The name game

Face time with Woody

NEW YORK -- If celebrity means much to Woody Allen, he doesn't show it. His new film, called Celebrity, is a broad satire on our culture's obsession with fame, but when it premiered with a life-imitates-art gala at the recent New York Film Festival, Allen was too busy shooting his next movie, in a railyard in Queens, to attend.

The film is filled with bizarre intersections of real fame and reel fame -- like the cameo by Leonardo DiCaprio (cast before his Titanic superstardom) as a spoiled movie hunk. "I didn't know who he was," insists Allen. "I saw Leo in Marvin's Room because Diane Keaton, who I'm very close with, was in the picture. So we sent him the material, and he wanted to do it."

That DiCaprio became what he played in the film even before Celebrity's release points up the difficulty a contemporary satirist has in keeping up with reality. "You almost can't," notes Allen. "I was trying to write about the phenomenon of celebrity within our culture. In every aspect of the culture, in every aspect of life, there are celebrities, so Joey Buttafuoco gets a television show, and a guy walks down the street with a sweatshirt and Charles Manson's picture is on it. And [in the film] Bebe Neuwirth plays a fellatrix who is the star in her area. Who would ever know that every day in the headlines, oral sex would be the topic of the day? But that's what happens when you're writing something that's contemporary. The culture moves so quickly and is so volatile that these things happen, for better or worse. They can make you lucky to cash in on something or outdated like that" -- Allen snaps his fingers.

One character observes that you can tell a lot about a culture by those whom it chooses to celebrate, but what do our current choices of celebrities say about us? "That's the good question," shrugs Allen. "That is beyond me. I know that the phenomenon exists, but I need someone deeper than me to be able to pull that together, somebody like Norman Mailer or Camille Paglia, somebody that's good at social insight."

Can our celebrity dependence be reduced? "Not now. I don't see any way out of that now. There's such a devouring search for material, for things to fill up the news hours. So they grasp at people, and the country likes the excitement. It's almost as if fiction doesn't excite them as much anymore as the real-life things that were played out in the O.J. Simpson trial or the Monica Lewinsky thing or Court TV. They need a real thing to latch onto. It's a step beyond. They're sort of jaded with -- you don't see that many Broadway shows that are about people that aren't glitzy musicals, or films that are about people. They're getting their human-interaction entertainment from the news and Court TV and watching real people on television."

Allen himself has long been famous -- and thanks to his personal life, which has settled down this year with his marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, sometimes infamous. "It's very tempting to want to be in the celebrity culture because it has enormous perquisites. On the other hand, there are some real drawbacks. In the end, I think the perquisites outweigh the drawbacks. Those people who are in the celebrated life whine about it and complain about it, and there's plenty to complain about. But in the end, the perquisites that they experience are better than the average person's, and most people would trade for it."

Of his own celebrity, the 62-year-old Allen still claims, "It's a complete surprise to me. I was a writer for years and stayed in a room, isolated. And suddenly, I started performing and was immediately successful. I had no idea why. I asked this question of my agents and managers, what do I have that somebody else doesn't have? This guy's getting just as many laughs as I'm getting. Why do they want to hire me back? I could never figure it out. I was always thankful for it. It's like, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

"To this day, I'll watch films with Diane Keaton that we're in, when we're making a film, when we see our dailies, and she'll think, `Gee, we're just two such jerks up there. What is it that people are responding to?' I never know. It's just amazing to me. I couldn't be more surprised. And also happy, delighted."
-- Gary Susman

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