• University Of British Columbia
• Robert H Jackson
• Georg Sorensen

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For roughly a quarter century—from Take the Money and Run in 1969 to, say, Bullets Over Broadway in 1994—Woody Allen was among America’s most fascinating and iconic filmmakers. His early comedies were a revelation; his more mature works (in particular Annie Hall, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Hannah and Her Sisters) were among the best films of the period. Frequently casting himself in central roles, he mined a vein of humor that was emphatically Jewish yet accessible to a wide audience. And if his occasional homages to great European directors such as Bergman ( Interiors and Another Woman) and Fellini ( Stardust Memories and Alice) weren’t entirely successful, they nonetheless deepened the intellectual reputation of an oeuvre also known for its allusions to art, literature, and philosophy. Alone among major directors, he seemed to be speaking almost intimately to his audience, playing repeated variations on the same character, a man who was a recognizable variation on Allen himself.

Allen says he functions “within the parameters of my mediocrity.” Though Allen, now 81, has maintained his frenetic pace of one feature film a year since 1982, his more recent output has been generally, yet gently, judged a disappointment. His best films of the past 20 years— Match Point, Blue Jasmine—are solid but overrated, perhaps because so many of us dream of a return to his early form. Scott of The New York Times, who accurately described Match Point as Allen’s “most satisfying film in more than a decade,” then couldn’t resist hyperbole: “a Champagne cocktail laced with strychnine.”) The rest run the gamut from middling— Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris—to genuinely bad: Scoop, Whatever Works, To Rome With Love. While the former have a habit of garnering plaudits anyway ( Midnight in Paris won an Oscar for best original screenplay), the latter are often politely ignored in discussions of the overall quality of his work. The upshot has been that Allen’s stature as an important filmmaker (unlike his personal reputation) has proved surprisingly sturdy—despite the withering self-assessments he offers every so often. In an interview during the filming of Match Point, he described himself as “functioning within the parameters of my mediocrity,” and went on to note that if he were ever to make another great film, it would be “by accident.” False modesty?

Some, no doubt. But we would do best to take his words at face value. For years the evidence has accumulated: Allen is an astonishingly lazy director. Often this fact gets a positive spin, as when he is described as “an actor’s director”—code for the reality that he offers his performers little or no guidance and tries to complete every scene in as few takes as possible. Here, again, Allen is bluntly honest.

“I’m lazy and an imperfectionist,” he explained in a 2015 NPR interview. “Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese will work on the details until midnight and sweat it out, whereas for me, come 6 o’clock, I want to go home, I want to have dinner, I want to watch the ballgame. Filmmaking is not the end-all be-all of my existence.” From Our October 2017 Issue Try 2 FREE issues of The Atlantic The most recent grist for this assessment comes from Eric Lax, an Allen acolyte, whose fourth book on the director, Start to Finish: Woody Allen and the Art of Moviemaking, is essentially an indictment framed as an encomium. Focused on the making of 2015’s Irrational Man, a film seen by few and liked by fewer, it functions as a third-person diary of a directorial indifference so extreme that one would expect it to have eroded the Allen brand by now. So how and why does Allen still enjoy his current level of prestige? Lax’s otherwise tedious account is a good occasion to explore that mystery, the key to which is something of a paradox: Allen’s reputation depends in no small part on the very indolence that undermines so many of his films.

Despite the art in his title, Lax reveals Allen’s moviemaking technique as something more akin to an assembly line. From beginning to end, the enterprise is designed to maximize efficiency, all but inevitably at the cost of quality. Screenwriting, casting, shooting—at almost every stage of the process, Allen performs, to judge from Lax’s account, a fraction of the labor customarily expected of a director. How else could he keep up a filmmaking pace that smacks more of neurotic obsession than of intensive dedication? (When the character he plays in To Rome With Love is told, “You equate retirement with death,” the line lands close to home.) Allen’s oft-quoted dictum that “80 percent of success is showing up” seems to apply to almost every aspect of the endeavor.

This lassitude is enabled by an arrangement that is virtually unique among major directors: Allen is answerable to no one on his films. Though they are distributed by major studios (most recently Amazon Studios), those studios play no role in their production. Allen arranges his own financing, and investors sign on with barely any idea of what they’re investing in. (As he explains, “I’ve never given anybody who’s done one of my films more than three or four lines” of description.) Allen’s longtime producer (and sister) Letty Aronson, and his editor, Alisa Lepselter, offer advice throughout, as do the cinematographer and others on set.

But that advice is always Allen’s to take or leave. He typically offers his actors no direction before the camera rolls. Start to Finish, well over half of which consists of a scene-by-scene account of the 32-day shooting schedule of Irrational Man, sheds limited light on Allen’s writing process. But another of his longtime producers, Robert Greenhut, marveled in Woody Allen: A Documentary, “I’ve never seen anybody write so fast.” Allen once boasted that he rewrote a central character in Match Point in “about an hour” after changing her nationality from English to American—scarcely a sign of thoughtful revision. And anyone who has watched recent Allen films knows that he leans on the crutch of voice-over to an extraordinary degree. On this count, too, he is his own most astute critic: Lax quotes him saying, “Don’t ruin it by making the characters talk to the audience because that distances you from the intense reality of it.” When it comes to casting, Lax’s description of Allen’s method is unintentionally comical. His longtime casting directors, Juliet Taylor and Patricia DiCerto, will propose actors, show him footage, and if he likes what he sees, there is a quick face-to-face interview, “quick” meaning about one minute The actors are not told what part they are being considered for or anything about the film.

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Each interview is an almost verbatim repetition of the last Allen is standing toward the middle, comes over, shakes hands, and says a version of, “Hi, I’m shooting a film starting in July. We thought you might be right for one of the parts, and today I just want to see how you look.” Usually the actor stammers out something reasonably appropriate. Then Woody thanks the actor and he or she leaves. Those wondering how Andrew Dice Clay came to appear in Blue Jasmine, visibly straining to act, have their answer. Other corners are comparably cut. Allen’s editor sometimes has to live with technical imperfections in the footage because he hasn’t shot enough takes for her to choose from. He selects his music from the decidedly limited range of his own personal taste—jazz, classical, American standards—because he “does not like working with a composer.” And so on.

Allen’s laziness becomes most glaring as the shoot approaches and then unfolds. In Lax’s telling, Allen is disengaged prior to the shoot, sometimes leaving his collaborators (location scouts, costume designers, etc.) to spin their wheels.

“Woody has paced himself to be at top strength when the filming begins” is how Lax puts it, “often to the frustration of those who want only to do their best work on his behalf but cannot always get his attention to make a choice on what he wants.” As for the shoot itself, Allen has confessed, “I don’t do any preparation. I don’t do any rehearsals. Most of the times I don’t even know what we’re going to shoot.” Indeed, Allen rarely has any conversations whatsoever with his actors before they show up on set. Those with smaller parts will not even have seen the full script, merely their own scenes.

(Parker Posey showed up for her first Irrational Man shoot not knowing whether it was a comedy or a drama.) The limited time and effort he expects of his cast surely helps him attract topflight talent. On the set, Allen typically offers his actors no direction before the camera rolls. If he is unhappy with a performance, though, he will weigh in with recommendations.

In addition to limiting the number of takes on any given shot, he strongly prefers “master shots”—those that capture an entire scene from one angle—over multiple shots that would subsequently need to be edited together. In the past, Allen budgeted sufficient time and money to go back and reshoot scenes: 1987’s September and 1989’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, for example, were both extensively reshot.

But he stopped doing that about 20 years ago, according to Lax. Allen now tries to stay as close to the allotted schedule as possible, in part because his financing agreements stipulate that any budget overage come out of his own fee for writing and directing. In a passage in Start to Finish, Allen seems genuinely astonished when his editor tells him that the director David Fincher frequently does 30 or more takes of a single shot: “Really? Well, his movies are terrific.” Allen’s rather different approach was crystallized by Liam Neeson in a 2014 interview in which he spoke about his experience working on the 1992 picture Husbands and Wives: “Not a lot of takes, right?” “Oh no, no, no.” “Because he wants to be done by six o’clock every day.” “Oh, we were out at four in the afternoon. It was fucking great.” Neeson’s delight offers a crucial clue to the endurance of Allen’s reputation.

Filmmaking can be a grueling process, and Allen has settled upon an alternative business model that serves the interests of all involved. The limited time and effort that he expects not only of himself but of his cast surely helps him continue to attract topflight talent to his films, despite paying his actors just over the Screen Actors Guild minimum. He is one of the few genuine household names—and internationally recognized figures—working in cinema, and appearing in one of his movies checks off a useful career box. Especially for younger actresses eager to signal their desire to work with serious material, the experience is an ideal credential. Think of Scarlett Johansson (who appeared in three Woody Allen pictures from 2005 to 2008) and Emma Stone (who was in two in 2014 and 2015, including Irrational Man). The minimal commitment that appearing in an Allen film entails is a highly relevant consideration for a time-strapped actor. Lax himself notes the contrast with Mike Leigh—another director of small, art-house films—who rehearses his actors for weeks before shooting even starts.

For Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, Stone and her co-star, Ryan Gosling, rehearsed for four months before the cameras rolled. Among other chores, they practiced singing, dancing, and, in Gosling’s case, piano. The fact that Stone’s Irrational Man character plays piano is less central to that movie’s plot, but Allen didn’t expect her even to fake it.

He simply shot her recital with the piano blocking her hands. Similarly, in Match Point, Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a retired tennis pro who once almost beat Andre Agassi. But the scenes of him on court give every indication that tennis lessons were not required. He looks as though he’s never lifted a racket before in his life. Such shortcuts result in a feedback loop of cinematic prestige: Allen is considered an important director in part because so many big stars still want to work with him. Meanwhile, his perceived importance as a director draws those stars for the short period it will take to film a movie and acquire their Allen credential. The accumulated prestige also rubs off on his investors, some of whom have even gotten bit parts.

And their risk of a financial loss is low. Allen’s films almost always recoup their modest budgets—here, the actors’ willingness to work at a deep discount is essential—and now and then one strikes gold. ( Midnight in Paris made more than $150 million on a $17 million budget.) The fact that so few of them wind up being any good barely enters into the director-actor-investor equation. Given that Allen’s movie-a-year schedule extends well back into his prime, one might wonder what explains such a precipitous decline in quality since the 1990s. Presumably age, however healthy and fit he remains, has something to do with it. His shoots are typically shorter now than they were in his earlier years. (The shoot for 1973’s Sleeper lasted a full 101 days.) Ambition simply isn’t on the agenda.

When asked whether his films would benefit from more time and effort, he has consistently maintained that they are as good as they can be and no amount of additional work would improve them. Moreover, it is hardly unusual for a director’s later work to grow somewhat stale, particularly when the director’s preoccupations—death, philosophy, older men sleeping with younger women—remain as constant as Allen’s have. But once again, Allen himself is ready with the most astute diagnosis. “I’m not a curious person,” he noted in that 2015 NPR interview.

“I’m not curious to travel I’m not curious to see other places, I’m not curious to try new things.” During the fertile years in which he forged his reputation, he pursued themes very close to home, with films that were set almost exclusively in his native New York City and frequently dealt with the fields of comedy or show business. More recently, he has worked in locales—London, Paris, Rome, Barcelona—he evidently knows only from the perspective of an unenthusiastic tourist. Match Point was knocked for its unfamiliarity with London; To Rome With Love looks as though it was shot with a copy of Fodor’s in hand. Early in his career, Allen was often his own star, and his distinctive patter—the phobias and neuroses and literary references—worked effortlessly in a way that it does not when it emanates from the mouths of his various surrogates since then. And the filmmaker who these days has so little contact with his actors used to have his female stars close at hand: Between them, his longtime love interests Louise Lasser, Diane Keaton, and Mia Farrow starred in 22 out of 23 consecutive films during his heyday. So it is perhaps good news that Allen’s next film, Wonder Wheel, is set in 1950s Brooklyn, where he spent his youth. In fact, the movie takes place on Coney Island, where his long-ago Annie Hall character, Alvy Singer, claimed to have grown up in a house beneath the roller coaster.

His 48th movie—scheduled for release on December 1, Allen’s 82nd birthday—will be the first one he has released during awards season since Match Point more than a decade ago. No one will be more pleased than I if the film turns out to be a return to prime form for Allen. But even if Wonder Wheel is a triumph, it will likely be, as Allen himself has suggested, a happy accident. “I can handle things.

Not like everybody says, like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!” This morning’s presidential Twitter outburst recalls those words of Fredo Corleone’s in from The Godfather series. Trump that his “two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” and in called himself a “very stable genius.” Trump may imagine that he’s Michael Corleone, the tough and canny rightful heir—or even Sonny Corleone, the terrifyingly violent but at least powerful heir apparent—but after today he is Fredo forever. There’s a key difference between film and reality, though: The Corleone family had the awareness and vigilance to exclude Fredo from power.

The American political system did not do so well. The first thought that comes to mind staring at the photograph above is: This has got to be fake. The B-2 stealth bomber looks practically pasted onto the field. The flag is unfurled just so. The angle feels almost impossible, shot directly down from above. And yet, it’s real, the product of lots of planning, some tricky flying, and the luck of the moment.

The photographer, Mark Holtzman, has been flying his Cessna 206 around taking aerial images for years, since before the digital-photography days, and he’s developed his technique for just this sort of shot. “The plane is my tripod, and it is a moving tripod,” he told me. In fact, the way he took this photograph was literally half-hanging out the window of his plane, his Canon 5D Mark III fitted with a 70–200 mm lens, working the rudder pedals on his craft to put himself in position to fly right over the bomber, as it approached at 200 miles per hour from the opposite direction. Three months ago, when Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times unloaded about Harvey Weinstein’s pattern of sexual aggressiveness and abuse, the depth of detail made the story unforgettable—and as it turned out, historic. Real women went on the record, using their real names, giving specific dates and times and circumstances of what Weinstein had said or done to them. Of the reactions that flowed from this and parallel accounts—about Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly in the Fox empire, or Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose in mainstream TV, or Kevin Spacey and Louis CK in the film world, or Michael Oreskes and John Hockenberry in public radio, or Mark Halperin and Leon Weiseltier in print and political media, and down the rest of the list—one response was particularly revealing. It was that the behavior in question had been an “.”.

Ironically, it was the publication of a book this week that crystallized the reality of just how little Donald Trump reads. While, Trump’s indifference to the printed word has been apparent for some time, the depth and implications of Trump’s strong preference for oral communication over the written word demand closer examination. “He didn’t process information in any conventional sense,”. “He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim.

Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-­literate.” Wolff quotes economic adviser Gary Cohn writing in an email: “It’s worse than you can imagine Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”.

P resident Donald Trump’s decision to about the size of his “nuclear button” compared with North Korea’s was widely condemned as bellicose and reckless. The comments are also part of a larger pattern of odd and often alarming behavior for a person in the nation’s highest office. Trump’s grandiosity and impulsivity has made him a constant subject of speculation among those concerned with his mental health. But after more than a year of talking to doctors and researchers about whether and how the cognitive sciences could offer a lens to explain Trump’s behavior, I’ve come to believe there should be a role for professional evaluation beyond speculating from afar.

I’m not alone. Viewers of Trump’s recent speeches have begun noticing minor abnormalities in his movements. In November, he used his free hand to steady a small Fiji bottle as he brought it to his mouth. Onlookers described the movement as “awkward” and made jokes about hand size.

Some called out Trump for doing the exact thing he had mocked Senator Marco Rubio for during the presidential primary—conspicuously drinking water during a speech. It was an otherwise ordinary snow day in Hartford, Connecticut, and I was laughing as I headed outside to shovel my driveway. I’d spent the morning scrambling around, trying to stay ahead of my three children’s rising housebound energy, and once my shovel hit the snow, I thought about how my wife had been urging me to buy a snowblower. I hadn’t felt an urgent need. Whenever it got ridiculously blizzard-like, I hired a snow removal service.

And on many occasions, I came outside to find that our next door neighbor had already cleared my driveway for me. Never mind that our neighbor was an empty-nester in his late 60s with a replaced hip, and I was a former professional ballplayer in his early 40s.

I kept telling myself I had to permanently flip the script and clear his driveway. But not today. I had to focus on making sure we could get our car out for school the next morning. My wife was at a Black History Month event with our older two kids. The snow had finally stopped coming down and this was my mid-afternoon window of opportunity. TSUKUBA, Japan —Outside the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine, the heavy fragrance of sweet Osmanthus trees fills the air, and big golden spiders string their webs among the bushes.

Two men in hard hats next to the main doors mutter quietly as they measure a space and apply adhesive to the slate-colored wall. The building is so new that they are still putting up the signs.

The institute is five years old, its building still younger, but already it has attracted some 120 researchers from fields as diverse as pulmonology and chemistry and countries ranging from Switzerland to China. An hour north of Tokyo at the University of Tsukuba, with funding from the Japanese government and other sources, the institute’s director, Masashi Yanagisawa, has created a place to study the basic biology of sleep, rather than, as is more common, the causes and treatment of sleep problems in people.

Full of rooms of gleaming equipment, quiet chambers where mice slumber, and a series of airy work spaces united by a spiraling staircase, it’s a place where tremendous resources are focused on the question of why, exactly, living things sleep. When I taught linguistics to undergraduates, I would start each semester off by asking students what sort of assumptions they would they make about a speaker who said, 'I ain't got no money.' The responses were always similar—'ignorant,' 'uneducated,' 'stupid.' If I pressed, one brave student would eventually come forward and say 'African American.' After writing up the list of associations on the board, I'd point out that for nearly a thousand years, double negation was standard in English. 'I ne saugh nawiht' in Middle English; 'I don't see anything' in Modern English.

Today, one can find it in French, which negates verbs by affixing the particles ne and pas to either side of the verb, as well as in Afrikaans, Greek, and a number of Slavic languages. The point: There is nothing inherently 'ignorant' or 'stupid' about double negation; judgments about speech are judgments about the speakers themselves. “Sit down,” Larry Bloom (Kevin Costner) says to his daughter Molly (Jessica Chastain) near the end of Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, Molly’s Game. “I’m going to give you three years of therapy in three minutes.” It’s a line seemingly meant to draw scoffs and eye-rolls, a cherry on top of the ostentatious 140-minute sundae that is this movie—a dramatic retelling of the rise and fall of a real-life underground-poker mogul.

University Of British Columbia

Sorkin has been one of Hollywood’s premier screenwriters for decades, creating the TV hit The West Wing and scripting films like The Social Network, Moneyball, and Steve Jobs. For years, Sorkin’s rat-a-tat conversation has been interpreted by famed directors like David Fincher and Mike Nichols. Now, we’re finally getting the unfiltered version. BRUNSWICK, Maine—For over a hundred years, the company Leon Leonwood Bean founded has been making rubber boots and outdoor clothes in this area, about 25 miles north of Portland. But on the particular afternoon I visited their manufacturing plant, loud music was pumping inside the office, beats spilling into the cubicled area where visitors sign in—a Zumba class for employees was in progress. Bean’s offerings have traditionally not been synonymous with cool. The company’s signature items are intended for the unglamorous activity of camping: pragmatic sleeping bags, flannel pajamas, fleeces, and down jackets.

But then something happened: The outdoorsy aesthetic that L.L. Bean had been selling for 100 years. That’s when the duck-boot shortage first began, and “” spread as countless consumers found that retailers didn’t have what they wanted. Every autumn since, business reporters have provided. This year’s update?

Opposition lawmakers chanted and held a banner saying “Out with Temer” in Brazil’s lower house of Congress on Wednesday during a session to determine whether to suspend President Michel Temer. Credit Eraldo Peres/Associated Press CURITIBA, Brazil — Brazilian lawmakers voted on Wednesday to spare President Michel Temer from standing trial on corruption charges, choosing to keep the deeply unpopular leader in place and avoid yet another round of political turmoil. Temer needed at least 172 lawmakers to back him or abstain from voting to avoid prosecution.

In a marathon congressional session that underscored ’s polarization, 263 deputies supported him and 227 voted against him. The remaining 23 lawmakers abstained or were absent. Several lawmakers who sided with him said Brazil could not afford more political upheaval. But opponents said that allowing Mr. Temer to stay amounted to an endorsement of the culture of impunity that has made corruption in Brazilian politics pervasive.

Robert H Jackson

Before the vote, shoving matches broke out in the lower house of Congress. Lawmakers critical of Mr.

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Temer tossed fake bills in the air to denounce what they called the brazenness of corruption in Brazilian politics. The vote on Mr. Temer came nearly a year after Congress, for diverting money from state-run banks to conceal budget shortfalls before her re-election in 2014. When the top prosecutor in June with accepting a $152,000 bribe from a food industry magnate, Brazilians faced the possibility of losing a second president in two years.

Prosecuting a sitting president in Brazil requires that two-thirds of the lower house of Congress formally send the case to the Supreme Court. If enough lawmakers had voted against Mr. Temer, he would have been suspended for 180 days and potentially put on trial, much like Ms. Rousseff was. But many lawmakers have argued that Brazil and its aching economy need stability, not more political turmoil.

Temer also doled out millions of dollars in federal money to key congressional districts in the past few weeks, in what some critics called an effort to sway lawmakers. In June and July, Open Accounts, the government awarded more than $1.3 billion in discretionary funding. That is an unusually high amount, particularly in an era of austerity during which hospitals, universities and police departments have had their budgets slashed.

More than 80 percent of Brazilians favored suspending Mr. Temer and putting him on trial, conducted late last month; 73 percent of respondents said that any lawmakers who blocked the charges did not deserve to be re-elected. Temer’s approval rating sank to 5 percent last month, according to the poll, which was conducted by the research company IBOPE and had a sampling error of three percentage points and included 1,000 respondents. That makes him even less popular than Ms. Rousseff at her low point in late 2015, when 9 percent of Brazilians supported her.