Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“I’ve known Woody Allen for 46 years,” Eric Lax told an attentive audience at the Georgetown home of Sheila and Ed Weidenfeld where he was being celebrated for his latest tome Start to Finish. “This is not a relationship that I ever expected to last so long. Things just sort of kept happening. And so now, after 46 years and 44 movies that I’ve seen him put together, we’re still talking.”
Ed and Sheila Weidenfeld with Eric Lax
About the book: A cinephile’s dream: the chance to follow legendary director Woody Allen throughout the creation of a film–from inception to premiere–and to enjoy his reflections on some of the finest artists in the history of cinema.
Eric Lax has been with Woody Allen almost every step of the way. He chronicled Allen’s transformation from stand-up comedian to filmmaker in On Being Funny (1975). His international best seller, Woody Allen: A Biography (1991), was a portrait of a director hitting his stride. Conversations with Woody Allen comprised interviews that illustrated Allen’s evolution from 1971 to 2008. Now, Lax invites us onto the set–and even further behind the scenes–of Allen’s Irrational Man, which was released in 2015, and starred Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone. Revealing the intimate details of Allen’s film-making process, Lax shows us the screenplay being shaped, the scenes being prepared, the actors, cinematographers, other crew members, the editors, all engaged in their work. We hear Allen’s colleagues speak candidly about working with him, and Allen speaking with equal openness about his lifetime’s work. An unprecedented revelation of one of the foremost filmmakers of our time, Start to Finish is sure to delight not only movie buffs and Allen fans, but everyone who has marveled at the seeming magic of the artistic process.
“It’s been a huge pleasure,” Lax added. “He’s a very different guy in person than the character he plays. Any great comic doesn’t necessarily create the character, the audience creates the character through what he does. So he’ll go see what an audience responds to when they’re doing their stand up, or when they’re making their film. And he’ll write more and more, to fit that. The character really came out of the appreciation of those who heard it through his standup and saw his films. Because the character we see in the film and the guy we see on the street wear exactly the same clothes, it’s very hard to realize that they’re quite different.”
Eric Lax with Karen Fawcett
This is the third time that Ed and Sheila have thrown a book party for the prolific author. “I now feel that a book of mine is not launched unless they’re bringing the champagne and the crowd.” Sheila, a television producer and the former Press Secretary to First Lady Betty Ford and Special Assistant to President Gerald Ford, is an author in her own right: “First Lady’s Lady,” a book about her experiences in the Ford White House.
