Zelig

Comedy, Documentary, Mockumentary

Woody Allen	Leonard Zelig
Mia Farrow	Dr. Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher
John Buckwalter	Dr. Sindell
Patrick Horgan	The Narrator (voice)
Marvin Chatinover	Glandular Diagnosis Doctor
Stanley Swerdlow	Mexican Food Doctor
Paul Nevens	Dr. Birsky
Howard Erskine	Hypodermic Doctor
Ralph Bell	Other Doctor
Richard Whiting	Other Doctor

Director	Woody Allen
Producer	Robert Greenhut
Writer	Woody Allen

The thinking person's Forrest Gump, Woody Allen's 1983 Zelig is a funny, atmospheric mock-documentary about the collision of one man's manifest neuroses colliding with key moments in 20th-century history. Allen plays the title character, a self-effacing, timorous fellow with such a porous personality that he physically becomes a reflection of whoever he is with. Complex and painstaking, the film's pre-Gump special effects manage to place Allen, buried under a series of makeup and prosthetic guises, in a number of scenes along with Adolf Hitler at a Nazi rally, a pope at the Vatican, and famous guests at a garden party hosted by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Similar in tone and satire to some of Allen's short, comic pieces published in The New Yorker magazine, Zelig is a one-note movie that takes its delicious time establishing the fullness of its central joke. It's well worth the wait. --Tom Keogh

Leonard Zelig (Allen) is a social quick-change artist whose neurotic insecurity forces him to mimic - mentally and physically - whomever he's with. Treated by Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Farrow), Zelig is slowly cured, and in the process goes form side-shoe freak to national celebrity - to Eudora's fiancé! But when misdeeds from Zelig's multiple-personality past start to surface (larceny, bigamy and an unauthorized appendectomy), the human chameleon is on the run again, and Eudora must search the world over to find - and save - the only man who's every man she's ever wanted!

Mr. Personality? Or Mr. Personality disorder? Find out in Woody Allen's madcap mockumentary about an identity crisis of hilarious proportions! Thematically intricate, technically complex and filled with some of the most astonishing special effects ever, Zelig is "pure magic" (Newsweek)! Nominated for two Oscars®, this "work of breathtaking virtuosity" (Playboy) is further proof that Allen "is the premier American filmmaker of his day" (The New York Times)!

"Uproariously funny! A cinematic marvel!" -The New York Times