Every 10 years or so, Woody Allen heads for Splitsville. Twenty-two years ago he and Diane Keaton ended the long Svengali-Trilby relationship that had provided Allen with his ideal shiksa muse and his most productive creative period.
Then in 1991 his long and complicated relationship with Mia Farrow nosedived after it emerged that he was involved in a relationship with Soon-Yi Previn — adopted daughter of Farrow and composer André Previn — whom Allen later married.
Since then Allen has maintained his position as the United States’s favourite arthouse director, thanks mainly to a number of sympathetic backers. As a result of their generosity, he has — almost uniquely among US directors — been able to make at least one movie a year, sometimes two, no matter what their fate at the box office. Only Allen could survive three flops in a row and not pay the same penalties — ignominy, unemployment — suffered by other directors who fail to deliver a hit.
But now, with a legal fraças developing between Allen and Jean Doumanian, the producer who saw him through the past decade, it seems that Woody’s run of luck may be coming to an end.
Doumanian stepped into the fray during the Soon-Yi affair, when Allen’s distributor TriStar developed a galloping case of nerves and asked him to delay his next movie for six months. Doumanian’s boyfriend is the reclusive Swiss-Lebanese financier Jaqui Safra, so she has access to serious money.
Now, however, Safra is tightening his belt, having spent a fortune buying the Encyclopaedia Britannica and attempting to expand it online.
The crunch came during the production of Allen’s latest film, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, when Doumanian suddenly gave Allen 48 hours to find alternative backing. He was horrified and implored her to think again, pleading the length of their friendship — 35 years — as a reason for sticking with him.
Now, however, the pair are involved in a potentially ugly lawsuit as Allen claims his bookkeepers have discovered a $10-million shortfall in profit payments from Doumanian-Safra.
Allen claims the lawsuit is merely meant to rectify what he assumes were innocent mistakes by his producers, rather than acts of malfeasance. However, his attempts to defuse the crisis in an amenable manner seem to have come to naught. Doumanian and Safra have offered to let their 50% ownership stake in the past decade’s Allen films — and their negatives, which they own — revert to Allen if he repays them all the money they invested in them.
Fat chance of that: Doumanian has a bank behind her while Allen, though a multimillionaire, is in no position to come up with that sort of money on his own.
All of which poses the question: how would Allen fare if he were thrown into the lions’ den of real-life studio financing? I think the best he could hope for would be a deal forcing him to participate in big-budget studio productions — as he did on Dreamworks’s Antz — with the occasional personal project to keep him happy.
Which of course would be intolerable to the speccy auteur. In order to function in the manner to which he is accustomed, Allen will need to find another benefactor — and fast.
So we leave Allen in limbo between a decade of lesser works — the exception being the hysterically mean Deconstructing Harry — and an uncertain future. It might be sad if Allen’s output was substantially reduced, but when one looks at the innumerable flops between his intermittent successes — Another Woman, September, Shadows and Fog, Small Time Crooks and particularly the idiotic Celebrity — it’s possible that a lower output might be the best thing that could happen to him.