Woody Allen Stewart Konigsberg Chapter Summaries

Chapter1 Formative Years in the City: New York in Fantasy, New York in Reality

Woody Allen, born Allan Stewart Konigsberg on December 1, 1935, and raised in a middle class Jewish neighborhood from Flatbush to Brooklyn, often fantasized Manhattan in his childhood as a place of infinite possibility and grandeur with all its sophisticated people dancing and socializing in duplex penthouses and fancy nightclubs. As he narrates in Radio Days (1987): “My most vivid memory connected with an old radio song I associate with the time that Aunt Bea and her then-boyfriend Chester took me into New York to the movies. It was the first time I'd ever seen the Radio City Music Hall and it was like entering heaven. I just never saw anything so beautiful in my

At the age of 17, Allen was already making more money than his parents combined by writing gags for newspaper columnists. Two years later, his natural genius for jokes got him invited to join the NBC Writer's Development Program. And soon after that, he began writing scripts for Caesar's Hour (1954–1957) and was earning $1,500 a week. Thus from very early on in his life, money has never been an issue for Allen, which helps explain why his cinematic evocation of New York is limited to an upper-middle class Manhattan society that mainly consists of writers, journalists and academics, upon whom financial worries never intrude. The loss, loneliness and anguish that his characters suffer from are in essence existential: they are upset not because they have to struggle to survive; quite the reverse, they survive to struggle. The one they are

The great formative experience of his life growing up in a brutally thuggish environment has an enormous influence on his cinema. At the opening scene of GoodFellas (1990), Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) narrates in a voice-over: “For as long as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster. To me that was better than being president of the United States. To be a gangster was to own the world,” which, indeed, is also Scorsese’s memory: an asthmatic kid who could not play sports like his peers, Scorsese would often observe the hustle and bustle of street gangs with his nose pressed against a window of his house and envy with awe the swagger of the low-level wise guys who got girls, cars and money but never even one ticket from the police. Fortunately, Scorsese did not become a gangster: his parents and older brother often took him to movie theatres when he was a little kid, which helped him develop a passion for films and soon enough, make his name in the who’s who of cinema