The Unruly Life of Woody Allen by Marion Meade Page B

the nature of the picture business, he had fancied that his story would reach the screen intact. He no more expected Feldman to change his script than he expected the mogul to have rewritten his club act. In fact, the plain truth was that nobody paid a bit of attention to what he thought about the movie. During the months of production, making no attempt to adapt to his loss of control over the situation, he lived in raw misery. In his hotel room at the Hotel George V, he practiced his clarinet, and every night he patronized the same bistro where he supped on soup and fillet of sole. In Woody s estimation, the script now belonged to Feldman, who had weakened and butchered his work as he turned it into commercial dreck, the idea of movies as a business being a concept Woody would never really comprehend. "They just killed it completely. I fought with everybody all the time." In a fury during rushes one night, he shouted "fuck off" at Feldman, who ignored him. Later, however, he asked Charlie Joffe to make Woody stop cursing. It hurt his feelings.
    Humiliated, Woody returned to New York in January 1965 and announced that the picture was so awful he had no intention of seeing it. "It would only bother me," he told the New York Morning Telegraph. Privately, he promised himself that he would never do another film "unless I had complete control over it."
    What's New, Pussycat? opened in June to frightful reviews. A disgusted Judith Crist of the New York Herald Tribune dismissed the picture as smut, "a shrieking, reeking conglomeration of dirty jokes." Stung by her scornful comments, Woody sent her the original script, then invited Crist and her husband to his home for a dinner that concluded with six desserts. "It was a delightful evening," recalled Crist, who, completely charmed, would remain devoted to Woody from that day forward. In The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann described Woody as an amateur who had no idea how to write for the screen. His material "probably reads hilariously but does not play successfully," an astute observation because this would remain one of Woody s major problems for the next ten years. Almost alone among the critics was Andrew Sarris, the influential Village Voice columnist who had introduced American audiences to the French "auteur theory" (the director is the real "author" of a film). Sams could not remember seeing "a more tasteful sex comedy." Familiar with Woody from clubs, he considered him "a terrific stand-up comic, very charismatic, fast on his feet when it came to improvisation. And with his great ear he knew how to deflate pomposity." Sards admitted seeing Pussycat four times.
    Probably it was to be expected that What's New, Pussycat? failed to impress Woody s mother. Attending a screening with Mickey Rose and some of her sons other friends, Nettie saw nothing to make her laugh and afterward dismissed the picture as moronic.
    In spite of bad reviews, there was no denying Feldman s business acumen. Pussycat turned out to be a solid success, grossing $17.2 million, the fifth biggest moneymaker of the year, and its title song, written by Burt Bacharach and sung by Tom Jones, was also a popular hit.
    On the strength oiPussycat, Woody received $75,000 to develop Kagi No Kagi, a Japanese James Bond-genre spy picture that, unsuccessfully dubbed into an English version, had proved an incredible mess. He wrote loony new dialogue, completely contrary to the action, which he put in the mouths of the Japanese actors. (Heroic spy Phil Moskowitz searches for the world s best egg-salad recipe.) Afterward, Woody disliked the film so much that he sued to prevent its release but changed his mind when What's Up, Tiger Lily? received decent notices. Andrew Sarris thought it was "one of the funniest movies of the year and the most creative job of dubbing dialogue" he had ever heard.
    Thanks to Charles Feldman, Woody now had two screen credits and a budding career as an actor, a line of work for which he had no