When Sid begins to fret, the intrepid Sondra tries to soothe him: “Think about this as adding some excitement to your life,” she says, even as you know this is the last thing a Woody Allen character wants to do. Once Sid gets his own glimpse of the daunting specter Joe, he’s nervously ready to help, but only as a kind of distraction, a device by which Sondra might sound out her theories. Joe pithily instructs her to pursue the killer and she agrees, based on her ambition to be a great reporter. She gets her chance at a big one when she meets the slightly disoriented but still self-involved Joe, who appears to her inside Sid’s box. And this, you discover, is her primary concern, to get her story. “I slept with him and I didn’t even get the interview,” she complains to her friend Vivian (Romola Garai). Sid solicits a pretty girl to be “put her life on the line,” that is, step inside a dematerializing box and “disappear.” She happens to be an American journalism student, Sondra (Scarlett Johannson), already feeling uneasy because she’s just had mirthless, drunken sex with a self-loving film director. Here a magician, the Great Splendini (Allen), also known as Sid, is performing shtick (“You’re a credit to your race,” he tells his audience, “And I say that from the bottom of my heart”). Joe’s ruthlessness and ego kick in, and soon he’s found his way back to the world of the living, specifically, a theater stage. For as Joe wanders over he deck, he meets a dead young woman whose story becomes the germ of his last scoop: she believes her former employer killed her and further, that he is the Tarot Card Killer who has been targeting young women in London. For a moment, it looks as if Scoop might be something relatively new for Woody Allen, considering a man’s anxiety about death without involving a nubile or dead young woman. It cuts to Joe afloat on Death’s boat (this would be this Bergman reference, as Death wears hooded cloak and carries a scythe). His colleagues toast his memory, amazed at his nerve but not exactly touched by his demise.įrom here, the film takes the question of what happens after death a step beyond survivors’ chatter. In this case, it’s a dead reporter named Joe Strombel (Ian McShane), whose utter ruthlessness and colossal ego as a reporter now (post-mortem) appear both brilliant and lunatic.

Scoop starts much like Woody Allen’s recent movies: a group of friends sit around a table, drinking and pondering a problem.

Scoop 2006