The last time Woody Allen went a full calendar year without having a movie in theaters was 1976, between Love and Death and Annie Hall, so I guess you could say he’s kind of prolific. He finished his follow up to Midnight in Paris, To Rome with Love, in March (it opens June 22nd, starring Alec Baldwin, Ellen Page, Jesse Eisenberg, and Greta Gerwig), and he’s already casting for his next picture. While the new one doesn’t have a title yet, we can assume he wrote it on a typewriter, like all his scripts, and today, thanks to a press release, we know that it’s going to star Alec Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, Peter Sarsgaard, Louis CK, and… Andrew Dice Clay. (Yes, I’m bound by blogger law to include a befuddled ellipses before any Andrew Dice Clay casting news).
There’s still no word on the plot of the movie, but Louis CK recently hired a story editor, Susan E. Morse, who used to work for Woody Allen, and here’s what she had to say in an interview with Vulture last week:
I think it would be absolutely great for those two guys to work together and to collaborate on some level. I think they would appreciate each other. They have different and similar personalities; it would be interesting to see them together. I think one of the things Woody would love about Louis would be the fact that there’s no way in hell Louis would be trying to “do Woody,” if he were to take on the “Woody Allen role” in a film. That was always an exasperating thing that would happen when people were trying to carry that lead role, they would often try to mimic Woody’s delivery, whereas he encouraged them to be themselves. He was always happier if they took whatever he wrote and put it in a vocabulary that was natural to them, rather than to say things literally, the way he had written them. Nothing was to be taken as though it was etched in stone.
As for the Dice man, I never saw his story arc on Entourage because I never cared about what shoes Turtle was buying or why E was feeling unappreciated on a given week (perhaps because he was completely uncharismatic?). But I always thought of Dice as much as an actor as a stand up, if not more. He’s definitely a performer’s comic (as opposed to a writer’s comic) and he was basically playing a character every time he was onstage. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that he has dramatic chops when he’s not trying to play Dice.
However, I would be interested in some kind of “Woody Allen Dice Clay” character. “Eh, sweetheart, let’s not have another turgid discussion about categorical imperatives over here! Let’s have a discussion about my turgid COCK, and I spray so much cum in ya mout’ it looks like ya teeth are melting, OH! Hickory dickory dock, death is my greatest fear…”
[original photo credit: Featureflash / Shutterstock.com]