Woody Allen Tonight: "A Twenties Memory" (from "Getting Even")

Hemingway in the '20s: His 1923 passport photo

"I kidded Hemingway about his forthcoming novel and we laughed a lot and had fun and then we put on some boxing gloves and he broke my nose."

-- from "A Twenties Memory"

by Ken



What's so inspiring about this "memory" isn't just the famous names littered through it but the deep insights into them. The author hobnobs with famous writers including not just Hemingway and Gertrude Stein (who turn out to have something surprising in common but Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald ("most of our friends believed that [Scott] based the protagonist of his latest novel on me and that I had based my life on his previous novel and I finally wound up getting sued by a fictional character"). Thanks to Hemingway the author even meets "that great, great artist" the bullfigher Manolete ("had he not become a bullfighter, his grace was such that he could have been a world-famous accountant").



And he pals around with artists like Picasso (who, because of having coffee with the author and Gertrude Stein, was delayed by ten minutes in starting "what was later to be known as his 'blue period' -- though "it lasted four years, so the ten minutes did not really mean much") [that's a Picasso "blue period" self-portrait at right], Dali (he recalls the one-man show of Dali's that "was a huge success, as one man showed up"), and Gris ("Gertrude Stein used to say that only a true Spaniard could behave as he did; that is, he would speak Spanish and sometimes return to his family in Spain").



All somehow crammed into a single decade!





FOR THIS RIVETING "TWENTIES MEMORY," CLICK HERE

SO FAR IN "WOODY ALLEN TONIGHT"



from Getting Even (1971)

"A Look at Organized Crime"

"Death Knocks," Part 1 and Part 2



coming Sunday and Monday: "Hassidic Tales, and a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar," Parts 1 and 2

THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Woody Allen Tonight: Part 2 of "Death Knocks" (from "Getting Even")

Tonight Nat Ackerman's drawing and discarding for his life.

NAT: You want to play a tenth of a cent a point to make it interesting?

DEATH: It's not interesting enough for you?

NAT: I play better when money's at stake.

DEATH: Whatever you say, Newt.

NAT: Nat. Nat Ackerman. You don't know my name?

DEATH: Newt, Nat -- I got such a headache.

-- from tonight's installment of "Death Knocks"

Last night, in our Part 1 of "Death Knocks," we met dress manufacturer Nat Ackerman near midnight in the bedroom of his two-story home in Kew Gardens, Queens, so absorbed reading his Daily News (headline: "NAB COEDS IN POT ORGY") that he fails to hear an intruder climbing up his drainpipe with a view toward making a dramatic entrance, which turns instead into a stumbling and gasping entrance. Death ("for it is no one else") lays out the situation for Nat: His time is up. When he insists, "It's the moment," Nat replies, "How can it be the moment? I just merged with Modiste Originals." Eventually Nat persuades Death -- who doesn't play chess but claims to be good at gin rummy -- to play a hand, bargaining for a chance to win a day's respite from his departure. Let the game begin! -- Ken





FOR PART 2 OF "DEATH KNOCKS," CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Woody Allen Tonight: Part 1 of "Death Knocks" (from "Getting Even")

[The sombre, caped figure huffs audibly and then trips over the window sill and falls into the room.]

DEATH [for it is no one else]: Jesus Christ. I nearly broke my neck.

NAT ACKERMAN [watching with bewilderment]: Who are you?

DEATH: Death.

NAT: Who?

DEATH: Death. Listen -- can I sit down? I nearly broke my neck. I'm shaking like a leaf.

NAT: Who are you?

DEATH: Death. You got a glass of water?

-- the opening of "Death Knocks"

Tonight we continue our Woody Allen sampling, begun Monday night with "A Look at Organized Crime," with a justly famous playlet from 1968, "Death Knocks." Woody's well-known admiration for, or perhaps awe of, Ingmar Bergman seems to me more productively expressed in this rollicking hommage to The Seventh Seal than in his later stiflingly pseudo-Bergmanesque films like Interiors and September. -- Ken





FOR PART 1 OF "DEATH KNOCKS," CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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Woody Allen Tonight: "A Look at Organized Crime" (from "Getting Even")

"Vincent Columbraro, the Buttered Toast King, has such tight control over all buttered toast moving in and out of New Jersey that one word from him could ruin breakfast for two-thirds of the nation."

-- from "A Look at Organized Crime"

by Ken



Of the 17 pieces in Getting Even, Woody Allen's first book of humor pieces, published in 1971, 11 had first appeared in The New Yorker. (Three had appeared in other publications, and the remaining three had not been previously published.) The earliest of the New Yorker pieces dates from 1966, when Woody was still transitioning from stand-up comedy to movies -- the first film he directed, Take the Money and Run, came out in 1969; the second, Bananas, in 1971.



Woody has maintained a pretty steady production over the years; a quick search of The New Yorker index for him as author turned up 42 listings, the most recent from this past January ("Money Can Buy Happiness -- As If"). This week, in addition to tonight's "A Look at Organized Crime" (from 1970), we're going to have two longer pieces in two parts each: the playlet "Death Knocks" (from 1968) and "Hassidic Tales, with a Guide to Their Interpretation by the Noted Scholar" (from 1970).





FOR TONIGHT'S "LOOK AT ORGANIZED

CRIME," CLICK HERE





THURBER TONIGHT (including WOODY ALLEN, ROBERT BENCHLEY, BOB AND RAY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, S. J. PERELMAN, JEAN SHEPHERD, and E. B. WHITE TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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