Book review - "Start to Finish: Woody Allen and the Art of Moviemaking" by Eric Lax

Do we really want movie making advice from late period Woody Allen? His films are so flabby and hit or miss these days. Still, Lax wrote some excellent books on Allen so I thought I'd give this a go. There are boring slabs but it was worth it.

Lax follows Allen while he made An Irrational Man a not particularly highly regarded Allen film but not a shocker (Allen says Curse of the Jade Scorpion is his worst... he may be right).  He follows Allen through the process of writing, casting, prepping, shooting, editing and post production of this movie in sometimes exhaustive detail. Only a real fan will enjoy the stuff about him getting the right shade of colour or sound or cuts or on a set. He's a compulsive worker who has some good people on his movies - his work ethic is to be admired.

By Lax lets him off the hook in key areas - the fact Allen's scripts are finished too soon, his unwillingness to write with a collaborator (which he's done before), his seeming inability to make a film where a young hot thing doesn't want a middle aged man, the clunky dialogue.

There's also this really uncomfortable chapter in the middle where he addresses the Woody sex stuff - Lax basically accuses Dylan Farrow of making it all up having been trained by Mia, and quotes Soo Yi and Moses in support. He makes some valid sounding arguments in Allen's defence and then goes and writes vague things like "Allen has spent millions of dollars trying to be in contact with Dylan". Ah, it's so sordid and every account I've read of this someone seems to have an axe to grind and no one ever footnotes their pieces.

There is interesting stuff - Allen talks of his admiration for European directors, Bob Hope and films like Shane, and chats about the DOP (Gordon Willis used to make him go over every scene every night and now he gets on the floor and wings it - that's a key reason why his later movies are so flabby). He clearly lives in a world where no one truly challenges him - he has employees whose opinions he respects, that's a different thing. The book ends with him getting that dream deal from Amazon and he whines about it. Seriously. But still, he's out there, plugging away.