Woody Allen: The Inside Scoop--Twice

Woody Allen has never seen David Letterman. He’s never been in a shopping mall. He eats dinner out 360 nights a year and he thinks “Blue Velvet” was the best movie of 1986.

Those and many other astonishing facts can be found in two current cover stories on America’s favorite media-shy neurotic. In Esquire, media critic Tom Shales gets pretty rough with Allen in his essay/interview. He applauds Allen for being a true American original who’s virtually alone in being able to make idiosyncratic, literate, anti-Hollywood films unspoiled by compromise. But Shales also questions or criticizes everything from “that stupid clarinet” Allen plays on Monday nights at Michael’s Pub to the overly solemn, “joyless” movies he makes.

He takes a long time to say it, but Shales basically just wishes Allen would lighten up and get back to making funny movies again.

William E. Geist takes a more amicable, reportorial approach in Rolling Stone. New York Times man Geist declares that he found Allen sane and well-adjusted (for a New Yorker), despite an inordinate fear of bushes and woodchucks.

Among many other things, Allen confesses to Geist in a question-and-answer session that he hates girlfriend Mia Farrow’s pets but likes her eight kids. That he never watches his own films because they disappoint him. And that, as he also told Shales, “It wouldn’t matter to me if I stopped making films tomorrow. I’d be just as happy to write books.”

A Deadly Perspective

In a commentary opening its April issue, Discover magazine throws some cold perspective in the face of recent government warnings that the AIDS death toll may one day make the Black Death pale by comparison.

Discover says that AIDS, as tragic as it is, is not among the world’s deadliest killers and probably never will be. (About 32,000 AIDS cases have been diagnosed so far in the United States, says Discover, with 18,000 deaths already and possibly a total of 54,000 by 1991.

Worldwide, however, measles still kills 900,000 and tuberculosis 500,000. In Africa alone, 1 million die each year of malaria. In the United States, heart disease kills 950,000 and cancer 500,000.

AIDS doesn’t compare with the Black Death (bubonic plague) of the 14th Century that wiped out more than 60 million Europeans, says Discover. Historically, it’s closer to TB, whose victims also included highly visible artists like Chopin, Keats and Chekhov, and which was responsible for 20%-25% of all deaths in the industrial world in the 1800s.

It’s “clear that for now the hysteria over (AIDS) has little to do with its death toll,” says Discover. What AIDS has in common with the Black Death is the certainty of death for its victims. AIDS “seems shattering to us,” concludes Discover, because we’ve come to think we could prevent any infectious disease, “but to those who have never been freed of humanity’s other scourges, it’s just another deadly affliction.”

The Last Laugh

Political writer Fred Barnes, a familiar face on the Sunday morning TV political talk show circuit, makes the interesting case in The New Republic that Gen. William Westmoreland may have gotten the last laugh on CBS after all.

Westmoreland didn’t win his $120-million libel suit over a 1982 CBS News documentary that said he’d fudged Vietnam battle statistics for political reasons. But the general’s trial, Barnes says, started a five-year series of events (starting with bad publicity in TV Guide and elsewhere that raised charges of sloppy editorial practices and a liberal bias at CBS and ending with takeover attempts by conservative Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and Atlantan Ted Turner) that hastened the network’s slow decline and eventually drove it to seek financial help from Loews Corp. chairman Laurence Tisch.

Ironically, Tisch--the white knight who’d saved CBS from being taken over--soon became CBS’ chief executive officer and chief cost-cutter. His blade recently hacked 10% off the budget of CBS News and drove Dan Rather to write an anti-Tisch Op-Ed piece for the New York Times. At once-proud CBS, says Barnes, “the arrogance, the swagger, was gone. Call it Westmoreland’s revenge.”

New-Born Magazines

No one publicizes the annual death rate of magazines, but about 100 new periodicals such as Arrival are born each year. The Berkeley-based quarterly identifies itself as “A Lively Venture in Politics, Literature and the Arts.” New Yorker magazine movie critic and interview subject Pauline Kael (who says she’s generally scandalized at the movie critics on TV and has “yet to hear one of them sound even half-way like a critic”) graces the premiere cover. Inside are an interview with Art Spiegelman, the creator of “Maus,” the prize-winning comic book about Jews in Nazi Germany, three “urban essays” by welfare mothers, reprints from books and magazines like Bomb and the Realist and the artful news photos of Fred Comegy, the 1985 Newspaper Photographer of the Year.

Parents, Parenting, Mothering and Child magazines already are among us. Now, from the people who publish Better Homes and Gardens, comes Grandparents, which hopes to appeal to America’s 49 million grandparents, our richest and fastest-growing age group. The spring issue, first of two planned for 1987, includes articles on the legal rights of grandparents, how to pick out the right toy for the new grandchild, plus health and fitness tips and retirement advice.

Reflecting (on the Memories of War) of Chanhassen, Minn. (Box 234, Zip Code: 55317), asks readers to submit their war memories--direct or indirect--for publication. The layout is high school-year-book plain. The uncaptioned black-and-white photos of anonymous soldiers at war, all apparently Vietnam-era, are fuzzy and faded gray. Some of the simple poems and loving letters from 19-year-old soldiers or their parents are quite moving, however. So are the daily horrors in the diary of combat doctor John F. Stahler. War is not glorified in Reflecting. Nor is America trashed. With few resources and considerable passion, it achieves its goal to be “a wall to post our memories on.”

Bits and Pieces

Bill Mazeroski’s Baseball, “the baseball annual for the serious fan,” is crowded with the genre’s usual batch of last year’s stats, rehashes and preseason prognostications. It’s also exceptionally bright and breezily written, boldly illustrated and suffused with wit, sarcasm, and cutting humor. There’s an insider’s guide to how scouts find and judge young baseball talent plus a massive skill-by-skill, position-by-position ranking of baseball’s elite by top scouts. Best American League curve ball: Mike Witt of the Angels. Best trick pitch: Dodger Fernando Valenzuela’s modified screwball. . . . The first of Nat Hentoff’s friendly, two-part profile of New York’s Cardinal John J. O’Connor in the New Yorker traces his remarkable career and touches on some of the current burning issues of Catholicism, from the sharp decline in the number of priests to abortion and the Church’s proper role in politics. . . .Joe Bob Briggs, the infamous red-neck drive-in critic, drops his Oscar picks on unsuspecting readers in the April 6 US. (The winner for best supporting actress will be “Room With a View’s” Maggie Smith, he predicts, “ ‘cause she’s getting real old.”) In April’s Film Comment, a much higher-browed version of Joe Bob appears. He assembles and then critiques the theological content of the Top 10 most popular Biblical films of all time to “find what kind of God Hollywood worships.” He’s not too impressed. If they were books, “they’d be on the Pope’s forbidden list,” he says, before selecting “Ben-Hur” (1959) No. 1--mainly because director William Wyler didn’t try to make a religious movie.