Milwaukee Writer a National Leader in Movie Bios

It was Patrick McGilligan’s editor at HarperCollins who suggested he write a biography of Woody Allen.

McGilligan has written more than 20 books including acclaimed bios of actors like Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood, and directors like Alfred Hitchcock and George Cukor. He is no stranger to daunting tasks: the Hitchcock bio required him to discuss and analyze 53 films without bogging down the narrative. But Allen created even more films, plus plays and books and a career as a standup comedian.

“I thought it would be too daunting, too big of a job,” McGilligan says.

Not to mention that he’d also have to take on the controversy: the claims that Allen had sexually abused his adopted daughter Dylan.

“Do you think he molested his daughter?” his editor asked McGilligan.

“I don’t think so,” McGilligan answered. “But if I find he did it I will be the first person to say so.”

Actually he wouldn’t have been the first. Allen has by now faced many accusers though of a different sort: the claims often have a curious tone, as though located outside the world of evidence. And McGilligan is all about documentation. While many movie bio writers operate first as critics and secondly as writers, McGilligan reverses the order. He has done movie criticism and can be insightful in that regard, but what stands out about his books is the voluminous research.

These are not books based on access to the stars. For most of his books McGilligan hasn’t even interviewed his subject. He operates more like an investigative reporter who digs for every single nugget. Everything must be proven. The citations and notes sections of his book go on and on in small print. That approach has allowed him to take on someone like Hitchcock, about whom many books had already been written and come up with a completely new take. Today, his 2003 book is often called “the definitive biography of the Master of Suspense.”

And McGilligan does not shy from controversy. His 1991 biography of movie director George Cukor was the first to reveal the fact that the Hollywood director was gay, and discuss how that affected his work. It was chosen as one of the notable books of the year by the New York Times. His 1997 book on director Fritz Lang suggested he could have and probably did kill his first wife. That, too, became a Times notable book of the year.

Then there was his Clint Eastwood bio: it revealed that the actor and director actually lived at times in two households with two different women who bore his children. It described “a compulsive horndog with a preference for teenage girls; a vindictive sumbitch who routinely betrayed friends and colleagues, wives and lovers,” as one review put it.  The book penetrated the good-guy cover story Eastwood liked to tell, and protected by filing many lawsuits. That included a suit against McGilligan and his publisher, which decided not to publish the book.

But a British publisher was undaunted and the book was released in 1999. Eastwood sued for $10 million and there was an out-of-court settlement. “I was not allowed to say I won the suit,” McGilligan notes, “but I wrote the press release for the settlement.” He made “some small changes” for the U.S. publication of the book in 2002, McGilligan adds, “but the old books without those changes were still allowed to be sold.”

McGilligan’s latest bio, released this year, and entitled “A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham: Woody Allen,” pulls no punches. The introduction to the book is radical and unlike any I’ve encountered, all in italics and taking us immediately inside the life, nay almost inside the mind of Allen, giving us a visceral sense of the gloomy descent of a once fabulously successful writer, director and actor. He is suffering “the living death of being declared an ‘unperson’ by the Woke Generation, the most militant of whose representatives do not care if the entertainer has ever been charged or convicted of a crime,” but “want him shunned, condemned, vilified, hounded to the grave,” McGilligan writes.

All of which might set the reader up for some kind of angry screed, but on the contrary, from chapter one on we get a wryly objective narrative of Allen’s life and it’s a great read. McGilligan can tell a good story and doesn’t let all that research get in the way of a well-structured, fast moving narrative. It’s like Allen’s “early funny movies,” which his fans were always clamoring for — it’s a fun and flavorful tale.

Allan Stewart Konigsberg was small, nebbish, a “middling” student at best whose talents were limited. His family wasn’t well off and moved a lot and his gun-toting father as “mob-adjacent,” as Allen once wrote and held various jobs, including taxi driver, and “mingled with equal affability with organized crime.” But Woody had an incredible knack for comedy. At 17, while a student at Brooklyn’s Midwood High in 1952, he adopted his professional name, and mailed his jokes to columnists like Earl Wilson, who needed the filler. Before long, Allen earned 75 cents for every joke they used.

His rise was meteoric: he was soon writing for TV and in 1958, TV legend Sid Caesar hired him to join his stable of writers for his ABC comedy series. The others were Mel Brooks, Mel Tolkin and Larry Gelbart. Allen’s salary was $88,000, the equivalent of $982,000 today. He was only 24.

From there he went on to become a standup comedian, actor, playwright, New Yorker comic essay writer and finally a movie director — all driven by his disciplined, almost obsessive work habits and hilarious sense of humor. Meanwhile the lousy student became a prolific reader of heavy literature and fan of serious arthouse films.

Alas, once we get to the breakup of Allen and his longtime romantic companion Mia Farrow, the fun ends and we get a long section detailing every accusation and ugly attack they level at each other. Neither comes off well.

McGilligan looks at every shred of evidence offered to prove Allen was a sexual predator. Indeed the LA Times review declared the book was not for Allen’s “haters or his super-fans,” but was an objective review of all the facts.

And “these are the facts,” as Hadley Freeman wrote in The Guardian in 2020:  “after Farrow alleged that Allen – never accused of any impropriety before or since – molested Dylan in her house in Connecticut, doctors examined her and found no physical evidence of abuse. Allen was then investigated by the Yale New Haven hospital’s sexual abuse clinic and New York City’s Child Welfare Administration. The former concluded: ‘It is our expert opinion that Dylan was not sexually molested by Mr Allen.’ The latter, after a 14-month investigation, wrote: ‘No credible evidence was found that the child named in this report has been abused or maltreated.’”

“I covered the Weinstein and Cosby cases,” Freeman wrote, “as well as many other stories about high-profile men either convicted or accused of sexual offenses: Michael Jackson, R Kelly, Jimmy Savile, Jeffrey Epstein, Larry Nassar. All of them were accused of attacking multiple victims; their pattern of predatory behavior spanned their lifetime. Allen was accused of one instance of molestation and not only was he not convicted, but he was never even charged.”

McGilligan reports all this and more, thoroughly detailing the campaign against Allen that arose (with no additional proof) after the MeToo movement, pushed by Dylan Farrow and her brother Ronan Farrow. Hollywood actors, actresses and directors have been challenged to denounce Allen and shamed if they do not. McGilligan compares it to the Hollywood blacklisting of the 1950s and makes a powerful case for this.

Interestingly, McGilligan says he has gotten no blowback from the Allen haters. He has by now built such a reputation as an accurate researcher that the Allen haters may prefer to ignore the book.

For those who are fans of Allen’s films, this is a must-read. And you can always skip the chapters covering “The Great Unpleasantness,” as columnist Liz Smith dubbed the Allen controversy. Though anyone who hasn’t made up their mind about the accusations or is willing to consider the facts could not find a more thorough job of reporting. This book, too, may ultimately be seen as the definitive biography of its subject.

You can find the book easily enough on Amazon or back your local bookstore while supporting a local if nationally known writer by buying it from Boswell Book Company.