Woody Allen's 40-plus-year career offers the lesson that being a legend is no guarantee of thriving financially in the American film business.

Luckily for Allen, he doesn't have to.

With his Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which opens Friday, earning some of his best reviews in years, Allen was able to announce an agreement between the Gravier production company run by his sister, Letty Aronson, and European production, distribution  and financing giant MediaPro.

The deal promises him funding for his next three productions, anywhere in the world, with budgets estimated to be in the neighborhood of $15 million dollars. The likely schedule will have Allen shooting one film for each of the next three years.

Most important to the filmmaker, MediaPro was happy to agree to leave Allen to his own artistic devices--what's called in Hollywood, where it almost never happens, a "see you at the premiere" policy.

That opportunity, combined with assurances from the city of Barcelona that he'd be welcomed and his production given every possible courtesy, helped induce Allen to rewrite a script that had originally featured two girls in San Francisco into one involving Scarlett Johansson's Cristina and Rebecca Hall's Vicky in a complex Catalan love story with Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem.

When I had the chance to ask Allen about the deal at a press conference for the film, he was animated in his response. "In Europe, they don't have the studio system. In the United States, guys are always saying, 'We'll give you the money to make your film--but we're not just bankers,'" he said. "In fact, they are just bankers. They wind up saying, 'Who are you casting, let me read the script'--stuff they're utterly unqualified to judge."

Allen said he "could get money in the United States if I wanted to go let them make suggestions, and I didn't want to do that. In Europe, all [they] want to do is put up some money and make some money on it or get their tax thing alleviated in some way--whatever mischief they get involved in."

Although the Spanish parliament began rolling out tax advantages to private investors in film in 2007, MediaPro funds its production much as an American studio would, using its own capital. Its corporate profile is sufficiently diverse and lucrative (they own major Spanish television channel La Sexta)  that it needn't rely on working the margins. Thus the company wasn't overzealous in making pre-sales of the Allen film in other territories.

Rather, it waited until the film was nearly a finished product and then was able to quickly recover its investment as distributors bit. (Subsidiaries of Warner Bros. picked the picture up for Spain and France; American distribution, which went for an undisclosed sum, is being handled jointly by MGM and the Weinstein Company.)

Aronson, after overseeing Allen's British films Match Point, Scoop, and Cassandra's Dream, is plenty savvy to the ins and outs of overseas financing. "If you film in the United Kingdom and the subject matter is [British] and you pass other tests, you get a certain percentage of the budget. It doesn't work that way in Spain--if the municipality wants to give money they give money locally." (The exception to Allen's recent string of overseas shoots is Whatever Works, shot on the streets of Manhattan and starring Larry David, but financed by the aptly titled French sales agents Wild Bunch.)

Aronson and Allen were in talks with Wild Bunch, whom Allen describes as "lovely people," for a multi-picture deal when, after an optimal production experience for both sides, they struck the agreement with MediaPro.

Much as they had with the British productions, Allen and Aronson also recruited virtually all their crew in Spain. Beginning with the actors' willingness to forgo their usual costly salaries and continuing with the agreement by the local crews to work for scale, the city's move to lay on police to help shelter the production from churning summer tourist crowds, and the eagerness of many local businesses and institutions to loan locations to the production without charging fees, the shoot came in at around $15 million.

Aronson is guarded about where Allen's muse may take him next. "He made all his films in New York for so long, and then he found London so pleasurable. We're still hoping to do a film in Paris, though it's so expensive, and we're interested in doing something in Italy. But it won't be the countryside. Woody likes to do things in major cities--he's an urban writer."

Allen, characteristically pessimistic, can't quite seem to give full credence to the largesse he's currently enjoying: "Everything's fine, now! Will it be fine if I make two embarrassing pictures for them and they lose their shirts? Will they be so nice to me?

"A lot of times everything starts off and there's a lot of hugs and kisses--'You're a real artist and we love art.' And then you make a picture and it tanks, and you can't get them on the phone and your lawyers are talking. But my experience with these people has been very positive so far, and I have great faith in them."