Woody Allen’s Cancellation Is a Crime Against Culture The great director made his 50th film far from Hollywood, which has unjustly shunned him. By Kyle Smith
In August 2017, a year after Prime Video aired Woody Allen’s comic miniseries “Crisis in Six Scenes,” the director signed a deal with Amazon Studios to produce his next four films for a reported minimum payment of $68 million. A few weeks later, allegations of sexual misconduct against Harvey Weinstein emerged and the #MeToo movement was born. In December, Mr. Allen’s adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times with the headline “Why Has the #MeToo Revolution Spared Woody Allen?”
Mr. Allen wasn’t spared much longer. Ms. Farrow’s op-ed accused Mr. Allen of molesting her in 1992, when she was 7—a charge that her mother, Mia Farrow, had raised at the time in a custody dispute with Mr. Allen. Authorities in two states thoroughly investigated, and no charges were filed against Mr. Allen. Child-abuse investigators at Yale-New Haven hospital reported that “it is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually abused by Mr. Allen.”
Yet a quarter-century later, Mr. Allen found himself an unperson. Though in the intervening decades he had worked with acclaimed actors at major movie studios, been nominated for Oscars and won one for writing “Midnight In Paris” (2011), he became a target of obloquy and outrage.
Several of Mr. Allen’s collaborators, including Kate Winslet, Colin Firth, Timothée Chalamet and Greta Gerwig, publicly turned against him. Others, such as Diane Keaton, Alec Baldwin and Scarlett Johansson, rallied to his defense. Amazon Studios canceled the deal with Mr. Allen, leading to a lawsuit that was settled out of court on terms that weren’t disclosed. Amazon Studios also declined to release to theaters the third film he had made for them, “A Rainy Day in New York” (2019).
In 2020 Mr. Allen’s son Ronan Farrow, whose reporting on Mr. Weinstein helped launch #MeToo, said he was severing ties with his publisher, Hachette Book Group, after it agreed to publish Mr. Allen’s memoir, “Apropos of Nothing.” Dozens of employees staged a walkout to pressure the company into dropping the book, which it did. It was later picked up by the much smaller Skyhorse Publishing, which has become something of a refuge for the canceled.
Mr. Allen has maintained his innocence, and key witnesses such as his adopted son, Moses Farrow, who was in the house when the sexual assault was alleged to have happened, have cast doubt on the version of events told by Ms. Farrow and her mother, Mia. Yet today it seems no major American movie studio, distributor or publisher will accept Mr. Allen’s work. His 50th film, “Coup de Chance”—which, like “Rifkin’s Festival” (2020), was financed with European backers—was released on the Continent last year but is coming out in the U.S. only now, through an obscure distributor called MPI Media Group.
Mr. Allen, 88, exists in a weird space: forgotten but not gone. The New Yorker magazine, where he placed dozens of short stories over nearly 50 years, last published him in 2013. When Mr. Allen had a new story ready last winter, he published it not in his longtime literary home or another big-budget magazine but a small arts-and-culture monthly, the New Criterion (for which I also write). “Coup de Chance,” which has almost no publicity machine behind it and is playing in only a handful of theaters, happens to be the finest work he has done in more than a decade. Few will see or even hear of it. It exists—but barely.
Mr. Allen is unlike many others accused in the #MeToo era. His alleged transgression was taken seriously and investigated by police. There exists a compelling counter-narrative that exonerates him. Yet popular culture’s mandarins have turned against him like the townspeople who form a bizarre hostility brigade tormenting the character he played in his marvelous Kafkaesque parable, “Shadows and Fog” (1991). He is a pariah in a situation that to him makes no sense.
Why, for instance, did Amazon find “A Rainy Day in New York” so repellent that it refused to release it—only later to boost the film by placing it among its Prime Video offerings? Why, asked the essayist Freddie de Boer, does Hollywood ostracize Mr. Allen yet treat Mike Tyson as a beloved kitsch figure? Mr. Tyson is invited to goof around on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, even though the former boxer is a convicted rapist who has admitted to hitting his ex-wife Robin Givens so hard that “she flew backwards, hitting every room in the apartment. . . . That was the best punch I’ve ever thrown in my entire life.” Why do people lump Mr. Allen together with Mr. Weinstein, whom a jury convicted of sexual crimes, and Roman Polanski, who pleaded guilty to one?
Mr. Allen may shrug and say he’ll keep doing what he does even if every company shuns him. But the cultural forces that condemned him ought to put down their pitchforks and torches. This great artist shouldn’t end his career in shadows and fog.
Mr. Smith is the Journal’s film critic.
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