the first 49 ¹/3 of Woody Allen’s movies

Smacking the Blackballing, Cracking the Blacklist

by  the editorial board

The 49th full feature-length movie that Woody Allen has made, Rifkin’s Festival, was released in Europe year before last.   It’s been blacklisted in North America until a week ago.   And it’s been reported at length that this blacklisting has been due to the ascending of what’s called the #MeToo movement, which is aimed at publicizing and opposing practices of sexual abuse and sexual harassment.

As this movement gained momentum in recent years, his daughter Dylan and others in the family renewed allegations from about 30 years ago that he had sexually abused her at that time.   Yet others in the family strenuously rose to his defense and voiced their certainty that these accusations are untrue, and he himself responded with how preposterous and sad he feels these have always been, including in his memoir of a couple years ago [*1]:

I never laid a finger on Dylan, never did anything to her that could be even misconstrued as abusing her; it was a total fabrication from start to finish, every subatomic particle of it.

It makes no sense why a fifty-seven-year-old man who has never been accused of a single impropriety in his life, while in the midst of a contentious and very public custody fight, drives up to the hostile environment of the country home belonging to the woman who hates him most, and in a house full of people sympathetic to her, this man, who is thrilled as he has just recently found the serious love of his life, a woman he’d go on to marry and have a family with, would suddenly choose that time and place to become a child molester and abuse his seven-year-old daughter whom he loved.

It defied simple common sense.   Especially since I had been alone with Dylan many times in my apartment over the years, and if I were actually fiend, I had ample opportunities to act like one.

Yet it makes perfect sense for the angry woman who had announced she would take away my daughter and had a plan worse than death for me, to resort to the single most common cliché of custody warfare, accusing the spouse of abusing the child.

In particular because both he and Dylan’s mother are very famous individuals in a very public industry, this all attracted and continues to attract great media attention, just as it had 30 years ago when these same allegations were initially made.   And at that time three decades ago, the accusations were extensively investigated in the courts of two different states (Connecticut and New York), with the results being that no charges were ever filed against Allen and that the public announcements by the authorities included not just that there was not enough evidence to prove the truth of the allegations but that the evidence indicated conclusively that these accusations were not true. [*7]

As we look back in our history, many have always wondered how being blackballed, such as during the McCarthyistic Red Scares of the 1950s, could have happened or how witchhunts could have come about, with those hunted down being hanged for the witchcraft that the society became certain they were guilty of.

Wallace Shawn, one of the stars of this movie that finally was theatrically released a week ago, has expressed his sense that the assumption Allen is guilty has been “a miscarriage of justice” and has further commented recently [*10] [*12]:

I feel that Woody Allen is an innocent man, and it’s an injustice that we’re even talking about this.   The legal system has decided he’s innocent, so now it’s in the court of public opinion.

I was very upset that some of my fellow actors leapt to the conclusion that Woody was guilty of a serious crime that you can go to prison for without really knowing that much about it.

I’ve followed the case.   I’ve read quite a bit about it.   I saw the documentary trying to substantiate Dylan’s story, and I don’t believe that this happened.

I hope that the more of us who stick our neck out and say, “You must not jump to that conclusion,” it will become easier for more people to say that.

Then maybe eventually the tide will turn.

Last weekend, this year-and-a-half-old movie was finally released, with little marketing or fanfare, and only in 26 theaters across the country.   So it shouldn’t really have been unexpected that it didn’t sell many tickets. [*5]   Yet still we may look on it as at least a little crack in the blacklist.

A few years ago, there was a stand-up comedian and actress who announced [*11]:

I sat next to Woody at a dinner party.

(Long story) and he actually had the nerve to say to me, “and now I have to watch my good friend Bill Cosby get railroaded”.

So yeah, it’s a club.   They cover for each other.

Well, last year in the state where Bill Cosby was convicted, the supreme court voted overwhelmingly to rule that, after all, Cosby had in fact been railroaded, and they ordered that he be released from prison.   The court called the prosecutor’s violations of Cosby’s rights involved in his arrest and trial “an affront to fundamental fairness”.   The ruling of the justices was that they were forced to overturn the conviction and to bar any further prosecution, because it “is the only remedy that comports with society’s reasonable expectations of its elected prosecutors and our criminal justice system”. [*2] [*3] [*6] [*8] [*9]

Should we suspect that the stand-up comedian and actress complaining about those in the club covering for each other believes that in order to bring justice we should throw out the US Constitution, due process, Miranda rights, the Bill of Rights?   Whether she does or not, there are many who do believe that those rights are only for innocent people, and that when “we all just know” that someone is guilty, then yes, we just have to throw out those rights so as to do the “right thing”.   This attitude has been so for thousands of years.

It is how witchhunts have always come about.

It is how inquisitions have always come about.

It is how Socrates was blackballed & executed.   (Our best understanding is that to select who would decide his fate, black balls or pebbles were used to indicate the Athenians who weren’t allowed to vote and white ones indicated those who could; from this practice, which chose the crowd who ended up voting to kill him, we ultimately derive the expression [*4]).

It is how lynchings have always happened.   This is what mob rule is.   The founders called it mobocracy, and essentially everything the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights tried to set up there was in order to protect us from it.   So long as our society—and our culture—puts up with this, it is the peril that we all will be in.

For the opening of Rifkin’s Festival a week ago, Gina Gershon, another of the movie’s stars, pointed out [*12]:

In this world that we’re living in right now, it’s a little bit tricky to even talk about it, because things are pulled apart and put on social media and clickbait, and no one is safe.   It’s sad, and that’s the world we’re living in right now.   Because really, I always thought in this country, you’re innocent until proven guilty, because if the opposite were true, we’d all be canceled, basically.

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