Woody gets Small

A talk with Mr. Allen

NEW YORK -- Moviegoers assume that Woody Allen's movies about cultured New Yorkers are autobiographical. But he'd have you believe that he's more like Ray, the feckless thief he plays in Small Time Crooks -- a streetwise knucklehead with unsophisticated tastes.

"I've gotten a lot of mileage out of people thinking I'm intellectual when in fact I'm closer to the other part," he says during our conversation at Manhattan's swank Regency Hotel, not far from his Upper East Side townhouse. "If you could see my life, you would see me with the spaghetti and turkey meatballs [that Ray eats], watching the Knicks game at home with a Beck's beer. I'm not at the opera."

Allen has played guys like Ray before, most notably Virgil Starkwell, the similarly clueless crook in his directorial debut, Take the Money and Run. "There are very few characters I can play. I'm not really an actor. One kind of thing that I can play is a lowlife, a streety person. So I was able to play Virgil, this character, and Broadway Danny Rose. I can also play a college teacher. But nothing in between."

Crooks does indeed suggest that a person can either be crude or urbane but not both, even though Allen seems to do so, in art as well as in life. He insists, "I'm basically a low-culture person. I don't say that pejoratively. The truth is, when I was in high school, there were a lot of very wonderful women that had no patience with you if you hadn't read a certain amount, if you weren't culturally interested. And so, in order to keep pace with those girls, I educated myself. But my natural tendencies -- the family I grew up in, the environment -- are not even to low culture, but to no culture. My parents never took me to the theater, to a museum. Sometimes to the movies, but not often. They introduced me to no music at all.

"I look intellectual and studious because I have these black glasses and I'm slight. But that was never me. I was a street kid who played ball all the time, a very good athlete, not the last one but the first one chosen all the time, a winner of track medals, not a student or a Casper Milquetoast. I was a very poor high-school student. I was thrown out of college my first year. So I'm much closer to Ray."

So the brainy, non-athletic nebbish persona is just an act? "That's just a chancy, creative function. I didn't set out to do it that way. As I wrote jokes, the jokes that seemed funny to me had a literate patina to them without really being overly literate. I had a facility to utilize the intellectual patois and make it seem that I knew more than I knew. But the truth is, it's just a skill. It's not really deep."

It's certainly clear from Crooks that Allen knows bad taste. "I was pretty horrified when I saw the opening shot with me in green leggings," says Tracey Ullman, who plays Ray's wife, Frenchy. "It's not a choice an actress makes very often." Notes Hugh Grant, who plays an art dealer, "A lot of the sequences are laughing at these people's vulgarity." Of the extravagantly tacky furnishings Ray and Frenchy buy when they strike it rich, he marvels, "That is a woman's house in New Jersey with her things, and she was there all day [during the shoot]. Swear to God. It was so amazing, people came from miles around to see it."

Allen is known for doing much of his directing during the casting stage. "He wrote me a fax," Grant goes on, "saying, `I've written a part for a man who seems incredibly charming and debonair and attractive but turns out to be an utter shit, and I thought you'd be perfect.' "

And once everybody's on the set, Grant found, Allen gives his actors minimal instruction and maximum freedom. "At first, it was really alarming. We'd do two or three takes and it would be just before lunchtime, five to one, and he'd say, `Well, great!' And that was the end of the day, and we'd go home."

In fact, the shoot went so quickly that Crooks was ready for release just six months after Allen's last film, Sweet and Lowdown. "This kind of film is easy for me," he explains. "What's very hard for me is a really serious film. The more serious the comedy, the longer it takes, because the relationships become complicated, and I find, when I look back at my first draft of the film, that this doesn't work and I have to go back and reshoot. But a film like this, I could do two of these a year because this is really what falls off of my fingers easiest. I can make up broadly comic things very easily. This is really what I am after all is said and done and all the pretension falls away."

-- G.S.

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