The work of Woody Allen reveals perhaps some of the most instinctively recognized preoccupations and consistent attitudes of contemporary screenwriting. In all of his most celebrated and well-known films (Annie Hall {1977}, Manhattan {1979}, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask {1972}, Match Point {2005}) there exists innate cursors of the screenwriter’s opinions and attitude towards his craft that will, in this essay, be evidenced not just by the films themselves but by Allen’s own remarks, as made in Eric Lax’s Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the movies, and moviemaking. Not only this, but through discussion of the three of the four films mentioned, as well as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), common story patterns, character types and treatment of themes will be explored, as they pertain to Allen’s writing and the aforementioned opinions he holds.

The primary fact of Allen’s process and career as a screenwriter must be his origins as a comedian. It’s apparent from his earliest screenplays (Take the Money and Run) {1969}, Bananas{1971}) and from some of the later, more successful ones that integrated elements of them greatly that Allen began his film-making career seeing movies as a means of channeling his comedy. This is perhaps exemplified by Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex…, which literally has no plot; only a series of comedic skits, shown one after the other. Understanding that, for Allen, screenwriting and filmmaking grew out of a creative wellspring of stand-up comic methodology is vital in understanding how he approaches the writing of a film.

Aside from the circumstances of its outset, by the mid nineteen seventies, Allen’s grasp of the craft of screenwriting and his attitudes toward it had changed significantly and, quite arguably, deepened. He is by this stage telling Lax that “plot is dynamite in comedy”, and is operating on a screenwriting level out of an internalized understanding of movie-viewing’s historical progression:

You see [the old movies] as old movies, so they’re delightful. But they’re plotty, based on mechanics the public’s outgrown. In this new script [which will become Annie Hall] I’m trying to work from within, from the neurosis out, so it will not seem dated a hundred years from now. (Lax 10)

Allen also now ascertains that “there’s something less satisfying about comedy, even though it’s harder to do” (Lax 67). His opinion of his ‘craft’, which refers very specifically to the writing of comedies, is that it will “never have the impact” of the more “serious stuff” (Lax 66). Through this minor dissatisfaction with the inferior impact of comedic films and screenplays will come the more philosophical and emotionally potent narratives of Annie Hall and Manhattan. Judging by these professional developments, it’s fair to assume that Allen’s attitude towards his craft is that it must very much reflect himself in all honesty, while still retaining ‘impact’ and respecting the art form of films as they are appreciated by the public.

This more-or-less covers the issue of how Allen relates to the craft of screenwriting in general, but the more forceful issue when discussing this particular writer is the entirely specific niche that he occupies in contemporary cinema. I am of course referring to the thoroughly self-referential and self-aware nature of his writing, and the revolving of his seminal films around the constant of what can only be described as ‘the Woody Allen character’ – a neurotic, urban, intellectual type with a frank sexuality but a problem with women. Though this can and will be classified as a recurring theme or pattern, it also needs a significant portion of attention devoted to it as a matter of screenwriting, because it is a such a specific element that influences so greatly the construction of so many of his screenplays.

Allen talks at great length about this in his conversations with Lax, but perhaps his most succinct discussion of it is thus: “It’s hard to write good films and accommodate my character.” Allen professes that ‘his character’, which is prolific in spawning most any of his most recognized and accomplished films, can be a problem in the writing stages if only because it limits the film to a specific, personal and intimate space. He goes on to say:

I’ve got to get an idea that’s believable, yet funny, and within my miniscule acting range…[t]herefore plot possibilities get reduced to human relationships, and because they get reduced to human relationships…the conflicts become internal and not as visually active and cinematic as they were years ago. (Lax 9)

Here is a fine example of how Allen’s attitude towards the generic craft of screenwriting is intensified when furthered in relation to his specific and personalized craft of writing ‘Woody Allen’ films, meaning those in which he is a character and with which he is most closely associated. The writing of a ‘Woody Allen’ character-based film is almost a craft unto itself, one which Allen has explored in as many different genres as he can, and of which his opinions are just as steadfast as those he holds in regard to all screenwriting.

This quickly honed sense of his own specific films and subsequent writing style lead to 1977’s Annie Hall, the most acclaimed (four Academy Awards) and celebrated of all his films and here the first of discussion. In the context of Allen’s career, Annie Hall establishes almost all of the story patterns, character types and themes that would later come to define him as a writer and performer. Although it had been present as far back as Take the Money, the Woody Allen character is here for the first time really strongly realized and contextualized, given a background that is not outlandish and a lifestyle situation that does not ring false. It also follows quite closely a story pattern that Allen will use a number of times later: the Woody Allen character (in this case Alvy Singer) meets a woman, falls steadily in love and goes through a series of dynamics with her over a number of years. (Incidentally, this pervasive plot indicates an adaptive element of Allen’s writing: apparently in the original screenplay “[t]here were a million other digressions…Then we found the story was so strong that nobody cared about anything else. They wanted to get back to the parts about ‘you and Annie’ so I let it grow that way” {Lax 19}).

Another immeasurably key element that Annie Hall introduces with the full fervor that the topic really warrants in the context of Allen’s films is the location of New York. Late in their ill-fated relationship, Diane Keaton’s titular character exasperates to the film’s surrogate Allen: “You’re like New York city…you’re just this island, all by yourself.” This reference and comparison is vital, as the city is in so many of Allen’s films not just as an atmosphere but as an emblem, and her labeling of him as an ‘island’ helps place the city’s significance to Allen firmly in the metaphysical realm. Both Manhattan and Hannah and Her Sisters also make direct reference to New York as being fundamentally and inseparably “his”: in the first it is through opening narration that the Allen character (while tellingly writing a work of fiction about himself) firmly labels New York “his town; it would always be his town”. In Hannah, the Allen character uses this trope as a comfort, assuring himself that no illness, no harm at all could befall him in New York City, for which he feels such a strong affinity.

The last point is one that relates most strongly to the writing of the film and the writing of Allen to follow, and that is the motif of characters writing texts that are strictly based on their experiences. This is particularly important when it is found in Allen’s own characters as it is here (one of the final scenes is of the enactment of a play that Alvy has written specifically detailing his relationship with Annie), because it helps the audience feel they can read Allen through the film, and it reflects nicely the sentiment that “[a]lmost all my work is autobiographical and yet so exaggerated and distorted it reads to me like fiction” (Lax 7).

His next film, Manhattan, made two years later, will also be the next film of discussion, and one that perhaps solidified the public image of Allen as a character and hence as a writer. Described by Angela Errigo as “the rapturous high point of Woody Allen’s on-screen love affair with New York City”, Manhattan did indeed expand strongly the romanticism of the town that Annie Hall hinted at, going so far as to open with voice over narration (another beloved Allen device) that riffs on the Allen character (Isaac Davis)’s love for New York. Admittedly, this narration is spoken in the voice of an internally fictional character that Isaac is writing for, but as fictional writing has already been suggested by Annie Hall to be a theme that represents the character doing the writing (and since Isaac will later give direct evidence that he himself does love the city he inhabits) we can safely assume it is really his own voice he’s speaking in during this opening montage.

Aside from this, New York City is given much more significance and credence in the writing of Manhattan that the simple presence and mention of it in Annie Hall could achieve. Although Allen’s role as director is not the issue of focus here, it’s necessary to note that as a writer, at least in the case of this film, he was thinking even during the conceptual stages in a directorial capacity:

I had brought Michael Tilson Thomas’s recordings of Gershwin overtures and I kept hearing them in the shower everyday and thinking, God, a scene would be great set to this, or a scene would be great set to that. And I started working out the story with Marshall Brickman (Lax 32).

The spark of an exclusively George Gershwin soundtrack here was the origins of the whole screenplay, and found its way into the script very easily and early. This happens during the opening monologue, wherein Isaac states his ‘fictional character’ “romanticized [New York] all out of proportion”, imagining it as a place where George Gershwin was always playing and everything was black and white (this seed of imagery sown in the screenplay of course influenced Allen’s own decision to shoot the whole film in black and white).

Also, the city’s symbolic nature is all but announced in the beginning when Isaac writes “he adored New York, although to him it was a metaphor.” He goes on to say that the metaphorical implications of the city pertain directly to the “decay of contemporary culture”, which Mary (Diane Keaton) underlies with her hostility towards what Isaac considers the great figures of contemporary culture (Bergman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jung, Van Gough). In one of the final scenes, Isaac suggests to his Dictaphone that “his town” breeds emotional neurosis of petty issues to shelter its inhabitants from the “unsolvable, terrifying” issues. So Manhattan features quite pivotally and extensively the city of New York in its narrative.

The other element of Allen’s work that is deepened in the screenplay for Manhattan is the intertwining of human relationships; the focus of desire shifts for all four of the main characters of the film, to each other, off each other, onto someone else. This film, like the one before it, studies romantic relationships in a tight social circle over a long period of time and pointedly observes any changes. In Annie Hall, it was only a brief encounter with a rock journalist (Shelley Duvall) that served to be Alvy’s distraction away from Annie, but in Manhattan Isaac finds himself equally in love with two separate women, and suffering at the hands of fate and irony in both cases. There is also a serious narrative focus on infidelity, which will become an issue even more tightly connected between Hannah and Her Sisters and Match Point.

In fact, the two films just mentioned, for the reasons just mentioned, are probably best discussed together. Hannah, despite an increasing interest in other characters besides the Woody Allen character, is still set in his beloved town and features him quite strongly (and almost entirely apart from everyone else, as though narratively sheltered and alien). Nonetheless, there is much more emphasis put on the women of the film, and their various relationships. The most important theme that this attention reveals is one of infidelity, more particularly infidelity amongst familiar people. In this case, Elliot (Michael Caine) cheats on his wife Hannah (Mia Farrow) with her sister Lee (actress). It’s interesting to note that even in comedic environments such as this film, the theme of infidelity is always treated by Allen with seriousness.

The much later Match Point deviates from the Woody Allen model in some crucial ways, but using Hannah as a mediator, it’s clear to see it also abides by a lot of the writer’s established rules. It is far removed from New York, set instead in London and harbouring only one American character, Nola Rice (Scarlet Johanssen). Ergo, there is also no Woody Allen character, not even one that isn’t played by Allen himself, as has been the case in a quite a few other films (Celebrity {1998}, for example, which featured a distinctly written Woody Allen character played by Kenneth Brannaugh). Match Point is also not, in any sense, a comedy, which makes for some interesting comparisons between treatment of themes: it has in common with Allen’s very first screenplay (Take the Money and Run) strong elements of crime and punishment, yet doesn’t at all treat them in a jokey manner, rather with a disturbing practical and emotional realism.

Yet the central theme of infidelity is kept from Hannah, and even too are the premises and emotional consequences of the infidelity kept the same. In both films, a man (Elliot in Hannah, Chris in Match Point) marries a beautiful woman, yet instigates an affair with a close member of her family (sister in Hannah, sister-in-law in Match Point). They then fail to follow the affair through and leave their wives, which although having quite different outcomes in the two films (in Hannah the mistress simply moves on and finds another man, leaving Elliot still somewhat pining after her; in Match Point the mistress threatens to break up Chris’s marriage and he murders her to prevent this), nonetheless does not result in anybody ever discovering the infidelity.

Judging by these two separate and stylistically opposed films, its fair to suppose that the “plot possibilities [that were] reduced to human relationships” (Lax 9) by Allen’s initial restriction of writing his own character have become, over the course of his career, actively preferred. In other words, even when the Woody Allen character is no longer present, the focus on intimate human relationships that the character once dictated remain a pivotal part of Allen’s writing.

The last recurring motif of Allen’s writing that I would like to discuss is his dramatic use of apartments. Throughout all of the films examined here, it has not yet been noted how prominently the apartments, the intimate living spaces of the characters are presented. Perhaps as a by-product of his urban New York sensibilities, the apartments of Allen’s characters, particularly his own character, are always brought closely to the attention of the audience and almost reach and equal symbolic status as New York City itself.

Consider Annie Hall, where it is the argument over whether Annie should give up her own apartment to live permanently in Alvy’s that trigger’s the couple’s and the film’s first serious emotional altercation, and lays the groundwork for their first break up. Or Manhattan, where Isaac’s artistic integrity costs him his beloved apartment and ends him up in a living space and living arrangement that he is uncomfortable with, one that makes strange noises and produces suspect water. Yet despite being totally uncomfortable of and in his intimate apartment, Isaac is still extremely reluctant to let Tracy spend the night there, to let her be too familiar with this architectural extension of himself.

Even Match Point, the most removed of the films, anchors its typically Allen human relationships in the emotional logistics of the character’s apartments. Chris begans London life with an expensive yet inferior apartment, physically present in the English city of dreams (or the English New York City) but without a yet-suitable intimate environment. In the structure of the screenplay, we notice that after he has married into wealth and class, he is given the most luxurious and spacious apartment imaginable… with an amazing city view. Compare this to Nola’s apartment, which is small, clustered and cheap but warm and personal, and where every single passionate moment of their official affair takes place.

Woody Allen’s screenplays seem then to relate very strongly to his views and opinions about the process of writing them – they tell of honest, human relationships, they interchange comedic and dramatic takes on subjects close to his heart, and they reflect him, even when they do not contain ‘the Woody Allen character’ that so uniquely defines him. At his most honest, Woody Allen appears to be a writer who is completely unafraid to write films about nothing but his own simple concerns and pleasures, and at his most daring, he appears totally unafraid to explore them in “relation to what other people feel” (Lax 20). In either case, his devotion to human relationships is real, complex and complete, and his films, no matter their specifics, consistently demonstrate this.

Further Reading

Lax, Eric. Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the movies and moviemaking. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

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