Another Woody Allen website, huh. Another parade of Woody Allen’s massive oeuvre. Why?

Seriously, though… why?

Let me explain…

I saw my first Woody Allen movie as a teenager at a theater in Kansas City, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. I walked out of the theater feeling underwhelmed by the movie experience as a whole, but the bright spot for me was Woody Allen. From the first scene of him prancing and leaping through the meadow, trying desperately to get his absurd flying machine aloft, to the then-fresh, now-trademark nervous stammering, the fumbling for words, to the quips and banter, the flighty dreamer, sometimes inept but in the end triumphant… it all went down like a hooker on payday night… and I needed more.

Growing up, my Saturday mornings were devoted to Bugs Bunny and Abbott and Costello. I loved that wise-cracking, smooth-talking rabbit. I loved the bumbling innocence of Lou Costello. I loved Groucho with his glib, pseudo-suave demeanor. I loved that he could cleave any pompous twit with a sharp one-liner. I loved Jack Benny with his wry smile and smooth, leisurely delivery.

Woody didn’t invent the nervous, fast-talking, anti-Romeo archetype. Bob Hope and others had been doing it decades before. But Woody took that comic persona that would become his go-to character for years with next to no variation — the impish, nebbish, libidinous skirt-chaser — and tapped into the spirit of the times and turned it up to eleven.

The 60’s and 70’s, the second coming of the sexual revolution, saw a more relaxed public expression of sexuality — thank you, Lenny. And, Woody with his quirky looks and diminutive stature would mine it for comedy gold.

Those 88 minutes sitting in the dark in that theater in Kansas City stoked an interest in Woody Allen that would send me down a rabbit hole of films, books, stage plays, stand-up albums, TV shows, interviews. I searched out and devoured anything I could get my grubby little mitts on.

I dove into the backlog of movies I’d missed from the late 60’s and 70’s and interspersed it with his first three books, Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects. What a goldmine. I even recorded myself reading them (no Audiobooks at the time) so I could listen to them as I walked or drove. I found his stand-up on vinyl and ported it over to cassette for the same reason. I paid my money and attended each Woody Allen film that reliably came out each year. This went on for a couple decades to the early 2000’s, and then I stopped — not cold turkey, mind you. Like any reasonable junky, I tapered off, I became more selective.

I noticed repetition had crept into Woody’s work: refurbished stories, rehashed jokes, and limited themes. It mildly annoyed me that his stand-up routine “The Lost Generation” had been turned into his New Yorker piece “A Twenties Memory” and that would become the film Midnight In Paris. And that Shadows And Fog was a film version of his one-act play Death. For me, the surprise of an original screenplay was lost.

Perhaps I had become too familiar with his work? Perhaps, Woody’s creativity couldn’t keep pace with his work ethic? I quietly lamented why he couldn’t take two years and make a better movie rather than pounding them out year after year. I do think his “quantity over quality” attitude developed from that old comedy writing mentality where, if you write a hundred jokes, maybe, maybe ten will work, so keep writing new jokes.

I’m a huge fan of Woody Allen, more so his personal life than his films I would say.