Duh, Woody Allen has been ‘obsessed with teenage girls’ throughout his career

'Untitled Woody Allen Project' filming in New York

The Washington Post published an interesting piece in their “Outlook” section this week. The piece is by writer Richard Morgan, and it’s called “I read decades of Woody Allen’s private notes. He’s obsessed with teenage girls.” Morgan was – he says – the first person to request and read all of Woody Allen’s notes, archives and papers, which are currently housed at Princeton University. Woody began housing his written archives at Princeton in 1980, and they include script notes, short stories, half-written outlines and character sketches and more. The through-line for “The Woody Papers” is pretty simple, Morgan says: he’s obsessed with teenage girls. Which is something we’ve known for a long time, but good God. You can read the full WaPo piece here.

Woody Allen is making a new movie. Just kidding: He doesn’t make new movies. What he’s editing now, “A Rainy Day in New York,” about a college-age love triangle, could, like any of his movies, instead be titled “A Woman Gets Objectified by a Man.” This, in his view, is the pinnacle of art, its truest calling and highest purpose. Especially when it involves young women who are compelled to lackluster men merely by the gravity of the men’s obsession.

I know this because I’ve seen his whole career up close — going through all of his drafts and scribblings, his psychological and physical cutting-room floor that exists in the 56-box, 57-year personal archives he has been curating since 1980 at Princeton University (which he did not attend). According to the staff at Firestone Library’s rare-books wing, I’m the first person to read Allen’s collection — the Woody Papers — from cover to cover, and from the very beginning to the very end, Allen, quite simply, drips with repetitious misogyny. Allen, who has been nominated for 24 Oscars, never needed ideas besides the lecherous man and his beautiful conquest — a concept around which he has made films about Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Manhattan, journalism, time travel, communist revolution, murder, writing novels, Thanksgiving dinner, Hollywood and many other things — because that one idea bore so much fruit for his career.

Allen’s archive is a garden of earthly deletes — decades of notes and stories and sketches that the prolific filmmaker exiled, for whatever reason, to the shadowlands in between whole-hearted commitment and half-hearted possession. His screenplays are often Freudian, and they generally feature him (or some avatar for him) sticking almost religiously to a formula: A relationship on the brink of failure is thrown into chaos by the introduction of a compelling outsider, almost always a young woman. Sometimes, this produces a gem, such as “Match Point.” Often it does not. Ellen Page, featured in 2012’s “To Rome With Love,” called working with Allen “the biggest regret of my career.”

Allen’s work is flatly boorish. Running through all of the boxes is an insistent, vivid obsession with young women and girls: There’s the “wealthy, educated, respected” male character in one short story (“By Destiny Denied: Incident at Entwhistle’s”) who lives with a 21-year-old “Indian” woman. First, Allen’s revisions reduce her to 18, then double down, literally, and turn her into two 18-year-olds. There’s the 16-year-old in an unmade television pitch described as “a flashy sexy blonde in a flaming red low cut evening gown with a long slit up the side.” There’s the 17-year-old girl in another short story, “Consider Kaplan,” whose 53-year-old neighbor falls in love with her as the two share a silent, one-floor-long elevator ride in their Park Avenue co-op. There’s the female college student in “Rainy Day” who “should not be 20 or 21, sounds more like 18 — or even 17 — but 18 seems better.” That script includes a male college student but gives no description of his age. Another of Allen’s male characters, in a draft of a 1977 New Yorker story called “The Kugelmass Episode,” is a 45-year-old fascinated by “coeds” at City College of New York. In the margin next to this character’s dialogue, Allen wrote, then crossed out, “c’est moi” — it’s me.

[From The Washington Post]

It does feel like The Emperor’s New Clothes, right? It’s something we’ve known about Woody Allen for many, many years. He tends to make the same movie, over and over. He wants to work with the youngest actresses. He’s obsessed with very young women and girls. There’s the criminal/legal aspect of this, where Woody can’t help revealing his modus operandi as a predator through his art. Then there’s the art-criticism take too, which is that Woody Allen’s art is two-dimensional and he exhausted his schtick many years ago.

Filming of Woody Allen's new untitled movie in New York City

Photos courtesy of WENN.

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66 Responses to “Duh, Woody Allen has been ‘obsessed with teenage girls’ throughout his career”

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  1. Lee says:

    On a side note, Dylan Farrow called out Blake Lively and many other actors/actresses who are speaking against harassment but gladly worked with Allen:
    https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/109038476.html

    • Nicole says:

      Good. I hope she never lets up

    • Erinn says:

      I remember it being covered on here a few weeks ago that she was doing that. I wish she’d start swinging harder at all the men who work with him too, though. But I suppose she’s entitled to feel however she feels with all that happened to her – and maybe feels more betrayed by women in this circumstance.

      • Sky says:

        @ERINN

        She has, this isn’t the first time she publicly called out celebrities who have work with him

      • Mia says:

        I really don’t understand how she should not call out women who uphold patriarchy. Women like this are patriarchical adjacent when they go out of their way to keep upholding the system. They only care about how they or others like them personally benefit in the system

        It is the exact same as some minority groups who are white adjacent in white supremacy. Yes they may be oppressed but their oppression does not stop them from stepping on those below them to ensure they hold onto whatever little power they have. And I would call those people out and often do.

        Women who support systems that oppress them need to be talked about too.

    • Jordan says:

      It’s disgusting that it’s been known and normal for so long. The thought that these men have that there’s nothing wrong. I can’t wait for the revolution to fully begin, outside of Hollywood.

  2. Lahdidahbaby says:

    Woody’s got pedo tendencies?!? NO, how can this be? He has always seemed so wholesome. Just ask his daughterwife, Soon-yi.

  3. BaBaDook says:

    Quelle suprise.

  4. Surely Wolfbeak says:

    Guys, someone just told me that water is wet. It’s going to take me a while to process this.

  5. QueenB says:

    Can someone look into if Michael Bay likes explosions?

    • Hoopjumper says:

      I feel like Wes Anderson has this thing with aesthetics…

    • lower-case deb says:

      can’t help but segue here: Every Frame a Painting channel on youtube made a great dissection of Bay-hem. although it stopped short at explosion and did not cross to the women-exploitation/objectification.

      but to be fair to the channel (which is always interesting even when he’s only talking about chairs) it is discussed from the point of view of the channel owner’s real life work as a cutting room editor.

    • I Choose Me says:

      LMAO.

  6. tegteg says:

    BREAKING NEWS: water is wet.

  7. cleveland girl says:

    Anyone who saw “Manhattan” back in the 70s already knew this

    • Boxy Lady says:

      Amen.

    • anon14 says:

      Yes. And that movie received a lot of critical acclaim when it was released. I saw the film as a teen and I remember thinking the film’s premise of a relationship between a middle-aged man (played by WA of course) and a teenager (Mariel Hemingway) was more than a little skeevy.

  8. AnnaKist says:

    Wow. You don’t say…

  9. Myhairisfullofsecrets says:

    It’s the shock heard ‘round the world.

  10. Anonymouse says:

    As Phoebe from Friends would say:

    “This is SHOCKINGLY NEW INFORMATION!!!!!”

    Not so much.

  11. Lindy says:

    Unshocking. And so vile. He’s like a fanfic writer who puts himself in every story as the most important character. Also, I’m a Princeton alum and I’m skeeved out and annoyed that we’re housing his archives. Why? I mean… Can they not go to NYU or Columbia or something? I associate Allen with NYC so it’s bizarre that he’s got his papers lodged at Princeton.

  12. EOA says:

    While this is of course no surprise, I am still glad he wrote this piece. So many of Allen’s apologists just want to ignore the messages in his work, and it’s nice to see someone acknowledging them rather than just lionizing him as a genius.

    • Wisca says:

      I agree; it was a really strong, well-researched piece.

    • ira says:

      Please anyone explain to me why Woody Allen is considered as genius?

      • ParlerBleu says:

        white supremacy + patriarchy + one or two clever lines of dialogue in a career spanning half a century = mediocre, mentally disturbed molester Woody Allen is considered a genius

  13. Michelle says:

    The guy married his & mia’s daughter for God’s sake, you know what he is, yet they still line up to work with him.

    • Mia4s says:

      Sorry, small point but it’s a pet peeve. She was not his daughter, her father was and is Andre Previn. Divorce does not undo adoption. Again sorry, but I cannot stand when people insist on calling her his daughter, everything’s sketchy enough without having to do that and the dismissiveness it implies about adoption.

      • TrixC says:

        His stepdaughter then. Does that make it any better? Barely.

      • Redgrl says:

        He was her mother’s spouse. Her step father. Don’t know about US law, but in Canada that puts him, in criminal law, in a position of trust & authority to her while she was under 18. . As an adult, morally , it is a boundary that should never be crossed. He began a relationship with Mia Farrow when Soon-Yi was nine years old. Nine! He was a father figure to her and this was a massive, egregious exercise in grooming a vulnerable child to whom he owed a parental role. I prosecute these guys for a living – and I will never ever watch a Woody Allen movie.

      • Casey__. says:

        It’s kind of creepy but sometimes in these Woody threads, there are a couple apologists for Woody Allen, spinning themselves into the core of the earth to make him sound not so creepy and pedo-incestuous. I’ve long suspected these apologists were close to him, actually knew him. Maybe were/are in his immediate family.

        Anyhoo, just musing…

        I’d like to address @mia4s — how do you ‘get’ that people are being dismissive of her adoption by Previn? The fact of the matter is most people are unaware of it or consider it irrelevant to the topic at hand. Previn was busy living on the west coast while Mia had custody of all of her children, and was in a very high profile relationship with Allen on the East coast from the time Soon Yi was 9yrs old. For the next decade, Allen was the male parental figure in those kids lives, as he was with her mother and proceeded to have a biological child and adopt two children with Mia – those children of Woody’s (Dylan, Moses and Satchel or Ronan) were Soon yi’s siblings, her brothers and sister.

  14. DiligentDiva says:

    Wait a man who had nude photos of a 16 year old was obsessed with teenage girls?????

    I mean really we already knew this, we’ve known for decades now that Allen is a p3do. Nothing new here. I hope more of his victims (cause god knows there are more) come forward. I also hope that Soon Yi wakes up one day, realizes she’s been groomed and manipulated by this man, takes her children and runs as far away as she can.

  15. Seraphina says:

    This really angers me. We all knew this. Every one here has posted the same and now due all that is being called out THIS comes out. Give me a break. This should have been dealt with long ago. Just another powerful white male who was allowed to do as he pleases. and I’ve tried to watch his movies so I could see what all the hype was about, they suck.

    • DiligentDiva says:

      I feel you, I’m happy it’s finally happening but we already knew this. To me this is why the #metoo coming from celebs feels fake. They’ve known about this sh!t for years, we all have. They should have cleaned up there house years ago, but decided to wait till now after they’ve been forced too.

      • Sky says:

        Yes they also knew about Roman Polaski and Terry Richerson. This is not a Harvey situation, Allen, Roman and Terry sexual assaults have been out there for years with victims publicly coming forward. There is no way in hell any of them can claim to be ignorant, they knew they didn’t give a sh*t because if “art”.

  16. Nancy says:

    Pedophile is the more appropriate word than obsession. You don’t take nudes of a girl you are raising as your daughter and display them on a mantle to be found by your partner and allegedly have inappropriate touching of another daughter without,…..I don’t understand how this little perv who destroyed so many lives is revered by so many in his vocation. What a wicked evil POS.

    • TrixC says:

      Paedophilia is a sexual interest in pre-pubescent children, not teenagers. Let’s not muddy the waters. Woody is a disgusting pervert but I haven’t seen any evidence he’s a paedophile.

      • Erinn says:

        Dylan was pre-pubescent.

      • Redgrl says:

        @trixc – re his obsession with young teenagers – he may be a hebephile – a sexual interest/attraction in pubescent but young teenage girls. But @erinn raises a good point that Dylan was prepubescent- so he may be both…

      • Casey__. says:

        Dylan was a 7yr old child – please get your facts straight @TrixC, thanks.
        If true, and I believe Dylan…that makes him a p3do. Also he’s known Soon Yi since she was 9yrs old. I dont believe the p0rn pics he took of her at 16 were his first sexual contact with her.

  17. Jayna says:

    Yay, Washington Post.

  18. Margo S. says:

    I just read the full Washington Post article. I am CRINGING. He needs to stop. Actors need to stop working with him. And all the ones that do continue to work with him need to be called out and shammed.

  19. Va Va Kaboom says:

    “Science has failed us. True, it has conquered many diseases, broken the genetic code, and even placed human beings on the Moon. And yet when a man of eighty is left in a room with two eighteen year old cocktail waitresses, nothing happens.” What the actual f***?

    Nevermind his easy dismissal of almost godlike scientific advancements, what problem exactly does he wish science could solve? Does he assume the only barrier to “something happening in that room” is the man’s impotence? Even if the 80yr old is mainlining Viagra nothing’s going to happen because teenagers aren’t attracted to octogenarians!!!! Science hasn’t failed you a******, reality has!

    • I Choose Me says:

      Jaysus that quote.

      Reason 93568755 why this man is disturbed and should NOT be a Hollywood icon.

  20. minx says:

    He is beyond revolting.

  21. Lyka says:

    He’ll always have his apologists because Soon Yi says publicly that their relationship was consensual and because he’s never been convicted of a crime. There are some lifelong New Yorkers who have been influenced so deeply by Allen’s ethos, they’ll just stick their fingers in their ears and await his death before they can more freely laud the complicated, controversial, significance of his body of work on cinema (or something like that).

    This airing of your perversions through your art is very Louis C.K. to me, and it’s just sickening and WRONG that we hand wave it away because the artist is considered too important to have to actually adhere to social mores, common sense, or human decency.

  22. Lila says:

    Woody Allen is more gross then I realized.

  23. lower-case deb says:

    that writer of WaPo has a stomach of steel and willpower of the mighty himalayas! to read through 56 boxes of those stuff…
    and sparing also a thought for their factcheckers and editors…

    .

    holy moly!

    then one on Abascal… for instance…

    if i were the one to do it Princeton would need a hazmat team to clean up that library wing. revolting man.

    and of course i made the mistake of reading the comment section. the apologists are coming in droves like the plague!

  24. Mari says:

    Woody is disgusting. Hollywood’s continued support of him is even more disgusting. But here’s the catch. WE pay Hollywood. That’s right. We, the movie goers, the general public who happily shell out $20s from our wallets to watch their films, are the ones who let this barbaric trend continue. All we have to do is stop. Stop going to the movies. Stop renting the movies from Redbox or wherever. Stop paying their salaries. I wish someone would put together a comprehensive list of anyone and everyone who has supported this type of predatory behavior. The public should blacklist them. WE have the power to actually do something. Hollywood may seem far away for most, but truthfully it’s not. It’s right here in our own homes. We can and we should make a uniformed stand that we’ve had enough.

    • Regina Falangie says:

      100% yes!!!!!! Mari is right!!!!

    • minx says:

      I’ve done that with Allen’s movies since 1992, when the whole scandal broke. I haven’t spent a dime on his films or even watched anything of his on tv. It’s mostly because he’s a disgusting, lying pedophile, but also because, as said in the post, he makes the same movie over and over again. His characters exist in a weird, hermetically sealed world that bears no resemblance to reality.

    • yikesyikesyikes says:

      as someone who has worked in indie theatres where it shows all those art house/foreign/small features…and woody allen everytime it comes out….

      its the old people. old people LOVE WOODY ALLEN. when midnight in paris came out, the line was around the block, 70 or 80-something year old women were physically fighting after one thought the other & her husband cut her and her husband in line. they were the rudest human beings I’ve ever encountered – they would make a group of 10 year old boys loaded up with sugar look civil in comparison.

      I just wish we wouldnt have to wait for that whole generation to shuffle off their mortal coil to be rid of Allen’s popularity, you know?

      also, this WaPo writer with the line, “Allen’s archive is a garden of earthly deletes”

      DAMN THATS GOOD. thats good writing mhmmm.

      • I Choose Me says:

        “Allen’s archive is a garden of earthly deletes”

        Yes that line struck me as well. Just those eight words perfectly encapsulate the writer’s clear contempt for Allen and his ‘genius’.

  25. Veronica says:

    This, to me, has always been the problem with applying the “art over person” approach to Woody Allen. The problem – beyond the fact that he’s really not that talented to begin with – is that he doesn’t separate his person from his art. It’s his own gross, misogynist story shown over and over again, rubbing it all in our faces that he got away with abusing his own stepdaughter and still found success.

  26. SM says:

    I just vomited in my mouth a little bit. But that first paragraph is so on point about him always making an atempt at the same movie. I keep saying that even of he was not a perv, I still can’t understand why anyone would want to work with him and would consider him genious. There are so many artists making real interesting things and everyone just keep prasing him as the ARTIST.

  27. I Choose Me says:

    But he’s just so empowering to women you guys.

    Side-eye to Winslet and Lively forever for those comments, which I’m not convinced either of them believes.

  28. Amie says:

    – Sometimes Allen is in his work, but even when he isn’t, his characters are often obvious stand-ins. In a story that takes place wholly in the mind of a man named Moses Rifkin, he writes: “Unlike the Jewish girl — the shiksa is not guilt-ridden — not a complainer — she is abandoned, fun-loving, and above all promiscuous. The shiksa will perform any sex act.” –

    So in Allen’s mind, Shiksas (a term for non-Jewish females) are all prostitutes.

    This is quite an admission.

    Edit: I originally read the quote in context with the whole article. In isolation, it can be taken to mean just sex-positive. However, in tone with the general attitude he displays toward women, I suspect it’s something darker.