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“Hollywood Ending” Cast Interview

Woody Allen once insisted, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”


If that’s so, Hollywood Ending, his latest effort, should be raking in cash.


Why? Because the other day, Manhattan’s Drake Hotel was in celebrity overdrive. A very pregnant Tea Leoni and a very tan, tight-skinned George Hamilton were scurrying one way. Butch Treat Williams and director-turned-actor Mark Rydell stalked another. Then Woody Allen, with a very black pair of eyeglass frames resting on his noble nose, appeared looking a bit puzzled not far from where all of Will and Grace‘s 5’8″ Debra Messing in very tight jeans was making an entrance.


Yes, these stars all showed up to promote Hollywood Ending, a frantic farce about down-and-out, neurotic Val Waxman (Allen). This washed-up director gets his last chance to helm a big picture thanks to the shenanigans of his ex-wife (Leoni) who left Val for the bed of a handsome studio head (Williams). All goes well until the first day of shooting when Val comes down with psychosomatic blindness and has to direct the whole film without being able to see a thing.


(Anyone who’s watched the recent The Scorpion King or The Mothman Prophecies will note that having vision doesn’t exactly help some directors, either.)

Messing who plays Lori, Waxman’s girlfriend who walks around with ankle weights, immediately shared, “I guess if you have to characterize her, you would say she’s more of a ditz than a bimbo because I don’t think she has any
malice or that she is necessarily using her body to get ahead. She just has a very simple view of the world and about her place in the world. She’s sure she’s going to be the next Julia Roberts.”


Messing’s own world view is a bit more complex. Acting-wise, she wouldn’t mind being the next Diane Keaton. Politically, she’s an activist.


“It’s very important to me to speak out,” Messing noted about all her recent public service announcements for gay and other causes. “I mean it’s a privilege. Will & Grace has given me the opportunity to do these things just by virtue of the nature of what our show is about, and I have so many gay friends. I also had very important gay teachers who either have past away from AIDS or who have had horrible acts of prejudice committed against them.


“Plus my parents throughout my entire life,” she continued, “have been deeply involved

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in giving back. Their motto: ‘Do what you can to help if you are lucky enough to be able to help in anyway that you can.’ ”


Taking a breath, Messing added, “I mean it can’t be all about me me me me me me all the time.”

Don’t tell the dapper George Hamilton that.


“You know, I sold out so long ago, I wouldn’t know how not to sell out now,” he laughed graciously. “To me, it’s an extension of my life style where I can be just more me and get paid for it. Where in the world is a better life than
that?”


As for a book on his long career and love life and the dating of President Johnson’s daughter, “There was a time a star could make out like a bandit and gotten a lot of money for his tales,” he smiles. “But unfortunately book
companies don’t do it any more, and I would never tell the stories that I know for the money they’re paying. They would have to pay a lot more money, and then I’d be happy to sell out.”


As for playing a studio executive for Mr. Allen: “Woody’s like a man trying to handle a soufflé. One thing I learned was to surrender.” Surrender to a soufflé?


As for the Oscar-nominated director of On Golden Pond and The Rose, how did he get to play the part of Val’s agent? “Woody called me,” Mr. Rydell laughs. “He said, ‘I have a great part for you. . . .ah. . .ah . . .ah.’ I didn’t ask him, ‘Why me?’ No. No. No. When Woody calls you, you do it.”


Leoni agreed, then reminisced about when she first saw Woody: “I was 12 years old and walking my dog. I used to see him a lot. I think he was the most special star I had ever seen in New York. He was always in his Army jacket. I could spot him on 77th Street really easily. I never thought I’d be in a picture with him.”


But now Téa was, and she was playing his love interest. Was that difficult? “Oh, no,” she replied. “It’s quite easy. I’m very attracted to very smart, funny, talented men, and he is all that. Then he’s a musician to boot, and you know how we girls go for musicians.” Then she took a deep breath, laughed, and apologized for losing her focus. “Oh, sorry. Golly, the pregnancy’s just rearing its awful little head.” She has three weeks to go.

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And Woody has several weeks to discover if Hollywood Ending will find a huge audience or just please his regular fanbase. But he’s not worried. He’s not even sure who is in his fanbase.


“I haven’t thought about it because I know that it’s very small,” he noted. “I don’t know who it is. And no film company’s ever been able to figure out who it is with all their marketing research and testing. It’s not young
people. It’s not baby boomers. It’s not New Yorkers necessarily. It’s not Jews necessarily. It’s not mid-Westerners. There are no good clues to anything,” he said.

“I mean I’ll do very well inexplicably in Minnesota for some reason. I don’t know why, and not do well in Chicago. Nobody’s ever been able to figure it out. The one constant for me has been Europe. Europe, again inexplicably, embraced my films years ago and continues to.

“What confounds me,” he continued, “is why I don’t do better because I feel my films are accessible. They’re not all great but some of them are as good as other films out there that do much better that are no better than mine. And they do much better. So I’ve never been able to figure out why I always have had a very, very small audience.”


Well, maybe this Hollywood Ending will give Woody a different Hollywood ending. It deserves to.

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