Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham - Patrick McGilligan

Written by Patrick McGilligan
Read by Seth Lews
Format: MP3
Unabridged

Patrick McGilligan, one of America’s foremost film biographers—author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane, Funny Man: Mel Brooks, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light and many others—returns with Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham, the definitive biography of a towering but deeply controversial American filmmaker.

McGilligan charts Allen’s rise: the misbegotten Brooklyn childhood, early break writing for Your Show of Shows, his stand-up, his New Yorker stories and Broadway plays, culminating in his breakthrough films like Annie Hall. But he does more than celebrate: this is a rigorous, even-handed accounting of Allen’s darker chapters—his fraught relationships, scandals, and especially the allegations surrounding his relationship with Mia Farrow, his daughter Dylan, and his marriage to Farrow’s adopted child, Soon-Yi Previn.

Drawing on exhaustive new research—archival work, court and media records, critical interviews—McGilligan weaves together Allen’s creative signature with the complexity of his personal life. The result is a biography that neither mythologises nor demonises, but insists that no contemporary American filmmaker has matched Allen’s influence, productivity, or cultural footprint.

___________________

Shoutouts to the Woody Allen Pages Website, The Woody Allen Subreddit & The Woody Allen Retrospective Podcast!