-As a teenager and realizing he had a gift for comedy writing, Woody knew he wanted to be a writer in show business. His mother told him he should pay his distinct relative Abe Burrows a visit for career advice, who was a famous comedy writer, and director and had coauthored the book Guys and Dolls. When Burrows asked Woody what his ambitions were, Woody replied he wanted to be a TV writer. Burrows replied, “You don’t want to be a TV writer all your life.” Woody said “movies?” Burrows said, “No, theater.” Woody was under the impression that all playwrights really wanted to do was write for the movies. Burrows quickly corrected him, “No, all the screenwriters want to write plays.” [2]
-That advice must have stuck with Woody, because after many years of being a TV writer and a standup comedian in his early twenties, he had a desire to be taken seriously as a writer, and wrote two Broadway plays, Don’t Drink the Water and Play it Again Sam (both of which incidentally became films Woody starred in). [WLC]
-For Allen, the chance to do Don't Drink the Water [as a TV movie] wasn't so much an opportunity to try the TV movie genre as it was an open invitation to erase one of the darkest blots on his film career - the lowly regarded 1969 feature film version of the movie, directed by Howard Morris and starring Jackie Gleason and Estelle Parsons as the Hollanders. [8]
-When the news broke that Woody Allen would direct and star in his first made-for-TV movie, some considered it a sure sign that TV finally had come of age if it could attract the interest of the man many consider America's finest auteur filmmaker. [8]
-Clearly, it’s only because of Woody Allen’s prestige that this time capsule of a play has been transformed into 1994 prime-time fare. But it’s only because of Woody Allen’s skill that this comparative antique has become a zippy, exhilarating comedy. [6]
-The Iron Curtain reference is a tipoff to the film's only flaw, its outdated premise. Allen hasn't changed a word from the original script, which played heavily on U.S.-Soviet tensions. What was born as a topical comedy has evolved into a period piece. [5]
Somewhere behind the early 1960s Cold War iron curtain, the Hollander family cause an international spying incident when Walter photographs a sunset in a sensitive region. In order to stay out of jail, the Hollanders take refuge in the American Embassy, which is temporarily being run by the absent Ambassador's diplomatically incompetent son, Axel. [1]
-Woody finished writing Don’t Drink the Water before leaving for London to do Casino Royale in the spring of 1966. [3]
-He had worked on the play for a couple of years with (American theater producer) Max Gordon [who was in retirement]. He and Woody correspond regularly during the filming of What’s New, Pussycat?. About the play, but in the end Gordan decided against taking it on because he felt there were too many problems with the structure and characters. [3]
-When Woody started to write plays, he would ask himself what successful production his idea resembled. Don’t Drink the Water is based on the premise of a family living together in close quarters and getting on one another’s nerves, a source of comedy that worked wonderfully in You Can’t Take it With You. [3]
-Lou Jacobi was envisioned for the father role. Gordon had agreed to the role, but [David] Merrick at first did not.; he wanted a more commercial, less pronounced ethnic actor. In the end Woody prevaled, but while in London filming Casino Royale, Merrick cabled him that he wanted Vivian Vance (of I love Lucy fame) for the female lead. Woody finally agreed although he later said it was a mistake…”she was the wrong person for the character. [3]
-Bob Sinclair was hired to direct, though he had not directed a play in approximately 30 years. [3]
-The first out-of-town performances were in Philadelphia, where reviews were mixed. The laughs were big but they couldn’t hide that the production was in shambles. Woody would call it a “nondirected play.” Soon director Sinclair would be fired and Woody would take on the task of directing the play. [3]
-Woody would rewrite whole sections of the play with the cast playing half the new version that didn’t quite match the remaining half of the old version. Although it didn’t matter - hardly anyone showed up. [3]
-The show began its turnaround when Stanley Prager agreed to take over as director. Prager reblocked and restaged the play. He got the idea to make the priest the narrator and then the show started to coagulate. But the laughs were always in it, even though there were weak spots and it was a soft blob. In all, there were 13 cast changes, the most major being the replacement of Vivian Vance with Kay Medford. [3]
-The play’s great appeal was that its audience identified with the characters, however burlesqued they were, just as Woody’s cabaret audience identified with his exaggerated monologues. Had the show not been forced to move to another theater twice during its run, it would have played longer than the 18 months it did. [3]
-”I wrote it for laughs, "Woody said. “I didn’t know how to survive any other way…” [3]
I don't eat oysters. You have to eat them alive. I like my food dead. Not sick, not wounded -- dead!
-Don’t Drink the Water, Allen’s first play, ran for more than a year on Broadway, starring the great Lou Jacobi. In 1969, without Allen’s involvement, Water was made into an unfunny bomb of a theatrical film starring a miscast Jackie Gleason as Walter. One reason the magnificent Gleason wasn’t any good in Water was because Allen had written the part in his own, stand-up-comic voice; Gleason’s trademark bombast messed up the rhythm of Allen’s verbally intricate jokes. [6]
-In the new Don’t Drink the Water, Allen, as might be expected, delivers his own lines with breathless assurance. But he has also aged into a very funny actor, and in playing a harried middle-aged family man, Allen uses everything he has — including his prominent bald spot — to great comic effect. His Walter is no mere victim: He’s a cranky, defiant victim. [6]
-One of the pleasures of this Don’t Drink the Water is the way its auteur ignores the conventions of current television. Instead of updating his play to make things easier for the slacker generation to follow, he just uses a narrator to set up the era. And instead of populating the production with the latest hot stars, Allen opts for idiosyncratic, nostalgic, yet entirely appropriate casting. [6]
-Allen's sister, Letty Aronson, is vice president of a new production company formed by Allen's friend, Jean Doumanian, who's best remembered by TV fans as the unlucky woman who became the producer of NBC's Saturday Night Live in 1980, the year that all the regulars and the best writers left the show. Doumanian was fired in the spring of 1981 but rebounded and last year made a deal with ABC to produce three TV movies. [8]
-So naturally, when Allen casually mentioned to Doumanian and his sister that he thought his first Broadway play, Don't Drink the Water, would make a good TV movie, they had a deal for him to direct and star in it 24 hours later. [8]
-"That was the genesis of it," Allen told TV critics after finishing the film in a hectic three weeks. "It was just a casual idea that was seized upon and became a reality before I knew what hit me." [8]
-It's an outright farce, filmed by Allen in the same style as all his movies - wide master shots, precious few close-ups, lots of handheld camera movement - without any concession to the TV medium except for the commercial breaks. [8]
-But when Allen got down to the task of making a movie on the tight schedule a TV budget requires, he realized he had no idea how unprepared he was for the ordeal. [8]
-Woody Allen: "I'm used to a very, very leisurely schedule," he said. "It was very, very difficult. I didn't think I was going to be able to do it at all. I just shot it exactly the way I would shoot it if I was doing it for the cinema." [8]
-Woody Allen: "When the word got out that I was doing it, all these wonderful people wanted to do it," he said. "I was thrilled to get the cast that I got. I couldn't have done any better. It was a treat for me." [8]
-Allen denies staging what amounted to a lifelong holdout against television, although he concedes he has avoided the medium for years because he thought it might hurt his drawing power at the box office and because he had concluded it was "a great medium that wasn't doing anything of any real consequence." [8]
-The truth is Allen was, in large part, nurtured as a comic talent by television in its early days when the creative center of the medium still was in his beloved New York. He was a writer on NBC's legendary Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca in the early 1950s, working alongside such other youthful talents as Neil Simon, Mel Brooks and Larry Gelbart. He guest-hosted CBS' Hippodrome circus show in 1966, was a regular on NBC's Hot Dog kiddie show in 1970-71. At the peak of his popularity as a stand-up comic, he starred in his own 1969 special and did another TV special in 1972. [8]
-Most notably, Allen has cast himself in the lead, his first performance on TV since 1969. Coincidentally this is the year Don't Drink the Water opened in theaters. With all respect to the former lead, Jackie Gleason, who Allen said he worships as a comedian, Allen is far more suitable for the role of Walter Hollander, a nerdish nudge who is mistakenly taken for a spy in an Iron Curtain country. [5]
-Woody Allen: "I think the pendulum has swung over," he said, "and television has become not only a help to drawing (customers) to the movies, but it's influencing movies." [8]
-Don’t Drink the Water premiered on ABC, December 18th 1994 at 8:30pm. [1]
-The original Broadway production of "Don't Drink the Water" opened at the Morosco Theater on November 17, 1966, and ran for five hundred ninety-eight performances. [1]
-The name of the Eastern European country they are in is never mentioned. [1]
-Woody was offered to shoot the film in Budapest but rejected it, saying “I could have shots of great scope and it would be tremendous and it would cost us very little money. But I wouldn't go. And then they said, `Look, if we just go up to Canada for a week, you could do a week up there of the exteriors, in Montreal, and it would look great.' I ended up shooting the entire thing within like six blocks of my house and it all takes place behind the Iron Curtain or some Middle Eastern country. And it's just fine." [14]
-In keeping with the enclosed setting of a play, all of this film was shot in New York. The setting of this fictional is never explained, but for establishing shots, Allen used Prague. There is also an establishing shot of Washington. Both shots are stock footage. [15]
-One of seven films Woody Allen and Julie Kavner appear in together. [1]
-According to Woody, during Don’t Drink the Water theater run at the Morosco Theater, stagehands who had worked there for 30 years said they had never heard so many laughs. [3]
-Woody Allen: "I never even saw the [1969] movie until about two weeks before I shot this one. I was happy to get the paycheck for the sale, but I was never consulted about any aspect of it. When the movie came out, loved ones told me, 'Better you don't see it.' " [8]
-This is the second time Allen wrote and performed in a movie made for television (Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story was filmed in 1971 but was never broadcast). [11]
-Dave Matthews Band song, “Don’t Drink the Water” is not based on Woody Allen’s play of the same name. [12]
-Production began 4th April 1994, and ran until 25th April 1994. [15]
-What is different for TV was the aspect ratio - broadcasting at 4:3, a far cry from the widescreen of some of Allen’s most beautiful work. Allen also made no concession to commercial placement on a TV network. Apparently the ad breaks came suddenly and with little sense in the original broadcast. [15]
-By Woody's own admission while doing an interview for a French publication for A Rainy Day in New York in 2019, he stated he has done 48 films. Woody's core films, in which he has written and directed, start with Take the Money and Run (1969) and end with A Rainy Day in New York (2019), totaling 47 films. The missing film can only be What's Up, Tiger Lily (co-directed), Oedipus Wrecks (short film within New York Stories), or Don't Drink the Water (a TV movie which he wrote and used the same crew he makes his films with). With the given options, we include Don't Drink the Water as his missing film. [WLC]
$6,000 for three weeks of uninterrupted diarrhea!
I'm a dignified human being with a hernia.
-Tom Jacobs for Variety wrote: “It must have been some self-destructive impulse that led Woody Allen to adapt his 1966 play "Don't Drink the Water" into a TV movie. This hopelessly dated comedy is the sort of work that should be kept hidden in a shoe box in his bedroom closet, to be unearthed by future historians who can use it to show how far Allen progressed over the years.” [13]
-Jacobs continues: “Years of insanity have made this guy crazy,” Allen’s character jokes at one point. Years of practice have made Allen a much better writer than this early effort would suggest.” [13]
-Ken Tucker for Entertainment Weekly wrote: “If the material is a throwback to the barrage of one-liners that characterized such early Allen movies as Take the Money and Run and Bananas, the technique is state-of-the-art Woody: Water has been shot in the same shaky-camera, improvised-looking manner of Husbands and Wives. One reason Don’t Drink the Water isn’t quite as funny now as it was three decades ago is that Allen’s way of constructing a joke has become so familiar, having been copied by countless others. But there’s immense pleasure to be taken from that craft, and from the novelty of seeing Allen giving a first-rate, uncompromising performance on the small screen.” [6]
-Howard Rosenberg for the Los Angeles Times wrote: “There’s rarely redeeming humor in “Don’t Drink the Water,” the one amusing component being Dom DeLuise’s turn as a priest who does magic tricks. Otherwise, though, no rabbits in the hat.” [7]
-Nathan Rabin for the A.V. Club wrote: “It's often said that Allen's early comedies are more entertaining than his later work, but his lifeless adaptation of Water seems intent on disproving that notion by demonstrating that his early projects can be as dull and trying as any of his Fellini- and Bergman-inspired dramas.” [9]
-David Zurawik for The Baltimore Sun wrote: “The one-liners and jokes, especially in the opening 20 minutes of this ABC version, might set a record for gags delivered in the shortest time in a made-for-TV movie.”
-Tom Jicha for South Florida Sun Sentinel wrote: “Don't Drink the Water is a throwback to Allen's farcical years - the favorite period of many fans - when he was doing ludicrous gems such as Bananas, Take The Money and Run and Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask. If you enjoyed those, don't miss Don't Drink the Water.” [5]
-Some reviewers will say this version of "Don't Drink the Water" doesn't work as well in post-Cold War America, when the Iron Curtain was real and scary. I say that's more baby-boomer, everything-was-better-in-the-'60s myopia. [4]
-Taste of Cinema called Don’t Drink the Water Woody Allen’s second worst movie(behind Shadows and Fog). [10]
-Flavorwire called Don’t Drink the Water one of Woody Allen’s most underrated movies, saying “But it’s a wonderful slice of early Woody redux, and Michael J. Fox is an excellent Allen surrogate.”
-Don’t Drink the Water has a 44% Rotten Tomatoes rating as of 2021.
