Then This short film was produced to be presented during The Concert for New York City, an event to benefit the victims of September 11th attacks. Predictably the wikipedia has a surprisingly detailed entry, including a set list though it fails to say where in the line-up the film appeared. At just three minutes long, it's well worth a look, especially since, even with this slender duration, it's still unmistakably a Woody Allen film:
Now Sounds from a Town I Love looks like the potential opening scenes of a feature, a way of introducing some of the characters. You could imagine that somewhere along the line we'd keep returning to the same actors until eventually we discover that Griffin Dunne, Michael Emerson and Tony Roberts are playing the ex-husbands of Bebe Neuwirth and that like Hal Salwen's prescient Denise Calls Up, the majority of the piece will be conducted on mobile phones to show how they have transformed relationships in the contemporary Big Apple.
Traversing what looks like most of Manhattan in just a couple of minutes, the look of the film flashes forward to Anything Else with its mix of steady tracking shots and steady-cam close-ups, though in a more guerilla style. This has to have been shot quickly. Woody has been lucky enough to enjoy fairly large budgets throughout his oscillating popularity, but perhaps what we see here is how he might approach film making if he was forced to do it much more cheaply, not that he'll be visiting Sundance any time soon.
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