"Working with Woody Allen is like filming Howard Hughes's will. It's a very mysterious and strange event. You never get a peek at the whole will"
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It lands like a beautifully nasty backstage whisper: the joke isn’t just that Woody Allen is controlling, it’s that the control feels posthumous. By comparing a film set to “filming Howard Hughes’s will,” Michael O’Donoghue yokes two famously hermetic men into one image of power exercised through absence. Hughes, the reclusive tycoon, became a punchline for paranoia, secrecy, and unseen strings; a will is the ultimate one-way document, a set of instructions issued from behind locked doors. Put them together and you get a production atmosphere where authorship is less collaboration than compliance.
O’Donoghue’s phrasing does the heavy lifting. “Filming” a will is a category error, and that’s the point: it suggests an enterprise devoted to translating private intention into public spectacle while never being allowed to understand the full intention. “Mysterious and strange event” reads, in his deadpan cadence, like a polite label slapped on dysfunction. The kicker - “You never get a peek at the whole will” - implies a crew kept on a need-to-know diet, handed pages and tasks without the architecture of the story, the plan, or the rationale.
Context matters: O’Donoghue came out of National Lampoon and early SNL, a sensibility trained on puncturing auteur mythologies and entertainment royalty. The subtext is a takedown of the genius-as-enigma pose. Allen’s set, in this telling, isn’t a workshop; it’s probate court: everyone waiting to learn what the unseen authority has already decided.
O’Donoghue’s phrasing does the heavy lifting. “Filming” a will is a category error, and that’s the point: it suggests an enterprise devoted to translating private intention into public spectacle while never being allowed to understand the full intention. “Mysterious and strange event” reads, in his deadpan cadence, like a polite label slapped on dysfunction. The kicker - “You never get a peek at the whole will” - implies a crew kept on a need-to-know diet, handed pages and tasks without the architecture of the story, the plan, or the rationale.
Context matters: O’Donoghue came out of National Lampoon and early SNL, a sensibility trained on puncturing auteur mythologies and entertainment royalty. The subtext is a takedown of the genius-as-enigma pose. Allen’s set, in this telling, isn’t a workshop; it’s probate court: everyone waiting to learn what the unseen authority has already decided.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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