Rating: 
Summary: Delightful, but guilty pleasure
Review: With 'The Unruly Life of Woody Allen', Marion Meade has written a delightful, gossipy life story of the irreplacable New York artist. Anyone who has seen his work knows the basic gist of the story: raised in Flatbush during the '40s, a dropout of NYU film school, a self-made auteur by his late 20s. A filmmaker whose work manages to nostalgize, lampoon, and transcend the New York Jewish intellectual scene.Who is the man behind all this? Marion Meade supplies a lot of details about his life without ever really getting to the heart of the man. I can't fault her for that, since I'm not sure any writer could understand someone at once so sentimental and mean spirited, so artistic and tired, so trailblazing and so old fashioned. Why do we need to? His films speak for himself, and his life speaks for itself. We don't need to like or understand the man to be entertained by his movies. This book is a gossipy, guilty pleasure. It will hold the interest of anyone curious about what the Woodman eats for breakfast, which co-stars are still his friends, what a declining audience has done to his career. The Mia Farrow fiasco is covered in some detail -- probably a little too much time in spent on the custody trial and subsequent legal problems with his film production company. The book covers no new ground but does provide a lot of new details. I enjoyed it and would recommend it to fans.
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