Woody

Today is the birthday of filmmaker Allen Stewart Konigsberg, better known as Woody Allen (1935) (books by this author). He legally changed his name to "Heywood Allen" when he was 17, to pay homage to clarinetist Woody Herman. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and New York City often figures prominently in his movies. It's getting harder, and more expensive, to film on location there, so lately he's taken to setting his movies in Europe, but he always comes back to the city he sees through a romantic lens. He told USA Today: "Guys like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee depict New York very often very realistically. Very, very beautifully and very correctly. I don't. The New York I've shown over the years is the New York I got from Hollywood movies."

Though he's become a movie icon, he consistently refuses to appear at the Academy Awards. He's always claimed that the ceremony conflicts with his standing gig playing jazz clarinet at Michael's Pub in New York, but he's also said, "The whole concept of awards is silly. I cannot abide by the judgment of other people, because if you accept it when they say you deserve an award, then you have to accept it when they say you don't." He made one exception, showing up unannounced at the 2002 ceremony; he made a brief speech asking filmmakers to continue to make movies in New York City in spite of the attacks of September 11, 2001. "I didn't have to present anything," he explained backstage. "I didn't have to accept anything. I just had to talk about New York City."

He wrote in New York Magazine: "I still fantasize that a million interesting stories are occurring in those apartments on Fifth Avenue and in those redbrick houses on Bank Street and on Central Park West. You know, it's still so vibrant that I've never felt any diminution of intensity for the city. It's always Manhattan, this little, compact island, where everything is going on. The cosmetics have changed. You know, it's a computer world now, and terminology changes, and styles of psychotherapy changed to a degree, and the protocols of relationships go in and out. But the fundamentals have not changed."