Annie Hall

• 1. Introduction

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  Annie Hall arrives on screen in 1977 with Woody Allen staring directly into the camera, ignoring every convention of moviegoing in the process. He plays Alvy Singer, a comedian trying to understand why his relationship with Annie Hall fell apart. Rather than telling us what happened, he asks us to watch him figure it out in real time. The questions this film plants are deceptively simple: why do relationships fail, and why do we keep trying anyway? What follows is a film that won four Academy Awards, helped launch a fashion trend, and disappointed its own director.

• 2. A Script That Changed Shape

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  Woody Allen and co-writer Marshall Brickman developed the idea for what became Annie Hall while walking around New York City together. Allen wrote a first draft within four days. At that stage, the story centered on a man in his forties dealing with several strands of life: a relationship with a young woman, a preoccupation with the banality of everyday existence, and an obsession with testing his own character. Allen himself turned forty in 1975, and Brickman later suggested that advancing age and worries about death had pushed Allen toward a more personal approach alongside his commercial instincts.

  The original draft was not a romantic comedy at all. It was a drama built around a murder mystery, with the romance and the comedy as subplots. According to Allen, the murder occurred after a scene that survives in the finished film, the sequence in which Alvy and Annie miss an Ingmar Bergman film called Face to Face. The murder plot was eventually dropped, though Allen and Brickman revisited the idea decades later in Manhattan Murder Mystery in 1993, again with Diane Keaton.

  Allen proposed calling the film Anhedonia, a clinical term for the inability to experience pleasure. Brickman offered alternatives including It Had to Be Jew and Rollercoaster Named Desire. An advertising agency working for United Artists actually embraced the Anhedonia title, proposing fake tabloid headlines like "Anhedonia Strikes Cleveland!" to market it. After testing several titles over five screenings, including Anxiety and Annie and Alvy, Allen settled on Annie Hall. The draft he handed to editor Ralph Rosenblum closed with three words: "ending to be shot."

• 3. Gordon Willis and the Camera

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  Principal photography began on the 19th of May 1976, on the South Fork of Long Island, with the scene in which Alvy and Annie boil live lobsters. Filming continued periodically for the next ten months and deviated frequently from the written screenplay. The cocaine sneeze scene, in which Alvy accidentally scatters an expensive pile of cocaine, was not scripted at all. It emerged from a rehearsal accident and stayed in the film because audience testing showed the laugh ran so long that a much longer pause had to be inserted so the next lines of dialogue could be heard.

  Allen brought in Gordon Willis as his cinematographer, a pairing that many at the time considered odd. Allen was known for comedies and farces; Willis had earned the nickname "the prince of darkness" for his work on dramatic films including The Godfather in 1972. Allen described Willis as "a very important teacher" and "a technical wizard", and said he counted Annie Hall as "the first step toward maturity in some way in making films". Willis described the production as "relatively easy" from his perspective.

  Willis made deliberate choices in how each setting was lit. He used hot golden light for California sequences, grey overcast tones for Manhattan, and a Hollywood studio gloss from the 1940s for dream sequences, most of which ended up cut. It was Willis who suggested filming the dual therapy scenes with the two halves of the set divided by a wall rather than using a standard split screen. Roger Ebert later noted that a study calculated the average shot length of Annie Hall at 14.5 seconds, while other films released in 1977 averaged 4-7 seconds per shot. The collaboration continued on several later Allen films, including Zelig in 1983, which earned Willis his first Academy Award nomination.

• 4. The Edit That Found the Film

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  Ralph Rosenblum assembled the first cut in 1976, and Brickman was not pleased. He recalled feeling that "the film was running off in nine different directions", likening it to a first draft of a novel from which two or three separate films could be assembled. Rosenblum described it as "the surrealistic and abstract adventures of a neurotic Jewish comedian", clocking in at two hours and twenty minutes. Brickman found it "nondramatic and ultimately uninteresting, a kind of cerebral exercise."

  The present-tense love story between Alvy and Annie was not the center of that first cut. Allen and Rosenblum identified it as the dramatic spine and rebuilt the film around it. Allen recalled that he had no hesitation trimming away much of the first twenty minutes specifically to establish Keaton's character more quickly. He later said: "I didn't sit down with Marshall Brickman and say, 'We're going to write a picture about a relationship.' The whole concept of the picture changed as we were cutting it."

  With the film budgeted for two weeks of additional photography after editing, late 1976 saw three separate reshoots for the final segment. The narration that ends the film, including Alvy's joke about needing the eggs, was conceived and recorded only two hours before a test screening. The film's editing won a BAFTA Award for Ralph Rosenblum and Wendy Greene Bricmont.

• 5. Diane Keaton and the Role

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  The role of Annie Hall was written specifically for Diane Keaton, whose real surname is Hall and whose childhood nickname was Annie. She and Allen had been romantically involved, and she had appeared in three previous Allen films: Play It Again, Sam in 1972, Sleeper in 1973, and Love and Death in 1975. Keaton described Annie as "an affable version" of herself, noting that both were "semi-articulate, dreamed of being a singer and suffered from insecurity." She was surprised to win the Academy Award for Best Actress.

  Keaton performs two songs in the jazz club scenes: "It Had to Be You", written in 1924 with music by Isham Jones and lyrics by Gus Kahn, and "Seems Like Old Times" from 1945, with music by Carmen Lombardo and lyrics by John Jacob Loeb. Both performances are uncredited on screen, accompanied by Artie Butler. "Seems Like Old Times" reprises in voiceover over the film's closing scene.

  The costume choices Keaton brought to the role, layering oversized blazers over vests, billowy trousers or long skirts, a man's tie, and boots, became one of the film's most lasting cultural exports. Costume designer Ruth Morley worked with Keaton on the look. Allen recalled that a crew member tried to talk Keaton out of the style, and he intervened: "I said, 'Leave her. She's a genius. Let's just leave her alone, let her wear what she wants.'" Ralph Lauren has claimed credit over the years, though only one jacket and one tie in the film were purchased from Lauren. In 2006, Premiere magazine ranked Keaton's performance in Annie Hall 60th on its list of the 100 greatest performances of all time.

• 6. Breaking the Frame

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  At several points in Annie Hall, the film openly undermines its own narrative. Allen's character faces the camera at the start, immediately stepping outside the fiction. In a theater queue, Alvy listens to a man behind him misrepresent the work of Federico Fellini and Marshall McLuhan, then pulls McLuhan himself from just off-camera to correct the man directly. McLuhan had been Allen's first choice for the cameo because his films were being discussed in the scene; Fellini and Luis Buñuel both declined before McLuhan accepted. McLuhan had to travel back from Canada for reshooting, and biographer John Baxter notes that Allen treated him coldly during production.

  The animated sequence, with artwork based on the comic strip Inside Woody Allen, places Alvy and Annie as characters from Snow White. Mental subtitles appear during the balcony conversation to reveal what Alvy and Annie are actually thinking beneath their small talk. Allen explained his reason for breaking the fourth wall: "I felt many of the people in the audience had the same feelings and the same problems. I wanted to talk to them directly and confront them."

  Allen later described his disappointment with how the film was received despite its awards. "The film was supposed to be what happens in a guy's mind," he said. "Nobody understood anything that went on. The relationship between myself and Diane Keaton was all anyone cared about. That was not what I cared about." He felt forced to reduce the film to the love story. Keaton, by contrast, has said that Annie Hall was her favorite role and that the film meant everything to her.

• 7. Awards and Lasting Reach

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  Annie Hall screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival on the 27th of March 1977, before its official United States release on the 20th of April 1977. At the 50th Academy Awards ceremony on the 3rd of April 1978, the film won four of the five major Oscar categories it was nominated for: Best Picture for producer Charles H. Joffe, Best Director for Allen, Best Original Screenplay for Allen and Brickman, and Best Actress for Keaton. Allen was also nominated for Best Actor. Many observers, including Brickman and executive producer Robert Greenhut, had expected Star Wars to win.

  The film grossed $38,251,425 in the United States and Canada against a budget of $4 million, making it the eleventh highest-grossing picture of 1977. It played for over a hundred consecutive weeks in London and grossed over $5.6 million in the United Kingdom. When adjusted for inflation, the domestic gross makes it Allen's highest-earning film.

  In 1992, the Library of Congress selected Annie Hall for the National Film Registry as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. The American Film Institute placed it 31st among the greatest American films and 4th among the greatest comedies. The Writers Guild of America named its screenplay the funniest ever written, placing it above Some Like It Hot from 1959, Groundhog Day from 1993, Airplane! from 1980, and Tootsie from 1982. Film director Rian Johnson cited Annie Hall as the film that inspired him to become a director. In 2018, Matt Starr and Ellie Sachs released a short film remake starring senior citizens, one measure of how deeply the story had worked its way into popular consciousness.