Woody Allen

All these years I've defended Woody Allen. And I was right---he didn't molest Dylan and he's been married to Soon-yi for so long that it was obviously a wise move on both their parts.

But now a 59-year-old former teen model, Christina Engelhardt, claims that she dated him long ago when she was sixteen and he was forty-one. They were together for eight years, she said, so I don't know how old she was when she did this, but she said that they had "threesomes" with Mia Farrow. If she was sixteen when they did that, Mia Farrow was guilty of a monstrous crime herself.

Remember the shame Woody Allen's character felt in Manhattan when his friends were reading his ex-wife's tell-all book which revealed they had three-ways?

We already knew about Allen's other girlfriend back then, Stacey Nelkin, the one who was 17. He acknowledged that. Seventeen is the age of consent in New York.

Would it have killed Allen to make Muriel Hemingway's character 19 or 20 in Manhattan? Make her a college girl? His dating her would have been shameful but not so monstrous.

I always thought that Allen had painted himself into a corner. As long as he was with Mia Farrow, he had to put her in every single one of his movies. He said himself that it had gone on too long. The only way to end it was to destroy their relationship. Which is too bad because they were made for each other, a couple of degenerates.

For Soon-yi, Woody was her ticket out of Mia Farrow's abusive household. For Woody, Soon-yi removed that millstone from around his neck.

I hope Allen's career continues. America needs a director who'll continue working into his 90's and he's our best hope.

Allen's movies are low budget by Hollywood standards but they still cost way too much. As it is now, he gets paid for writing and directing his movies whether they make any money or not. Movies cost less to film in Europe---Call Me By Your Name, for example, cost $3.5 million. He can't make a movie that cheap?

Allen is rich enough that he can make a movie a year for as long as he wants. He may not get the stars he wants but the world's full of actors. Orson Welles bankrolled his own movies. It would probably be good for him to put some thought into profitability for a change. As it is, most of his movies lose money or make so little that the idea that anyone could "bring him down" is absurd.