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"I'm certainly not a partygoer at all. I work 90 percent of the time. But I'm not a recluse. People think because I don't want to get photographed by paparazzi all the time — I don't even mind that, if they don't follow me down the street for fifteen minutes, if they just take their pictures and go — that I'm a recluse. This is a thing that's been built up over the years for some reason, but it just isn't so. I go to Madison Square Garden for basketball games. I eat out every single night. I'm always at the opera or at shows." Now, all this stuff about Woody's Rolls- Royce, Woody's relationship with Mia, Woody's paparazzi problems, Woody's table at Elaine's — this is the kind of celebrity slop that interests mainly magazine editors. The real question is _ whether Allen is so professionally isolated, so irretrievably cocoon-ensconced, that it skews his world view and warps his work, threatening it with irrelevancy, risking anachronism. Allen says that while he doesn't read much criticism of his films, he does send the occasional favorable critic a handwritten note on yellow legal paper because "Nobody likes to write in a vacuum." And yet he sometimes seems to be operating in one himself. Certainly Radio Days was a vacuum-packed movie if there ever was one. An indignant grouch attending a screening of the film in Manhattan scoffed when it was over, "If he can get nostalgic over stuff like that, it's no wonder he's living with a ahiksa." His working relationship with Orion Pic- tures, which has been releasing his films since about the time United Artists fell apart, is "very nice," Allen says, and Rollins and Joffe, with him since the stand- up days, are "very nice" too. "There is never an argument, ever," he says, not even when he announces that his next film will not star him, that he'll stay behind the camera. "I have an absolutely wonderful working situation. I have no friction whatsoever." But is "no friction whatsoever" necessarily a "wonderful working situa- tion"? Doesn't the creative process, especially in a collaborative medium like film, require some friction? Woody stares through his glasses in mute apoplexy at such a thought. "This I never heard. I don't think so. 'Iblstoy sat home, and Flaubert, and they wrote their thing. I don't think there has to be friction at all. I think it's a debilitating factor. I think we'd have better films if directors con- trolled them completely." From Take the Money (1969) on, Allen has enjoyed a phenomenal amount of con- trol over his films (Allen and Clint Eastwood are probably our two most smoothly functioning auteurs). Allen has been shielded from the kinds of in- terference and commercial pressure that plague most other filmmakers, at least in this country. Safeguards are contractual- ly spelled out, and the list keeps getting longer. Woody's films no longer play in South Africa, for instance, according to a clause he had added last year (not an emp- ty gesture, since Allen's films do better abroad, he says, than they do in the U.S.). The home-video version of Manhattan had to be released in the so-called letter-box for- mat, with top and bottom masked and the entire frame visible in the middle of the screen, so as to preserve the wide-screen compositions of cinematographer Gordon Willis. After the French retitled Sleeper as Woody and the Robots, and Annie Hall was rechristened by the Germans The Ci- ty Neurotic for release in those countries, Allen got a clause inserted preventing foreign title changes, too. Filmmakers in Hollywood are very jealous of such luxuries, and Allen has en- joyed them from the beginning. "I think I was lucky in that I did com- edy exclusively when I started, and I have this theory that the studios always think there's some mystery to that," he says. "They think, 'Leave Mel Brooks alone; he "I work 90 percent of the time. But I'm not a recluse. People think because I don't want to get photographed by paparazzi all the time — that I'm a recluse." knows what he's doing.' I got off on that foot with them and they've always left me alone. That's the way it's been on every film. I reshoot tons of material; I cast who I want; the films I work on are a complete mystery to the company that's paying for them." They left him alone even when his films started laying eggs, as did Stardust Memories, Broadway Danny Rose, and The Purple Rose of Cairo — everything, he says, between Manhattan and Hannah ex- cept Zelig. Since they don't cost all that much, however, his films can't lose all that much; at $15 million, Radio Days is the most expensive film Allen ever made. He stays within relatively narrow parameters, part of the way he protects himself, and is known for bringing films in on time and on budget. Like his public, Allen's backers would prefer him to make comedies in which he stars. When he decides to shoot something in which he won't appear, he says, he agrees with the boys in the front office to extend their deal by one picture and to make that picture a Woody Allen comedy starring Woody Allen. Indeed, the film he's work- ing on now, Allen says, will be "a real serious drama that I'm not in, and it all takes place in a single house." (Gee, we can hardly wait. What's it called, Interiors II: The Paralysis Continues?) Allen does not make the serious films just to be bratty or to ensure the occa- sional worthy flop. "I would like to make