New doc uses never-before-seen video to make its case against Woody Allen
In a grainy home movie, a 7-year-old girl with tousled blond hair sits on a bed, talking to the person behind the camera. A time stamp indicates the date: Aug. 5, 1992.
“We went into your room and we went into the attic,” says the girl, who is busy cutting paper with a pair of scissors. “Then he started telling me weird things. Then secretly he went into the attic” — she mumbles something inaudible — “went behind me and touched my privates.” Her voice rises at the word “privates.”
The girl is Dylan Farrow. The person operating the camcorder is her mother, actress Mia Farrow. And the man whose alleged abuse she is describing is her father, filmmaker Woody Allen.
Por tions of the videotape, which has been known to exist and discussed in general terms for decades but never before seen by the public, appear in “Allen v. Farrow,” an HBO docuseries from Oscar-nominated filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering that revisits one of the most emotionally charged and divisive scandals in Hollywood memor y.
For decades — even after Dylan came forward as an adult in 2014 — the allegations against her father have been dismissed by many as an unfortunate but private family matter or, worse, a false memor y implanted by a vindictive mother bent on vengeance. “Allen v. Farrow” makes the case that Dylan was telling the truth all along, but was silenced by her well-connected father, his powerful allies in the media and a public unwilling to believe such a beloved filmmaker could also be a predator. (Allen, who was never charged with a crime and has denied all allegations of sexual abuse, the series a “hatchet job.”)
Working with producer Amy Herdy, Dick and Ziering have amassed a mountain of evidence, including surreptitiously recorded phone calls, inter views with key witnesses and a newly uncovered cache of documents related to lawsuits and investigations in the early ‘90s. Mia Farrow, still fear ful of Allen, gives a rare, in-depth inter view about the ordeal, as does Frank Maco, the Connecticut prosecutor who chose not to pursue charges against Allen because he feared the psychological impact on Dylan.
But the footage of young Dylan, recorded at Farrow’s Connecticut home in the days after the alleged abuse, may be the most explosive and disturbing evidence presented in the four-par t series. Par ticularly after hearing others try to discredit and pick apar t her account for years, it is startling to watch the child tell her story, using simple gestures and direct language. To many, it will be revelator y.
“There’s no way that you can watch that tape and come away with any other conclusion that she was incredibly harmed,” says
Herdy, an investigative reporter who worked with Dick and Ziering on “The Hunting Ground” and “The Invisible War,” documentaries exploring sexual assault on college campuses and in the militar y, respectively.
After a screening of “The Invisible War” some years ago, Tara L ynda Guber, wife of film producer Peter Guber, implored them to consider making a documentary about incest survivors and offered funds to develop the project. “It steals your identity and it’s something the public really doesn’t know or understand,” Ziering says of the subject. “How do you know who you are when your primal love bond is formed with someone who then transgresses and violates it?”
Thinking they might use her stor y in a larger project, the filmmakers inter viewed Dylan Farrow and were astonished by her account.
Over the course of the next year, Herdy began to dig, gathering long-buried documents and recordings and tracking down old babysitters, caseworkers and prosecutors, some of whom hadn’t spoken about the case in decades.
“It was what I call ‘eyeballcalled stabbing work’ of going through thousands and thousands of pages of documents, boxes and boxes of files, and reading through all of them and discovering what was done — and not done — on her case,” Herdy says. “What we uncovered changed the project. This started out as a project about incest. And then we started getting these documents and these tapes that told a completely different story of cover-up and malfeasance.”
By the middle of the second year, they had “committed to fully reexamining this stor y to piece together what really happened, and what that truth has to say about incest, power, gender, and celebrity privilege in our culture,” Ziering says.
Mia Farrow shared a trove of home movies shot on her camcorder throughout her relationship with Allen. The footage shows the director splashing around the pool and flying on private planes with Dylan and her siblings and, Herdy says, “illustrates that Woody Allen was very much a part of that family and very much a father figure for all of those children. And that is something that he denied over the years.”
Allen’s own body of work also comes under scrutiny, par ticularly his penchant for portraying relationships between older men and much younger women — sometimes teenagers, as in “Manhattan.”
“I was very interested in doing close reading of his films, which I always thought were interesting in the way they groomed the public to normalize power imbalances in gender relationships that were questionable,” says Ziering, whose background is in film theor y. “He presented them in such a way that it sort of disarmed us all and made us more habituated to them.”