WOODY ALLEN: A RETROSPECTIVE is a profusely illustrated, coffee-table book. As a coffee-table book, it can be guaranteed to start conversations. I placed it on my coffee table and two of my guests who didn’t know each other, immediately began talking about Woody’s “Midnight in Paris,” which all three of us had seen. One of the guests liked the Hemingway scene as the best; the other preferred the T S Eliot scene. When asked, I said, "Pablo Picasso, the Gypsy visual artist. Did you notice how dark-skinned he was? Gypsies are an ethnic community originating from India.” The conversation shifted to other Woody Allen films that were precursors to “Midnight in Paris.” We looked up “Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Zelig,” and “Play It Again, Sam” and took turns reading aloud Tom Shone’s essays on these films. The reader of “Play It Again, Sam,” added that he recalled Quentin Tarantino acknowledging in an interview that in his film “True Romance” the character of Elvis Presley giving advice was inspired by the Humphrey Bogart character in Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam.”