I wonder when historians will pinpoint the exact moment that working for Woody Allen flipped from being an absolute honour for any actor to a matter of obvious shame, for which they would be donating their fee to charity. To the untrained eye, it seems to have been sometime last week, despite his daughter Dylan Farrow’s claims that Allen sexually abused her when she was seven having been known about for many years. (The director denies the allegations.) First to say she wouldn’t be working with him again was Greta Gerwig, and the actor and director has now been followed by Mira Sorvino, Rebecca Hall, Colin Firth and Timothée Chalamet.
Whenever the precise date falls, the director’s insistence on making a film approximately every 10 minutes means two things. One, that the much-vaunted “honour” has been somewhat diluted. Contrary to actors’ usual humblebrags, there are about three people in Hollywood who haven’t worked with Woody Allen, so much so that he’s down to honouring former Disney kids with roles. Once Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus and Justin Timberlake are having the most extraordinary creative experience of their career, or whatever the standard line is, you have to realise that Woody’s only a couple of rehashed melodramas away from casting the guy who plays Goofy at the Anaheim theme park as a romantic lead.
The second thing is that this cinematic sausage factory creates an intriguing temporal loop. After all, there are two Woody Allen movies that haven’t even been released yet for which actors are already apologising. Are these rueful stars contractually obliged to promote these movies, and explain the bizarre chain of events that led to them accepting with self-dramatising humility one minute, then donating their fee in the same fashion a few months later? Or will they be banned from discussing it at all on the circuit, leaving us with unusually agonised and monosyllabic answers on “the work”? On the form book, the press conferences will be worth watching rather more than the movies.
