The best play of the year took place on Instagram early Tuesday evening German time. Hollywood seniors Alec Baldwin and Woody Allen met there for an interview and looked like Statler and Waldorf from the “Muppet Show”. First, Baldwin explained to his pal Woody what Instagram is (“the Radio City Music Hall of Millennials”), while Allen had a friendly woman in the background adjusting the computer so that it wasn’t just his forehead that was visible. Woody Allen looked like he was about to have a colonoscopy.
Then Baldwin chattered away happily, but after a few minutes nervously asked if they were even live yet. A friendly female voice from the background said yes. The picture then froze three times for Allen. Baldwin got up in a panic, sporting a pair of nicely baggy blue sweatpants, to run off screen and yell for help in the next room. In any case, the thing had a lot of home story charm and was apparently not prepared by three dozen PR elves, as is usual in Hollywood. Baldwin had nevertheless deactivated the comment function as a precaution.
Negligent homicide, abuse allegations? Better make small talk first
Of course, there had already been plenty of malice before the conversation, because at least there’s never a shortage of that on the Internet. Alec Baldwin announced a day in advance that he would be interviewing his friend Woody Allen on Instagram – and the tweets practically wrote themselves. O-Ton: The two right people have found each other.
The actor Baldwin, who is currently under investigation and facing a court case for being killed last fall with a movie gun that contained real ammunition, who shot camerawoman Halyna Hutchins on the set of the western Rust. And director Allen, who for thirty years has been accused by his former partner Mia Farrow of abusing their adopted daughter Dylan when she was seven years old. Allen was never prosecuted for this and there is no new evidence of his guilt in the matter. But after decades of ignoring the allegations, Hollywood has turned the tide in recent years, and Allen is considered persona non grata in the American film industry.
Alec Baldwin and Woody Allen on the set of their film Blue Jasmine (2013).
(Photo: Mary Evans/Imago)
So now Alec Baldwin, 64, and Woody Allen, 86, are meeting on Instagram of all places, which is a first for the latter. Allen still writes his screenplays stoically on an old German Olympia typewriter, for which he regularly finds more tender words in interviews than other people for their wives.
Baldwin, on the other hand, has almost two and a half million followers, and he informed them in advance in large letters that he had ZERO INTEREST if the campaign annoyed people and encouraged them to make outraged posts. And further: “If you think a process should be conducted through an HBO documentary, then that’s your problem.” He played with that to the four-part HBO series “Allen v. Farrow”., which the pay-TV channel broadcast last year. It primarily represented the position of the Farrow family because Allen did not want to participate. Allen’s confidante Baldwin didn’t mention that the creators of the series, although very partisan, were quite adept at debunking a few old defenses of the Allen camp as false.
The two have worked together on several occasions, including on To Rome With Love (2012) and Blue Jasmine (2013). Baldwin is one of Allen’s most ardent defenders in Hollywood, and there are fewer of them every year. So the question was whether the interview should be a kind of liberation for the director to bring his point of view back to the fore. Because Allen vehemently denies all allegations against him.
First of all, he seems to have consented mainly because he had written a book of comedic short stories. “Zero Gravity” has just been released in the USA and probably needs more promotion than his earlier books since, see above, it doesn’t have an easy time in the entertainment industry. Baldwin dutifully holds the book up to the shaky camera.
Then, as always, with the hater of the present, Woody Allen, it’s about the past. The importance of the journal new Yorker for young writers when he was young himself. That he would have liked to have worked with the Marx Brothers. His failed attempts to write a good novel. The advantages of simply being able to stay at home during the pandemic. All things that he has often told in one way or another. During the almost three quarters of an hour that the interview lasted, one naturally asked oneself continuously whether anything would come of his current situation. But: none. Investigative journalist Baldwin praised and giggled, and with the action the pair found the right platform to promote Allen’s book, one has to wonder from the measly few thousand viewers who attended. It all seemed a bit bizarre and awkward.
Allen, who used to shoot a film every year, but not since 2019 (his last one, “Rifkin’s Festival”, will be released in German cinemas with a long delay on July 7th), announced that he would like to start shooting again in the fall , in Paris. There were no further details. Then the two gentlemen wished each other a nice summer. End of the two-person comedy.