Two Woody Allen Quotes

I began watching a taped Woody Allen documentary, Woody Allen: A Life in Film by Richard Schickel, and and liked this about the early funny ones>

What people don’t realize is that pictures like Bananas are very, very structured. But the structure really becomes an armature on which to hang a million crazy jokes, which is what the film is basically about.

And this about silent movies:

I had the idea that they [Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton] were working in a silent era, and that was easier. Most people think that silent films are harder, silent comedies were harder, because you didn’t have a voice, you couldn’t speak. But silent films were easier. When you added the voice, it became much more complicated. And it’s really the difference between checkers and chess. Without the voice it’s like checkers, it’s much simpler. When you add the voice—and consequently both Chaplin and Keaton were killed when the voices were added—because it becomes much less abstract, and much more real.