How do you make the life of Woody Allen unbearably dull? Mainly by retelling the plots of every one of his movies, along with lists of cast and crew, box-office receipts and critical reactions. And there are so many movies – 50 so far, but there’ll probably be another by the time you read this. Long ago, Allen got into the habit of making a film a year, and so he goes on. He once said he was ‘like an institutionalised person who basket-weaves’ – he couldn’t stop.
So we have to wade through an awful lot of filmography before the juicy stuff – the scandal – begins. Mia Farrow doesn’t even appear until page 313. In 1979, when she first met Woody, she was divorced from Frank Sinatra and André Previn and had recently adopted her seventh child. Woody took her out to dinner and thought she couldn’t have been ‘nicer, sweeter’, though he said in his autobiography years later that he should have been ‘more alert’ to the fact that her family was ‘rife with extremely ominous behaviour’. (Her father, the film director John Farrow, was an alcoholic and possibly an abuser.)
Anyway, Woody started taking Mia out. One day in the cinema she suddenly said: ‘I want to have your baby.’ But he changed the subject to lawn-mowers, and then promised to have to think about it, which she knew meant talking to his therapist. After they’d dated for six months, Mia decided she wanted to introduce him to her children, and he found them ‘very cute’, though at 45 he had zero interest in children.
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