"Woody Allen Interview - 1969"

I was recently reminded that, when I published an interview with Mel Brooks that I did for my Toronto newspaper column in the late sixties, I promised to subsequently publish the interview I did with Woody Allen during the same period.

First, a little background.

In 1969, I decided to move to New York to become a comedian. During that five-week mistake, which I ought to write about sometime, I performed only twice – once, on the first night I arrived, where I was totally terrified – I actually opened by saying to the audience, “Don’t scare me, okay?” – and once on the night before I went home, where I’d consumed on beer, I knew I was leaving, and was sensational. A guy after said he wanted to manage me. But I went home instead. It was probably a wise decision.

Though I was living in New York, I continued my weekly column-writing assignment for the Toronto Telegram. It was all very high tech. I wrote the column, and then I mailed it to them.

Since it very quickly gets tiresome, and embarrassing, to keep writing about why, though I went to New York to become a comedian, I’d been avoiding going onstage – the place where you learn to become a comedian – I eagerly searched of alternate sources of material. And self-respect.

At the time, my brother was partners with Lorne Michaels, and together, they would sporadically fly to New York to present Woody with material he had contracted them to write for his standup act. I don’t believe Woody ultimately used any of it, but it provided an “in.” An “in” to receive complimentary tickets to his show, “Play It Again, Sam” (after which, we were shuttled back to our hotel in Woody’s limo, with Woody actually in in), and an “in” to arrange a subsequent interview.

I will deliver the interview in two installments. The first installment immediately follows.

An Interview With Woody Allen: Circa 1969.

In the way he approaches a problem, Woody Allen reminds me very much of Tom Jefferson, a kid from my High School math class who always got a hundred on the exams. When I asked Tom how he did it, he’d shrug matter-of-factly and say, “Well, you know, I sorta looked at the questions, and kinda figured out the answers.”

What an irritating explanation! I mean, everybody looks at the questions and tries to figure out the answers. The difference was he got the answers! What exactly did he do different? Was he holding out on me? Or did he really not know himself?

That’s exactly how I felt about Woody as I talked with him in his maroon-carpeted dressing room at the Broadhurst Theater where he was starring in the hit comedy Play It Again, Sam, which he also wrote.

This is Woody’s second Broadway hit in two tries, the other being Don’t Drink The Water, which starred Lou Jacobi and ran a highly respectable 75 weeks – and Woody admits this one came a little easier: “It took a little while for me to learn to write for the medium. It’s an easy part for me to play because I wrote it with myself in mind, even though I didn’t want to play it. I didn’t want to tie myself down to Broadway for a year.”

But [other candidates for the role] Dustin Hoffman was doing Jimmy Shine on Broadway and Dick Benjamin was doing a film, so Woody took on the lead role himself.

“Once this play opened on Broadway,” he admitted, “you know, I couldn’t care less if I ever saw it again. You know, I like it and it was fun to do, but I wouldn’t want to do it in London, or do it in the movie particularly, or write the screenplay.”

To him, it was a learning exercise and now it was over. As an actor, his contract runs out in October 1, and he is searching for some name star to take over for him.

Tommy Smothers and Bob Newhart were two names mentioned.

As a professional comedy writer, Woody started at the age of 17, two years before he left school. He wrote TV and radio for the disparate likes of Herb Shriner, Sid Caesar and Peter Lind Hayes. Was it hard to produce material for comics who varied so greatly in style and quality?

“It’s not all that hard,” shrugged Woody. “People that you write for, you know, they have a very definite style of their own. You try and write it to their style. You can learn to do it. It’s really not all that difficult.”

Then Jack Rollins, a highly successful spotter and developer of comedy talent (Nichols and May, Woody, Dick Cavett, Joan Rivers, Milt Kamen, etc) talked him into trying to make it as a performer. “The idea had occurred to me vaguely, but I hadn’t tried it before.” He had the feeling, from conversations and from his overall personality, that it would work on stage.

“Nobody ever tried to build a character. I mean, I just did what I did, and a year later, looked up and in the newspapers, a character had emerged.”

For nearly two years, going on stage was a frightening experience for him, but the constant support and encouragement of Rollins, and his partner, Charlie Joffe, helped carry him over those necessarily trying and difficult times as a developing performer.

Even on his wedding night, Joffe came down with his new bride to a dingy Village coffee house to keep up his client’s morale and observe his gradual development. Did Woody ever adjust his material or style to make it easier for the audience to accept him?

“I just never thought about it. I just wrote the jokes and told them and as I gained a little strength as a comedian, as I got a little practice getting up there and sort of projecting, keeping the energy up and enjoying it, it began to work for me. It’s hard enough writing good jokes, much less tailoring them to the audience. But if a joke doesn’t get a laugh, I take it out right away. “

“I just knew I could write jokes,” he said, trying to help me to understand, “and the question was, could I develop the things that could be learned, how to structure a play, how to direct a movie, you know, all this stuff can be learned.”

Tomorrow: Woody Allen Interview: Installment Number Two.

"Follicular Nightmare"

You stand up before the assemblage, and you announce your discovery of the scientifically accepted cure for cancer.

You reveal the ultimate key to human happiness.

And you lay out a certain roadmap for the eradication of world hunger, and the end of war for all time.

But if there's hair sticking out of your nose

And that’s the only thing they remember.

"Uncle Grumpy Re-Redux"

It’s been quite a while, but he’s back. My highly opinionated Uncle Grumpy. Uncle Grumpy says controversial things. What’s important to remember is to blame him. I am simply offering him an arena to vent.

All right, Unc. The floor is yours.

Thank you, nephew. It's nice to have a relative so scared of disapproval, he surrenders to podium to a literary device.

Okay. Off we go.

Here’s why I haven’t said much for a year or two. I’ve been told – and I believe it’s true – that a lotta the things I say end conversations. Now that’s not sayin’ that I’m so darn clever, I have the answers to things, so it’s “Cased Closed.” No way, no how. It’s just that I say things that other people choose not to say, and after I say what I say, there is nothin’ more to be said.

Like lookie here.

There is no such thing as an “abortion debate.” You either believe life begins at conception, or you don’t.

End of conversation.

“Now hold your horses,” you might say. “Putting that aside, you can still debate the issue of whether one group of people has the right to impose its religious beliefs on everybody else.”

That’s true, theoretically – like if this were a Jewocracy, and everybody was required to wear little hats – but when the religious belief concerns murder, and with murder, there has to be a murdered person, and there’s an irreconcilable dispute as to whether a fetus, at least at a certain point in its development, is a person – some people thinkin’ it’s a person at conception, others attributin’ “personhood” considerably later on – then you’re back to “Square One”, and there is no possibility for debate.

Ergo, I repeat: End of conversation.

Here’s another one.

Money in politics.

We all know it takes millions of dollars to run for election – for president, hundreds of millions. It’s not magic. The money has to come from somewhere. And you have to be accommodatin' to the people who gave it to you when they call. Can you imagine the president going,

“Can I put you on “Hold” Mr. Wealthy Contributor? I’ve got a poor person on the other line.”

You might want to run for re-election someday, and if you do, you will be callin’ on Mr. Wealthy Contributor again. That’s just the way it is.

Money is the stand-alone Number One issue in politics. Everything else is secondary, because it inevitably “arrows back” to the money.

Universal Health Care? How in Hades do you take the debate seriously, when insurance companies, drug companies and HMO’s are enormous contributors?

Wall Street reform? Yeah, those folks don’t contribute to political campaigns. Not much, they don’t.

Let’s cut defense spending. “Wait, those guys wrote us a big check. On the other hand, we really should cut defense spending, because we got a huge deficit and, you know, you don’t need an aircraft carrier to shoot a guy out of cave. I don’t know. Maybe we should leave the defense budget alone. Or increase it a little, just to be safe.”

Environmental protections? A new energy policy? The Tax Code? Revampin’ the legal and educational systems? Workers’ rights? It’s all the same.

“We’d like to, but what are you gonna do? You can’t bite the hand, you know?”

Until you’re willing to take money out of politics through public financing of campaigns – and by the way, the Supreme Court just went the other way openin’ the floodgates for corporate donations – there is no point in debatin’ any other serious issue. You’d just be flappin’ yer gums. Once again,

End of a whole bunch of conversations.

And then, there’s this one.

“Huckabee says the president ‘grew up in Kenya.’”

“Michele Bachmann claims the Founding Fathers ‘worked tirelessly’ to end slavery.”

“Newt Gingrich says the president exhibits ‘anti-colonial behavior.’”

“Why do they say such ridiculous things?”

You hear that a lot on MSNBC. Chris Matthews is always yammerin’ away about that. He quotes a spokesperson from “the other side” – entirely accurately, but that’s another story – then he knits his brow, and he, symbolically at least, scratches his head – you can hear it in his voice – and he wonders why grown people make such incredibly stupid statements.

The answer is simple.

“Why do they say such ridiculous things?”

Because

They’re not talking to you.

And the people they are talkin’ to? They don’t think they’re ridiculous.

“They’re not talking to you” – by rights, that should end the conversation right there. But it doesn’t. If it did, Chris Matthews would have very little to talk about on his show. So even though everyone – including ol’ Chris – knows the answer, day after day after day, the man keeps

Askin’

The question.

Okay? So here’s me, itchin’ to pop off on the issues of the day. And there’s almost nothin’ I can pop off about. I can’t debate an issue where no debate is actually possible. I can’t get all worked up about issues that are subsidiary to the only issue that really counts. And I can’t take seriously bizarre statements whose audience is not meant to be me, but another group altogether.

Three important issues. But once you’ve said about them what I just said here, there is nothin’ left to say.

End of conversation.

"Cycling Through The Sky"

I love writing stories where I’m brave. I have so few of them to draw on. The following is one of them. Treasure it. It’s extremely rare.

On my last birthday, I wrote about treating myself to a ride on a Ferris Wheel, the one in question located on the Santa Monica Pier, about six blocks from my house. At this moment, I can see it out my office window. Or I could, if there weren’t this annoying clump of trees blocking my view. I can imagine seeing it out my office window.

As a result of that posting, I received a comment from Allan R., which read, in part:

“I’ve never taken a ride on a Ferris Wheel…My birthday is not until June, so I have time to consider it. But I really don’t like heights, so what’s the appeal?”

First, some immediate background. I took the Ferris Wheel ride for two reasons – one, because it was my birthday, and two, because fourteen months earlier, I had taken a ride on that same Ferris Wheel the day before my heart surgery, and I wanted to celebrate the contrast between me, shaking in my boots before going under the (robotically manipulated) knife, and me, feeling fully recovered two birthdays later.

So there’s that.

I also went up on the Ferris Wheel because I like how it feels. A liberating ascent from the earth, which, if you’re facing in one direction, offers a panoramic view of the Santa Monica coastline, and if you face the other way, you are greeted with a vast expanse of ocean as far as the eye can see. If your eyes are really good, you can see Hawaii. But they have to be really good. (My eyes aren’t that good. But I can see airplanes headed for Hawaii.)

Generally speaking, I am not a “rides” person. There were amusement park rides in Toronto of the stomach-dropping variety that I’d never go near. One was called “The Whip”, which, does that really need further explanation?

“The Whip”?

Another “Not for me” ride was “The Rotor.” You stand against the wall of “The Rotor”, the thing starts spinning around, and when it reaches maximum speed,

The floor drops out.

And you’re standing on nothing.

The centrifugal force of the motion plastering you against the wall.

I passed on that one too.

Over the years, not much in this regard has actually changed. Though, sometimes, I set aside my reservations and foolishly relent.

Not long ago, I was challenged to take a ride on “Space Mountain” at Disneyland – which can accurately be described as roller coaster in the dark. And for some inexplicable reason, I agreed.

As I careened crazily through the inky blackness, I could distinctly hear myself screaming, “I am going to die!” Later, as I continued around the park, total strangers would come up to me, asking me if I was okay. My complexion had apparently turned a worrisome green.

By contrast to these dubious sources of entertainment, the Ferris Wheel, though it does ascend (not all that high) into the air, is relatively benign, rising skyward with a gentle rocking motion. No abrupt changes in speed, no suddenly wrenching dips or drops. Overall, it’s a pretty comfortable ride. Though, I’ll admit, it is not entirely risk free.

Once, when we were kids visiting the Canadian National Exhibition, my grandmother invited my older brother and myself to take a ride on the Midway’s towering Ferris Wheel.

Now, one of the potential eventualities on the Ferris Wheel, is that, sometimes, for reasons generally unclear to the riders, the Ferris Wheel will come to an unexpected stop, and if your car happens to be situated at the top of the wheel’s rotation, you are, momentarily at least, pretty much stranded, your car rocking motionlessly in the breeze.

Well, that’s what happened to us. After an extended wait at the time, my brother took the opportunity to throw up, his semi-digested chunks spraying the passengers in the car directly below us.

Since we were currently suspended in space, with nowhere to escape to, angry shouts of “What’re ya doin’, eh?” came flying up in our direction. My brother, however, eluded the abuse with an ingenious ruse.

He blamed me.

And the people believed him. Why not? A skinny kid with glasses – I looked like someone who would throw up on a Ferris Wheel. My more muscular brother, on the other hand, seemed an unlikely vomiter, though, on that occasion, that had actually been the case.

To answer your question, Allan, despite the occasional surprises, which, to me, simply add to the adventure, I recommend a celebratory ride on a Ferris Wheel. It’s easy and it’s fun.

But the recommendation comes with a caveat, in the form of wise words once delivered by ventriloquist Senor Wences’s dummy.

In the act, Senor Wences is smoking a cigarette, when he says to his dummy, “Would you like a puff?” The dummy replies, “I can’t.” Senor Wences replies, “Why not? It’s easy.” To which the dummy replies,

“For you, easy. For me, difficult.”

"Near Sightings"

Prologue: (as they’d say on The Fugitive, only they used the American version: Prolog.)

Years ago, my buddy Cliff and I were aerobically high-footing it along the beach Walking Path near our house (Cliff, at the time, was my neighbor), with me walking on the ocean side, and Cliff beside me, taking the beach side. (That will turn out to be important.)

So I’m yammering away as usual, elaborating on what I’m sure is some earth-shattering insight, when Cliff looks past me at what I imagine, given Cliff’s proclivities, is some hot-looking joggerette. This time, however, I am mistaken.

“Did you see him?” he chirps, all kid-like with excitement.

“Who?” I reply, since the only person I was seeing at that moment was Cliff.

“Reagan!” he exclaims. “He just went by with four Secret Service agents.”

I immediately turn around, and see a mass of people. One of them is apparently the former President of the United States.

My unfortunate positioning had cause me to miss seeing the ex-fortieth-president, ambling along. And the weird thing is: Cliff spotted Reagan on a subsequent beach walk together about a year or so later.

And I missed him that time too!

Moving on…(which I don’t think they said on The Fugitive)

We’re driving back from the spa last weekend, and we stop at the beach town of La Jolla for a spa-cuisine “break fast”, meaning:

We are going to eat meat!

We’re at a restaurant named George’s, which came highly recommended by a guest at the spa. We are seated at a table. Dr. M departs for the Ladies’ Room.

To my delight, facing directly at me is a big screen TV (there are no TV’s in the rooms at the spa), and to my even greater delight, there’s a ballgame playing on it. San Diego versus St. Louis, neither of whom I care about, but the new season had just started, and, having been deprived of baseball all winter, I was ravenous for the game.

Oh, joy of joys! My primary needs are simultaneously being met:

Meat and baseball!

Then, almost as quickly as my excitement has ascended, it immediately crashes down.

It turns out, there’s this high counter-like table located directly between me and the television. And a waitress has just seated a family of three at it. Suddenly and sadly, they are

Blocking the screen!

Returning, Dr. M immediately senses my chagrin. A forlorn head gesture accurately summarizes its source. As is almost always the case, Dr. M instantly offers a solution.

She directs me to another big screen TV facing her (that I hadn’t previously noticed.) If we change places, I will once again be able to enjoy the game.

So that’s what we do. I abandon my seat facing the blocked TV, and exchange it for a seat with an unimpeded view of baseball.

The joy is back!

As we wait to be served, Dr. M notices two men, wearing earpieces attached to coiled wires that disappears beneath their casual beachwear. Past experience informs us that these are Secret Service agents. Meaning that some high, security-needing government official is also lunching at George’s.

A waitress passes, with a funny look on her face. Dr. M intercepts her.

“Who’s here?’ she inquires.

The answer comes back:

“Hillary.”

Can you believe it? Former First Lady and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was dining at the same restaurant as we were. And I had a straight-line perfect view of her.

From the seat I had just given up.

A fortunate person may have one fortuitous brush with history. I have been lucky enough to have had three.

But for every one of them, I was facing the other way.

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In response to Dave Stieb: There is also a band that play for me at the ocean. I am not sure it's the same musicians, as they are not dressed like mariachis and they not have a Mexican accent. But who knows? They could be a versatile group.

Dave Stieb used to be a great pitcher for the Blue Jays. I wonder if it's the same guy.

"A Plea For Making Things Better Than Perfect"

I had this idea for a cartoon once. It was a onepanel cartoon, where a guy’s lying in the road under Prius that has apparently just run him over. For those of you not from Santa Monica, where every third car is a Prius, a Prius is a Hybrid Toyota, which, when it stops at an intersection, the engine immediately shuts off.

Okay, so in my cartoon, the pedestrian’s under the Prius, except for his head, and he looks up and the driver, and, genuinely impressed, he says,

“Boy! These cars are quiet!”

There you have it. Not exactly a product feature Toyota wants touted on a Super Bowl ad –

“The Prius – so quiet, you’ll never see it coming.”

The problem here is that they made it too good. “Too good” meaning too good for “Man In The Street” – in this case, literally – consumption. As a result of our life experience, we develop certain expectations. One of them being that approaching cars make noise.

You’re crossing the street, you hear a car coming, and you look up. You’re crossing the street, and you don’t hear it coming – because it’s a Prius – and you could die.

This is unquestionably not as good. Even though it was meant to be better.

It is understandable how this happens. You can imagine surveys asking prospective car buyers:

“Which type of car would you rather drive – a quiet car, or a noisy car?”

Excepting those “Look at me!’ kind of drivers – the kind who deliberately remove their mufflers so when they race by, dead people in their graves go, “What was that!” the vast majority of survey respondents would check the box marked,

“Quiet car.”

At that point, the marketers would inform the engineers of the customers’ preference for quiet cars, and the engineers, being congenital problem solvers, which is the source of their rewards and advancements in the company, make the “leap” in their heads that, “If customers like quiet cars, then they’ll really like really quiet cars. And if they really like really quiet cars, they’ll go crazy for cars that make no noise whatsoever.

Overlooking, in the process, one troubling, unintended consequence:

People don’t hear the car coming, they don’t look up, and they’re a traffic fatality.

Which is a definite design flaw.

Now this is hardly a novel problem in the arena of advancing technology. In a similar, though less obituarial situation, when they invented the typewriter, they arranged the keys such that the most frequently used letters were the easiest to reach. Easier access to those keys, to the typewriter inventors, seemed to be a sensible idea, based on the belief that,

“Easier is better.”

A belief for which there is ample precedent. It’s easier, for example, to open a tin of peaches with a can opener than with a rock. That’s why today, when people want to open a tin of peaches, they reach into their drawer, and there’s no rock, the rock having been replaced by the easier-to-use can opener, much to the chagrin of rock salesmen, who were now reduced to advertising their product as easier to hit people over the head with than a tree.

You see, it’s always about “easier.”

It turned out, however – going back to the original letter-key arrangement on the typewriter – that the arrangement they came up with was too easy.

Because of the “helpful” way the typewriter keyboard was set up, with practice, people began typing too quickly. “What’s wrong with that?” you ask. The whole point of the typewriter was to replace the considerably slower modality of writing by hand, which, in turn, had replaced the monumentally slower practice of chiseling messages into a big slab of granite.

When people typed too quickly – because of the “user friendly” letter-key placement – the typewriter keys got all snarled together, rendering the typewriter entirely useless. Another commercial you don’t want to see in the Super Bowl.

“The typewriter – So fast, it doesn’t work at all.”

In the case of the typewriter, a solution was found. That solution was to rearrange the keyboard more inconveniently, and therefore, more inefficiently, slowing the typists down enough that the typewriter keys were no longer getting snarled, while continuing to make typewriting faster than handwriting, thus retaining its popularity for speed, not to mention legibility, since nobody has ever said, “I can’t read your typing.”

Problem solved. Making things worse made them immeasurably better.

That is the lesson here: Worse can be better. For example, if they added an, otherwise unnecessary, hum to my now totally silent computer printer, I would not keep forgetting to shut the damn thing off.

Similarly, if they added a “Grainy Button” to my HDTV, I could once again be able to watch the shows, without being unduly distracted by crow’s feet and cratered complexions.

Which leads to my plea, and if there are enough of you out there who agree with me, we can get up a petition, and send it to Toyota.

Toyota engineers:

I know you hate this, because you’re engineers striving for perfection, this is an this is an insult to your mission, expertise and integrity, but please:

Add a noise to the Prius, before somebody not in a cartoon

Ends up on the pavement.

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A rib-tickling fact. At the Toronto Hebrew Day School, I had a classmate named Ricky Green. Ricky's birthday was on March the 17th.

"Tecate Tales - Winding Down"

I'm not special.

Except in the sense that, you know, "We're all special." (There was a Dad here who revealed that his daughter's bedroom is crammed with soccer trophies, and the girl's terrible at soccer.)

Having said I'm not special - "having said that" sounding, I'm aware, suspiciously like "Please ignore the previous assertion" - every time I've visited this spa, there's been this nine-piece mariachi band, ribboned along the top of Mount Kuchima - which I've been told is a sacred mountain - that plays musical numbers that are exclusively for me. I know they're exclusively for me, because the songs have my name in them. And, having checked around, I've discovered that nobody here sees this band other than me.

Which, I'm aware once again, is a case for my being special. Though it's equally a case for my being crazy.

During the early stages of this visit, my band had been disappointingly absent. Then, two days ago,

They returned.

(I guess they'd been on vacation. Even invisible bands need a break. There may be an "Invisible Band" union that demands it.)

I was on the morning hike, the only exception to my "no exercise" rule. (I take a hike in the morning, and that's it. After that, it's back my unswervingly indolent routine of "hammock, nap and bath." Interrupted only by a massage. Yeah, I know. It's good.)

I thought I had been abandoned. But then, after three music-less mornings, the mariachian silence was eruptively broken.

My boys were back!

There they were, nine laughing, mostly middle aged gentlemen, decked out in all-black outfits, festooned with braided trim, silver discs, and oversized, black sombreros, playing the traditional trumpets, fiddles and guitars.

The band opened with a rollicking Mexican rhythm, ending each verse, singing,

"Mr. Pomerantz is on the trail."

With every new verse came an improvisatorily different rollicking rhythm, each variation more imaginative and intricate than the variation before it.

And all ending with,

"Mr. Pomerantz is on the trail."

Then, the band segued into instrumental fragments of familiar tunes, by which I mean melodies I knew.

The identifiable Lone Ranger theme song blared out:

"Buh-duh-dum, buh-duh-dum, buh-duh-dum bum bum

Buh-duh-dum, buh-duh-dum, buh-dah-dum bum bum

Mr. Po-mer-antz is on the trail..."

Then came the familiar first line from Peter and the Wolf:

"Bum, bum, ba-dum bum bum

Ba-dum bum bum, ba-dum bum bum

Mr. Po-mer-antz is on the trail."

Then, at a certain point, when the hike got tougher, I was all by myself, having lost contact with the faster hikers in front of me, and could not see the slower hikers behind. Catching the mood of my solitude, my personal accompaniment relaxed into a plaintive, yet still encouraging ballad, this time delivered with the full lyrical package, which went like this:

"Alone on the trail, Mr. Pomerantz

Alone as he travels along

There is no one ahead

There is no one behind

There is no one but us,

Singing this song.

Alone on the trail, Mr. Pomerantz

Being careful that he doesn't slip

He goes slow down the hills

So he won't take no spills

While his nose, it continues to drip."

I did not make that up. If I had, I'd have been more complimentary.

Tomorrow, when I leave, I expect to be serenaded off the premises with three spirited repetitions of,

"We're very glad you came, Mr. Pomerantz"

Ending with,

"And please come back again."

I'm sure I will. Besides how spectacular it is here, I owe it to the band.

Their songs don't fit anybody else.