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Remembering Siskel and Ebert’s great debate: Mel Brooks or Woody Allen?
Of the great debates in film history, a few dominate. How much of Citizen Kane did Orson Welles really write? Is the auteur a film’s true author? And, the one that will never be resolved, can we separate the art from the artist?
In 1980, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert devoted an episode of their PBS review series Sneak Previews to the following question: Who’s funnier, Mel Brooks or Woody Allen?
The camps fall out as one might expect. Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Chicago Sun Times, whose work spoke to the everyman, preferred Brooks.
“Mel Brooks satirizes old movies, he plays off of our own shared sense of movie history because we know these cliches and stereotypes as well as he does,” Ebert, who died in 2013, argued. “That’s part of the fun, we’re in on the joke.”
He laid out his evidence in the form of his favorite gags: A man punches a horse (Blazing Saddles); Gene Wilder gets smooshed in a revolving book case (Young Frankenstein); and Burt Reynolds is lathered up by Brooks, Marty Feldman and Dom DeLuise (Silent Movie).
Siskel, the stuffier, Ivy-educated writer for the Chicago Tribune, championed Allen’s films, praising the filmmaker’s perennial theme of “his difficulty, every man’s difficulty, in establishing a long-lasting relationship with a woman.” (Siskel died in 1999, the year of Sweet and Lowdown, Allen’s jazz-inflected riff on La Strada.)
He made the case that Allen’s oeuvre, from Take the Money and Run through to Annie Hall, showed a personal and artistic evolution. “Watch how he grows more competent as a lover, and as a filmmaker.”
It’s a kind of odd proposition for considering comedy, and, depending on your views of Allen, may give you pause today.
Yes, Alvin Starkwell’s reliance on voiceover to express his feelings for a love interest is different from Love and Death’s Boris, who is different from Alvy Singer and his assertive request that Annie Hall kiss him now to “get it over with and then we’ll go eat.”
The scenes Siskel curates by way of argument are not the funniest moments, but taken together they signal what is most unsettling in some of the films. That is to say, they are uncomfortable, or to borrow a term from Claire Dederer, “urpy,” because Allen casts himself as a mostly hapless lover, who only aspires to possess, in the words of his later character from Manhattan, where these problematic glimmers become plot, the “coiled sexual power of a jungle cat.”
1980 was an inflection point in the careers of both Brooks and Allen. Brooks, following the rave response to Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, had more measured — if not quite tepid — notices for Silent Movie and his Hitchcock sendup, High Anxiety.
Allen’s previous two films were Interiors, his attempt at a serious picture in the mode of Ingmar Bergman, and Manhattan.
Both Ebert and Siskel saw “danger signs” ahead in these artists’ filmographies.
Siskel thought Brooks was repeating himself and straying to a more niche mode of parody.
He was right, and after High Anxiety, Brooks could be said to have officially entered his flop era with History of the World Part I. Siskel also diagnosed a generally-agreed-upon development in the work to come: Brooks giving himself starring roles, and the proportional decline in quality corresponding to his screentime.
But it’s Ebert’s view of Allen that seems most prescient, however unwittingly.
Ebert likens Brooks and Allen to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. In Keaton he sees a man who remained true to himself and the persona he sought to perfect — this, one infers, is analogous to Brooks. In Chaplin, come The Great Dictator, there was a “creeping seriousness.”
I have to say, I stopped listening after “creep,” aware, as I am, that Chaplin, at age 54, married Oona O’Neill, a month after her 18th birthday.
Manhattan, and later Allen’s relationship with his now wife Soon-Yi Previn, echoes such an age gap. But Ebert’s issue with Manhattan, and he is not alone in this indulgence, isn’t with the film’s tacit approval of Isaac Davis’ relationship with a 17-year-old (played by a 16-year-old), it’s with its pretensions.
Out is Alvy Singer’s relatable, late-night campaign against a spider in his ex-girlfriend’s bathroom. In is black-and-white film stock and Isaac’s defense of Bergman as “the only genius in cinema today.”
“You can see Woody Allen there slipping away from his all-purpose comic persona that he developed in those other movies and into a character who might be a lot closer to life, but he’s also a lot less funny,” Ebert said.
Ebert’s forecast was astute. As Allen became ever more a caricature of himself, there have been both bright spots — Hannah and Her Sisters, Zelig — and diminishing returns — the run from, say, 2009 to the present, where actors including Larry David and Wallace Shawn have served as his surrogate.
Running through the discussion is a subtext of Jewish particularism. Allen’s voice is so personal, so dialed in to New York neuroses, that his departure to WASPs in Interiors sounded a symphony of false notes. In contrast is Mel Brooks, who brands his comedy not as Jewish, but “New York humor,” and whose main inspiration has always been the wider province of popular culture.
That Siskel, a Jew with a snobbish streak, should favor Allen and Ebert, a Catholic and the real film lover of the pair, Brooks, perhaps says it all.
But baked into everything is the unspoken question of legacy — who would fare better in the long-term. In a way it’s a tossup. So many of Brooks’ references were locked in place and time, even as they parodied older films. A young viewer today may need footnotes to get the joke behind the profusion of Johnsons (Howard, Olsen and Van) in Rock Ridge.
In this formulation, Allen skews (mostly) evergreen. Except when he doesn’t because of where the culture, and his reputation, is now.
For their closing arguments, Ebert and Siskel each selected a scene from their preferred filmmaker. One of them holds up today.
Ebert brought a scene from The Producers, where Leo Bloom has a meltdown over Max Bialystock’s suggestion they break the law. While this timid CPA is hyperventilating, Bialystock crosses the room to get him a glass of water — and douses him with it. Leo: “I’m hysterical and I’m wet.”
It’s timeless.
Siskel’s pick is from Annie Hall. It’s when Alvy Singer recalls his second-grade classroom.
“In 1942,” he says, “I had already discovered women,” a curious word choice for what follows. Alvy, 6, kisses a classmate (definitively a girl).
The girl cries out for the teacher, who scolds Alvy for his precocious sex drive. “6-year-old-boys don’t have girls on their minds.”
In comes the adult Alvy, cramped in a child-sized desk, to insist he had no latency period. He then gets the child actors to report on where they are a few decades later. The boys name their careers, and in one case, addictions. One girl, in glasses and a Peter Pan collar, simply says “I’m into leather.”
Is it funny? Such things are subjective, in the end. Given what we know now of Allen, the allegations of sexual abuse against him by his daughter Dylan Farrow (which he denies) and his proven and unrepentant association with Jeffrey Epstein, it’s harder to watch.
Without knowing it, Siskel chose the exact wrong clip.
As for Brooks, the baggage, and the ambition, may seem lesser, but in fact point to something unimpeachable.
“I think what Mel Brooks wants, when he walks past a theater that has one of his movies playing into it, is the sound of laughter coming from inside,” Ebert said. “That’s what I want when I go to a Brooks movie is to laugh. I can defend his career on that basis. That he wants to amuse me, that’s enough. I’m satisfied.”
To that, I say, Dayenu.
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Ari Emanuel has written a memoir and no one is safe — not even his brother
Roll the Calls: A Memoir
By Ari Emanuel
Knopf, 432 pages, $35
It must be exhausting to be super-agent Ari Emanuel: rising before dawn for a workout regimen, ingesting live worms to consume bacteria, and then placing hundreds of daily phone calls to clients and network honchos. It is, frankly, exhausting just to read about it, notwithstanding the clever, staccato narrative by (uncredited) ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer.
The point of it all, Emanuel keeps insisting in Roll the Calls, is not the dollars.
“Money isn’t the thing that makes me get up at 4:00 a.m.,” he says. “I’m just not sure yet what that thing is.”
Perpetually on the precipice of bankruptcy, he takes bold entrepreneurial risks to survive in an industry wracked by labor discontent, cutthroat infighting and technological change.
The goal, if there is one, seems to be simply to win — to bend everyone around him to his will. And, for the most part, he does. From the mailroom, Emanuel has ascended to the summit: executive chair and CEO of TKO and executive chairman of WME Group, “two companies,” his biographical blurb says, “that sit at the center of sports, entertainment and culture.”
Emanuel is probably best known as the model for the abrasive Ari Gold, the talent agent played by Jeremy Piven in the HBO show Entourage (2004-11). The show’s protagonist, Vincent Chase, is loosely based on one of Emanuel’s clients, the actor Mark Wahlberg. Emanuel says that he could never bear to watch the series, but notes that it helped turbocharge his career.
In his telling, the entertainment-industrial complex is a transactional, amoral, brutish and (though Emanuel doesn’t use this phrase) testosterone-fueled world, where the key players are nearly all men. It seems impossible to imagine any woman getting away with — let alone prospering from — the unhinged, profanity-laced approach that has become Emanuel’s trademark.
Even in this milieu, there are, in his view, particularly loathsome players. Among them is Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein, whom Emanuel indicts for his slovenliness, bullying tactics and editorial interference. Even without a mention of the producer’s alleged track record of sexual harassment and assault, Emanuel’s assessment of Weinstein is withering. “Empty at his core,” Emanuel writes, “Harvey’s sole motivation is to thwart and mess with other people.”
Emanuel expresses contempt, too, for other bold-faced names, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chair of Walt Disney Studios and cofounder of the film studio DreamWorks, and Hollywood scribe Nikki Finke, with whom Emanuel had a codependent relationship. He takes on Donald Trump as a client, doesn’t vote for him for president, and drops him, without regret, when he wins and can no longer generate commissions. None of this necessarily makes Emanuel a reliable narrator.
The memoir begins with the word “rage,” which Emanuel observes is also the first word of Homer’s Iliad. The allusion sets Roll the Calls up to be similarly epic. But its angry protagonist is, at best, an antihero, and the stakes of his success surely are less than mythic.
What are the origins of Emanuel’s rage? He points to his lifelong struggles with dyslexia and the bullying and humiliation that resulted. The Emanuel family ethos was unsparingly competitive. In life, he learned, “loser gets fed to lions,” so “keep your fists clenched and your head on a swivel.” And roughhousing with his older brothers, whom he jokingly calls “two violent psychopaths,” may have left Ari bruised and resentful.
Both Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, a prominent oncologist and bioethicist, and former Chicago mayor and prospective 2028 Democratic presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel are known for their combative personalities. Ari suggests that the family is tight-knit and loving. But one of the book’s quietly shocking reveals is Rahm’s mockery of his brother’s dyslexia when they share a stage during Chicago Ideas Week.
Emanuel argues that his anger, which can turn threatening, provides a bargaining advantage by intimidating adversaries. He cites a study showing “that angry negotiators had the edge.” In a bar, he calls out Michael Moore as an [expletive deleted] antisemite for views the director expressed about Israel; Moore denies the charge, they keep talking and Emanuel ends up with a new client.
“You’ve got to be a little psychotic in this town,” Emanuel argues. To succeed, “you need to show that you can color outside the lines, and that, once in a while, you might eat the [expletive deleted] crayon.” The memoir doesn’t delete the expletives.
Yet Emanuel understands the personal costs of his anger enough to have devoted years to psychotherapy aimed at moderating it. (The results seem mixed at best.) Emanuel also admits to a habit akin to stalking: calling potential clients, business partners and others constantly until they succumb to his sales pitch.
This incessant hounding landed him the mailroom gig at Creative Artists Agency, from which he quickly rose — until he departed, with allies, to start his own company. Similar persistence won him the business (and, later, friendship) of the famously curmudgeonly Larry David, who said, over lunch, that he would sign with Emanuel — if only the agent would stop calling.
After his first marriage (unsurprisingly) dissolved, Emanuel deployed his telephone tactics in courtship — not a method, one imagines, that would have worked for a lesser man. In Emanuel’s case, relentless pursuit led, after some drama and heartbreak, to his second marriage, to a much younger woman who had initially resisted his overtures.
None of this is to say that Roll the Calls isn’t worth a read, especially for anyone interested in an unabashedly jaundiced insider account of how Hollywood operates. The book is quick-paced, laugh-out-loud funny at times, and filled with acidic observations and gossip. It is also horrifying.
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NY Jewish Democrats defend Mamdani after Netanyahu calls him a Hamas supporter
(JTA) — Some top New York Jewish Democrats are defending New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him an “antisemite” and said he is “buddies” with Hamas.
Netanyahu’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, and the outsized role Mamdani played in it, were the culmination of escalating criticism of Mamdani from Israeli officials in recent weeks.
Mamdani is an avowed anti-Zionist who during his campaign to be the mayor had pledged to arrest Netanyahu. Over the summer, he conceded he didn’t have the power to do so, though he criticized the Israeli government over Gaza in the run-up to the prime minister’s visit.
But while his full-throated criticism of Israel has alarmed some local Jewish officials, many felt that Netanyahu’s attacks on Thursday from the U.N. plenum went too far.
“It’s scurrilous to suggest that the mayor voices support for Hamas,” Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who is Jewish, said Friday in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, also a Jewish Democrat, has opposed Mamdani on some legislation related to protests outside houses of worship — a sensitive issue in the wake of protesters picketing outside synagogues that were holding Israeli real estate events. Menin said in a press conference on Thursday that Netanyahu’s remarks were “not helpful at all” because “we need to turn the temperature down.”
“This idea of what the prime minister said can really incite violence. We cannot have this,” Menin said.
Mamdani, an outspoken pro-Palestinian advocate, has condemned Hamas as “a terrorist organization” and has denounced antisemitic hate crimes committed in New York.
The mayor responded with a statement of his own, saying that Netanyahu “used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians.”
“Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Mamdani said. The United States is not a party to the ICC and has no obligation to carry out its warrants on U.S. soil.
Netanyahu’s remarks at the U.N. General Assembly came amid a reelection campaign in which Netanyahu’s Likud Party has made Mamdani a villain. Hoylman-Sigal called Thursday’s speech a “political ploy” and a “deflection by someone who has a lot of domestic turmoil, political and otherwise.”
“Clearly, Netanyahu is fighting for his political life,” said Hoylman-Sigal, who is Jewish.
Netanyahu’s arrival in New York sparked a wave of demonstrations in Manhattan on Thursday, including multiple organized by Israeli expatriate groups who emphasized the Oct. 27 Israeli election date. Rallygoers chanted “Vote him out!” at a protest held by the Israeli anti-Netanyahu group UnXeptable.
Even before his visit, Gov. Kathy Hochul pushed back on comments Netanyahu had made. Calling Mamdani a “supporter of the Hamas monsters” was false and “hurt his own credibility,” Hochul said in an interview with the radio station WNYC earlier this week.
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, which is supportive of Netanyahu and has been harshly critical of Mamdani, called Netanyahu’s remarks “Churchillian” and his “greatest speech.”
“Importantly, he also called out Mamdani as a dangerous antisemite who has endangered Jews in New York City,” Klein said in a statement.
The U.N. speech came as Israeli officials have escalated their rhetoric against Mamdani.
Last month, Ofir Akunis, the Israeli consul general in New York, compared Mamdani’s support for the boycott Israel movement to Nazi Germany. A Mamdani spokesperson told JTA the comparison was “offensive, completely unhinged and detached from reality,” and said Akunis “should be ashamed of himself.”
The statement was Mamdani’s first time weighing in on the Israeli consul general, who had accused Mamdani of being directly responsible for anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city.
Republican City Council member Inna Vernikov, who is Jewish and a staunch Mamdani critic, took issue with the mayor’s response.
“When Mamdani cleans his own house, then he can criticize Jewish leaders,” said Vernikov, pointing to Mamdani’s wife’s anti-Israel views and his vetoing of a bill on protests around schools.
Brad Lander, the Jewish progressive and Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th congressional district, blasted both Akunis’ and Netanyahu’s attacks on Mamdani.
“Netanyahu and Akunis are cynically weaponizing accusations of antisemitism for their own narrow, selfish political purposes,” said Lander, one of Mamdani’s most prominent Jewish allies, in a statement to JTA. “They are making Israelis, American Jews, Palestinians, and the whole world less safe.”
Lander himself was the recipient of a Nazi Germany comparison when Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for New York governor, said that Lander “would be a camp guard in the concentration camp if he could.”
Hoylman-Sigal called the comparisons “outrageous,” and said that he is more worried about a rise in far-right parties, including Germany’s AfD.
“We should be very careful, no matter what our background is, to draw such extreme comparisons,” he said.
Phylisa Wisdom, who heads Mamdani’s office to combat antisemitism, told JTA that it is “appalling that some leaders have resorted to comparing their political opponents to Nazis.”
“We can and should disagree — sometimes deeply — but we must be able to do so without debasing public discourse,” she said.
Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a group that leads outreach to non-Jewish community organizations, told JTA in an email that comparisons to Nazis should be out of bounds.
It is “particularly concerning given that our own community frequently, and rightfully, calls out those using dehumanization and/or making inappropriate Holocaust comparisons,” she said.
As a case in point, Spitalnick pointed to the Anti-Defamation League’s article on inappropriate Holocaust comparisons, which includes COVID-19 vaccine requirements and free speech complaints.
The ADL did not return a request for comment on Akunis’ Nazi Germany comparisons.
“Disagree with the Mayor on his policies or rhetoric — I certainly have — but comparisons like this are deeply offensive and wrong, in addition to undermining the very relationships and engagement necessary to ensuring Jewish safety in New York and beyond,” Spitalnick said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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‘Nobody Wants This’ star Adam Brody on Gaza: ‘Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide’
Adam Brody, the Jewish actor who plays a “hot rabbi” on the hit Netflix rom-com Nobody Wants This, called the war in Gaza a genocide in a new interview, making him one of just a few Jewish celebrities to speak out publicly against the Israeli campaign.
The comments came in an interview with GQ about Brody’s efforts canvassing for Democratic candidates in the upcoming midterms.
“Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine,” he said. “It’s awful that it’s taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it’s reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago. I’m hopeful that another administration can really do some good and correct some of these policies that are helping that situation be as awful as it is.”
The claim of genocide in Gaza is heavily disputed. Several international bodies, human rights organizations and academic institutions have concluded Israel’s actions in Gaza since Oct. 7 fit the description, including a United Nations Commission of Inquiry. Other similar groups, like the International Court of Justice, have not applied the term.
Brody’s comments were surprising in part because he had previously kept his feelings about the war private, even as other leading Hollywood figures openly criticized it. He does not maintain a public social media presence, and he did not participate in pin-wearing campaigns or sign various petitions related to the war — an approach he indicated he might change going forward.
“I’m not wearing a pin, so I’m not inviting a certain question, and perhaps I should,” he said. “I really admire people who do. But 99% of what I’m asked about is about the show. I’m not trying to plead ignorance—here we are doing a political interview, so it makes sense that we wade into this territory—but I’ve never ducked a question, really, not a political question anyway.”
Brody — who came to fame in the 2000s as the teenager Seth Cohen on The O.C. — joins Hacks star Hannah Einbinder and Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride) as perhaps the most high-profile Jewish actors to publicly call the war a genocide. Other Jewish entertainment figures, like Mandy Patinkin and The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer, have criticized the war but stopped short of calling it a genocide.
Yet Brody’s comments are perhaps especially notable because of the character he plays on TV. In Nobody Wants This, Brody plays a rabbi dating a non-Jewish woman — introducing her to the beauty and foibles of Jewish faith and culture. Israel has been conspicuously absent from the show, with its creator, Erin Foster, saying she deliberately avoided geopolitics.
Season 3 of Nobody Wants This releases to Netflix October 22.
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