Woody Allen, Stephen King, JK Rowking, Terry Gross, Arthur Krim

I've seen interviews with Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. They talk about how horrible their lives were before they got their books published. Both of them had periods of poverty, I guess. King was from an impoverished family. When he was in college, he wore overshoes---rubber galoshes you put on over your shoes---instead of actual shoes.

I don't know why he couldn't find a pair of shoes anywhere. I've bought shoes at Goodwill or at garage sales. I wore a pair of shoes a friend of mine found out in the snow. At least, he said that's where he found them. I figured the extreme cold would kill any bacteria.

But the thing is that both King and Rowling were working as teachers when they hit it big. They both had pretty good jobs, but they talk like they were living in abject poverty.

I've heard interviews with writers on Fresh Air on public radio and Terry Gross talks to writers as if they were going through some terrible torment working the jobs they did. One had translated books before writing his own. Another was in advertising. Again, pretty good jobs, and these people talk like they were working at a car wash (like I did) or washing dishes for a living.

Now I'm sitting here with Woody Allen's Interiors, playing on Netflix. I just watched a scene with one of the sisters riding in a taxi with her husband. He wants her to take the job at an ad agency. She feels it would be anonymous. She would be swallowed up. Her creativity would be stilted.

How easy did Woody Allen think it was to get a job in advertising? To anyone but a character in a Woody Allen movie or an idiot being interviewed by Terry Gross, it would be a great job.

In fact, Diane Keaton plays a poet in this thing. Would it really be a step down for a poet to get a job in advertising? I've knew a couple of very successful, prominent poets. One of them won a big literary award but they couldn't scrounge up bus fare to be present at the ceremony to pick it up.

Who was the beatnik who wrote the ad slogan for Raid, "Kills bugs dead"?

Interiors was this movie Woody Allen made for United Artists. Arthur Krim, the head of UA said that they were giving Allen the money to make to help him grow as an astist---they weren't expecting it to make any money off it.

When I was in high school, I had a teacher talk about this---how wonderful it was that a movie studio was helping Woody Allen in this way.

In fact, Krim was planning on leaving United Artists to start Orion Pictures. He wanted to take Woody Allen with him. So he spent United Artists' money for Woody Allen to make this terrible movie in order to curry favor with Allen so he could steal him away. Which he did.

Allen's "serious" movie are all like this. He gives people impressive sounding professions he knows nothing about, thinking this will give it some deep meaning. In September, one character is an astrophysicist for some reason.

It reminds me of The Cosby Show. Bill Cosby wanted it to be loosely based on his wealthy family, but he didn't want to make it about a celebrity like himself. How does he explain their wealth? He plays a doctor with a wife who's a lawyer. Neither one exhibits the slightest medical or legal knowledge. It's a stand-up comedian's idea of a professional couple.

And here we have Woody Allen's idea of artists and poets. He always has them talk about photography, something that doesn't require the sort of skill painting or sculpture or other art forms do.

I'm sitting here with the movie playing as I write this. My God it's bad!

Now the actress sister is complaining that she only works in television and they pass her over for all the "classy projects".