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This morning, almost two weeks after HBO completed its four-part documentation Allen v. Farrow, CBS Sunday Morning announced that they will air their own special on “the career and controversy surrounding filmmaker Woody Allen”, featuring an interview with the director himself, on Paramount + Sunday, March 28. If you assumed that the special would have the director responding to Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s recent documentary on the well-known allegations of sexual abuse made against him by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow, however, well, it’s more confusing than that.
According to the network’s press release, on Sunday CBS Sunday Morning: The Woody Allen Interview, anchored by Lee Cowan, will consist of a non-broadcast interview with Woody Allen from 2020, a 2018 CBS This Morning interview with Dylan Farrow and a report by Erin Moriarty on “controversial artists and their art”. Cowan reportedly sat down with Allen last July to discuss the director’s memoirs By the way of nothing, which was published on March 23 last year. The interview, notes CBS, is “the filmmaker’s first in-depth interview in nearly three decades.”
In his 2018 interview with Gayle King, Farrow reiterated his claim that Allen molested her in 1992 and denied having been trained by mother Mia Farrow, then Allen’s girlfriend. And how are you CBS Sunday Morning tie these threads together? Apparently, Moriarty will take a deep dive into “the challenges that the public faces when respected artists are accused – or discovered – of having acted in a morally questionable way”. Allen has repeatedly denied Farrow’s abuse, most recently calling HBO’s Allen v. Farrow a “poor quality hit” in a joint press release with his wife, Soon-Yi Previn.