delanceyplace.com 10/8/08 - editing annie hall

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In today's excerpt - Woody Allen's 1977 Oscar-winner Annie Hall (originally titled Anhedonia) paved the way for a new generation of romantic comedies but was a chaotic mess when shooting finally ended and the film arrived in the editing room:

"In the editing room, Annie Hall was an incoherent mess. [Co-writer] Marshall Brickman was appalled. 'To tell you the truth, when I saw the rough cut of Annie Hall, I thought it was terrible; completely unsalvageable. It was two and a half hours long and rambled and was tangential and just endless.'

"The original version was essentially Alvy [Singer, the main character played by Allen] free-associating about his life and his worries. Annie [Diane Keaton] was seen briefly and then disappeared from the movie for fifteen minutes. ... Even the scenes with Annie—they were already there, of course—led to fantasies and flashbacks galore. The sequence where Alvy, Annie and Rob (Tony Roberts) head to Brooklyn originally ran ten to fifteen minutes and had many more scenes than the one to two we see in the final film. Alvy and his date from Rolling Stone (Shelly Duvall) spun off to a scene where they wound up in the Garden of Eden talking to God. When Alvy is arrested in Los Angeles (after playing bumper cars in the parking lot), there was a long scene of him interacting with the other prisoners in his cell.

"Like the sculptor who chips away at the block so that the statue hidden inside can emerge, Allen and [editor Ralph] Rosenblum began hacking away at the movie to see if there was something in the material worth saving. 'It was clear to Woody and me that the film started moving whenever the present-tense material with him and Keaton dominated the screen, and we began cutting in the direction of that relationship,' Rosenblum later wrote. They tossed out entire sequences, tightened things up and always kept the focus on Alvy and Annie. Even the scenes of flashbacks to Alvy's earlier marriages were greatly shortened. Some characters were eliminated altogether. Said Allen, 'There was a lot of material taken out of that picture that I thought was wonderfully funny. ... It wasn't what I intended to do. I didn't sit down with Marshall Brickman and say, 'We're going to write a picture about a relationship.'

"One of the scenes cut was [Annie's brother] Duane's dark fantasy, but when the film started playing well at test screenings they decided to put back some of the material they had liked and missed. Christopher Walken's big moment was restored."