HOLLYWOOD ENDING: “The Hollywood Tide Turns on Woody Allen — Years after his daughter reiterated her allegation that the director sexually abused her, more actors are voicing their regret for collaborating with him.”
Woody Allen won an Academy Award, the fourth of his career, just six years ago for writing Midnight in Paris. He was nominated again two years later for Blue Jasmine, a film that won Cate Blanchett a Best Actress Oscar. The last year that Allen didn’t release a movie in theaters that he wrote and directed was 1981. Despite the controversy that has dogged him since the early 1990s—when he was revealed to be having an affair with his girlfriend’s daughter and was subsequently accused of molesting his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow—Allen has continued to make movies with the same once-a-year regularity as always, and usually with major stars. He has long denied that he abused his daughter.
But the film industry’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the allegations against Allen seems to be coming to an end. More and more actors who have worked with him in the past are announcing that they regret the collaboration, and it appears the sheen of Oscar-winning prestige he has relied on to attract big names to his projects is fading. Allen, who released Wonder Wheel last month and is set to come out with A Rainy Day in New York this year, may try to helm more movies. But with Hollywood finally beginning to grapple with his enduring presence as an artist, could that be enough to destroy his career?
Allen is 82 years old; this Atlantic article feels very much like Michelle Goldberg’s piece in the New York Times at the height of the #MeToo Weinsteinmania when she wrote “I Believe Juanita [Broaddrick].” Both Woody and Bill continued in the public eye, and were eagerly defended by the backers during the 1990s and right up until this fall. (Bill Clinton was fundraising for Democrats as recently as mid-December, at Andrew Cuomo’s birthday party; he doesn’t look to be going away quietly anytime soon.)
As Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon tweets, “there’s something grotesque (and, yes, totalitarian) about Hollywood collectively turning a blind eye to the allegations against Allen and now collectively ganging up on him because it’s the politic thing to do,” adding, “You f***ers knew all about this sh*t for decades, spare me your self-righteousness now.”