Woody Allen's tenth film as writer/director, Stardust Memories opens with a scene reminiscent of the opening of 8 1/2 and continues to use that film for inspiration. Sandy Bates (Allen) sits in a train at a train station, the car filled with very unhappy looking people. In a train on another set of tracks, Bates sees a wonderful party going on. A beautiful woman blows him a kiss as the happy train pulls out of the station. Bates is a famous film director who has been invited to attend a festival of his work being held at the Stardust hotel. He attends the event, but is ceaselessly harassed by fans who accost him and repel him in equal measure. While consistently hearing the complaints from fans, critics, and even space aliens that his earlier comedies are superior to his dramatic work, Bates juggles a trio of women in his private life. His encounters during the course of the retrospective force Bates to take a long look at himself. Sharon Stone makes one of her first film appearances as the woman who blows Sandy a kiss.


Stardust Memories is a 1980 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Woody Allen and starring Woody Allen, Charlotte Rampling, Jessica Harper, and Marie-Christine Barrault. The film is about a filmmaker who recalls his life and his loves—the inspirations for his films—while attending a retrospective of his work.[2] Allen considers this to be one of his best films, along with The Purple Rose of Cairo and Match Point.[3] The film is shot in black-and-white and is reminiscent of Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963), which it parodies.
The film was nominated for a Writers Guild of America award for Best Comedy written directly for screen. Allen denies that this film is autobiographical and has expressed regret that audiences interpreted it as such.[4] "[Critics] thought that the lead character was me," the director is quoted as saying in Woody Allen on Woody Allen [see Further Reading, below]. "Not a fictional character but me, and that I was expressing hostility towards my audience. That was in no way the point of the film. It was about a character who is obviously having a sort of nervous breakdown and, in spite of success, has come to a point in his life where he is having a bad time."


Release Date: September 26, 1980 @ The Baronet, Bay Cinema and Little Carnegie, NYC


Boxoffice: $10,389,003 2013: $30,664,900