It is not the largest apartment in Manhattan, but it may be the airiest. Woody Allen's penthouse duplex is high above Fifth Avenue, and its glass walls provide an illusion of floating. Outside, in foreshortened perspective, like Saul Steinberg's popular poster, stretches much of the city: the lakes and woods of Central Park, the skyscrapers of midtown, the rococo parapets of the West Side. This is literally and figuratively Woody Allen's Manhattan: the movie's opening sequence, a montage of romantic cityscapes, was largely shot from the director's own terrace.
Last week, just before the film's premiere, Allen sat on a comfortably worn couch with his back to the view. He had caught the flu and was huddling over a bowl of chicken soup ("the mythological panacea," as he called it). Between his upset stomach and the details of Manhattan's opening, Allen's normal routine had been disrupted. When he is not shooting a film, Allen usually gets up at 7, writes all day, and then goes out for a late dinner at Elaine's with a few pals (Actor Michael Murphy, Saturday Night Live Staff Producer Jean Doumanian, his frequent collaborator Marshall Brickman).
Last week not much writing was being done. His home phonewhere his movie will play and found some of them wanting: new screens and projectors had to be ordered to "keep Manhattan from looking like The Day the Earth Blew Up." Equally unsatisfactory was the typeface in a full-page Sunday New York Times ad for the film: a new mock-up awaited his inspection. The most annoying problem was the Motion Picture Association's decision to slap Manhattan with an R rating because of a few four-letter words. Allen was not pleased: "People say that the industry has a ratings board to keep the Government from invoking censorshipoesn't work, I have no trouble slamming it."
Such trivial bothers aside, Woody Allen seems content these days. Or at least as content as he can be. Rather uncharacteristically, he even seems tentatively pleased with his own work. "I wanted to make a film that was more serious than Annie Hall, a serious picture that had laughs in it," he says. "I felt decent about Manhattan at the time I did it; it does go farther than Annie Hall. But 1 think now I could do better. Of course, if my film makes one more person feel miserable, I'll feel I've done my job." He is only half joking. It is no wonder that his original title for Annie Hall was Anhedonia, a psychoanalytic term that means "incapable of experiencing pleasure."