Friday, July 3, 2026

Woody Allen Book Sales Jump After Alec Baldwin Interview, Director Says He Wished He Could Have Directed WC Fields, the Marx Brothers, Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope

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Woody Allen is not retiring, let’s get that straight. He’s making “one or two” more movies starting with one late this summer in Paris.

Woody’s interview with Alec Baldwin yesterday (see below) gave a big sales jump to his new collection of stories and essays, “Zero Gravity.” Publicity from the interview sent the book up around 4,000 notches on amazon.

In the interview, Woody does say that he’s lost the excitement of making movies because of streaming and his disappointment over people not seeing his movies in theaters. Woody tells Alec that he wrote several plays during the pandemic, and has thought about writing a novel.

Woody tells Baldwin that he wished he could have directed WC Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Bob Hope, and Jerry Lewis. Woody says Hope was very talented before he became “that Republican and Lewis did “a lot of silly movies.”

Baldwin says Woody is one few people he knows who has a wall of books in his living room, and they’ve all been read.

“No, I haven’t read them,” Woody replies, “I have them because books are warm!”

Good interview, but I’d like to have heard Woody do more talking than Alec.

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Roger Friedman
Roger Friedman
Roger Friedman is the founder and editor-in-chief of Showbiz411. He wrote the FOX411 column on FoxNews.com from 1999 to 2009, where he covered Michael Jackson, and previously wrote the "Intelligencer" column at New York magazine in the mid-1990s, where he covered the O.J. Simpson trial. He also edited Fame magazine. His bylines have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Vogue, Details, and the Miami Herald. He is a voting member of the Critics Choice Awards (Film and Television branches), and his movie reviews are tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. With D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, he co-produced the 2002 documentary "Only the Strong Survive," which screened at Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

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