Bullets Over Broadway (1994)
Film Overview
In 1928 New York, an idealistic young playwright finally gets the chance to stage his new work on Broadway — provided he gives a major role to a gangster’s spectacularly untalented girlfriend.
John Cusack plays David Shayne, a struggling playwright convinced that artistic integrity matters more than commercial success. Producer Julian Marx can finance David’s latest play, God of Our Fathers, but only with money supplied by gangster Nick Valenti.
The condition is simple: Valenti’s girlfriend Olive Neal must be given a role. Jennifer Tilly plays Olive as an aspiring actress whose enthusiasm is considerably greater than her talent, while Chazz Palminteri plays Cheech, the bodyguard assigned to keep an eye on her.
Rehearsals become increasingly complicated. Helen Sinclair, played by Dianne Wiest, begins an affair with David while encouraging him to rewrite her part. Jim Broadbent’s leading man Warner Purcell becomes increasingly obsessed with food, and Cheech quietly reveals an instinctive understanding of theatre that David cannot ignore.
As Cheech begins suggesting increasingly effective changes to the script, David is forced to confront an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps the gangster understands dramatic writing better than the professional playwright.
Written by Woody Allen and Douglas McGrath, the film recreates late 1920s Broadway through real New York theatres, period locations, Santo Loquasto’s production design and a soundtrack packed with jazz and popular songs from the era.
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My Review
When the gangster turns out to be the artist
Bullets Over Broadway is one of Woody Allen’s funniest films about artists because it is ruthless about the possibility that being passionately committed to art does not necessarily mean you are any good at it.
David Shayne has built almost his entire identity around being a serious playwright. He talks about compromise as though commercial theatre were a moral disease and regards artistic integrity as something almost sacred. The joke is that David’s certainty about his importance is considerably stronger than the evidence provided by the play he has actually written.
John Cusack gets the balance exactly right. David is pretentious, but not entirely ridiculous. He genuinely cares about theatre, genuinely wants to write something important and genuinely fears becoming the kind of artist who changes his work merely to please an audience. Those are reasonable concerns.
What David has not considered is that compromise and improvement are not always the same thing. Sometimes another person’s criticism is not an attack on artistic purity. Sometimes the scene simply does not work.
David is prepared to suffer for his art. The more alarming possibility is that his art may not be good enough to justify the suffering.
The entire production begins with a compromise David believes he can justify. Julian Marx has found the money to stage the play, but the financing comes from gangster Nick Valenti, whose girlfriend Olive must be cast as a psychiatrist. David knows instantly that she is wrong for the part and accepts her anyway.
Jennifer Tilly is wonderful because Olive never doubts herself. She is loud, irritating and catastrophically unsuited to the role, but she possesses the absolute confidence of somebody who has never seriously considered the possibility that talent might be required.
That confidence makes her strangely indestructible during rehearsals. Everybody else can hear how bad she is. Olive hears an actress giving the performance of her life. Her lack of self-awareness is the mirror image of David’s more sophisticated version of exactly the same problem.
Both believe deeply in their own artistic ability. Only one of them knows enough about theatre to disguise the delusion in impressive language.
Olive and David have more in common than either would admit: both are completely certain of talents the rehearsal room keeps questioning.
Then Cheech begins listening. Chazz Palminteri’s performance is the film’s great comic surprise because the bodyguard initially appears to be there for one reason only: make sure nobody causes trouble for Olive. He sits silently in the theatre while the professionals rehearse, until eventually he can no longer tolerate what is wrong with the play.
His first suggestions are treated almost as an insult. David is a playwright. Cheech is a gangster. Their cultural positions should make the question of who understands theatre absurdly obvious.
Except Cheech is right.
A scene improves. Then another. Soon David is waiting for Cheech’s comments while pretending he is not. The gangster understands structure, character, pace and dramatic necessity instinctively. He has never studied theatre and has none of David’s vocabulary, but he knows when something is false.
Cheech cannot explain the theory of dramatic writing. He can simply hear when a scene is lying.
That turns the film into a much more interesting argument about talent. David has devoted his life to becoming an artist. Cheech appears to have been born with the thing David has been trying to acquire. The unfairness is almost cruel.
Allen and McGrath keep pushing the joke until authorship itself becomes unstable. David begins accepting Cheech’s changes, then presenting the improved play as his own. The man who lectures everybody about artistic integrity is quietly taking credit for somebody else’s best ideas.
Cheech is not especially concerned with credit. He is concerned with the play. That makes the gangster, absurdly, the person with the purer artistic motivation.
And then he makes the ultimate artistic decision: Olive is ruining the work and therefore has to go. The logic is monstrous, but it is also the logical extreme of every conversation in which somebody has claimed art matters more than life.
David talks about sacrificing everything for art. Cheech is the person who takes the idea literally.
Dianne Wiest’s Helen Sinclair exists at the other end of the theatrical hierarchy. She is a genuine star and knows exactly what that means. Every entrance is a performance, even when she is not on stage.
Wiest gives Helen a wonderfully exaggerated grandeur without losing sight of the intelligence underneath it. She understands David’s vanity instantly and knows exactly how to feed it. Her admiration becomes one more intoxicating piece of evidence that he is finally becoming the important artist he always imagined himself to be.
Their affair is funny because Helen seduces David almost as much artistically as romantically. She gives him notes, demands stronger material and persuades him that serving her performance is somehow equivalent to serving the play.
Meanwhile Mary-Louise Parker’s Ellen watches David disappear into the theatrical world he once insisted would never corrupt him. His betrayal of her is another compromise he can explain to himself until the explanations stop sounding convincing.
Helen does not merely seduce David. She seduces the version of David who has always wanted to believe Broadway was waiting to recognise his genius.
Jim Broadbent’s Warner Purcell supplies a different kind of theatrical vanity. He is a respected leading man whose compulsive eating becomes impossible to control. Costumes have to be altered as rehearsals continue, while Warner keeps insisting everything is manageable.
Tracey Ullman’s Eden Brent and Harvey Fierstein’s Sid Loomis add to the sense that the rehearsal room contains an entire ecosystem of performers, each with habits, egos and private worries. Nobody enters the theatre as a blank instrument waiting to serve the playwright.
That is one of the things the film gets right about collaborative art. David begins with the fantasy that the production exists to realise his text. In reality, actors, producers, gangsters, designers and audiences all change what that text becomes.
Theatre is compromise because theatre is made by people.
Visually, Bullets Over Broadway is a pleasure. Carlo Di Palma and Santo Loquasto create a richly coloured 1928 Manhattan of theatre marquees, nightclubs, restaurants, rehearsal rooms and dressing rooms. The period setting never feels like a museum.
Real locations help. The Belasco Theatre immediately gives the Broadway material authenticity, while the Edison Hotel, Prospect Park, Conservatory Garden and the old Claremont Riding Academy expand the period world beyond the stage itself.
Costumes matter enormously too. Helen Sinclair has to look like a star before she speaks, Olive has to look like somebody’s very expensive idea of sophistication, and David’s increasing immersion in Broadway needs to be visible in the world around him.
The result is one of Allen’s most visually pleasurable period films, particularly because the production design supports a comedy rather than announcing its own importance.
Broadway is David’s dream world until he gets inside it and discovers the dream has producers, gangsters, egos and rehearsal notes.
The soundtrack completes the illusion. Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Duke Ellington, Bix Beiderbecke and period dance music make the late 1920s feel alive rather than reconstructed.
Cole Porter’s Let’s Misbehave is particularly appropriate for a story in which almost everybody eventually does. Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael and other songwriters create a musical world as busy as the theatre itself.
I like that Allen does not use the music merely to signal the decade. These are songs connected to pleasure, nightlife and performance. They make Broadway feel like a place where everybody is permanently half a step away from another show.
It is difficult to imagine the film without that musical energy.
Cheech’s death is where the comedy finally reveals how serious its argument has become. He dies defending the theatrical work he has effectively written, and David is left facing the unbearable conclusion that the supposed criminal may have been the genuine artist.
That revelation does not inspire David to become a better playwright. It makes him question whether he should be a playwright at all. Surprisingly, that becomes a liberation.
He returns to Ellen and admits that he loves her more than he loves the idea of being a great artist. Earlier David would have regarded such a choice as surrender. By the end, he understands that recognising your limitations can be more honest than dedicating your life to protecting an illusion of genius.
That is why the film’s conclusion works so well for me. David does not win Broadway. He escapes the need to believe Broadway proves his value.
David’s happy ending begins when he accepts that failing to become a great artist does not have to mean failing at life.
Dianne Wiest deserved every bit of the acclaim she received. Helen Sinclair could easily have been an affectionate caricature of a grand theatrical actress, but Wiest makes the character much sharper than that. Every gesture is theatrical because Helen has spent so long being watched that performance has become personality.
Palminteri is just as important. Cheech’s intelligence has to emerge without suddenly transforming him into another person. He remains a gangster throughout. He simply happens to possess a gift for dramatic writing.
That contradiction contains the whole film. Talent does not necessarily arrive in the person who deserves it, studies for it or builds an identity around having it.
Bullets Over Broadway is therefore both a loving period comedy about theatre and one of Allen’s least sentimental films about artists. The show must go on, certainly. The more difficult question is who really deserves to have their name on it.
Cast and Characters
John Cusack
An idealistic young playwright who discovers that getting his work onto Broadway requires compromises he once insisted he would never make.
Dianne Wiest
A celebrated theatrical actress whose grand personality, professional instincts and attraction to David reshape both the play and its author.
Chazz Palminteri
Olive’s gangster bodyguard, unexpectedly revealed to have a remarkable instinct for dialogue, structure and what the play actually needs.
Jennifer Tilly
Nick Valenti’s girlfriend, whose casting is the price of the gangster’s financial support despite her almost complete lack of acting ability.
Jack Warden
The producer trying to get David’s play onto Broadway while managing the increasingly dangerous conditions attached to its financing.
Jim Broadbent
The production’s leading man, whose considerable theatrical reputation is accompanied by an increasingly uncontrollable appetite.
The sound of Broadway before the curtain goes up
Jazz, dance-band recordings and popular standards create the musical world of 1928 New York, with Al Jolson, Duke Ellington, Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Cantor and many others heard throughout the film.
Let’s Misbehave
Irving Aaronson and His Commanders perform Porter’s 1920s standard. Few song titles could fit the film better: artistic compromise, adultery, organised crime and backstage chaos all unfold beneath a soundtrack determined to enjoy itself.
Popular music makes the period feel alive rather than preserved
The soundtrack includes Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Duke Ellington, Bix Beiderbecke, Red Nichols and George Olsen alongside specially performed period material.
Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern, Hoagy Carmichael and the Gershwins join Porter in a selection built from some of the defining songwriters of the era.
Toot, Toot, Tootsie
Jolson’s recording immediately evokes the popular entertainment world surrounding Broadway in the late 1920s.
That Jungle Jamboree
Ellington brings authentic period jazz into the nightclub and theatrical atmosphere of the film.
You Took Advantage of Me
A title almost designed for a film in which writers, actors, lovers and gangsters are all taking advantage of somebody.
That Certain Feeling
Another period standard helping Loquasto and Di Palma’s Broadway world feel as though music is always waiting behind the next doorway.
Locations
New York becomes 1928 again through a mixture of surviving theatres, hotels, parks and carefully designed period interiors.
The real locations give David’s theatrical world an authenticity that complements Santo Loquasto’s detailed production design.
Belasco Theatre
The historic Broadway theatre at 111 West 44th Street provides one of the production’s most important genuine theatrical locations.
Hotel Edison
The Art Deco-era hotel contributes another surviving piece of the Broadway district to the film’s period recreation.
Prospect Park Boathouse
Prospect Park provides one of the film’s elegant outdoor settings away from the rehearsal rooms and nightclubs of Manhattan.
Conservatory Garden
The formal garden becomes another convincing part of the film’s carefully controlled late-1920s visual world.
Claremont Riding Academy
The former Manhattan riding stable was among the distinctive New York locations incorporated into the production.
The Theatre District
More important than any single building is the sense of Broadway as an entire working world of performers, producers, money, ambition and compromise.
Awards and Recognition
Seven Nominations
The film received seven Academy Award nominations, including directing, original screenplay, acting, art direction and costume design.
Dianne Wiest Wins
Wiest won Best Supporting Actress for Helen Sinclair, her second Academy Award for a Woody Allen film.
Palminteri & Tilly
Chazz Palminteri received a Supporting Actor nomination and Jennifer Tilly was nominated alongside Wiest for Supporting Actress.
Dianne Wiest Wins Again
Wiest also won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.
Top Film of 1994
The National Board of Review included Bullets Over Broadway among its top films of the year.
Art Versus Life
The film remains one of Allen’s sharpest comedies about artistic ambition, talent and the danger of believing art automatically matters more than the people making it.