Good Old Woody In An Attempt To Bring Back Filmgoers, Marketers Try To Revive The Allen Of Years Gone By

It’s like he never left.

That would be the old Woody, the one who made those fall-down-funny movies about kooky criminals and lovable losers. The Woody who was wacky, but not weird.

That’s the Woody they’re marketing in his new movie, “Small Time Crooks,” and Woody Allen says he’s happy to go along.

“It’s become a tough thing for me to get customers,” says Allen, who - save the Ellington-like bags that have recently formed under his eyes, and hair now more gray than reddish - still looks remarkably like he did when everyone thought he was still a funny fellow.

“Once they’re in the theaters, I find they enjoy the pictures, but they don’t come to begin with,” he says. “I can’t tell you how many times people have come to me and said, `I saw “Broadway Danny Rose” on television and it was wonderful, it was so funny.’ And I say, `Well, why didn’t you go see it when it was in the theaters?’ And they say, `Umm, I don’t know.”’

To bring back the audiences, his new marketing team at DreamWorks believes, Allen needs to convince them he’s having fun these days. He is bemused by this but tries to understand it.

“The fact is, I’ve made a number of pictures in the past few years that had no noticeable serious content. `Manhattan Murder Mystery’ for one, and `Mighty Aphrodite.’ But it is true I haven’t made a comedy as broad as `Small Time Crooks’ in a long time. So as long as no one’s deceiving anyone, it’s OK, I think. I mean, I think people will like this movie if we get them to see it.”

Allen doesn’t believe that the distasteful events of the past decade, when he left longtime companion Mia Farrow to live with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, were responsible for the desertion of his fans. (He and Previn are now married, and parents of an adopted daughter, Bechet.)

He knows the large audiences he commanded for early, knockabout comedies like “Take the Money and Run” and “Sleepers” had begun drifting away years before, when he began mixing serious dramas like “Interiors” with comedies. They fled in droves after he depicted some of them as parasites stunting an artist’s growth in “Stardust Memories.”

“I never thought I was different from any other filmmaker, in that I just wanted to grow and expand with every movie and make different kinds of movies,” Allen says. “But because of my physical appearance, there were really only two characters I could believably play, which is the lowlife, the schlub, or the tweedy guy, the college-professor type or writer.

“And I got tired of playing the schlub all the time. So I played these smarter guys, and because people persisted in believing my movies were autobiographical, they began to think that was me. But the truth is, I’m more Ray, the guy in `Small Time Crooks.’

“I’m no intellectual. My parents never took me to a theater or museum in my life. I was a street kid. If I wasn’t here with you right now, I’d be home watching the game drinking a Beck’s.”

Not a Bud?

“Well,” says Allen, almost smiling. “You got me there.”

There’s not likely to be any confusion which Woody we’re getting in “Small Time Crooks.” When we first meet would-be bank robber Ray, he’s dressed in denim shorts (“because I know I look ludicrous in shorts”), buying chocolates for his ex-stripper wife Frenchy, played by Tracey Ullman.

At 64, Allen says he couldn’t be the old Woody if he tried, but he does believe “Small Time Crooks” represents a kind of “lightening up.”

“I felt a little guilty making this film, because I felt like I was indulging myself, enjoying myself too much,” he says. “That’s not what I’m familiar with. If I’m not suffering, and not working too hard, and everything’s not coming slowly and agonizingly, and we’re not reshooting … I’m not going to get anything out of it.”

Ullman says she even saw Allen happy “for a second or two, but maybe it was just a trick of the light.

“Seriously, we all had such a wonderful time because Woody lets everyone do what they do best,” she says. “If there’s one thing he knows how to do, it’s celebrate the loser. He’s spent a long time getting that right.”

The years since l’affaire Farrow have been tumultuous for Allen. He left his longtime agent, Sam Cohn, for the William Morris Agency. After the dissolution of his longtime home, Orion Pictures, he saw his films shopped from distributor to distributor by producer Jean Doumanian.

They recently ended their partnership, and Allen signed up with DreamWorks, mostly because he respects partner Jeffrey Katzenberg. He’s become an actor for hire, though not very successfully. His voice contributed to the success of DreamWorks’ animated “Antz,” but two other movies in which he appears, “Company Man” and “Picking Up the Pieces,” failed to find theatrical distribution.

“It’s safe to say that I’m not especially good at change,” says Allen. “So a lot of this has been very upsetting to me.”

Even more upsetting, he says, is his recent move from his Upper East Side penthouse, where he had lived alone since his 1970 divorce from second wife Louise Lasser, into a home in the city with Soon-Yi and their child.

“I didn’t want to move, not only because I was comfortable, but because I felt protected,” he says. “I have always had this fear that if I didn’t live in my apartment with a doorman and a manager and people around all the time doing business that someone could come in in the middle of night and bludgeon me to death while I slept.

“But I’ve changed. After six months of living in a house, now I’m praying someone will come in and bludgeon me to death in my sleep.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: FILMOGRAPHY Allen as director

Small Time Crooks (2000)

Sweet and Lowdown (1999)

Celebrity (1998)

Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

Mighty Aphrodite (1995)

Don’t Drink the Water (TV) (1994)

Bullets Over Broadway (1994)

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

Shadows and Fog (1992)

Husbands and Wives (1992)

Alice (1990)

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

Another Woman (1988)

Radio Days (1987)

September (1987)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

Broadway Danny Rose (1984)

Zelig (1983)

A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982)

Stardust Memories (1980)

Manhattan (1979)

Interiors (1978)

Annie Hall (1977)

Love and Death (1975)

Sleeper (1973)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1972)

Bananas (1971)

Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971) (TV)

Take the Money and Run (1969)

What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)