1973

DIRECTOR: WOODY ALLEN PRODUCER: JACK GROSSBERG SCREENPLAY: WOODY ALLEN AND MARSHALL BRICKMAN STARRING: WOODY ALLEN (MILES MONROE), DIANE KEATON (LUNA SCHLOSSER), JOHN BECK (ERNO WINDT), MARY GREGORY (DR. MELIK), DON KEEFER (DR. TRYON), JOHN MCLIAM (DR. AGON), BARTLETT ROBINSON (DR. ORVA)

Sleeper

UNITED ARTISTS • COLOR, 88 MINUTES

A health-food grocer is frozen in 1973 and thawed two hundred years later, only to be hunted down as a threat to America’s totalitarian society.

Woody Allen as Miles Monroe in a robot factory

In the 1970s, the science-fiction comedy came into vogue. Germany’s Alexander Kluge made the space satire Der grosse verhau (The Big Mess) in 1971, a young John Carpenter directed the 2001 spoof Dark Star in 1974, and Mel Brooks parodied the Universal classics with Young Frankenstein that same year. When Woody Allen aimed his talents at sending up the sci-fi genre with Sleeper, the result was one of the freshest and funniest films of his career. A pivotal movie in Allen’s oeuvre, Sleeper marks a transition between nutty comedies such as Take the Money and Run (1969) and more sophisticated, complex ones like Annie Hall (1977). It also posits an outlandishly imaginative view of the future as seen from a seventies perspective.

Allen got the idea for Sleeper while working on a sci-fi segment for his 1972 comedy Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask. By the time he and Marshall Brickman were finished with the script, Allen had a stellar vehicle for himself and his Play It Again, Sam (1972) costar, Diane Keaton. As timid health-food fanatic Miles Monroe, Allen gets what he calls “a cosmic screwing” when he is sealed in foil like a TV dinner and frozen in 1973, then rudely awakened two centuries later. The space-age premise allowed the director to pay tribute to his beloved comics of the past, to lampoon the present, and to poke fun at science fiction.

Director Woody Allen on location in Colorado

Woody Allen’s vision of the year 2173 is a fascinating paradox. Though America is run by a totalitarian dictator, partying seems to be the national pastime. They have computerized dogs, sex machines, and over 1,200 TV channels, yet all the cities have been leveled by a nuclear bomb. Everyone lives in circular houses in the middle of nowhere, but they still have freeways and McDonald’s. Allen takes a swipe at the ’70s health-food craze by making junk food and cigarettes nutritious in his future. When a doctor tells him that after two hundred years all of his friends must be dead, Miles exclaims in shock, “But they all ate organic rice!” Apparently the only thing the future is missing is a sense of humor, which Allen is more than happy to supply using his own brand of sharp-witted buffoonery.

When Miles masquerades as a mute robotic servant for Diane Keaton’s pampered poet Luna, Allen slips into stream of sight gags and pratfalls in the style of his silent-era heroes Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. In a scene where robot-Miles sidesteps through the repair shop with a disarming grin, he’s a dead ringer for Lloyd. Later, Allen even dangles from a top-floor window like Lloyd in Safety Last! (1923). The Dixieland-jazz soundtrack, like the film, is all up-tempo energy and spontaneity.

Sleeper mixes visual comedy with dialogue that takes jabs at politics, pop culture, sex, religion, and science. “Science is an intellectual dead-end,” Miles tells Luna in the final scene. “It’s a lot of little guys in tweed suits cutting up frogs on foundation grants.” Of course, Allen’s high-tech nightmare can’t end without a run-in with Bio-central Computer 2100 Series G, a near-twin of Stanley Kubrick’s HAL 9000 (and also voiced by Douglas Rain). The stark white sets and avant-garde architecture (in the Denver, Colorado area) set a funky post-apocalyptic mood, while the costumes—designed by filmmaker-to-be Joel Schumacher—charmingly evoke a very 1970s version of the future that includes turtleneck tunics and bell-bottom slacks.

For all its slapstick-sci-fi trappings, the story is essentially a romance. The trailer for Sleeper describes it as “a love story about two people who hate each other 200 years in the future,” as Luna proves when she repeatedly growls, “I hate you, I hate you!” and “Shut up, shut up!” to Miles. Keaton is equal parts sassy and ditzy as Allen’s shallow love interest. “I was portraying her as a Buster Keaton heroine,” Allen said of her role. “Chaplin’s heroines were just idolized. Keaton’s heroines were dummies…. I wanted to have more of a Keatonesque Diane Keaton.”

Diane Keaton as Luna Schlosser

Miles poses as a robot.

Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in a car of the future

Woody Allen inflates

With comic-foil Keaton at his side and Marshall Brickman cowriting the script, Allen struck gold; he would collaborate with both of them again on the Oscar-winning Annie Hall in 1977 and Manhattan Murder Mystery in 1993. But Sleeper started it all. Its whimsical take on sci-fi—filtered through Allen’s zany yet cerebral lens—made the critics take notice. In his review for the film, Roger Ebert wrote, “Sleeper establishes Woody Allen as the best comic director and actor in America.”

FAR-OUT FACTS

Allen initially envisioned the film as an epic. “At the start,” he said, “I had the insane idea to make it a four-hour movie with an intermission.” The first half would have been set in the present, the second half in the future. “I found it hard to write such a big thing,” the director said. “I figured, let’s just do the second half.”

Sleeper won the 1975 Nebula Award for Best Dramatic Presentation from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

MIND-BLOWING MOMENT

Miles disguises himself in an inflatable hydrovac space suit that fills with air, blowing him up like a helium balloon. To evade the authorities, Luna climbs on his back and rides Miles across a lake like a motorized raft.

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