as long as I wanted. The people in the band were polite and encouraging to me, and when I played, they all clapped desperately and desperately. When I got back to New York, I was already playing in the Turk Murphy Band, and I was no longer content to play alone, so I gathered some people and played in our home once a week. The rest is history - but that's how the Holocaust happened.
Years later, on a visit to New York, I invited Turk to guest star in my band's show at Mack's Bar. He came, and I couldn't help but reflect, it's ironic that at first I nervously made a cameo in his band, and years later he nervously made a cameo in my band. Then, realizing that this empty little irony was meaningless, I turned to another topic. Today, when I go up to solo, I only think that two great jazz musicians, Jean Cedric and Turk Murphy, would jump out of their graves in anger.
(This article is excerpted from Woody Allen's book Meaningless: Woody Allen's Autobiography, published with permission from New Classic Culture Nova Press.) ）
Humanities and Social Sciences | biography
Meaningless: The Autobiography of Woody Allen
By Woody Allen
Translated by BTR
New Classic Culture ·Nova Press
December 2022
"Meaningless" continues the romance and humor of Woody Allen's films, with heartbreak and both written on the same page. Like traveling back to New York and Paris after the rain of the twentieth century, experiencing the story behind Woody's work on the set, Godard and Fellini shuttled through it, arriving at the flowing feast of the film in the nostalgic chatter, and like watching a talk show of more than 400 pages, glimpsing the struggle and growth of the master in the hilarious laughter, the creative source of the perpetual motion machine, and the old Woody's philosophy of life: life is meaningless, and you can make it a tragedy or comedy.
Edit | Little fairy
Editor-in-Chief | Ocean blue
2023 Good Book Selection Collection!
Select the book type
The books are mainly aimed at the general readers, and are four categories: Chinese and foreign genre novels, Chinese and foreign literature, humanities and social science originals, and humanities and social science translations.
1. Chinese and foreign genre novels
A collection of long-form genre novels + novels and novels
2. Chinese and foreign literature
novels + novella collections; autobiographical fiction; literary essays, essays; reportage
3. Humanities and social sciences original
Thought, history, popular science, new knowledge, art, non-fiction writing and feature articles, biographies, scholarly prose essays
4. Humanities and Social Sciences Translation
Thought, history, popular science, new knowledge, art, non-fiction writing and feature articles, biographies, scholarly prose essays
Publisher recommendation standards
☑Books published between January and December 2023 (except January, good books from December and November of the previous year will be supplemented)
☑ Chinese mainland first published
☑ Reprints and reprints are not included here
Contact us
chief editor
Liu Yihan
WeChat: happysueve
Email: [email protected]
Please add WeChat or QQ to join the work group
Culture is a beacon of the country, and reading is a spiritual symbol of culture.
We still believe in the power of culture, in the power of reading.
Please pay attention to the searchlight book critics' good book list, we will recommend the best books of this era.