Mim udovitch biography templates download
By MIM UDOVITCH
THE UNRULY LIFE OF WOODY ALLEN A Biography. By Marion Meade. Illustrated. pp. New York: |
his is not a vile book; it is accurate to its sources; its presentation of the facts of Woody Allen's life, while highly selective, is not irresponsible. It is actually quite a bit of fun to read, sort of like spending an evening reminiscing about a discrete period of shared history with someone you have known familiarly but not intimately -- a former officemate or an old neighbor or a world-renowned American filmmaker whose life is as crammed with detail as that of any year-old but contains one action that was at the very least so spectacularly injudicious that it has all but eclipsed every single other professional achievement and personal quirk in his moderately well-documented history.
In other words, what do you think of first when you think of Woody Allen? Well, that's where Marion Meade starts, recounting the events of Jan. 13, , the day on which Allen's girlfriend of 12 years discovered sexually graphic Polaroids of her year-old adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, under a box of tissues on the mantelpiece of the den of Allen's duplex on Fifth Avenue.
The prologue proceeds with the kind of hushed moment-by-moment attention to dramatic and atmospheric (if not strictly relevant) circumstance that usually attends the prologues of mass-market true-crime paperbacks: ''It was crazy weather for January. A sudden balmy spell swept a froth of showers and the fresh breezes of April into the city in the dead of winter,'' Meade writes.
Mim udovitch biography templates Free Professional Bio Templates to Edit Online & Print Mim Udovitch interview with Robert Downey Jr, who has lead role in film The Singing Detective, his first since six-year string of drug arrests and imprisonments; photo (M).''On Fifth Avenue, tangled morning traffic inched south toward the crosstown intersection at 72nd Street. Under a mottled gray sky, packs of M.T.A. buses, white-and-blue, bunched in twos and threes, crept like a rare breed of tiger down the puddled asphalt of the Upper East Side, swerving royally past fortresses guarded by chandeliered lobbies and spiked gates.
. .
. On the side of every building was clearly posted the constitutional law of the land: ALL DELIVERIES MUST GO THROUGH SERVICE ENTRANCE.''
That's quite a multiplicity of symbolism, even if it is leading up to the revelation of an April-January romance. And it is not really representative of the much more modest narrative tone of most of the book.
(Though Meade does have a tendency, when striving for style, to let a simile be her umbrella -- early on, for example, Allen's ''career blasted off like a rocket shimmying toward the Milky Way.'') From a purely pragmatic point of view, you can't really blame Meade for what she has chosen to emphasize -- approximately the final two-thirds of the pages in ''The Unruly Life of Woody Allen'' are devoted to Allen's relationships with Mia Farrow and Soon-Yi Previn, and the preceding pages, as the prologue indicates, are essentially designed to lay the groundwork.
This is, to judge by all market indicators (which include the plummeting grosses of Allen's films and the evidently undiminished interest in the salacious details of his personal life) what people want to know, and presumably what will inform their decision to plunk down $26 for a biography.
Nevertheless, this triumph of the trash imperative is a shame.
Mim udovitch biography templates free Mim Udovitch is a New York-based writer who contributes regularly to The Village Voice, Details, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Book Review. History (Sony). Strange as Jackson is, the booklet accompanying this double CD is stranger still.And it is one that you can almost sense Meade feels a little of, because she certainly includes enough interesting and frustratingly brief allusions to other aspects of Allen's life and work to suggest that she had the material for a less predictably directed book. The basic biographical facts are handled with dispatch: Allen was born Allan Stuart Konigsberg in , and grew up in a lower-middle-class Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn; his academic record was undistinguished, and his attraction to movies was formed early, perhaps as a response to the emotional discord of his family life.
He started selling jokes to newspaper columnists in his teens, and moved from there to writing for television, then to stand-up comedy and ultimately, with a detour here and there, to movies. He married the year-old Harlene Rosen when he was 20, and divorced her six years later; he subsequently married the actress Louise Lasser, a union that also ended in divorce.
He had a long relationship with the actress Diane Keaton, which he later memorialized in one of the most loving of his movies about male-female relationships, ''Annie Hall'' (). From the early 's to the late 70's, his career as a writer, director and actor, and as an extremely funny spokesman for an emerging cultural trend toward openness about one's own neuroses and one's own sexual foibles (which ironically in some way later enabled the kind of tabloid coverage of celebrity neurosis and sexual foibles on the petard with which he is currently hoist), blasted off like a, well, rocket.
Since then, as Meade documents, with a few exceptions his commercial popularity, as measured by movie grosses, has plummeted from a high of $ million for ''Manhattan'' () to $5 million for ''Celebrity'' (), the latest release for which figures are available.
Meade, who has previously written biographies of Buster Keaton and Dorothy Parker, does a good job of integrating Allen's various business connections with the managers and movie executives who ended up making him, through various quirks of fate and loyalty, the model of the contemporary independent filmmaker; of describing the process by which he developed his cinematic abilities; and of crediting the collaborators who helped him.
Who is mim udovitch Use the best editable biography templates to gather information for your journalistic, literary, or research projects. Enter our online editor now and download your personalized biography template in seconds!.For critical perspective, she relies primarily on the opinions of a handful of reviewers, all of them more than well worth hearing from -- John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann, Penelope Gilliatt, Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby. In other words, although the book lacks the kind of serious and considered assessment of Allen's work that, whatever his moral failings, it deserves, the lack is not so much a failure as a comment on what kind of book it is.
Basically, ''The Unruly Life of Woody Allen'' follows what has become, unfortunately for him, the consensus of opinion on its subject, depicting him as self-involved, misogynist, egotistical, inconsiderate, isolated and stagnant. And there certainly isn't much evidence out there that contradicts this portrait, including the evidence that can be inferred from Allen's work.
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Where the book fails is in giving a sense of the interiors. Allen was in analysis for 40 years, and although he chose to make a joke out of that fact, that does not mean it is one -- both in his work and in interviews, he frequently described himself as depressed or evinced the symptoms of depression, at one point telling an interviewer that not a day went by that he did not think about suicide.
His rigidly controlled modus vivendi (the very opposite of unruly, despite Meade's title), with its reliance on a severely limited orbit of the same people, the same daily routine, the same foods and the same restaurants, suggests in itself a chronic disturbance.
Meade mentions all these things, but more as an indication of a willfully negative temperament than of a person whose behavior, however reprehensible, originated in trauma.
Mim udovitch biography templates pdf
Mim Udovitch is a New York-based writer who contributes regularly to The Village Voice, Details, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Book Review. History (Sony). Strange as Jackson is, the booklet accompanying this double CD is stranger still.Trauma is, of course, no excuse -- adults with the resources and privileges Allen has enjoyed for most of his life are responsible for what they do, no matter why they do it. But part of a biographer's job is, or should be, to explain the person whose life it recounts. Allen's relationship to his mother, which, again, he has himself often characterized in terms that could be translated as abusive and negligent, is surely worth more than the occasional line or two that ''The Unruly Life of Woody Allen'' devotes to it.
Given Farrow's avocation for parenthood, Previn's relationship to her and the indelible blot these things have left on Allen's life, the marriage of Woody and Soon-Yi could be viewed as an attempt to make the mother disappear, only to find her dominating the landscape at every turn. Didn't Allen once make a movie that was something like that?
Mim Udovitch is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone.
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