40 little-known Annie Hall facts

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This article was published 21/04/2017 (3441 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Love is too weak a word for what we feel about Annie Hall.

Woody Allen’s timeless ode to love, lobsters and life in New York redefined the romantic comedy with its story of neurotic comedian Alvy (Allen), who tries to understand why his relationship with the original “manic pixie dream girl” Annie (Diane Keaton) disintegrated.

Forty years after Annie Hall arrived in theatres (on April 20, 1977), we take a look at 40 things you may not know about the movie.

1. The film’s original title was Anhedonia, meaning the “inability to experience pleasure.”

2. Other titles Allen considered included Anxiety and Alvy and Me, while co-writer Marshall Brickman jokingly suggested Me and My Goy and It Had to Be Jew.

3. At the urging of the studio, Allen eventually went with Annie Hall. The title is a play on actress Diane Keaton’s real name, Diane Hall. (Although she told Katie Couric that she was never nicknamed Annie.)

4. At 93 minutes, Annie Hall is the second-shortest winner of the Best Picture Academy Award. Marty (1955) is the shortest at 91.

5. The movie won four Oscars, including Actress (Keaton), Director (Allen) and Original Screenplay. Allen was also nominated for Best Actor, although he lost to Richard Dreyfuss for The Goodbye Girl.

6. In what was considered a major upset, Annie Hall beat Star Wars for Best Picture. Other nominees were The Goodbye Girl, The Turning Point and Julia.

7. Allen didn’t attend the Oscars, later saying, “I have no regard for that kind of ceremony… When you see who wins those things — or doesn’t win them — you can see how meaningless this Oscar thing is.” He read about Annie Hall’s wins in the New York Times the next morning.

8. Christopher Walken is one of only a handful of actors to appear in back-to-back Best Picture winners: Annie Hall and The Deer Hunter (1978).

9. The first cut of the film was 140 minutes.

10. The earliest version of the movie was less focused on Alvy and Annie’s relationship, which Allen preferred. “The film was supposed to be what happens in a guy’s mind,” but “it was completely incoherent,” he said in a 2012 Q&A. “Nobody understood anything that went on. The relationship between myself and Diane Keaton was all anyone cared about.”

11. The film was initially going to include a scene in which Alvy and Annie witness a murder. The plot line was later used in Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), which co-starred Keaton as his wife.

12. Other axed sequences include a fantasy New York Knicks game with Franz Kafka and Friedrich Nietzsche, and a tour through hell with Satan and Richard Nixon.

13. Another deleted scene depicted a traffic advisory sign urging Alvy to fly to California to win back Annie. According to editor Ralph Rosenblum, Allen hated the sequence so much that he threw the footage in the East River.

14. Although they were left on the cutting-room floor, images from some of these sequences were still used in promotional lobby cards for the movie.

15. Brooke Shields appeared in an early version of the film as young Alvy’s girlfriend, but her scenes were later cut.

16. In one of the flashbacks to Alvy’s childhood, a teacher writes “December 1” on the chalkboard (Allen’s birthday).

17. Sigourney Weaver made her big-screen debut in Annie Hall, as Alvy’s date toward the end of the film. Her non-speaking appearance is a mere six seconds.

18. Jeff Goldblum makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in a Los Angeles party scene, murmuring on the phone, “I forgot my mantra.”

19. Joan Newman played Allen’s mother in both Annie Hall and his Stardust Memories (1980) three years later.

20. The jokes in Alvy’s stand-up comedy scenes were all recycled material from Allen’s early stand-up days.

21. Kay Lenz (Breezy) was offered the title role, but turned it down at the suggestion of her then-boyfriend David Cassidy.

22. Much of Annie’s eccentric, Charlie Chaplin-esque wardrobe belonged to Keaton.

23. Costume designer Ruth Morley attempted to dissuade Keaton from wearing the androgynous attire, saying she looked “crazy.” Allen later remembered firing back at Morley, saying, “Leave her. She’s a genius.”

24. Keaton, who had a brief offscreen romance with Allen, says he captured the “essence” of her in the character of Annie, namely in the disjointed way she speaks.”I never said, ‘La-di-da’ in my life until he wrote it, but I was a person who couldn’t complete a sentence,” she told Couric.

25. In the park, Alvy points to a man and jokes to Annie, “There’s the winner of the Truman Capote lookalike contest.” That man is actually Capote.

26. Filmmakers Federico Fellini and Luis Buñuel both turned down cameos in a scene where Alvy imagines berating a pretentious moviegoer. The bit eventually went to philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who famously scolds, “You know nothing of my work.”

27. The cartoon version of Alvy in the animated fantasy sequence is borrowed from artist Stuart Hample’s comic strip Inside Woody Allen, which ran from 1976 to 1984.

28. In one of the most notable early uses of split screen, cinematographer Gordon Willis actually erected a thin wall between Annie and Alvy talking to their therapists so they could be shot simultaneously.

29. The beloved lobster dinner — in which Alvy and Annie attempt to cook the rogue crustaceans — was the first scene shot.

30. Outside a movie theatre and accosted by fans, Alvy jestingly remarks to Annie that he’s “standing out here with the cast of The Godfather.” Keaton was in The Godfather, as was Richard Petrocelli, who played one of the men asking for Alvy’s autograph.

31. In the memorable scene where Alvy is offered cocaine at a party, his sneeze that ends in a cloud of cocaine was actually unscripted. The accident got so much laughter from test audiences that Allen decided to keep it.

32. The scene was later parodied in an episode of Gilmore Girls, when Lorelai (Lauren Graham) sneezes near a chalkboard and causes a billow of chalk dust.

33. Alvy famously says, “That was the most fun I’ve ever had without laughing,” after having sex with Annie. The line is a nod to H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations, published in 1942, which includes the quote, “Love is the most fun you can have without laughing.”

34. Annie Hall originally ended with an awkward run-in between Alvy and Annie. It was only during a cab ride to an early screening of the film that Allen came up with the “Most of us need the eggs” speech that’s heard as a voiceover in the last scene.

35. Allen teased an idea for a sequel in his 1993 book Woody Allen on Woody Allen, saying, “I did think once that it would be interesting to see Annie Hall and the guy I played years later. Diane Keaton and I could meet now that we’re about 20 years older, and it could be interesting, because we parted, to meet one day and see what our lives have become.”

36. Annie Hall earned US$38.3 million at the box office on a US$4-million budget.

37. It was the 10th highest grossing movie of 1977. No. 1 was Star Wars (US$307.3 million).

38. Annie Hall is Allen’s fourth-highest grossing movie, behind Midnight in Paris, Hannah and Her Sisters and Manhattan. Adjusted for inflation, it is his highest earner, with an estimated gross of US$148 million.

39. It has 99 per cent “fresh” reviews on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes and is ranked No. 35 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest American Films of All Time list.

40. In the book The Film That Changed My Life, director Rian Johnson (Star Wars: The Last Jedi) wrote that he decided to become a film director because of Annie Hall, admiring how it “broke so many rules of film narrative.”

— USA Today