Woody and Mia, before the fall:

“I could go on about our differences forever: She doesn’t like the city and I adore it. She loves the country and I don’t like it. She doesn’t like sports at all and I love sports. She loves to eat in, early — 5:30, 6 — and I love to eat out, late. She likes simple, unpretentious restaurants; I like fancy places. She can’t sleep with an air-conditioner on; I can only sleep with an air-conditioner on. She loves pets and animals; I hate pets and animals. She likes to spend tons of time with kids; I like to spend my time with work and only a limited time with kids. She would love to take a boat down the Amazon or go up to Mount Kilimanjaro; I never want to go near those places. She has an optimistic, yea-saying feeling toward life itself, and I have a totally pessimistic, negative feeling. She likes the West Side of New York; I like the East Side of New York. She has raised nine children now with no trauma and has never owned a thermometer. I take my temperature every two hours in the course of the day.”

[Picture via Kateoplis]

After visiting with Danny Rose, Woody Allen’s most optimistic creation, perhaps it’s best to begin our exploration of The Purple Rose of Cairo with Woody’s take on the film, from Conversations with Woody Allen by Eric Lax:

When I first got the idea, it was just a character comes down from the screen, there are some high jinks, but then I thought, where would it go? Then it hit me: the actor playing the character comes to town. After that it opened up like a great flower. Cecilia had to decide, and chose the real person, which was a step up for her. Unfortunately, we must choose reality, but in the end it crushes us and disappoints. My view of reality is that it is a pretty grim place to be, (pause) but it’s the only place you can get Chinese food.

This should prepare you for the sadness that accompanies a viewing of this film and the sorry state of the lead character, Mia Farrow’s Cecilia.

Set in New Jersey of the 1930s Cecilia is buried beneath a country-wide Depression that has claimed the humanity of her husband Monk, a dastradly Danny Aiello, and, with the help of Allen’s longtime collaborator Gordon Willis, drained the color from the world around her. Woody recollects:

I deliberately wanted her to come out [of the theater] to a very unpleasant situation for her. Gordon was able to do that. I described to him coming out of the movie theater and it suddenly being the real world in all its ugliness.

Cecilia waits tables and trods beaten paths to broken door frames amid drab New Jersey browns. She finds solace at the local movie theater, where, in a neat reversal of the color-coding of The Wizard of Oz, the black-and-white of the fantasy world on screen is a veritable wonderland of richness and possibility and the colors of reality are stifling.

Woody Allen doesn’t appear in this film, and if you squint really hard, I guess you can see some of him in Cecilia. But I think that “looking for Woody” in the films in which he does not appear is sometimes a mistake. And it does a disservice to Mia Farrow’s performance. Woody Allen does not hold a patent on neurotic behavior – I found Mia’s Cecilia to be an original. Her beaming recollections of the previous night’s cinema smoothly countering her fumbling dishes at the diner.

But you can’t break dishes during a Depression. Her job lost and her two-timing abusive husband a constant oppression, she returns again and again to the cinema to lose herself in the latest bit of romantic escapism on display: The Purple Rose of Cairo, featuring an explorer named Tom Baxter, of the Chicago Baxters, whose import to the film is of some contention. Regardless, Cecilia fixates on him to the point that he notices. Upon her fifth viewing, Tom decides to approach her – by walking out of the screen and into the theater.

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We’re getting into a definite type of situation here…

My mother took me to see Jason Robards and Collen Dewhurst in Long Day’s Journey Into Night on Broadway for my seventeenth birthday. We went to a Wednesday afternoon matinee in late June, 1988. Before the show I interviewed for a summer job as a messenger at Sound One, at the time the biggest post-production film company on the east coast. Sound One rented out a majority of space in the Brill Building, the city landmark on 49th Street and Broadway.

The Brill Building in the 1930s and Today (New York Times)

The Brill Building was one of the homes to the music business dating back to the Tin Pan Alley Days. Neil Diamond, Laura Nyro and Carol King worked there in the Sixties. By the time I arrived, there were a just few holdovers from the music business—Paul Simon had a suite on the 5th floor—but it was mostly about film. Martin Scorsese had his offices there, so did Paul Schrader, and Lorne Michaels’ company, Broadway Video, ran most of what Sound One didn’t.

It is a small building, only 11 stories. Today, a skyscraper hotel sits to its right on the southwest corner of 49th street. Another skyscraper is across the street on the east side of Broadway between 49th and 50th. In 1988, there was a pornographic movie theater across the street on Broadway, another one on 49th between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, and yet another one on the east side of Broadway between 49th and 48th. 

I got the job and spent many days during the hot New York summer walking between the Brill Building and the Technicolor lab down on 44th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenue, passing by hookers with bruised arms and legs and over empty crack vials in the cracks of the sidewalks.

There was one guy left over from the old days of the music business, guy named Benny Ross. He owned “St. Nicholas Music,” which had a dusty office on the sixth floor. St. Nicholas was famous for publishing Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer. Benny was a nice man, shrunken little Jewish guy, always ready with a handshake and a kind word. “Hi,howareya?” He’d come upstairs to Sound One and get a cup of coffee and eat a slice of pound cake and schmooze-up whoever was in the vicinity. And he’d take the new messengers into his stuffy little office and offer up any of the dozens of free promotional records that were sent to him.

Benny was from the Old School, the vanishing show business world that is so affectionately depicted in Woody Allen’s 1984 comedy Broadway Danny Rose. Woody plays Danny Rose, a lovable lowlife theatrical manager, whose best act is Lou Canova, an Italian lounge singer. According to Sandy Morse, who edited all of Allen’s movies from Manhattan through Celebrity, they found Nick Apollo Forte, a real-life singer who plays Canova, in the 99-cent cutout bin at Colony Records, downstairs in the Brill Building. They were mixing the sound for Zelig at Sound One, came across a couple of Forte’s records and knew they had their man.

Broadway Danny Rose is all of a piece, a pastrami-on-rye sandwich shot in grainy black-and-white. It’s Allen’s gift to Mia Farrow and a fine tribute to the Broadway Area, from Damon Runyon through Sid Caesar, the Catskills all the way to the Joe Franklin Show.

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